After the Hurricane
Leah Franqui
One
“I think you need to get some help.” Elena has been practicing these simple words for almost a year when she says them to her father, over lunch, peering through the beer bottles on the table, all his, to look into his eyes. These words are so simple, so stupid, that they feel impossible coming out of her mouth, they feel like something from a television show, in fact, she thinks she might remember them from a “very special episode” of Saved by the Bell. And yet they are all she has, all she can offer him, and she hopes they will be enough.
They are not.
All she sees looking back at her on her father’s face is confusion, willful and broad. She wants to remember him as he used to be, when she was very small, so present and alert that it hurt her eyes to look at him. But it has been years since she saw him like that. She would like to cry. That hot hard feeling haunts the back of her throat, and her face prickles.
“Help with what?” her father asks her. He is smiling. She never knows how he will react to anything. Sometimes he becomes angry and sometimes the same thing will make him laugh for long minutes until he coughs, a deep dragging smoker’s cough. She is pleading with him, begging him to change, to give her the thing she wants, himself, just himself, but sane. Sober. The way he was until a few years ago. She is asking him to stop crumbling away, she is asking him to stay, although the way he is now is less than what he once had been. She wants to halt the decay. Why does he not see himself disappearing? And he smiles.
“Help with your problems.”
He waves at the air like a cat batting at a moth.
“Problems. What problems? You’ve been talking to your mother, haven’t you? She just worries. She’s got that anxiety thing. Now, enough. You tell me about something, tell me about your job,” he demands, taking a deep sip of his beer. They are at a Korean restaurant on St. Marks Place in Manhattan, and it is 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, and he has been drinking deeply.
“I’m just working at the university library, Papi,” she reminds him. He looks confused for a moment, and then nods, vigorously, covering up the evidence of his memory lapse.
“Tell me about classes.” Elena is in graduate school at NYU, getting her master’s in history. She is writing her thesis about the way cotton production in South America changed the fashion industry in the United States, and the lives of garment workers in New York City. She is working with professors from Stern for the economics, and students from NYU’s Costume Studies program for the fashion. She has sent her father article after article about her research. She tells him everything about her life, and he tells her nothing. She comes home to Philadelphia at least once a month and she has listed her classes for that semester at least three times, watching her mother’s hand tighten on her wineglass in frustration as she, who knows her daughter’s life well, mouths along, watching her father nod and smile, knowing he will remember nothing, hoping she is wrong.
“What are you taking?”
But she is never wrong about him. Heat rises up her throat, and she swallows water, pushing it down where it belongs.
“I think you need some help with your mental health,” she tells him, her voice low.
“What is this bullshit term? I read about this in the paper. What is this?” he asks, his voice curious, amused.
“Your mind. Your mental condition,” she says. They have never talked about this. Her father does not really talk with anyone. He talks at people. He talks at her. He tells her what he thinks of the world, and when, as a little girl and then a teenager, she asked him about his life before she existed in it, he told her he had been poor and now he wasn’t. And that she should stop asking. So she did.
“Have you given any thought to what you are going to do after you graduate?” he asks her, finishing his beer. He gestures to the waitress for another one. The only other people in the restaurant are a group of college students filling up on the free kimchi, four kids sharing a single order of bibimbap. Elena’s father looks at them.
“Poor kids. I was like that.”
“In college?” Elena asks, timidly. He never talks about himself. She knows he won’t answer her questions, but something inside of her compels her to ask. Maybe it is the disappointment that her carefully constructed attempt to talk about his mental condition burned down so quickly. Maybe it’s the beers, which she can see have loosened him, the way alcohol sometimes does. Other times it tightens him, making him tense and sharp. Even in his drinking, he is inconsistent and impossible to predict.
“I used to live around here. Did you know that?” Elena nods, her body trembling. She did know that, it is one of maybe five pieces of real information she has about her father before her birth. She does not want to speak, does not want to disturb his mood. How awful she is, that she can put aside her planned speech—her plea for him to stop drinking, to get more serious help for his bipolar condition, to stay on his medication instead of going on and off whenever it suits him, to see a therapist, to want to help himself—for a tiny piece of information about his childhood. She is pathetic, she knows.
“At First and First. Center of the universe. Not then, though. Then it was . . . God. What are those rents like now?”
“Expensive.” She breathes out. He nods, like she has delivered vital wisdom.