Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
Read Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Online
Authors: Alysia Abbott
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs
FAIRYLAND
A Memoir of My Father
ALYSIA ABBOTT
for my mother and my father,
and
for Annabel, so she may some time
know where her mother “was at.”
I wanted to show children these fishes shining
In the blue wave, the golden fish that sing
—
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
, “The Drunken Boat”
CONTENTS
To write this book, I’ve relied on personal memory, interviews with family and friends, articles and history books, and, especially, the papers my father left. These include his journals, poetry, prose, and letters, from which I draw quotes. Informed by my father’s work, my own memories, and other research, I’ve sometimes re-created scenes and dialogue. These are mostly expanded from those described in my father’s papers; however, I’ve also invented dialogue and changed the names of a few individuals in the book, but only when doing so had no impact on the veracity and substance of the story.
I
T’S A LATE
summer afternoon. I’m watching my father’s hands manipulate the rubber-net-wrapped steering wheel of our 1972 Volkswagen bug as we move onto the Golden Gate Bridge. In between his first two fingers is a lit cigarette, its ash long and in need of flicking. He straightens the wheel, and the ash falls, as he tells me again the name of this place where we are going, a place I’ve never been before: Sausalito. When I hear the word I picture flying saucers taking off and landing and I imagine this party will be held in a flying saucer. I am five years old.
We arrive at a large pink adobe house. Someone with curly hair answers the door wearing sunglasses and a flimsy pink and purple robe. He gives my father a big hug and ushers us into the house. As he leads us through the rooms, the tall man points out to me the items that I can break and the items that I can’t break because they are antique. Then he leads us out onto a large pool deck where a punch bowl, chips, and small sandwiches are laid out on wicker and glass tables. Music plays from speakers as tall as I am. There are no other kids.
I don’t yet know how to swim, but I want to be in the water. Through the smooth surface I can see the shiny aqua-green tiles at the pool’s bottom sparkle as they reflect the sun. I beg my dad, so he takes off my clothes and sets me up on the second of the steps leading into the water and instructs me to keep still.
From my concrete perch, I watch as my father’s friends cavort in various states of nakedness. Young men close-dance with other young men around the pool. As I stand there, taking in the scene around me, I feel surreptitiously with my right foot the step under the water next to where I am standing. I step down to it, then, reaching with my foot, find another step below. I float down to this new step where I can stand, my head and shoulders still safely clear of the water. My father, deeply engaged in conversation with the host, isn’t watching, so I find with my outstretched toes another step where I can float and stand. The warm water rises to meet my dry skin and I feel as if I’ve uncovered a secret pathway to a magic place, a mermaid sea.
Lulled by the jets now pulsing in the pool, the thumping loud music, and the golden late afternoon light, I move myself deeper into the water, always finding a step to catch me. Then I reach out for another next step and find there is none, and, just like that, the pool’s warm water engulfs me, filling my mouth, my nose, my ears. Splashing frantically to keep myself afloat, I try to yell for help but, because I can’t keep my head above water long enough to formulate a cry, I can only call out, “Hell! Hell!”
Peering at me from one of the deck chairs, a young woman calls out to my father, then points to me, “Steve, isn’t that your daughter bobbing up and down in the water?” My father yells, “Give me your arm!” then pulls me out onto the pool’s rough edge where I cough up water and the bitter taste of chlorine stings my nose and throat. It will be years before I learn to swim, and—like not learning to ride a bike until college and my father’s sexuality—this will be a source of secret shame.
My father notes this day in his journal with the headline “Alysia’s Swimming Accident,” and beneath it a small scribbled drawing showing my thin arm flailing above wavy water. When I later find the journal entry, I smile with delight.
I FOUND
my father’s journals in our dining room closet four months after he died of AIDS-related complications. I’d always known Dad kept journals. Peering through the French doors separating my bedroom from the living room where he slept at night, I could see him perched on the edge of his sagging fold-up futon, legs crossed, foot dangling as he scribbled away on the spiral notebook balanced on his lap. When I was a girl, I used to wait until he left the apartment to sneak into his milk-crate bookshelves and pull out the two hardback black journals in which he’d recorded our life in the mid-1970s. Crouched on the floor, I sifted pages and pages of these books in search of the capital A, for Alysia, or my childhood nickname A-R, short for Alysia-Rebeccah. I delighted in the descriptions of myself as a toddler—how I inexplicably used to call Dad “my poor little Da-da,” or the time I peed in his bed. I took comfort in knowing that as young as I was I already had my own history, and that I had changed from the person I’d once been.
I hadn’t read his journals in many years and I didn’t expect to find anything new when I decided to clear out our dining room closet that spring afternoon of 1993. At twenty-two years old, fresh off a year of nursing my father and then watching him take his last breath at the Maitri Hospice in the Castro, I thought nothing could hurt me anymore. What I most dreaded all my life, the death of my father and only parent, had already happened.
I also believed there were no surprises left. After my mother’s car accident when I was two, my father had raised me on his own and with few boundaries. After our nearly twenty years together as only parent and only child I felt I knew him—his warm cigarette-tinged scent, the twitch of his foot whenever he was deep in thought, his taste for hard candies and chocolate Kisses every time he tried to quit smoking—as well as I knew myself. In the shape of his hands and the length of his fingers I saw my own. Sitting quietly beside him in the solitude of his hospice bedroom in those final months felt as natural and comfortable as breathing.
So I boldly dug into the journals, pulling out a dozen notebooks from beneath a box of dusty Billie Holiday and David Bowie records covered in yellowed newspapers. These journals spanned from 1971, when my father was still in graduate school, to 1991, when AIDS-related CMV retinitis began to strip him of his sight and his ability to write. I honed in on three notebooks dating from 1971 to 1973, which I’d never seen before. These journals recorded the brief time when my mother, father, and I formed a family, and they enthralled me. It was the first time I experienced my mother in that most exciting of verb tenses: the present.
Paging through these entries, it struck me that I shouldn’t be reading my father’s journals, that I was invading his privacy. But after our last year together and without any family to help sort the fourteen-year accumulation of stuff in our apartment, I also felt it was my due. Besides, as I read on I learned that my dad had anticipated the possibility of my finding them:
September 9, 1973: Want to start writing again, More than ever! But who will I write for? For John – that deposed dream? For myself I guess. Maybe for Alysia that she might sometime know where her parents were at.
My father’s journals indeed revealed where my parents were at. The problem was, his version of our family story was different from the one I’d been carrying around my whole life. Here’s what I knew:
My parents met as graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Stephen Eugene Abbott had resisted the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector and came to Emory to pursue a master’s in English literature. Barbara Louise Binder, a self-declared Marxist, was pursuing a master’s in psychology. They came together through a common passion for the antiwar movement and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). The following year they were married by a justice of the peace and nine months later, in December 1970, I was born. We lived happily until, one night late in the summer of 1973, my mother was out driving when her car was rear-ended. She flew into the street, was hit by a car, and was killed instantly.
My version of this story highlighted the tragic. My photogenic mother, who graduated valedictorian from her high school in Kewanee, Illinois, who graduated with honors from Smith College, who loved dogs and lost causes and made a great chicken cacciatore, was only twenty-seven when she died. My father had been desperately in love with her and was so distraught over her sudden death that he turned gay and moved us to San Francisco. From then on he exclusively dated men, making the possibility of remarriage and siblings impossible. All of my hardships as a girl and teenager, from my difficulty fitting in, to my enduring loneliness, to my propensity for keeping secrets, could be traced back to that night in the car. It was an accident. No one was to blame.
Then I read the journals. And another story emerged.
Atlanta Trip. I go see lawyer. While waiting, lawyer talks about his writing. I’m nervous and smoke a heck of a lot. Get idea for a novel called “The Gypsy Man’s Daughter” about Alysia. Begins on my death bed – she remembers back how it was growing up with me, about my boyfriends – diaries, etc. come in. flash forwards & backwards.
My father wrote this entry in his daily journal in 1975, two years after my mother died leaving him the single father of a needy toddler. Seventeen years later, I would sit by his bedside as he died. Thirty-five years later, I am finally telling this story, a story he envisioned, but in my own way.
I sensed our excesses would lead to death, only I assumed I’d be the one to die.
—STEVE ABBOTT