Part 7 (1/2)

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NOT LONG AFTER THAT, my father moved out. On the Sunday morning he left, my mother stayed upstairs in her room while my sister and I sat on the front step, watching him s.h.i.+ft the last of his boxes from the house to his car. Snow from another day lay on the ground, still white in the center of our lawn, nearly black at the curb. The brick walk wasn't shoveled and the snow there had been pressed by our boots and our weight into ice. The sun was bright enough that I kept my eyes s.h.i.+elded with my hand while my sister puffed out cloud after cloud with her breath. my father moved out. On the Sunday morning he left, my mother stayed upstairs in her room while my sister and I sat on the front step, watching him s.h.i.+ft the last of his boxes from the house to his car. Snow from another day lay on the ground, still white in the center of our lawn, nearly black at the curb. The brick walk wasn't shoveled and the snow there had been pressed by our boots and our weight into ice. The sun was bright enough that I kept my eyes s.h.i.+elded with my hand while my sister puffed out cloud after cloud with her breath.

Every time he pa.s.sed empty-handed, heading inside for another load, he would rub my hair, or he would rub hers.

The whole thing didn't take very long. After he slammed his trunk, he walked back to where we sat. And he told us he'd be by to visit any day. That we would see him all the time. Neither of us said anything, until we stood up on the front stoop side by side and waved toward his car, calling Bye Daddy, bye Daddy Bye Daddy, bye Daddy while he disappeared from view. while he disappeared from view.

Back in the kitchen, we took off our coats and boots without a word. I sat on the coiled radiator for warmth, and when my sister walked toward me, I thought she wanted my spot. I thought she might shove me over with her usual insult. But then she smacked me so hard across my face my left eye swelled shut-as though she had closed another door. I tried not to move, hoping that the hit I'd taken was the end of something and not the start. But when she raised her hand again, the word you you curling from her lips like something filthy, I grabbed those curtains of blond hair and pulled so hard that she just froze. curling from her lips like something filthy, I grabbed those curtains of blond hair and pulled so hard that she just froze.

I was screaming as my knee slammed into her body. Screaming as my foot wrapped around her ankle, toppling her. My fingers gripped that hair as she fell, my hold on her pulling me down. ”I hate you,” I spat as we thrashed on the floor, our knees and feet all trying to deliver blows, her hands squeezing my wrists. ”I hate you.” I pulled as hard as I could, not letting go, not for a second, not until I had beaten down her years and years of practice torturing me, and I felt her give up.

”I really, really hate you,” I said more softly as she began to cry. By then, her arms were dropped to her sides. Her neck had relaxed. I told her she was a crybaby. I told her she was the moron. I told her it was all her fault. Because she was so mean. I told her that our father hated her. That her evil was the reason he moved out. And then I heard my mother's footsteps overhead.

I left my sister crying on the floor. I walked as quietly as I could through the hall, along the peculiar wall that shaped our home, and into my father's ransacked study. There was little sign of him there. No books, no rugs, no cigarette packs, no round and naked women, thick-nippled, shameful, thrilling. Only sunlight pouring through the windows onto emptied surfaces, a few b.a.l.l.s of rolled-up paper on the floor like tumbleweed.

My eye began to ache and throb.

From the kitchen, I heard my mother. What is going on? What do you girls think you're doing? How am I supposed to handle one more thing? What is going on? What do you girls think you're doing? How am I supposed to handle one more thing?

I slid to the floor and I waited to be found.

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AFTER THAT, I stopped believing the things that Harriet said. I knew she had been wrong about my wish. Just like I knew that when my father told us he would be visiting all the time it was a kind of lie, even though he meant it. Just like I knew that the G.o.d I had been looking for would never show himself to me. Just like I knew that Harriet Elliot would never ride a s.h.i.+p to Italy and kill those men. I stopped believing the things that Harriet said. I knew she had been wrong about my wish. Just like I knew that when my father told us he would be visiting all the time it was a kind of lie, even though he meant it. Just like I knew that the G.o.d I had been looking for would never show himself to me. Just like I knew that Harriet Elliot would never ride a s.h.i.+p to Italy and kill those men.

I stayed away from her bench at recess. Most of the time, I sat alone. Occasionally I joined the others. But not very often. Sometimes, like Harriet, I would bring paper and a box of crayons outside. Or maybe a book. Sometimes I would play with Teacher Margie's little dog. None of my cla.s.smates ever said a word to me about my father, though I knew, even then, that their parents must have told them he had left.

My grandparents, the ones who had brought me the kimono from j.a.pan, visited that Thanksgiving. The nights they were there, I heard voices floating up the stairwell to my room again. But no more arguments. No more chances for making up. After they left, my mother told us, very calmly, that we would be moving in with them, in Was.h.i.+ngton D.C. We would leave right before Christmas. ”It's only until I find a teaching job,” she said. But to me that sounded like just another wish that wasn't coming true. I mumbled something about it being okay with me, then glared at my sister until she did too.

”You're good girls,” our mother said, and looked away.

On my last day at the co-op, I filled a brown paper bag with all the projects I had made, now peeled from the windows and the walls. I spent that recess watching my cla.s.smates try to build a snowman from the few fresh powdery inches on the ground.

Just before pickup time, Teacher Margie clapped her hands, calling us all to the circle. ”We're having a Farewell Ceremony today,” she said as we sat down. ”We're creating a new ritual for ourselves. We've never had to say goodbye to one of us before.”

She called their names, and one by one each of my cla.s.smates faced me where I sat, singled out, beside her feet; and each of them told me I was cool cool. Just as we had said about the slide of saliva that Jenny brought in and shared with the cla.s.s. It had been great to be my friend, they said. It had been fun. And in the singsong of their voices I could hear the ease with which my absence would exist. A few handed me sc.r.a.ps of paper, their addresses written in an obviously adult hand. Mary Hudson unfurled a picture she had drawn of me in blue jeans and a sweats.h.i.+rt, my hair a labyrinth of brown lines, my name written large, hers tiny in the corner.

When Harriet's turn rolled around, she stood as the others had all stood. But when she spoke, she stared out over our heads, as if alone. Her hands clasped in front of her, she said nothing at all about me. Not that I was cool. And not that we had been friends. She only said that the most important thing to remember was that wishes made correctly made correctly do come true. Always. do come true. Always.

”Even when you think it's impossible,” she said. ”Even when you think that it's too late.”

Then she looked at me. With those eyes that seemed so powerful they could will away anything in her path. She just stood there, motionless, staring into my eyes, conjuring with her gaze her own determination, those tales of her capture, the smell of crushed flowers and lemon juice, the feel of my words seeping through my skin, spreading out into my veins. The fantasy of putting things to rights. She looked at me until I could feel something like belief again take root. And then Harriet Elliot blinked; and I was gone.

Gaining Ground

MY DAD DIED on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba- on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba- ba-duh ba- ba-duh ba- ba-duh ba- ba-duh ba- ba-duh ba- ba-duh. But it isn't truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.

It was about a month ago, and you'd think I'd have figured out by now which way to put it. Harris says the whole worry is stupid, the whole question of how to put it, because it makes it sound like I'm debating some point of causality, as if the two events were in some way related. Linked. Which they obviously were not. The water ran electric because the house was not properly grounded. Because my electrician is an a.s.shole. And always has been. And ought to be shot. Or at the very least not be an electrician anymore. My father died because he walked in front of a train. On purpose. Like in a movie. Like Anna Karenina. Because he was a whack job. Mentally ill. And always had been. No connection. Unless you think having a lousy electrician you don't fire and a lousy father who offs himself is some kind of connection, which even I do not think. So in the end it's just timing. And timing is nothing, meaningless, a slim quality to build any conclusion around.

That's Harris's point, anyway. That timing isn't everything, like people say it is. It's bull. And that's Harris pretty much all around. Harris is a piece of work. Forty-seven years old, pretty fat now, he's got these lingering tufts of leftover hair sprouting all over him, any which way. He's got skin like badly mashed potatoes. He's got eyes like he knows perfectly well he's wrong. About everything. All the time. And couldn't care less. He works in quality control at the local paper plant. Which is a joke, since neither quality nor control, nor any imaginable combination of the two that does not involve adding the words ”lack of” or ”out of,” can be applied to him. And he is just who you would expect to take you on about something like this. Just exactly who you would expect to pull the plug on trying to find meaning in anything. While he leans into my fridge, scrounging, foraging, investigating, making himself at home, taking it upon himself to debunk phenomena like coincidence. Like timing.

I used to be married to Harris and I know Harris well. Last year, just about halfway through realizing he had turned into a walking, talking laundry list of human decline, I threw him out. Harris. His cigarettes. His underpants. His poking through my food. His need to talk me out of things. Out he went. Still, he comes back around to see our daughter, Allison, who's four now. Or at least that's why he says he comes back. That is why Harris claims he is still always around. The fact is, though, that there is only so left he'll ever agree to be. Only so thrown out. Only so gone he ever gets.

”Don't you believe in anything?” I asked him, right while he walked suitcase number one out my front door.

”Nope,” he answered me, standing there under a streetlight, his luggage kind of tilting him with its weight. ”Nope.” He shook his head. ”Not a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing.” And Harris, he just walked away, as they say, into the night.

He was the one I called. When it happened. My father. The water. All of that. About which fact I have nothing to say. Except that old habits die hard. And that if I could remember which part I told him first, I might have some idea about this whole how-to-put-it question. Either I told him my father was dead, and then that I had been bathing Allison when the bathwater shocked us both. Or I put it the other way around. I know that Allison was screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder, dancing this awful naked wet jitterbug of fear around my bedroom. Wouldn't even let me towel her off, because she didn't want to be touched. By anything. Ever again. Ever. And I had this phone in my hand. This phone that had rung just as I was reaching for it, so I just answered it and said h.e.l.lo. And then a man asked me, some man on the phone asked me if I was my father's daughter, because if I was, there had been an accident. It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.

”But I was just going to call you,” I said. Then I heard what was being told to me, and I asked, ”What kind of accident?” And then I took that in. The train, the dead, the my-father-is-over part. And then I called Harris. And told him something. I'm still just not sure exactly what. But I know I told him to come. I know I did that. So this one's on me, I guess.

Having a parent die who is crazy is different from having a parent die who isn't crazy. I know because I have had both kinds, and they have both died. My mother was just so normal you couldn't even be in the room with her and Dad both without losing all belief in G.o.d. In anything. In anything that made sense of anything. It just all seemed too impossible. Which, if you ask me, is why I married the king of nothingness in the first place. Why Harris's essentially unpleasant view of the world as a random and pointless sphere held some appeal. I mean, she was nice, my mom. She was pleasant. She was a mom. Picture a mom. Go ahead. You get the idea. Picture her cooking meals, coming to a.s.semblies, chatting on the phone with her other mom friends. Walking the dog. Making your teacher smile at pickup at the end of the day. Making your teacher like you more. Nice. Normal. Smart enough. Pretty enough. But not too pretty. A real mom.

Now you explain my father to me. What he was doing in that house with her. When he was there. Or in those wedding pictures. Or on my birth certificate. You go ahead and make some sense of that, because I have pretty much given up. My earliest memory of my father was of visiting him in a linoleum room, little windows, bars on them, long tables, scattered with art supplies. Construction paper. Clay. Pipe cleaners. Glue. I must've been about Allison's age. Four, maybe three. I know I'd met him before that, because it wasn't like we were introduced or anything. That's just the first image I have of him. In the Art Room. At the Place. He had made a picture for Mom. A collage she admired like it was mine. Which it easily could have been. Red paper, s.h.i.+ny foil s.h.i.+t glued on it. It ended up on our fridge. And there was a woman there on a sofa who stared at me the whole time. That's all.

That's the whole thing. My first memory of my father. Except he isn't even in it. Not if you look carefully. He isn't there.

When I met Harris, in a bar about ten years ago, I was just twenties, young twenties, and he was the first person who ever said to me ”So what?” when I told him about my dad. I was going on and on about how bad it's been, about this horror and that, how many times he was in the bin, how long he stayed, which birthdays Dad missed, and what graduations he ruined. And Harris, he just hoists a beer and shrugs: ”So what?” I guess that was love. Not his saying it. Me hearing it. ”So what?” I heard freedom in that. Like a great big chalkboard eraser getting rid of all that s.h.i.+t. So what. That won me over. Until I got sick of it. Then really sick of it. And then threw him out.

I mean, it's hard to build a whole life around someone saying ”So what.” Frankly, I think nine years was a pretty d.a.m.ned good stretch.

So I called Harris that night, and I called my same a.s.shole electrician too. But the difference was that when I heard the electrician answer the phone, I just hung up. Then I pulled out the yellow pages and went for the biggest, glossiest, most expensive ad I could find. The kind of ad that has about sixteen phone numbers listed, according to time of day. Emergency and all. And that was the one I called. Because this was an emergency. I mean, for G.o.d's sake, if electric water isn't an emergency, what is? For one thing, not my father at that point. That much I had taken in. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help him. Which was actually not news; there had never been anything much I could do for him. But it was official now, in some way it had never been before.

”It won't kill you,” the guy said who answered the phone, and right away I liked that I had never heard his voice before. I kind of trusted that quality in him. ”You're not in any danger. The house isn't going to burn down. And you aren't going to be electrocuted if you need coffee or something. Water. Maybe wear rubber gloves. Wear rubber shoes. Sneakers, maybe. I'll come in the morning. By eight. I'll be there at eight.”

”That's good,” I said, hearing Harris let himself in downstairs. ”That's great.”

The whole father-daughter thing with Allison and Harris gets me down sometimes. Sometimes it's like I should have done better by her, gotten her a better dad. And sometimes it's just facing that there's Harris in her, Harris genes, Harris thoughts, Harris G.o.d knows what that's hard for me. Like her being upset when he moved out. Like her being so happy these days when he comes around to see her. Like him being able to rea.s.sure her that night, when everything I did just made her scream and dance around. It's like I spilled something on her. Harris juice. It's like she's stained. Like there's something that connects them, wherever I send him to live.

”You gotta go anywhere?” he asked when I came downstairs, those great big hopeless eyes of his staring right at me. And there she was wrapped in a towel, a towel Harris found who knows where, happy, happy, happy sitting on his lap. ”You gotta deal with anything?” he asked, and I shrugged.

”Where is he?”

”Morgue. Hospital,” I said. ”Morgue, I guess. In the hospital. I don't know.”

”They need you to identify him?”

”No one said. I have a number to call.”

”You should call it then.”

Allison had her head turned away from me, buried in Harris's big chest. Her hair was starting to dry, springing into its little curls. My curls. Her father. Harris. It's all just unbelievable sometimes.

”Yeah,” I said. ”I'll go call now.”