Calypso(22)

One night, I looked over and saw that he was wearing a Cherokee headdress someone had brought to the house for Thanksgiving. Paul had put it on him and, rather than shake it off the way he would have a few years earlier, he accepted it—owned it, really. Just before dessert was served, Amy and I noticed that he was crying. He looked like the Indian from that old “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign. One single tear running down his cheek. He never blubbered or called attention to himself, so we never asked what the problem was, or if there even was a problem. “Maybe he was happy that we were all together,” Lisa said when we told her about it. Gretchen guessed that he was thinking about our mother, or Tiffany, while Paul wondered if it wasn’t an allergic reaction to feathers.

It’s not that our father waited till this late in the game to win our hearts. It’s that he’s succeeding.

“But he didn’t used to be this nice and agreeable,” I complained to Hugh.

“Well, he is now,” he said. “Why can’t you let people change?”

This is akin to another of his often asked questions: “Why do you choose to remember the negative rather than the positive?”

“I don’t,” I insist, thinking, I will never forget your giving me such a hard time over this.

Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

For whatever reason, I was very happy with my snapping turtles. In the wild, they can live for up to thirty years, though I fear that my favorite, the one with the hideous growth on his head, might not make it that long. There’s something wrong with his breathing, though he still manages to mount the females every chance he gets.

“Oh, look,” a passerby said, pointing down into the churning water on the last full day of our vacation. “They’re playing!”

I looked at the man with an incredulity that bordered on anger. “Snapping turtles don’t play,” I said. “Not even when they’re babies. They’re reptiles, for Christ’s sake.”

“Can you believe it?” I said to my father when I got back to the beach house that evening. He was standing beside the sofa, wearing a shirt I clearly remember throwing into his trash can in the summer of 1990, and enjoying a glass of vodka with a little water in it. All around him, people were helping with dinner. Lisa and Amy were setting the table while Gretchen prepared the salad and Paul loaded his juicer with what looked like dirt. Hugh brought fish up from the grill, and as Kathy and Madelyn rounded up chairs, I put on some music. “Attaboy,” my father said. “That’s just what we needed. Is this Hank Mobley?”

“It is,” I told him.

“I thought so. I used to have this on reel-to-reel tape.”

While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man, oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in, “isn’t this just fantastic?”





Your English Is So Good



There’s a language instruction course I turn to quite often. Pimsleur, it’s called, and I first used it in 2006, when preparing for a trip to Japan. “I am American,” I was taught to announce, somewhat sheepishly, at the start of lesson one. Half an hour later, I’d advanced to 日本語がお上手ですね, which translates to “Your Japanese is so good!”

It seemed a bit early in the game to be receiving compliments, but still I learned to recognize the phrase and to respond to it with ありがとうございます、ですが私はまだそんなに上手ではありません (“Thank you very much, but I am not really skilled yet”). This came in handy as, once I got to Tokyo, every time I opened my mouth I was clobbered with praise, even if I was just saying something simple like “Huh?”

The same was true with a number of other phrases I’d considered unnecessary but heard again and again once I arrived in Japan. The fact is that, unless we’re with friends or family, we’re all like talking dolls, endlessly repeating the same trite and tiresome lines: “Hello, how are you?” “Hot enough out there?” “Don’t work too hard!”

I’m often misunderstood at my supermarket in Sussex, not because of my accent but because I tend to deviate from the script.



Cashier: Hello, how are you this evening?

Me: Has your house ever been burgled?

Cashier: What?

Me: Your house—has anyone ever broken into it and stolen things?



With me, people aren’t thinking What did you say? so much as Why are you saying that?

I know that Pimsleur offers an English course for native Spanish speakers, but I’m not sure if it’s geared toward U.K. English or what you hear in the United States. The former would most certainly include “At the end of the day…” Turn on British TV or follow anyone named Ian for more than a few minutes, and you’re guaranteed to hear it. In France the most often used word is “connerie,” which means “bullshit,” and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,” which has replaced “incredible,” “good,” and even “just OK.” Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.