Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (21 page)

“It's hot in here,” he said. “I hope your mother is making iced tea.”

 

Forty-Three

 

Not long after that, my snooping came back to pinch me—not hard enough to make me stop, but enough to make me reevaluate my skills. Along with taking covert inventory of my father's office on a regular basis, I branched into the house. I regularly examined and sometimes played with my mother's stash of Christmas and birthday gifts in the back of the hutch, then acted surprised when I opened my presents. I pilfered from boxes of candy and Pop Tarts stored discreetly on the top shelve of the pantry, then agreed with my mother that yes, we must have a mouse inside the walls.

One particular weekend my father had gone to Hollywood for a night on the town with his friends while my mother, who may have been pregnant with my brother at the time, and I stayed home and watched Peter Falk in an episode of
Columbo
. My father's car sat in the driveway when I awoke early the next morning, so I knew he'd come home during the night. Outside their closed bedroom door, on the cluttered dining-room table, I spotted something new—a 45 rpm record, the same type of black vinyl record as the Hendrix albums in the office, but smaller in diameter, with only one song on each side. I picked it up, held it in both hands, and tipped it from the protective paper jacket. How dare he go out, have fun without me, and bring back this trinket for himself? I held the record up to the light to examine the spiral grooves. Like I had with the Hendrix albums, I pressed my fingers gently into the surface. First I ran my fingers along the grain, parallel with the circular disc's perimeter; then across the grain, over the grooves from the edge of the disc toward the center. I knew to be careful, because pressing too hard could scratch the groves and ruin the record—the needle would skip when it played, and there's no fixing a scratched record. Where had he gone last night, I wondered. To a movie? To dinner? To the Chinese place with round red doors? And now he had this token.

I pushed my finger harder. I rubbed back and forth across the grain, harder than I ever had with the Hendrix album. And then my finger slipped, and my fingernail gouged a deep rut into the soft plastic. I didn't scratch it on purpose, but then again, he got what he deserved. Maybe next time he'd bring a gift home for me, not for himself. I slid the record back into its jacket and returned it to the table.

Later that morning, as soon as my father appeared from his room, he picked up the record and brought it to me. He held it in front of me, the paper jacket still hiding the scratch. “I got this for you,” he said with a smile. “This song reminds me of you. It's called ‘I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.'” He promised that later on we'd go into his office to play it on the hi-fi. “But in the meantime,” he said, “it goes like this.” Standing between the table and the grate of the floor furnace, with his bare chest and bare feet, he broke into song. “I'd like to build the world a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtledoves,” he sang, then waited for me to repeat the line. Then he sang the next line: “I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I'd like to hold it in my arms and keep it company.” He sang the entire song, pausing for me to repeat each line.

He slid the record from the paper sleeve to show me the title printed on the label. That's when he noticed the scratch. “How could that be?” he moaned. “I checked it in the store.” He turned the record over and over, examining it closely in the light, then moving to the unshaded window for closer inspection.

I played dumb, never confessing to my little crime. It was an accident, after all. Sort of. And isn't that what I deserved, I thought. Here I'd been jealous of my father's outing, jealous of the thing he'd brought back—a trinket he'd purchased for me.

 

Forty-Four

 

My parents divorced at the end of my fourth-grade year, just before my tenth birthday. Not long afterward, my mother moved with my three-year-old brother and me to Visalia, a three-hour drive north from Pomona. For a while, my father made the trek up Highway 99 fairly frequently, staying the weekend every couple of months. He and my mother would hole up in the bedroom during the day, and in the late afternoon he'd saunter from the dim hallway and walk around the house in his underwear before taking us to Yen Ching's for mushu pork with sweet and sour shrimp, where my father, without fail, licked his plate when the waiter wasn't looking, and my mother perpetually scolded, “Bruce, how many times do I have to tell you?”

“What?” He shrugged and winked at me. “Carole, did you see anything? David?”

“No,” David said, and we laughed when my mother rolled her eyes.

David and I were always eager to see him those weekends. Between visits I mailed letters frequently, many of which I found in his filing cabinet when I recently cleaned out his house. My father and I share the same birthday, June 2, so a few days before my eleventh birthday, my mother took David and me to J.C. Penney's to pick out shirts we would give him as gifts. I chose a green T-shirt with a photo on the front: a bird resting atop a rusted tin mailbox, the red flag raised. The image seemed to encapsulate my sending those weekly and biweekly letters. When he arrived at our house in Visalia that weekend, David and I ran to greet him in the driveway. He swooped us into his arms and said how much he'd missed us.

As soon as we got inside, I thrust my gift at him, which I had wrapped in plain white paper I'd patched together with Scotch tape and decorated with colored pencils and crayons. I'd wrapped the paper directly around the shirt without putting it in a box, so the asymmetrical package squished and crinkled as I pushed it into his palms.

My mother urged him to wait. “Open it later, Bruce,” she said. Her face indicated something I didn't understand at the time.

“No, don't wait,” I said. All I wanted was to see the look on his face when he saw that shirt. The songbird, the red flag. How perfect. I would be sure to tell him later on that the bird chirped “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

He sat down on the couch, still holding the canvas overnight satchel he'd brought in from the car. He rested the satchel in his lap and wagged his head side to side, explaining that he didn't have a birthday gift to give me just yet, that he thought we'd all go out to dinner that night to celebrate.

“Certainly you have
something
for her,” my mother said. She wasn't asking my father, but telling him. He had something. A thing. Anything. Any object. She stood in the doorway, that liminal space between the kitchen and the living room, as if there was something important that needed to be done at that exact moment, an unspecified task that precluded immediate gift exchanges. It was like she stood in between
here
and
there
, ready to either stand behind me in the living room or call me away to the kitchen, depending on how the conversation between my father and myself unfolded. “You have something, I'm sure,” she said again. “Maybe out in the car. Yes, maybe you need to go look for it, Bruce—in the car, under the seats, perhaps—while we stay inside. Carole, can you help me in here?”

I plopped down on the floor across from my father.

My mother stepped back once, no longer in the open doorway, but fully in the kitchen.

My father held the wrapped package in his hands, the paper crumpling between the pressure of his fingers and the soft contents inside.

“Bruce,” my mother said, “you told me on the phone before you left this morning that you'd already packed it in the car. Remember?”

Today, I know this was my father's cue. He could have made a big act of searching the car while I watched, all the while muttering under his breath,
Your gift must be here somewhere. Where did it go?
—or else he could have made a covert dash to KMart around the corner while my mother kept me distracted inside the house.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and unzipped the satchel. “I do have something. I almost forgot.”

My mother then stepped forward, now on our side of the doorway, her hand grasping the frame. I suppose she held onto that liminal position between rooms so that she could call me into the kitchen if my father failed to produce a gift and she needed to distract me from disappointment.

He rooted among his socks and electric shaver, then pulled out a boxed bar of soap. Yardley London English Lavender. It wasn't gift-wrapped, but just in the box it's sold in. “You'll become a young lady soon, so I want you to have this, my favorite kind of soap.” I knew this box well. It was the same soap he used all the time—a slightly upper-priced product sold at grocery and drugstores. “Here,” he said, and placed it in my open hands.

I fell for it. Wow. What a grownup gift, I thought.

He opened my gift, oohed and aahed over the artistic wrapping paper, then modeled the shirt to show how perfectly it fit.

By the time we left for Yen Ching's, I'd placed my bar of soap, still in its cardboard box, on my dresser, as if it were a delicate porcelain trinket. The soap stayed on my dresser for years. To me, it was a scented decoration. Not a utilitarian bar of ordinary soap, but a solid oval sachet that rattled in my hand each time I shook the box gently from side to side.

 

PART VI

The Face of Perfection

 

Forty-Five

 

(2008)—

Although my father's never been real big into giving gifts to his children or grandchildren for birthdays and holidays, he's quite the gift-giver nonetheless. He might tip a pretty waitress twenty or even a hundred dollars. While visiting his in-laws in Mexico, he might befriend the nineteen-year-old maid (who's married and has two babies) and then, upon his return to the States, periodically mail checks to show his appreciation (along with a standing invitation for her to come visit him in the States anytime, free and gratis). What he really wants, though, is not merely to brighten a stranger's day. He's fishing for a wife. Sometimes the whole business gets a little smelly.

Like with Charlotte.

Charlotte happened a couple of years after my father had moved to my neighborhood in Visalia. He'd been going to Kinko's frequently during the preceding weeks, often daily. I wasn't really aware of these outings, nor did I have reason to care. Although we lived on the same street and we spoke frequently, I was only peripherally involved in most of his day-to-day doings, partly because I wished to avoid the awkward Save Mart cashier and Mexican motel clerk-type situations, and partly because David, Penny, and their two kids lived with him.
Here, there, here; together, apart, together
. I was off the hook.

Apparently, my father had befriended and developed a crush on a married thirty-something clerk at Kinko's while making copies of his correspondence to and from various friends and professional acquaintances. No surprise there. Dad's modus operandi in full force. When he'd gone into the store one afternoon and was told that Charlotte no longer worked there, he begged the Kinko's manager to contact Charlotte and relay the message that she should either call him or drop by his house for a visit. Full knowing that this woman (fifty years his junior) had a strapping husband (with a good job as the manager at Lowe's) and two teenage daughters, my father saw this as an opportunity to woo her, lure her from her husband so she might marry him. I know this sounds improbable, but this is what he does all the time—in his eyes, just because someone is married doesn't mean that person needs to stay married (or faithful) to their spouse. Everyone is fair game. I think this stems partly from his self-centered view of the world and partly from some isolated, out-of-context remnant of the free-love hippie culture of the 1960s. And because my father lacks the social savvy to really sweep a woman off her feet (and because he's most interested in women much younger than himself—a twenty-two-year-old would be ideal), he relies on his generosity to make friends. He's a version of the lonely character you see in the movies, the awkward loner who buys rounds of drinks for everyone seated at the bar. Suddenly, he's everyone's bud, at least until closing time.

The first time Charlotte visited my father's house, he offered cash gifts so that she'd be able to (in his words) “feed her family” during what he presumed to be “a period of financial desperation” for poor, unemployed Charlotte. At first she refused. Then she accepted. Several times, over several visits. Twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there.

It seemed that each of them, the old man and the young woman, had tacitly agreed on their rules of engagement—she allowed him the fantasy of a potential intimate relationship (although during her visits they mostly sat on the couch and talked, as if he were a forgotten nursing home resident and she a candy-striper), and he concluded each visit by insisting she take the crisp bills he fanned from his wallet. I'm not sure which bothered me more: the fact that she took advantage of my dad, or the fact that he painted himself a neglected, lonely old man in need of attention. Taking his money was one thing—her bad, his choice. But the woe-is-me scenario reflected poorly on me—look how the old coot's family ignores him. (Which, of course, my brother and I were trying to do. This is why the whole thing drives me nuts. If I paid more attention to my father, he wouldn't need to buy friends. But he drives me crazy. So I ignore him. I avoid him. And when someone like Charlotte comes around, well—I look bad. And it feels like my father's situation is my fault.)

After a while, David and Penny and I made a point of being at home when Charlotte was scheduled to visit, if for no other reason than to show this woman that my dad was not a neglected shut-in to be pitied but a man surrounded by grown children and grandchildren. Nothing changed. The gifts continued.

When the gift ante reached five hundred dollars a pop, my brother intervened by asking Charlotte to stay away. But instead of going away, she resorted to calling right before coming over, then hanging up if David or I answered. She called daily, several times a day, often into the night. Each time my brother or his wife answered, the line clicked and went silent.