Four years ago, he came to the city to take me out to dinner for my tenth birthday. He was three months early. We went to a diner on Eighty-Sixth Street. He’d suggested we go somewhere nicer but I told him no, I liked that place best. I knew his bus ticket alone had cost him a week’s salary. My mother had told me that, but not in a nice way. He wore a white shirt that I had given him for Hanukkah three years before, when we’d still lived with him. I had stolen it from Mrs. Bennett’s house. Her husband died. She paid me to help clean up. She shook so much she broke things. I didn’t have to steal it. I could have asked for it. No one would have worn it. The shirt was still in plastic. I stuffed it in my jacket while she was napping with the TV on.
My father and I got there for the early-bird special, which meant a beverage, dessert, and coffee were free with an entrée. I planned on giving him my free coffee.
I’d cleaned my room and refolded all my clothes even though I knew he’d never come to the apartment. He was the opposite of pushy, especially when it came to my mother. I braided my hair along both sides of my head because he once said that he liked it that way. He looked strange in New York. Somehow too delicate, even though he was big; his hands were covered in calluses, his pants were torn at the ankle, and his beard was so thick it could catch all the dirt that the wind picked up. He looked fuller, like the inside of his skin was lined with bark. His eyebrows had gotten bushy, and his eyes rested in two dark spots.
He was doing odd jobs, he said. Sometimes logging. He looked up at the buildings, almost crouching. He wobbled and grabbed for a parking meter and my shoulder. It made me feel strong.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said. “I used to love this city. I guess now it’s too much for a country boy like me.”
He read the gigantic menu over again and again. I made eyes at the waitress to tell her not yet. I didn’t want to embarrass him. He mouthed his order before he spit it out to her.
“Mile-high turkey platter with spinach, no garlic.”
His mouth was so dry his lips got stuck on his teeth.
How’s school?
How’s your room?
Did you make any friends?
He was looking out the window, waiting.
“Dad,” I said. “Mom’s in the Village with Aunt Lou.”
He was startled by what I said and then suddenly relieved, as if he’d taken off a couple of layers. He could really see me then.
Where’s she working now?
How’s her mood?
Has she changed her hair much?
He closed his eyes like he was crying or dreaming as I told him every detail, hoping it would be enough to fill him. Every time she’d gone to the dentist. Every change to her lemon-lavender crème brûlée recipe. The way she blew on Lou’s stove to get it to light. The new shampoo she was trying. I had a feeling he would buy it in New Hampshire, use it himself. She hadn’t been on any dates that I knew of. I told him that too, and how often I’d found her with half her body out a window because, she said, the air was cleaner a few flights up. I didn’t tell him that I believed she did it to remind herself of my father, of sleeping with the windows open in Cow Hampshire, breathing through both her nose and mouth—his breath keeping her alive too. Or about the owls he’d carved when we were a family, how she’d never gotten rid of them, and some nights, she’d clutch them in her sleep. If I’d told him, it would have overwhelmed his heart.
I did say, “I could have stayed with you.” He actually laughed.
“No,” he said. “Over your mother’s dead body.”
For a second I felt flattered. He thought she’d never give me away.
“Your mother is gorgeous as a vase until you knock her over,” he said. “Then all you have is a boatload of jagged pieces.”
I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I think I do now. He meant that her presence was staggering. That she was commanding, blinding, so much—like sitting in the front row at the movies—and that it was just about impossible to get any real sense of her when you were right next to her, unless you could break her, which he knew I never could. I’d never even try.
When he said goodbye—he took the bus down and back up on the same day—he pressed his rough cheek to my head.
“Send my best to your mother.”
His body had gotten more solid.
“I love you, honey.”
I pushed down the urge to ask him why. I felt the stiffness of his brown workman’s coat for days, its elbow awkwardly jammed into my eye.
At home, I looked in the mirror until I had three eyes and five sets of lips. I wanted to see what it would be like to try to love me. Sometimes, I imagined that my father stood on the corner yelling up to my mother and Aunt Lou that he was going to take me and take care of me, and he was always holding this big white down comforter, like a deflated hot-air balloon. He was ready to wrap me in it.
I’d had a choice, I guess. I could have moved up there with him. Except that I couldn’t have, even if he’d offered. The last time I heard his voice was on the answering machine three years ago. I was supposed to be sleeping. He sang “Happy Birthday” like the words were weeping out of him. My mother pressed Delete.
“Damn drunk,” she’d said to Lou, and Lou’d said, “That’s right! That’s exactly what he is.”
That evening, after I used the phone at the bookstore, I searched for hours on the Internet for something about my father. As it turned out, there was only one mention of him anywhere, crediting him for the millwork in a historical bed-and-breakfast in Cow Hampshire. I thought about calling the place but then I came up with a better idea. If he was anywhere at this hour, he was at a bar. It was too late for him to be working. So I went online again and found the names and numbers of the three pubs in our old town.
Aunt Lou was watching
Jeopardy!
in the living room when the phone rang.
“Get that!” she shouted. “If it’s Jorge, tell him I died.”
I raced for it in the kitchen, even though the phone was just feet from Lou.
“Hello?” I said, picking it up and making my way to the couch.
“Yup,” my mother said to me. Then she was silent. I was too. I was wondering why we were on the phone if she wanted to say nothing at all. For a moment, I wondered if she somehow knew I was getting ready to call my father. Then I imagined she’d called because she just wanted to be with me somehow, to protect me from myself—that it was her way of holding me in her mother arms. We stayed like that forever.
“That’s it?” she said finally. “That’s all you have to say for the trouble you’ve put me through? I can’t focus at work. I can’t do a single thing right.”
“I’m so sorry,” I began, aware that this was out of the blue but feeling horribly guilty nonetheless. I wondered if she’d found a razor or had a camera somewhere or had met Blot, but asking would get me nowhere. I wanted to tell her all the work I’d been doing, how desperate I’d been to find the recipe for her, but I knew how stupid it would sound. I’d wasted so much time.
All I could get out was “Is there anything I can—” before my mother was gone. The phone line was deader than langoustines in pea risotto. I sat there, brimming with emotion but motionless, wanting to take a nap but too tired to even move. When I finally did, it was only because the phone was beeping that it needed to be hung up.
Lou stood up. She was shaking her head. “Naughty, naughty, naughty,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
Lou rolled her eyes.
“We used to hope and hope and hope, your mother and I,” she said, putting her palms together as if praying, “that you wouldn’t end up like your father.”
“Stop,” I whispered but Lou didn’t hear. She loved to trash-talk my father. She loved it almost as much as building up my mother, but not quite.
“You know, silent but deadly,” she said. “All nice on the surface but really taking a knife to everything.”
I imagined my father racing around Cow Hampshire with a knife, going at the hammocks, the black ice, the fences, the flies, the fluorescent lights at the gas stations, but I couldn’t imagine his face. He wasn’t like that. He used to rescue moths.
“Maybe we didn’t hope hard enough,” she said.
She sat down again on the couch across from me and looked at something between her toes.
“This is not going to make your mother love you more,” she said. “You doing those things, it makes her feel like a bad parent. This isn’t the way to get attention.”
“It isn’t about her,” I said. “I don’t do it so she’ll notice. I try to make sure she won’t.”
“You think that,” she said, “but everything you do is about her.” She repeated the word, drawing out the syllables: “Ev. Ree. Thing.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I have a life.”
“Oh yeah?” Aunt Lou said. “Prove it. You don’t have friends like a normal teenager. You don’t have hobbies. You don’t do drugs. You don’t do anything because you’re afraid you might miss her.”
“There’s this guy—” I began.
“Oh Christ,” she said. “You’re like six years old. You tell that to your mother and she’ll chain you to the fridge.
“You think,” she continued, “that maybe one day she’ll be home and she’ll want to take you to Les Halles. And if you’re out with your friends or you’re getting laid in a museum bathroom, you’ll miss out on being with her. I know. I get it. Don’t feel bad. Nancy has that effect on people. When we were kids, everyone wanted her to sit in the middle of the table at a birthday party—even when it wasn’t her party—just so they could be a part of what she gave out.”
It happened right then. It started in my shoulders and made its way down. It was like traveling ants. The question I wanted to ask Lou was if Les Halles was my mother’s new favorite restaurant. It used to be, years before. But what else didn’t I know?
“So just live your life,” she said. “If she’s going to be happy, it won’t be because of you. I can tell you that right now.”
“I’ll take Mobisodes for two hundred,” said
Jeopardy!
I tuned out.
Then: “What is
The Sopranos
?”
“That is correct!”
“I knew that,” Lou said, and clapped her hands in front of the television.
When Aunt Lou was on her third glass of wine, and my mother was in the middle of dinner service at the restaurant, I closed the door to the bathroom and called the Hinkley Pub. The line was busy. At McSorley’s, they knew no Paul. I was starting to feel like this was the stupidest idea in the world when I called Frosty Bear Tavern and asked the final time for Paul Seltzer.
“Paul!” said the bartender. “It’s for you.”
I had to do a little dance with my lips to keep them from sticking together. I swallowed hard.
“Hello?” said my father, whose voice was more careful than I remembered, and higher.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said back.
“It’s me,” I said. I wondered if my voice had changed too. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers that he’d recognize it anyway and that if he did, it meant something.
“Hey, you,” he said, clearly unsure. My heart dropped.
“Oh, you!” he just about shouted. “Lorca?”
“Yes, hi,” I said, relieved. “I was just calling—”
He cut me off. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did something happen? Is your mother all right?”
I sort of laughed. It was a question I didn’t know how to answer but that I should have been prepared for.
“I know you’re busy,” I said, wanting him to say something about his never being too busy for me or that he’d been hoping I’d call. Instead, he got defensive.
“I am busy,” he said. “You can tell your mother how many calls I’ve gotten lately about my work. The inns around here are throwing dozens of projects my way all the time. Every day.” He paused. “Just about every day.”
“That’s good,” I said. At that moment, I realized that I didn’t miss him anymore. I thought about dying in an accident: I’m in the back seat of a car, and he’s far away. I imagine my mother calling him, sharing the news, and him clutching his stomach, about to rip the phone out of the wall and then not, not wanting to lose her. Her. All the while, the seat belt is still across my chest, and my mouth is open, attracting flies. The police are circling around the car, making a brown ring of footprints in the snow, just waiting for someone to show up. It gets dark and no one does and finally, hours later, I just disappear. The seat belt is still buckled and the car is a tin can, but I am gone. No one ever claims me.
On the phone now, I had the urge to tell him that something was very wrong with me. I was very very sick.
“Honey,” he said. “I’m really sorry I missed your birthday. Like I said, it’s been busy up here. But I thought about you. Had a pistachio ice cream in your honor.”
I believed him. Pistachio was still my favorite.
“Is that why you’re calling, honey? I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
That was exactly what I’d hoped he’d say.
“Remember,” I said, “that restaurant?” I went through the whole song and dance about the Shohet and His Wife. I told him all the things I knew—and added some made-up details for atmosphere. Like about how in love they’d been and how he probably picked up my mother’s fork from the floor, put his hand over hers, knocked his knees against hers, and had bought her flowers, which she kept sniffing all through dinner. I told him about how beautiful she’d looked. That part, I didn’t need to make up. That was always the truth. I kept going—about her hair and her thick fans of eyelashes and her long legs, too long for any table, and about her perfect teeth. I told him that she broke her rule for him—she put her elbows on the table so she could be closer to him. I told him about the delicious masgouf.
When I was finished, my mouth was dry, and the line was silent.
“Hello?” I said. “Dad?”
“Is that what she told you?” he asked in a tiny voice. I could barely hear him.
“Well, sort of,” I said.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “Honey, I’ve never had that fish in my life.”
F
OR OUR FIRST
couple of lessons, I’d ordered in the groceries. They arrived at our apartment, boxed and fresh, at a designated time, requiring no more than a signature. The deliveryman brought the goods into the kitchen and put them at waist height, so I never even needed to bend.