Calypso(31)

“And?” my father asked.

“It’s just something I noticed, that’s all. When we were young, we had to get dressed up. Now I hear that people are wearing shorts to church and even sweatpants.”

My father winced. “Well, not at the Holy Trinity.”

Before our church moved in the 1980s, it was in a stone building located in downtown Raleigh. The neighborhood was thought of as rough, at least by suburbanites like us, and though nothing bad ever happened, occasionally something exciting did. “Say, Dad, remember the time you had a meeting with the priest and I went with you?” Lisa asked. “We were on our way back home when a black man exposed himself to us. I think I was twelve or thirteen, and he just pulled his penis right out of his pants and started waving it around.”

“Oh, right.” Our father wiped his mouth. “I remember that like it was yesterday!”

“Then you made a U-turn so we could see it again.”

He chuckled. “It was big!”

“Most fathers would shield their daughters from something like that,” Lisa said. “But there you were, making sure I got a second look.”

Again he laughed. “I guess I saw it as an educational experience!”

I like it when Lisa and Hugh are around, as they can always get my father to talk. When it’s just the two of us, I never know what to say. This is hardly a new development. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember.

All his life my father has been handy. He worked on his own cars and once built an addition onto our house in Raleigh. My job, always, was to hand him tools as he called for them and to hold the worklight, a bare bulb in an aluminum cage. It might have been different had I cared what a piston was, or were I interested in the proper consistency of cement. As it was, I never asked, and he never offered. Rather, I’d just stand there, my arm outstretched like a lawn jockey’s.

“Goddamn it, quit moving.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, you sure as hell are, so stop it.”

I suppose I could have asked him questions about his job, or his childhood, but it already seemed too late to get into it. These were the sorts of conversations that should have begun years earlier. They needed foundations built brick by brick, and not just thwacked down whole. He could have asked about my life, but I don’t know how articulate I would have been. “What were you thinking, slapping that beef roast with your bare hands?”

“I dunno.”

I wasn’t being cagey. I honestly hadn’t a clue why I’d done it. The roast was on a serving tray, puddled in its own juices—juices that, when I hit it, spattered all over the pastel family portrait we’d sat for earlier that week at the mall. I watched the blood drip down our faces, and then I slapped the roast again, wondering all the while what had come over me. It was the same when I took an industrial stapler to our new kitchen countertops, an out-of-body experience.

What do other fathers and sons talk about? I’d ask myself, shifting the worklight from one hand to the other. There was never any problem making conversation with my mother. That was effortless, the topics springing from nowhere, and we’d move from one to the next in a way that made me think of a monkey gracefully swinging through the branches of a tree. The silence my father and I inflicted on each other back then is now exacerbated by his advanced age. Every time I see him could be the last, and the pressure I feel to make our conversation meaningful paralyzes me.

“How do you talk to him so easily?” I asked Lisa as we carried the lunch dishes back into the house.

“It’s simple,” she told me. “Sometimes I’ll just call and say, ‘Hey, Dad, what are you up to?’”

“Watching Fox News while doing his taxes no matter what month it is or what time of day,” I said.

“Well, yes, but maybe he found a new deduction. Maybe someone from church died, or one of his old neighbors. You never know!”



That night, we went to a restaurant Lisa and her husband, Bob, are fond of in the town of Atlantic Beach. I put on a shirt and tie, Amy debuted a new dress, and my father wore a T-shirt with white tennis shorts. His legs used to be hairy, but now they’re as smooth as a child’s, the result, he says, of wearing knee-high socks for all those years at IBM. He rode to the restaurant with Hugh and me, and perked up when, halfway through the twenty-minute drive, we passed the condominium complex we often stayed at in the 1980s. “Hey,” he said, “that’s where we used to go when we were a family.”

“Well, aren’t you still a family?” Hugh asked.

“I meant when Sharon was alive.”

Though I hated hearing him say that, I couldn’t deny the truth of it. Our mother was the one who held us all together. After her death we were like a fistful of damp soil, loose bits breaking off with no one to press them back in. When she was around, we came to the beach every year. The place we’d just passed was set in a complex of twenty or so units, arranged around a pool. There are pictures of us all standing on the deck, my eyes and those of several of my sisters bloodshot from all our pot-smoking. I think of the meth-fueled sandcastles we built and the dinosaurs made of driftwood the year we could afford cocaine.

“You’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” our mother used to say when we’d return from our midnight walks on the beach. She knew what was up, while I don’t think our father had a clue. The condo we rented was arranged over five floors. When my sisters brought boyfriends, they had to sleep in separate rooms. It was the same at my parents’ place in Raleigh. “It’s my house, so you play by my rules,” our mother used to say. The sole exception was me, for some reason. I said to my father not long ago, “The only sex you and Mom allowed under your roof was gay sex. Didn’t that seem odd to you?”