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She drew stars on the document around the margins, the kind that are only outlines with hollow centers.
“I have nothing,” she said. “This life is shit. Shiiiiit.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want to live anymore! This shitty life. I haaaate this life!” Her throat was like gravel, her voice hoarse from yelling. “This hell life.”
“That’s how it should have been,” my mother said after she saw a documentary about whales, who are born already knowing how to swim, drift, float. No diapers, no being stuck, no mind-numbing tasks.
We could not both be happy at once. Her eagerness—for more life, for fun, the prickly pear—felt to me like danger. My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share. If she has it, I must not; if I have it, she must wilt. As if the emotional thrift of the world meant there was never enough for both of us at any one time.
On our first date, when he came to pick me up, my father asked, ‘Young man, what are you going to be when you grow up?’ And you know what he said?” “What?” “A bum. Your grandfather was not pleased. He was hoping for an upstanding man to take his daughter out, and instead he got this long-haired hippie, saying he wanted to be a bum.”
Of course the parts did not go together. He was rich but had holes in his jeans; he was successful but hardly talked; his figure was graceful, elegant, but he was clumsy and awkward; he was famous but seemed bereft and alone; he invented a computer and named it after me but didn’t seem to notice me, and didn’t mention it. Still, I could see how all these contrasting qualities could be an attribute, spun in a certain way.
“I’m going to die in my early forties,” my father said to me around this time. He’d come to pick me up at a friend’s house for the first time. His delivery was dramatic, as if to stir some action, but there was no action I could see to take.
For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.
I began to see how inside my father there were two competing qualities: one sensitive and specific as a nerve in a tooth, the other unaware, blunt, and bland.
There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and did not set him off.
She looked at him; I could tell she was trying not to cry. “Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?” he continued. “Please stop talking in that awful voice.”
I was predicting what I knew he’d like the least—to live a long and intellectually middling life. It would puncture his arrogance, the way he seemed magnanimous but disconnected, his feeling of his own tragic greatness so strong he had less energy to notice others.
Also, sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute, walking out of restaurants without paying the bill, refusing to buy things other people bought as a matter of course, like furniture. Everyone in his life had been treated to his whimsy about money, offering and rescinding payments for small and large things.
“This isn’t working out, Lis,” my father said the next day, when I told him I’d won. “You’re not succeeding as a member of this family. You’re not pulling your weight. You’re never around. If you want to be part of this family, you need to put in the time.”
It had been more than five months since I’d seen my mother. I was angry with her; I missed her. I hated her, I pitied her, I wanted to eradicate all the signs of her in myself, I missed being touched by her.
“Hey, would you guys come say goodnight to me sometimes?” I asked my father, standing in the kitchen. I’d built up the courage, after talking with Mona. “What?” he asked. “Just a couple nights a week,” I said. “Because I’m lonely.” “Nope, sorry,” he said, without pausing to think.
“I think that would be a good idea,” he said. “You should think about why you’re here and whether you are actually doing your job. Because so far what you’re doing is crap. Everything you’ve done is crap. You just bring this shit again and again. I would like shaved carrots and lemon in a bowl.” He made a gesture to show the size of the bowl.
One day she had turned to me in the kitchen and said, “I was too young.” “For what?” “Marriage,” she’d said dryly.
He isn’t cold, I thought; he just withholds his affection in a pattern I can’t predict or control. In the end, maybe it added up to the same thing.
We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?
“Lis, you’re not being part of this family,” he said. “Frankly, we think you’re being really selfish.” “I want to be part of the family,” I said. “If you skip the circus, you’ll need to move out.”
A few weeks after graduation, my mother asked Kevin and Dorothy to provide a sheet with a detailed accounting of everything they’d spent on me, including the flights, books, vacations, and clothing for school. She sent this piece of paper to my father and, shortly after, he paid them back.
“I want to say something: You were not to blame.” He started to cry. “If only we’d had a manual. If only I’d been wiser. But you were not to blame. I want you to know, you were not to blame for any of it.” He’d waited to apologize until there was hardly anything left of him. This was what I’d been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on a burn. “I’m so sorry, Lis,” he cried and shook his head side to side. He was sitting up, cradling his head in his hands, and because he had shrunk and lost fat, his hands looked disproportionately large, and his neck too thin to hold his skull, like one of
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