Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (19 page)

“As long as it's money,” the cashier said with a smile, and swept the coins into his drawer, dropping the dollars into the compartment usually reserved for checks and bills larger than twenties.

The woman in line behind us lifted her groceries and stacked them on the conveyor belt.

“This is my daughter, Carole,” my father said to the cashier.

I'd been shopping there for over ten years, so the guy knew me. Not by name, probably, but we'd been exchanging pleasantries for years—the
“Plans for the holidays?”
and
“Hot enough out there for ya?”
sort of stuff. He knew that I wrote travel articles for a glossy magazine, that I usually brought my own cloth shopping bags into the store, that if the fresh blueberries were buy one get one free I'd probably buy the maximum allowed by the per-customer limit, and that I preferred to carry my groceries to my car without the box boy's assistance. I knew the cashier had two kids in elementary school, a fairly new dragon tattoo wrapped around his neck, a wife who worked as an instructional aide, and that he often sat on the bench near the newspaper racks outside when he took a cigarette break. Neither the cashier nor I interrupted my father to say that we were already semi-acquainted. There was no chance, really, because my father went on.

“She once voted for Ross Perot, if you can believe that. Ha ha! But that was a long time ago and I don't hold it against her,” he said with a wide-mouthed smile.

And on.

“She's all grown up now, but I'm only seventy-eight—I'm just a spring chicken! Ha! We live on the same street, five doors apart. My son, David, and his family live with me.”

And we're off.

The cashier fiddles with his receipt tape as my dad explains the complicated logistics of their collective living situation. He tells the clerk that my brother and his wife are starting a business in Mexico—building a large apartment complex that they will eventually manage—and how for the next few years my brother and his family will be splitting their time between Mexico and Visalia, “living there, here, there,” my father says in a singsong tone. He explains that David and Penny stay several months at a time in their Mexico home (“apart, together, apart”) while overseeing their Mexico startup business, and how the rest of the time they live with my father in his Visalia home (David and Penny “apart, together, apart”), how my brother will continue with his current California employment until the Mexico upstart business has legs, at which time he will end his California job (“we should all retire at forty”) and join his wife and two young daughters in Irapuato permanently (“together at last”). My father explains that he will either precede or follow David to Mexico, and he'll live in my brother's newly developed apartment complex. (“The startup business will then be lucrative. Ha!”)

Holy crap.

I was no longer an unknown or loosely associated acquaintance who happened to be accompanying an elderly gentleman to the grocery store. Until then, I could have been a caregiver, a friend, a neighbor. Now we were family. I was fully implicated. In the two or three feet separating me from my father, as we stood alongside the counter with its motionless conveyor belt and its fixed ATM swiper box, an invisible bridge linked the two of us, a double-helix suspension bridge spiraled and anchored hip to hip, father to daughter. I was tethered. If things got out of control, I couldn't simply slip away unnoticed.

You probably think I'm overreacting. You're right. I'm not my father's keeper. And who cares if he's socially awkward? And anyway, my father wasn't the one who felt awkward. He was having a pleasant experience chatting up the tattooed guy behind the register. I was the one having a problem.

The cashier nodded at me. “That's nice,” he said to my father.

To others, my father comes across as quirky. Sometimes charming. Perhaps endearing.

“His two daughters, my granddaughters, go to school at Pinkham Elementary,” my father said.

I wished I could disappear into the floor. I was thankful that the cashier probably assumed my father's rambling was an old-age thing, which it wasn't. These outings are easier for me now that he's older, because in my mind I can pretend that he's senile, which usually alleviates the burn in my lower chest.

“I moved to Visalia a couple of years ago, shortly after my wife died.”

And there you have it—
shortly after my wife died
—he'd just slipped his toes across the tenuous boundary dividing what had been stranger-to-stranger chitchat, from what could have remained an appropriate public exchange to a veiled, albeit probably unconscious, slightly inappropriate grasp for deeper engagement. Why must he always do this? He gets people to feel sorry for him—a little at first—and then, if the conversation progresses, like if he's at a restaurant alone, talking to the waitress and the couple at the next table overhears (which they do, because my father talks extra loud now that his hearing's bad), he pours out his life story, which is a story structured to highlight his woes, a story that elicits sympathy, even pity, or, on occasion, an anonymously paid tab.
I travel alone because my wife doesn't enjoy travel; I moved because my wife died; I carry a photo of my dead daughter, Liza, would you like to see it?; My only friends live in Michigan and I haven't seen them in twenty years, so I type letters to them on my electric typewriter which I got at Office Depot and I'm here at Kinko's now to make copies of those letters, but you're so kind—What's your name? Charlotte?—you're so kind when I come here to Kinko's, that to be honest—and please don't take offence, Charlotte—half the reason I come is to see your bright face each week.

But why do I care? I wasn't at Kinko's when he poured his heart out each week. I wasn't at the restaurant when the couple at the next table picked up the tab. If I'm not there, it doesn't affect me, right? What was I bracing for, exactly—at that precise moment—there at the Save Mart register? What did I dread?

The cashier's eyes darted to the line forming behind my father. “I'm sorry to hear that. You're lucky to have family here.”

Family. You're supposed to look out for your family. Be grateful to have family. Be proud of your family. In some ways I am. As I've said, on one hand, he's a pretty cool dad—adventurous, carefree, inquisitive. Smart. On the other hand, I carry a sense of responsibility so heavy that it strains the double helix bridge suspended between us. Instead of merely noticing (what
I
interpret as) an awkward social interaction between my father and someone else, I actually
feel
it. I
experience
it. I
own
the emotion.

I'm the one doing the overstepping, then, aren't I? I've crossed the tenuous boundary separating my father from myself. How can I not? The line evades me, cloaks itself. Sometimes I don't know where it is, or if it exists at all.

His overextended transparency becomes my overextended transparency. He reveals too much, but I experience the pain on his behalf.

Revealing too much.

I suppose someone could say the same of a writer—of a memoirist or personal essayist. Aren't I doing the same thing here, on the page? Exposing myself? Engaging in a form of public exchange—disclosing intimate details about my life, my past, my thoughts and feelings, my shortcomings, my unfulfilled aspirations—for the purpose of eliciting an exchange of some sort, an intimate transaction between writer and reader?

The difference lies in the fact that when I play the role of discloser, I control the flow of information.

My father controls his flow of information.

When I appropriate the social fallout of my father's flow, when I over-empathize, when I intuit the unspoken responses, the reactions, the judgments of others, I assume responsibility for a combustion of elements over which I have little control. (I suppose, though, in writing this memoir, I've turned the tables. My father has no control.)

“Yes, I'm lucky,” he said.

Instead of leaving the bag of groceries on the counter for my father to pick up himself, the cashier lifted it over the counter and placed it in my father's hands. “You have a good day now.”

“Right-o.” He took his bag and stepped away from the counter, whistling a few notes of Beethoven's Minuet in G. He matched his stride with the rhythm of his notes and veered toward the parking lot.

 

Forty

 

Since my earliest childhood, my father and I have veered in and out of each other's lives, at times curving dangerously close. Although we were separated by hundreds of miles and two mountain ranges from the time I was ten until I turned forty, for the first decade of my life we often, albeit sporadically, lived under the same roof. During those early years, I secreted certain objects when he zoomed too far away, and withheld other objects when he veered too near.

From my perspective as a child, our living arrangements seemed unremarkable. I thought nothing of the fact that my dad maintained several simultaneous living spaces for himself. He shared a bedroom with my mother in our house on Ninth Street; he converted the detached garage behind the house into a combination studio-apartment-home-office for himself, which included not only his library and desk but a bed, dresser, and hi-fi record player; and he also bought himself a second home a few miles across town, which we referred to as his “pad” on Magnolia Street. Sometimes Dad lived with us, sometimes at his pad. Some afternoons he napped inside the house, sometimes in his office. Sometimes he brought his visitors into the kitchen for dinner, sometimes they stayed namelessly in the backyard or inside his private office. Sometimes he left for the weekend, sometimes the month. To me, it seemed like an easygoing arrangement between my parents. No drama—not that I was aware of, anyway. I thought all fathers kept separate quarters of some sort and everyone's dad came and went unannounced. While at the time I didn't begrudge him his absences—I didn't know any different—what I wanted more than anything was his undivided attention.

I recall one late afternoon in the living room when he recorded me singing songs as I made them up, impromptu. I must have been quite young, probably about six, a year or so before my brother was born. Our favorite grocery store was going out of business that week, and we had just returned home from our final shopping trip. As my mother unpacked the paper bags in the kitchen, my father suggested I sing a song about Lucky Mart into the reel-to-reel recorder. He held the microphone to my mouth, and as I concluded each song, he clapped, rewound the reels, and played the recording for us to hear. We did it again and again. I made up one Lucky Mart song after another while the world outside our front windows dimmed, until my mother finally announced dinnertime.

Those were the moments I sought.

But they didn't happen nearly as often as I wanted. I suppose that's why I took to snooping early on. When my father was away at work or staying at his Magnolia Street pad, I often snuck into his darkened office while my mother hunched over the rows of tomato plants in the backyard. I secretly pawed through the paper clips and ballpoint pens in the top drawer of his desk, pressed my cheek against the cold cylindrical metal of an unplugged microscope, gazed at—no, studied—the unclothed women in glossy magazines stacked along the bottom bookshelf, slid Jimi Hendrix albums from their jackets to feel the vinyl's grain against my fingertips. Examining and touching these objects brought me closer to the man who owned them. If I couldn't be the center of his attention, then his possessions could, as a convoluted substitute, occupy the center of my attention. I wanted to understand what he liked, even acquire a taste for his proclivities, simply because I wanted him to notice me, to like me. Sometimes I'd put the Jimi Hendrix album on the record player and lower the arm of the needle down. I did not understand this new kind of music, the rhythmless electric grind screeching from the speaker—it sounded like noise to me, like static from an unclear radio station. But perhaps I could learn to like it. So I climbed onto the double bed and bounced trampoline-style while the record spun its noise. I remember watching myself in the mirror that hung on the opposite wall, my bare feet pointed downward in mid-flight, my arms reaching for the ceiling. Jumping over and over, higher and higher, I eventually found the music's beat. Yes, I could learn to like it, even love it. I transformed myself into a living, panting percussion instrument, the soles of my feet plunging into and springing from the mattress—I the drumstick, the bed a drumhead. As my outstretched fingers neared the ceiling, each time with greater upward velocity, I recognized that familiar sensation in my stomach, the same flying sensation I'd felt while riding in the backseat of my parents' convertible when we zoomed full throttle through the California desert.

 

Forty-One

 

I recall one summer drive in particular, when I was around five years old. I've already told you how we barreled across the desert toward Death Valley, how gray waves of heat seethed from the highway, how the top of the Karmann Ghia was off and my mother's brown hair flew wildly around her sweating face, how my father stepped on the accelerator and turned up the radio. I sat cross-legged in the backseat with a sweater tied like a turban around my forehead. The empty arms streamed behind me in the wind, rippling between my shoulder blades. I pretended the sweater sleeves were my hair, long and sleek, like the beautiful magazine women my father had thumbtacked to the wall above his desk.

I told you how, there in the car, my mother didn't respond, just stared out the windshield when my father told her a woman would be moving in with us. “Her name is Pat,” he said, “and she needs a place to stay for a few weeks.”

It was too hot to have anything wrapped around my head, and I imagine my entire body must have been damp with perspiration. I didn't care about the heat, though, and it never occurred to me that I'd be more comfortable without the sweater. Even so, I probably would have kept it on because it made me feel exotic and important.