Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (2 page)

1.

W
HENEVER MY FATHER
described the two-room apartment he shared with my mother on Peachtree Street, he told me about the fish. When they first moved in together, they had little money to decorate. Curiously stained oriental rugs and once proud antique dressers and end tables were picked up at estate sales and hauled home in the back of a borrowed pickup truck. What money they did have, a gift from my mom’s parents, they put toward the tropical fish which they bought in a single day of romantic enthusiasm. In the entryway of their apartment stood a large, thick-glassed tank in which they kept angelfish. Past a curtain of clinking beads, in the den, were two more tanks. In one, kissing gouramis swam alongside tiny blue and green guppies, past plastic trees and a tiny figure of Neptune covered in algae. In the fish tank on the opposite wall swam South American piranhas, which my parents fed raw hamburger meat each night before bed.

When my parents first met at an SDS party and my father told my mother he was bisexual, she answered, “That means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it.” It was 1968 and everyone was talking about revolution. My father had just returned from a summer in Paris; the city was still roiling from the May riots when students had shouted, “Be reasonable! Demand the impossible!” Now, in the halls of American academia, antiwar students were shutting down campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia.

My mother was intrigued by my father’s open approach to sexuality. She never got hung up on his boy crushes, like his other girlfriends had. She was only jealous of his relationships with women and, according to Dad, even liked the guys he was attracted to. On weekends they went to the Cove and to the other gay and mixed bars that dotted the outskirts of downtown Atlanta. There, my mother picked out the young men my father could never attract on his own—men who’d never consider a gay encounter but who’d be up for a drunken three-way. In those early years of the sexual revolution, it was hip for young people to try new combinations. Sometimes my mom would dress in men’s clothing when they went out. Dad said she made a cute boy.

Other weekends, my parents hosted dinner parties, entertaining their antiwar and grad student friends with spaghetti, cheap red wine, and charades. Dad wrote about feeling satisfied at the close of these evenings, seeing himself and my mom as leaders of a salon of intellectually engaged students. As they cleaned up after one such party, my mom suggested they marry. “Landlords won’t hassle us so much,” she reasoned. “We’ll be able to stock the kitchen and house with wedding presents. My parents will give us more money. Other than that, our life won’t really change.” My father wrote about her furiously sweeping the worn linoleum, “as if all of the loose ends of our life could be gathered in a dustpan and tossed into the trash.”

My parents married on February 20, 1969, at the office of a justice of the peace in downtown Atlanta. They invited no family to witness the occasion. They took no wedding pictures. At first they enjoyed the novelty of matrimony. “It was like a game, or a sitcom,” my father wrote. My parents used to joke that he was like a flannel-clad frontiersman, coming home from his long day at school to a gracious wife who cooked dinner and washed dishes while he turned to his serious work as a graduate student and aspiring writer. But only a few months after their wedding, their life did change. Grad student friends distanced themselves, deciding perhaps that because my parents were married they wanted to be alone. And my mom seemed to grow restless and bored with the gay scene, just as my dad was growing bored with the domestic scene at home.

Four months into their marriage, my father learned about a disturbance in New York’s Greenwich Village. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a crowd of gay men and transvestites fought off a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-run gay bar on Christopher Street. The following nights of violent face-offs and demonstrations would mark what many consider the start of the modern gay rights movement.

Inspired by this event and his discovery of the cultural journal
Gay Sunshine
, my father, then Emory’s student government president, wrote a column for the student paper publicly coming out, an experience he later wrote about:

Because I had a wife no one could question my manhood. I obviously wasn’t gay just because I couldn’t relate to women sexually. No doubt this allowed me to “come out” much more publicly and aggressively than I would have otherwise. Even so I paid a price. I lost friends. What was hardest for Barb, so she said, was her straight friends’ “sympathy.” “How can you stand it?” they’d ask. They refused to accept that it didn’t bother her all that much.

Over the next two years, he helped organize Atlanta’s Gay Liberation Front, one of hundreds being organized on American campuses in the wake of Stonewall. He was also named the gay lib editor at Atlanta’s alternative weekly,
The Great Speckled Bird
, all the while sharing a life and bed with his wife.

The Great Speckled Bird, cover by Steve Abbott, June 28, 1971. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

Then, on a warm spring night in 1970, a year into their marriage, my mother entered the den where my father was sitting and sternly and needlessly rearranged chairs and straightened the piles of papers that cluttered his desk. I imagine her in a flouncy purple blouse and a brown corduroy miniskirt, which would ride up her bare legs every time she bent over to pick up a stray paper. My dad admired her compact frame, feminine and efficient in its movements. Finally, after straightening a calendar hanging on the wall, she faced him.

In his journal my father would recall how, lit by the gurgling blue-green light of the fish tanks that surrounded them, my mom appeared like a sea creature. With her black eyeliner and mascara accentuating her large eyes, he imagined her as a villainess in an underwater sea lair.

“I’m pregnant,” she announced.

“I thought you had an IUD.”

“I took it out. Don’t you remember?”

He didn’t remember. After a moment he asked, “Do you think we should keep the baby? I can’t really see us with a baby in this place.” He gestured to the apartment, which seemed to shrink as he sat there.

“I want this baby.”

“I don’t know if we’re
ready
. . . And then there’s the money. Even with your salary and my fellowship money, we’re barely able to support ourselves now. I mean . . . if you want to have an abortion, you know I’d be there for you.”

“I want this baby.”

My dad felt like Flash Gordon strapped to his chair in this underwater universe. The air felt suddenly heavy and suffocating. He scanned the room for a means of escape. But the serpentine siren flicked her tongue and repeated her demand:

I want this baby.

Five years earlier, in the winter of her freshman year, my mother had taken a leave of absence from Smith College and moved into Chandler House, a maternity home for pregnant girls in Evanston, Illinois, three hours’ drive northeast of her parents’ house. It was a difficult period. My grandparents worked hard to keep my mother’s pregnancy a secret as it would bring shame on the family in their small Midwestern town. My mother signed into the home using a fake name and didn’t return to her parents until after she gave birth to her baby. Records from the home indicate that my mother kept to herself, often reading or taking walks along the North Shore, no matter the weather. After the birth of her daughter in May 1965, she signed papers giving her away to people she’d never meet.

During that five-month stay at the home, my mother called my grandmother almost every night. My uncle David, then ten years old, remembers picking up the phone and hearing my mother crying. The rooms were poorly heated, she complained to my grandmother. The housemother was brusque. Every winter afterward, my mother slept with a plug-in electric blanket. It was Kermit green with a soft, nubby texture. She hated to feel cold, my father told me.

So on this spring night in 1970, my mom told my dad she wanted to keep me. Perhaps she thought having a baby would change him, might make him a more attentive husband or make him forget about his young lover, a lean blond undergraduate named John Dale. In his journals Dad recalled her saying that if he wanted to leave, he could.

I imagine their conversation, with Dad crossing and uncrossing his legs. He flicked ash from his cigarette into an abalone ashtray perched on an end table but said nothing. She read hesitation and fear on his face, then came up with a compromise.

“If I have this baby and it’s too much for you, you can split. I won’t chase you. You won’t even have to pay child support. I’ll take full responsibility.”

My mother took a deep breath and exhaled. Her brown eyes widened and then narrowed in a fixed gaze on my father. He felt, sitting next to her standing figure, like a small boy. He had no argument to offer. “We are married,” he wrote in his journal. “She’s free to be herself. How can I hold her back?”

JOHN DALE
told me that the rain fell softly down the oak-lined streets in front of the Emory University hospital on the night of my birth. He sat with my father in a hospital hallway. My dad smoked a cigarette and talked nervously waiting for his child to be born.

“Sometimes I find myself wanting it to be a boy and then I think, why do I want that?” My dad crossed his right leg over his left, and his one dangling foot twitched nervously from side to side. “Is it because . . . I’ve been
taught
to want a boy? Or do I need to see a version of myself reflected in this baby?” John shrugged, offering a weak smile. They continued talking when a nurse appeared from a side door. “Mr. Abbott? Your wife has delivered a healthy little girl. She’s resting now but you can see the baby in the window of the south ward, just down the hall.”

My dad stood behind the window of the baby ward, so close that he fogged the glass with his breathing. He scanned the many baby faces searching for mine. In a letter he later wrote me, he described all the babies as looking “like fruit in a fruit display.” When he found the baby with the index card reading “Abbott,” he studied my face and wondered if I would be like Angela Davis, the Black Panther activist famous for her Afro, her fist held high in court. “My hope was that you’d grab the world by the ears,” he wrote, “and carry on the revolution for ‘The Good.’”

But I wasn’t named Angela. My parents wanted a hyphenated name “like a real Southern belle,” Dad would later explain, “like Peggy-Sue or Betty-Joe.” After searching through books of names at the hospital, my parents decided on Alysia-Rebeccah, which translates as “captivating peacemaker.” They’d call me A-R for short.

Later, in the hospital room, my mother lay holding me against her chest. Her whole body ached. When she saw my dad, she smiled and placed me in his arms. I was smaller than he’d expected. He didn’t know how to hold me, and my mom laughed, showing him. My dad said I squirmed like a small reptile in his hand and then peed on his arm. He was elated.

SUNDAY

Alysia – 1 egg, 1 jar cereal. 2 pieces of bread. 1 jar fruit.

Barbara – 1 piece of toast + butter – juice.

Steve – 2 pieces of toast + jelly.

Steve – 3 pieces of bacon – 2 eggs. 4 pieces of bread. 1 glass of juice.

Barbara – 1 piece of bread – cheese. Marshmallow. Juice. Handful of nuts and raisins.

Alysia – 6 tbls yogurt. 1/4 jar prunes. 1 marshmallow.

This note is a surprise in the middle of my dad’s 1971 notebook. It’s the only time I’ve seen my mother’s handwriting. Unlike my father’s scrunched and tight letters, her script is neat and controlled, slanted to the right, leaning toward the future. She writes with a thin, blue, felt-tip pen. Perhaps money is tight. Perhaps she’s worried about our nutritional intake. It’s a concerned hand, a loving maternal hand that writes out the meals for the day.

The week before, my father had lost his job at the Atlanta Mental Health and Retardation Center, a job my mother had helped him get. So during these months, while my mother was pursuing her master’s in psychology and working every day at the clinic, my father worked on selling his comic strips to underground newspapers. He also stayed at home with his eighteen-month-old daughter, playing the revolutionary role of househusband.

Every day, after making calls and mailing off query letters, Dad would put me in the stroller and walk me into Lullwater Park. From a small paper sack, he ripped pieces of stale bread and handed them to me to toss in the water for the ducks. I loved watching the ducks quack and splash as they struggled to get every crumb.

Because of money concerns, my mom and dad moved their fish tanks into a larger apartment, which they shared with a roommate, an antiwar student named Bill. After work one afternoon, my mom came home to find my dad sitting with Bill and his friends Jeff and Phoenix on the sofa while I played on the oriental rug with a pink wind-up musical giraffe. My mom announced that she felt “intense feelings of love for everyone.” My father told me how she liked to imagine everyone as part of one big family.