We went to DC for the weekend for Mari’s company picnic. It was fun. Mari played Whack-a-Mole such that he was able to win for me a giant Kenny-from-South-Park doll. That is all there is to say about that, obviously. I was all, "However will I display such a fantastic trophy, my love?" The kids were elated because a. Six Flags and b. one of their best pals was meeting up with us, plus c. Uncle Sal’s, where there is i. Cartoon Network, ii. billion-inch teevee, mounted on the wall.
We always stay at Sal’s when we are in DC. It has its charms, mostly that it is totally Sal’s house. So, like, all of the kitchen appliances are very glamorous and cutting-edge and shiny, and the knives are very sharp, but Sal does not own measuring spoons, dishtowels, nor oven mitts. (The knives are sharp because no one uses them but me.) The bed is too hard & too soft at the same time, I think I am allergic to his new carpeting, his cats are mysterious and petulant, sneaking around at night and sneezing under the bed without warning.
On the other hand, I know where the batteries will be, or where I should put the laundry I just folded, or which in the pile of mail gets put on his desk and what goes in the trash. As if by magic, if anything mystifies me, I need only turn in the right direction, the right number of degrees & there will be a note for me, in Sal’s crazy, left-handed penmanship, like, “I left the pillowcases in the basement because the cat hair was too much, look there!” Or something.
It was funny to be awash in this kind of knowing and being known, especially because I have been parsing my relationships with everyone, holding them up to the light, in an effort to maintain perspective in difficult times. The first thing I said to Mari when we walked through the back door at Sal’s was, with this exhaling of great relief, “It smells just right!” Anyhow, I guess my father is dying . Or, if not dying, having one of those protracted episodes from which his emergence will just leave him so addled, surely people will secretly wish he were dead because he will be such a fucking burden. Or something.
I am not exactly sure what the deal is, largely because I have asked no questions nor lifted a finger, save for the desultory shipment of a dish garden to the Cardiac ICU in late August, when I received the first call. A dish garden, I tell you. With a card that said, “Hear you are feeling under the weather!” It seemed the best way for me to do nothing and even less than nothing at the same time. I thought it would convey everything and nothing at once!
After that, I got two phone calls, beseeching me to call him, and I just dialed it all the way to Vinnie Babarino. “What? Wait. I sent flowers. You mean he didn’t get them? I’ll call the florist right now! Gotta hang up!” All subsequent callers have been left to go to voice mail.
Mari said, “Why can’t you just say, ‘I’m not calling him.’” And I was all, “Because in 14 years you haven’t noticed these people can not hear the word no?” And really, he has not. My parents, their families, specialize in being controlling and distant at once. I spent my childhood meeting obligations, but volunteering nothing. When I went away, I never went back. Kowalski was my man on the ground when I was in the process of declaring emotional & familial bankruptcy, though it was only because he hacked his way into a very close contact. I was both distracted by my (s)mother's antics and also very down on intimacy because of the lot. It was very difficult to squirm free of them and at the same time, a lot of Kowalski wanting to rescue me, just get me away from them & their hijinks, which also felt smothering, in an Are you crazy kind of way. Like the time he planned to abduct me to Canada. Oh, youth.
But getting free of my father, that was easy. That was a non-issue from the beginning. Conspicuously disinterested in me since my parents’ divorce and his immediate remarriage, he nominally fulfilled his co-parenting duty, as ordered by the court, but once I turned 18, it seemed to me he burned a very lot of his bridges to me in the course of satisfying his second wife, which I considered a worthy goal. I mean, he had to live with her, not me. No pressure, we are all adults. Plus, in the face of my (s)mother's insanity, his aloofness was an oasis.
It was funny to me, as a girl, that Kowalski was always so impatient about and derisive of my father’s neglect. He thought, for many of the years we were involved, that my father was deceased. This came to light when I came back from NYC and rushed right into his arms. One day, we were in my apartment, and there was my father, leaving a message on the old answering machine. What a surprise for Mr Kowalski! Why? I asked him. He told me, Because you never talked about him in the present. It was always some anecdote from when you were a child.
Kowalski was actually kind of the last nail in the coffin, in some ways. My father disapproved and I told him I did not require his approval. Further, in that space, I really came out about being in a pre-maritally-sexy relationship, which bizarrely upset & disappointed him, this man who was thought by my closest, whispered-confessions confidant to no longer exist on this mortal plane.
When I got married less than a year later (to Mari, not Kowalski, obvsly) … I mean, I don’t know. He sure is in all the photos, proud of his duty in the giving away of me, which I actually found somewhat repugnant, since I had been on my own for many years at that point. That was my good deed. I knew that it was more important to my father to get to play Big Daddy than it was to me to stay the patriarchy. My mother was not invited to the wedding.
But after that … it was back to the sometimes-shocking noninvolvement of yore. I had been married 6 months and my grandmother, to whom I had always been quite close, laid in the hospital for more than a week, surrounded by her daughters and sisters and in-laws .., all family who had been summoned by my father while my phone lay silent. I got a phone call when she was dead.
The second year Mari & I were married, we moved back East. I kept in contact because my stepmother, who had spent that summer growing a gigantic tumor in her liver, was dying. I felt bad for him, worse when she died, being so far away in his widowhood. When I got over the sheer irony that he threw me over for someone who could not even stay alive, I recovered pretty rapidly. I mean, we had lived 5 miles from him for over a year and he had never called, nor returned my calls. Also, the grandmother thing? Major black mark.
Garçon was born the following year, and it was the craziest thing. He rushed to Washington, on a plane and everything, to see a 3-week-old baby, and have us shoot a whole bunch of film to send back with him and be a gigantic pain in the ass in our tiny little domicile. He was disapproving and/or snide about our parenting (of a 3-week-old!), and told me I was fat (3 weeks postpartum!). We were silent and lip-biting and kind, and deferential to his elder status, but secretly happy to see him go, and not sad when he never really called again.
I called, whenever I remembered, but because he never returned the call, eventually I remembered less. In 2000, I was pregnant with Fifille. I called the minute my second trimester started so to tell him I was pregnant with a second child and left a message – it was right around Thanksgiving, “Blah, blah, I have a question about a roast, what are your plans for the holiday, I have some news, call me.” – and he never returned the call. It became this thing with me, just a wonderment -- How long will it take for him to return the call? Weeks? Months?
When the baby was five-and-a-half (five-and-a-half years, is what I am saying!), my father picks up the phone, tumbles in, dusts himself off, and wants to carry on as if nothing happened. Say what? Really? Had he been cryogenically frozen? Because that is an excuse I was willing accept.
As it was, there were no excuses nor explanations. His sense of entitlement was astounding. Many demands were made, and I, wow. I would hold the phone with my mouth just wide open, then shut tight, like a fish, not knowing what to say. I mean, what could I say? Oh, it was horrible. It went on for weeks, before a few good friends massaged me into something like self-protection, at which point he told me I was “bitter” for “dwelling” and not letting us “be a family once again.”
I concocted this fantasy of having him here for Thanksgiving so I could poison him. It would look like a heart attack! No worries! That was the day I called Kowalski and tearfully confessed the whole mess. Mr Kowalski takes it all v personally, this stuff with my family. He should. It is not really a coincidence that I peeled back my family & promptly found the psychic space to get involved with the man I would marry. It is more complicated than that, surely, but they were a mighty phantom interference in our otherwise magical relationship.
Unfortunately, nothing was resolved, in spite of the excellent historical analysis from Kowalski, the handholding of Mari, and Alex as my fresh pair of eyes. My very real complaint of You have not made an effort, lo these many years and how do we have a relationship when you are acting with outdated information? was very lost in his babyish cleaving to the binary & dismissive conflict of, “I have been right, I am your father, you are being a rebellious child!” He thinks -- and this is shocking to me -- that he put in the time with the shelter & the K-12 tuition & he is all good. And I think, you know, Yeah, 20 years ago, you were all good to coast on that. But it's been 20 years since then.
I mean, to talk about the good times, like before I was a grownup? We are talking about the mists of time. And that, that gets you a dish garden. Sorry.
Mari keeps coming back to a hospital visit I made earlier this year to see someone with whom I had once been close, and in a relevant, and analogous fashion, had not seen for more than a decade. It is funny because he starts to talk about it -- how that all went down and the fallout -- so brings it up, and then has no words to really expound because it is all so night & day + black & white illustrative. My pump has been so primed, so to speak, already this year about all of the issues relating to loss and life and lingering fondnessess, and yet, this has not troubled me one whit, the mortality, loss-of-parentage piece. I do not believe, however, the liberties people dare to think they can take.
I just … I mean ... I feel like … if you are going to call a grownup person you barely know, due to your own negligence, and make demands? Well, ok, but do not expect anyone to drop anything to make an effort. I have people here -- again, bed-whispery, secret-sticky, magical confidants -- who are not even sure he is alive. I should extract myself from the smooth running of my household, of their lives, for someone of whom they have never heard? Think again, strangers.
People used to say that to me, all the time, back when I estranged my mother, “You will have children, and you will see,” and I do see. I see how screwed-up & belligerent my parents are, how easy it is to curry favor and receive forgiveness with one’s children. Admit your shit. I fucked up, I am sorry, I think it might have made you feel _____, it wasn’t loving behavior, is there anything you want to tell me now?
I mean, three years ago, I was kind of open, you know? But now that ship has sailed. I do not expect anyone to be perfect, but do not mix up forgiveness with docility about getting shit on in perpetuity.
And these people! Who are calling my house! They drank that fucking Kool-Aid in the last generation. But I am not going out like that. I will not even explain when they call, because they just cannot hear me. And while it sounds vengeful & repulsive, in a way I do not mean, he can lay there in the hospital and do without me just like his mother did. It is just how it is.
Anyhow. This is what has been on my mind for a few weeks while I write intently about the minutiae of everyday development, for I have been afraid I will slide type-typing into leaking boat of crazy. But it seems to be all out there at once, now, spit-spot!
I cling to what good people -- Alex: yeah, it's scary & hard being in the hospital, and so it is for us all. That's just how it is.; Mari: I don't mean to fuel yr paranoia, but it is possible that standers-by are exaggerating his agony just a wee bit to manipulate you; Kowalski: of course it's sad that his daughter won't call him, it's terrible. And a lesson to people everywhere to live right! -- have told me, Like Paul wrote to the Romans, "Destest what is evil, cling to what is good." I am glad to have written some of this down here. If you have read this far, Internet, I salute you!
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