My Father’s Keeper

As Dad points away from the other three, looking disgusted, Lee, on the other end, bears down into the heels of his shoes, looking constipated. I sit on the shelf of my father’s arm and beam brightness in my funeral dress, lacy bonnet and white ribbed leggings. And it is after this funeral that we do what most thinning, dysfunctional families do: move cross country to be closer to one another.

I have no other photo of my father and me until the age of nine and by then my brother Danny will have joined us, amping our total extended family count up to six. But until then, there are seven delicious years of just me and my dad.

It is 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am four years old. I have a Fisher-Price Castle and Weebles “wobble but they don’t fall down”. The plastic horses are thick and smooth and their legs move at the joints, and the castle has a dungeon where the innocent await rescue. They just don’t make toys like that anymore.

On the first day after our arrival, my father and I are dropped off in a public park while our mother drives around to scout for a place to live. Six years his senior, her 31 to his green 25 entitled her to make every choice that affected us, from where we lived to when we moved. Dad lounged in the lush grass, not a care in the world and peeled off a mound of marshmallow snowball from its wrapper to hand over to me. It was the most delicious thing I had eaten in all of my four years and we lazed in the grass, licking coconut marshmallow off our fingers; every moment stolen with my father one of pure contentment knowing he was safe with me.

In our rented crackerjack house, my days are spent parked in front of the television set in a sunken den of the Seventies, covered in wall-to-wall wine-coloured shag. Dad looks for work and Mom slumps at the dinette in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and pushing the cuticles back on her nails.

“Look, Julie, you’re father’s an ass, alright?” she’d startle when I’d catch her talking to herself. “So what if he does find work?” She blew smoke over my head from one of the emergency fags she kept stashed in the silverware drawer, “He couldn’t keep a job if his ass was on fire.”

It was a bad disposition and sheer idiocy, Mom insisted, that caused Dad to get fired. And the more he shied from her verbal assaults, the more I spread my wings to shelter him. If I could temper his mood and happiness, it seemed a small price to pay to have my father by my side. The details were never quite clear but, if there is one thing I can attest to with consistency about my father, it is that whatever misfortune happened along the way, it was never, ever his fault. Bound to see him through his own eyes, it would take me twenty odd years to trace the wreckage back to its source.

My father has the deepest dimples: craters carved into the sides of his face that when activated, all joy sprang forth and radiated outward. My father might not smile for the camera, but he lights up when he sees me. He bounds through the door at the end of the day and scoops me up and I wrap my arms around his neck, squeezing tight. He flips me upside down and swings me by my ankles, my long blond hair tumbling down. He draws my back to his chest with one arm, with me still upside down and pretends to stumble like a blind man into the living room, jutting his other hand out to feel the way. I giggle wildly as he steadies a faux fall down to the carpet, digging his fingers into my armpits until I laugh so hard I nearly wet my pants.

“Ah, baby, I love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” I say breathless.

He kisses my forehead. I fold his arms around me and brush the soft warm of his palms down over my eyes. I love these moments with my father more than anything.

“Sit on my feet so I can do my sit-ups, baby.”

My father calls me baby, a dizzying siren song to my ears. He lay down on his back, bends his knees. I plunk upon my father’s toes, leveraging my hands on his ankles. He curls into a sit-up and raises his feet too, lifting me like a see-saw.

“Daddddddd!” I cling to his shins for balance while he tries to buck me off.

“C’mon Baby,” he says, as he shakes me from his legs like a lemon from the tree, “You got to hold daddy’s feet down!”

I am all gums and teeth with laughter. I bear my weight on the tops of his feet, he crosses his arms on his chest and groans his first sit-up. One, two, three…four…fivvvve…sixsss…he falls back to the floor, winded.

“Six is enough for today, baby.” He wheezes and curses under his breath, “Fuckin’ Agent Orange.”

My mother slices through the corner of the living room, carrying stacks of sorted laundry. My father lies on the carpet, clutching his chest—still burning from a faraway place called ‘Nam.

“Dan, would you brush your daughter’s hair? God, it’s a rat’s nest. The brush is in my purse.”

My father blinks his Little Orphan Annie eyes and crawls over to dig through her bag. I stand between his folded knees and he brushes me from the top, pulling the bristles through my long, fine hair until it snaps in tiny knots at the end. I yelp.

“Jesus Dan, brush her from the bottom, not the top you idiot.” She grabs the brush from my father and pulls it hard through my hair, “Like this,” then slaps the handle back in his hand.

And my father blinks empty, starts over, follows orders, tries to please.

I didn’t meet another child until I was five years old and Mom finally ventured out of the house to find the neighbours. Marty is the Mexican boy from next door who is a year younger and bangs on our door at the crack of dawn; Jill is the girl across the street who is a year older and cheats openly at Hungry Hippos.

At my house we drape the blankets from the bed over the dining room table to make a fort beneath. Mom sits in the kitchen, filing her nails.

And that’s when Marty takes me into the bedroom and Jill makes me lay on my bedspread face down.

“We’re going to play doctor now,” she says in her bossy voice, “I’m the nurse and you need a shot.” She pulls my shorts down and my Tuesday underwear to the tops of my legs and Marty makes his papery fingernails into a C and pinches them closed on the skin of my bottom.

A dizzying electric current shoots down my legs and out the top of my head from the single vortex of one pinch. I lay there breathing into the pillow.

“That’s it.” Jill play-slaps my butt. “You were a good patient.”

In afternoons of deathly quiet, Mom draws the curtains to shut out the blazing Arizona sun and I play the game of Matching Pairs. I slap the cards down on the carpet and I’m good. I only have to turn them over a couple times before I remember where the exact match is. Apple to apple, orange to orange, flower to flower, I stack the matched sets one on top of the other until everything is paired. Then I shuffle them fancy like I see Mom do at solitaire and do it all over again.

An endless stream of unemployed days comes to an end and my father rushes in to grab me, cupping his big hands over my face and leading me out the door into the drive.

“Lookie, baby, lookie what Daddy got! I saw it and said ‘I have got to get that for my baby.’”

In the drive sits a tiny car, a 1972 Datsun painted green, the precise colour of split pea soup.

My father has landed a job as a plumber at the local Air Force base—a position he is almost guaranteed never to lose. Military bases are full of sinks and toilets and drains. In his excitement on the way home, he saw the car and bought it with the money we had left.

“It looks like a peanut, Daddy.”

Dad claps his hands, “That’s it! That’s what we’ll call it, my baby’s peanut mobile.”

My mother simmers at the door as Dad snaps me into the bucket seat. We take off around the block, my hand clinging to the armrest, my head barely high enough to see out the window. My father smiles down to me and I scrunch my shoulders and smile back. The car zips down the road like a Tylenol capsule on wheels, bounding inches above the pavement; racing along with all the punch of a rip cord toy car.

I’m curled in my father’s lap for Saturday morning cartoons when he gives me the signal to follow. He silently trips the latch on the screen and pushes me out the door.

“Sandy,” he leans back over the threshold, “Me and Julie’s going out in the peanut mobile.”

I can hear her No! from the kitchen but we’re already gone; my father exaggerating a tiptoe in fast motion across the pavement while I plaster my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling out loud. He squeals out the drive.

“Just like the Keystone Cops!” he shouts.

“Yeah!”

There is a feeling of exhilaration to be with my father, to escape from the house and have it be just us. Forever bonded; me and my dad. We don’t even have to talk. We drive out of our middle class suburb and through tidy neighborhood streets with Monopoly houses and green lawns, the jitter of sprinklers rapid firing across wet grass. We drive into foreign streets with dirt lots by the buildings, where neon signs light Martini glasses with a bikini-clad girl dipping over the side in an illusion of bright lights. Tall, lithe dogs shoot across the road without looking; their big, boney skulls slung low on the prowl.

Dad is taking me for the first time to his favourite Chinese restaurant.

The parking lot is empty. He opens the front door and a brilliant slice of light cuts into the dark. The carpet is sticky under the soles of my white sandals. There are no other people and not even tables set. He lifts me to the black high back of a barstool that is one in a row lining a long bar.

“Be right back, Daddy’s gotta go potty.”

My father slips through a set of swinging red shutters that hinge in a naked doorway at the end of the bar. Hushed whispers float from behind the shutters and I see a pair of woman’s legs rise from sitting under the frame. Minutes tick by with only the occasional rustle—the clamour of a falling pan, a single thud against a wall, another wave of frenzied whispers—that lets me know my father is still back there.

A long mirror runs behind the bar. If I kneel on the stool, my head crests into reflection and my face emerges in the dim light. Over the door behind me, I can see in the mirror a red exit marquee, and to the left a barely lit bathroom sign emitting the low sick buzz of electricity.

The bell on the door tinkles, a wedge of light slashes across the carpet.

Where is my dad?

A man stands just inside the door, adjusting to the dark.

I watch him in the glass, frozen in place.

He squints his eyes and slowly makes out my face in the mirror. He bolts to the men’s room just as my father swings the red lacquered doors open.

“Daddy!”

A woman follows, dressed in pink satin.

“Hi, Baby. Can you say, Sawatdee Cup? That means ‘Hello, how are you’ in Taiwanese.”

The girl smiles and slips behind the bar. Her long black hair runs cool down her back. My dad gives the doorknob of my knee a honk honk. He orders us wonton soup and egg rolls with duck sauce.

Behind the bar, our waitress turns to give us our drinks. I glare at her.

She smiles.

My father winks.

He is jovial, relaxed, blowing on my wonton soup to cool it, giving me feathery tickles under my chin, making up for leaving his baby in a way only a dad can do. And in the flicker of a moment, the space between us closes and it’s once again a Saturday with just me and my dad.

That first summer in Phoenix was so hot you couldn’t touch your bare feet to the sidewalk past morning light. Our reasons for moving close to Grandma Madge were fading as Mom bickered with her over everything from whether a red bell pepper was called a “mango” to the boxes of floor-length dresses Grandma Madge kept in a big box marked “Church Bizarre”. She dragged them out from the spare bedroom and held them up against me. Floor-length frocks made of heavy velvet and scratchy gold lamé; high collars, dowdy sleeves, zippered backs. These were not the dresses on their way to the church bazaar, they were in fact rejects coming from it.

“Thanks Madge, that’s great, why don’t you just keep them for Julie until she’s big enough?”

“What a good idea, how old do you think she’ll need to be?”

“Twenty, Madge. Twenty.”

And Grandma Madge counts on her fingers, pondering aloud where she will store them for fifteen years.

In the beginning my grandmother would take me for day trips to fish at the lake but every car ride home ended in a fender bender with her behind the wheel. Privileges were reeled in to the local Encino Park where she could pedal me around the lake in the Swan boats. But even then Grandma Madge never missed a chance for ministry on the fly and she’d sweep right past the water in one of her to-the-ankle long-sleeved dresses looking for a gang of homeless youths, me in tow.

When she spotted a kid high as a kite with a bloody nose, she made a bee-line for him. The kid looked around, trapped. With nothing else to lose, he closed his eyes as Grandma Madge fished a Bible from her purse. Caught in the rapture of spirit, she began to weep; one woman in prayer, her bony hand bound to the wrist of the bleeding boy. And the Swan boats floated by as the kid sneezed and splattered blood on me from his broken nose while Grandma Madge tried to convert him to Christianity. It was soon decided that only my mother’s presence could assure my safety.

I have only one photo from these rare outings with Mom as chaperone. The three of us are leaving the mall, my grandmother with a purse as big as a bowling ball bag looped over the crook of her arm. We have walked out into the parking lot’s bright sun and Mom has whacked me on the head with her fist. As I stand heaving in a pastel jumper with knobbly knees and long blond hair, she roots through her purse for the camera and passes it to Grandma Madge. And there we are, a snapshot captured in time, me wiping away a tear and my mother’s arm around my shoulder, veneered smile sealed upon her face.

To her credit, I always remember Mom having a soft spot for animals and back then she’d take me to the slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Phoenix, where we’d buy up the little colts whose mothers had already had their throats slit. The babies would skit around the corral with wide-eyed fright, snorting through their nostrils, afraid to even let their hooves touch the ground. The feeling that hung in the air was sheer terror. I understood that instinctively, despite being so young, and the smell of death seeped through the car windows as we drove in the dusty lane leading back to the slaughter pens. Mom said that most horses here were stolen from farms and given to slaughter because of the foreigner’s love of horse meat, and that was the first time that I knew that we were different. Because my God, Mom would say, who could ever eat a horse’s meat?

My father pants like a puppy, hangs his tongue out. The bike wobbles and spits down the sidewalk, my training wheels freshly shucked. He runs alongside, hanging onto the back of the bike seat.

“You’re doing it baby, Go, Go, pump the pedals.”

His shout at my side fades as I take flight from the push of his palm, pedalling furiously down the sidewalk. Like my father, my tongue hangs out, my face frozen in studied concentration. My arms are bent with a death grip on the handlebars, I’m riding my bike! And I have left my father behind. The ends of my long hair blow off my back, the squares of concrete rush beneath me. But I want my father here, running alongside. I turn to find him and see him back at the house, a block away. I tap my toes to the sidewalk to stop and the bike shimmies. My foot catches in the frame and I topple over, skinning my knee, my hair tangling in the chain. I look to my father and scream but it’s not the pain that brings hot tears. It’s my dad talking to the neighbour, only stopping long enough to wave wildly for me to walk back to him.

That night, Dad pads down the hallway to the bathroom where I soak my knee in the tub. He rummages through the medicine cabinet for a hairgrip.

He sticks the curved end deep into his ear and scrapes, sinking his eyes closed.

“Honey, don’t ever let me see you do this.”

He jiggles the grip and looks at it, then presses it to the leg of his shorts, popping a crescent moon of burnt orange ear wax onto his leg.

“If you ever want to clean your ears, honey.” He sticks the bobby pin back in the cabinet. “You come get either me or mommy. You never want to run a bobby pin in your ear without one of us there to supervise.”

It was just after the first Christmas in Phoenix that the call came in from the base. Dad had tangled himself up while clearing out industrial drains and been spit out again, with both elbows snapped.

My father sits at the dinette in the kitchen, his casted arms folded to his chest like a mummy, anchored by double slings that criss-cross over him and tie around his neck. His fingers rest under his shoulders and look like garden grubs, curled black and blue.

Our mother forks three poached eggs from pan to plate, “Here, feed your father,” she says and drops the plate on the table, walking out.

I butter his toast and spoon a bite of egg onto the corner. I stand at his knee and lift it to his mouth.

My father leans forward, armless. He bares his teeth and bites. A bit of yolk dribbles down his chin and I dab it with a napkin. The bottom rim of his eye wells, one giving way to a quiver.

“You’re so good to me, baby.” A tear splashes down his cheek.

I stand before my father, lift my small hands to his face. His drops his head into the cradle of my palms and I bear the weight of my father’s heavy head.

“You’re so good to your Daddy,” he sobs.

“It’s okay, Daddy.”

“Will you take care of me, baby?”

“I’ll take care of you, Daddy.”

“I got nobody else but you.”

He lifts his forehead from my hands.

“I love you so much, baby.”

A tear drops from his chin to my face.

“I love you, too.”

It trickles down and we are bonded; his tear in my eye, sealing me as my father’s keeper.

With Dad at home in his slings, Mom tries another approach with Grandma Madge. We pick her up at her own crack jack house a mile away and drive to a pool party of one of the neighbours.

“Whatever you do Madge,” Mom warns in the car, “for God’s sake don’t embarrass me.”

I spotted her first when she stepped out of the changing cabana. My grandmother ran a band of long black hair from her belly button to her thighs and there it was in all its glory. When she spotted me and Mom across the patio at the bowl of chips, she waved over the heads of a pool of people, “Sannndy, Jeweeelly, over here!”

Mom walked straight in the front door that night and said, “Dan, I could have died.”

When Dad’s casts came off he returned to the base, only to find he no longer had a job. In the time he’d worked as a plumber, he’d racked up almost more time off with pay than he’d spent working.

And that’s how we ended up leaving Phoenix, and back in Ohio, moving through a series of apartments and mobile homes in a never ending quest to be settled. I went to four different kindergartens alone; just making a new friend before being yanked out again. We finally spent six months in a rented trailer, long enough for Dad to till a garden and mound rows of dirt to plant cantaloupes. On Saturdays, he’d load great baskets of ripe melons into the back of the car and drive us over to the new base where he worked, parking at the edge of the gates to wait for the military men coming and going on shift. I sat on the tailgate of the family station wagon, swinging my legs, happy as a clam to be with my father. Dad was a master melon grower and the men of the base always pulled over to share a joke or a story with my dad and walk away with an armful of juicy cantaloupes. I watched them as the sun set and laughed with them, even though I didn’t know what they talked about. But it was just the warmth of the people who sought out my father that I liked so much; men who smiled and laughed and didn’t carry the weight and anger of my mother. And Dad was never like this when they were together. I experienced my parents separately—and it was my father who stole my heart.

And who knew that it would be in the hollow of Burns Road where we’d finally settle or that I’d come of age on the same track of isolation in which my life began? But we were driven to the ends of the earth by the 22 different jobs Dad had over the years and his increasing need for shelter, each loss a slit in the fabric of my father’s well-being and an obvious indication that the world was conspiring against him. After all, the proof was all around us. Grandma Madge was crazy. Former bosses were crazy. The people who got him fired were crazy. The only one who was not mad, my father insisted and I wholeheartedly agreed, was him.

Chapter Three

I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.

We weave our little fingers together;

Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.

When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.

“Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.

Ooooga-ooooooooga.

The other car would honk back and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.

Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.

Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.