You knew about that
Heather Sellers
I was shown to the dining area of my father’s nursing home while someone went back to retrieve him. I had not seen this man in person in a decade. Across the room, a woman in tan slacks and a blue blouse, neatly groomed, leaned forward in her wheelchair, facing the wall.
“Help me,” she moaned. “Help me, please. Someone. Help me.” Her cries came from the deepest well of human despair.
I stepped into the hall, looking for assistance, when I saw an aide pushing a man in a wheelchair towards me. I recognized the radical slope of the man’s body, a person caught constantly mid-fall, as he slumped to the side. His right hand was frozen in a claw at his heart. These were the disabling remnants of a cerebral hemorrhage that ravaged my father many years earlier, rendering an arm and leg useless, muddying his speech. But the man rolling towards me was an altered version of my father. Clean-shaven, he was dressed in a striped polo shirt and clean sweatpants. Cut short, and straight now, his thick white hair no longer streamed past his shoulders. It was so strange to see him this way.
The aide spoke at full volume. “It’s your daughter, Mr. Fred! Your daught-er!”
“Goddamn,” my father said, shaking his head.
I crouched down next to him in the dining hall. The aide disappeared. The woman continued to keen to the wall. My father clamped his good hand on my shoulder, with a strength that knocked me off balance.
“Where ya been?” he said.
“Michigan,” I said, nodding.
“Goddamn,” he said. Tears streamed down his face. I pinned his hand onto my shoulder with both my hands, in part to steady myself, in part to keep that hand from roving down the front of my body, over my breasts.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been down.”
I’d been coordinating his care over the years from afar, by mail and telephone, but distance had lessened the difficulties only slightly. At one point, my father had millions of dollars in the bank in cash, rental properties, a lucrative investment portfolio, and a sizeable inheritance yet to come. In the beginning, I’d tried to help him plan for his future, and to protect himself, but he refused; in fact, inexplicably, he cut me out of his will. Then, as an array of others took advantage, drifters, drinking buddies, and distant relatives, stealing from him, mistreating him, I finally went to court to have him declared legally incapacitated. In spite of the incredible challenges, I’d always tried to look out for his best interests. When the court-appointed attorney reported to the judge his recommendation that I be given guardianship, he said, “When I mention his daughter, Mr. Sellers always smiles.”
But by the time I was able to take over as guardian, he was flat broke, his house condemned and unsellable, and this subsidized state facility was his only option. I’d set up occasional video calls, and sometimes we talked on the phone, but I had not come to Florida since that visit, ten years earlier, when he’d banished me.
“Is she okay?” I said now, shifting my gaze toward the wailing woman.
“Yeah,” he said, “She always like that.” He slurred his words, as he had since the stroke. I felt a spike of pride, and a sense of ownership: I could always understand my dad, even when no one else could. I always knew what he meant.
Now, he looked up at the woman, shook his head, then pivoted neatly in his chair, and wheeled out of the room.
I hustled to keep up. “Do I follow?” I called.
“No!” He turned a corner and sped down a long corridor. It was then I remembered that since the stroke when he said “No,” he often meant “Yes.” And “Yes” often meant “No.”
I hurried after him. In the dim rooms lining both sides of the corridor, I saw ancient woman after ancient woman after ancient woman, their thin wisps of white hair, mouths gaping open, their boney bodies laid out stiffly on the white beds under thin white blankets, stilled in a kind of breathing death.
A few months earlier, I’d happened upon an essay where the author described visiting his declining father in order to read to him—Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Robert Frost. They talked about philosophy and shared meaningful stories of their lives. When I set the essay down, I was filled with the urgent desire to see my father in person. I wanted to have this exact kind of tenderness, too. I wanted to really be with him before it was too late. But there was more. In this new intimate, vulnerable space I would create for us, I would finally be able to ask my father about the things I’d always needed to know but had never been able to broach. I was consumed with urgency in the days after reading that essay. I had to talk to him. So, I booked a flight to Florida for me and my questions.
At the end of the long corridor, my father entered his room, and I followed. His roommate was there, watching television on the other side of a thin hospital-style curtain. My father shook his head in dismay. I knew he didn’t like this man. “He can’t talk about anything,” my father had complained in our video calls. “Doesn’t know anything.” Now, my father pointed to the dresser, where
someone had arranged the array of framed photos I’d sent down over the years. There was an 8 x 10 of me kneeling next to him in his wheelchair. He is grimacing, his good hand clamped onto my shoulder. He was still living in his house then, and I’m in my mid-thirties, down for one of my intervention attempts. I look incredibly young, strained, and hopeful. Another photo shows my father at midlife, some years before the stroke, wearing a red T-shirt and holding a huge snook up for the camera. His eyes are bleary with whiskey, or beer, probably both, but he’s so happy to have caught that fish, he fairly bursts out of the frame. That image sits next to a recent portrait of me, looking pretty and professional, and there’s a photo of my father and his father, Jefferson Grant, wearing cowboy hats, sitting on small horses in a field, not close together, not smiling. I managed to gather, save, and frame these moments where there was a fleeting pause in the chaos, and, thus assembled, we looked like a more or less normal family. But the story represented by the tableau was total fiction—the outdoorsy fisherman, proud of his successful, professional daughter—it took my breath away. It was as though I was in the wrong room.
The volume on the roommate’s television was so loud, my father could not hear me, so I suggested we go outside. Perhaps there was a patio, or a garden, where we would have privacy. I signed him out and pushed the wheelchair down the sidewalk, alongside the driveway, both of which stopped short at the empty county road. My father tilted his head back and gaped at the sky. “Goddamn. Will you look at that? Will you look at that?” He kept saying Will you look at that? over and over as though sky was a brand-new invention. He told me he had not been outdoors since being placed in the home. He wanted to continue. The wheelchair stalled in the grass. As I tried to push him forward, I could not imagine never being outside—it seemed so cruel, a recipe for speedy decline. Suddenly, I wanted to spring him, to take him home with me, have some days and months to get to know him,
time to find a way to come to terms with the past together. We paused there, stalled in silence, sinking down into that endless empty field in Central Florida, both of us sweating in the thick, sweet spring heat, while buzzards flew in tipsy circles overhead, as in a myth.
After lunch, he had to nap. I drove to a BBQ place and ate alone at an indoor picnic table and made notes in my journal. I had not anticipated how hard it was going to be to bring up the past. I felt myself losing my nerve altogether. I didn’t want my questions to upset him or to hurt him. But I also didn’t want him to die without my ever asking.
That afternoon, while he slept, I attended a meeting with Dawn, his social worker. She called in “the care team,” and I received oral reports from the tired-looking facilities administrator and a staff nurse. They flipped through sections in a carefully organized binder and pointed to forms. I learned he did not participate in any group activities. (The people here are not all there, he said to me on the phone, regularly.) He had lost four pounds in the past month. He was taking high blood pressure medication, and sometimes having trouble swallowing, which required hospitalization each time. The chronic cough had finally led to a lung scan, and he would see the thoracic oncologist in three weeks. But other than that, Fred Sellers was doing pretty great for eighty. I wrote all this down
“Mr. Fred is . . . ,” Dawn said, after the others left. “Well, he’s just so special.”
I started crying. “Tell me,” I said.
“He’s curious really about everything,” she said, handing me a box of tissues. “He likes to open all the cupboards here in the activity room. He comes down every day and pokes around, has to touch everything and he always asks me how I’m doing. Most of them aren’t like that. They just have their demands and complaints, on and on.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been down more.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “We don’t judge. Everyone is in this place for a reason. Believe me. We all know how families go.” She showed me pictures of her grandsons, whom she was raising. I didn’t want to leave the sunny office. I envisioned coming down once a month, from here on out, to go to his doctor appointments with him, take Dawn to lunch.
When I went back to his room, he was sunk in a deep sleep. Each time I checked on him, over the next several hours, I had the sinking sensation I’d waited too long.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, we rarely saw my father, not on weekends, not during the week, not even on holidays, but it didn’t seem that way to me at all. He was vibrantly alive in my mind, constantly on the verge of walking in the door.
My mother explained his absence simply: he traveled for work. “He loves you so much,” she repeated, throughout my childhood, and I never felt abandoned by him, just extremely special to him. Her mantra was that I, his daughter, was the light of his life. I can feel in my body to this day the warm sensation of basking in his affection, even though I ever carried only a couple hazy memories of actually being with him in person as a young girl. Because they were so rare, the moments held in these memories held extraordinary power; they were super-sized, filling up all that empty space.
In my earliest memory of being in the same room with my father, he is throwing me into my toddler bed—a game he called Throw You in The Lake—his way of tucking me in. Once, he threw too hard, and I hit the wall, hard, then dropped onto the mattress, stunned. I remember another night his timing was off, and when
I was tossed, my body fell short, and my head hit hard on the terrazzo floor. I saw stars, which he said was a good thing. They’re stars! Enjoy them cuz they don’t last. He read a book to me, Maurice Sendak and Ruth Krauss’s A Hole is to Dig, which somehow, I’ve saved our copy of, through college, and so many moves, to this day. It’s entirely possible that he read that book to me just once, but when I was young, it seemed to me it was a regular thing we did together, just the two of us, and one of many wonderful rituals that would resume when he returned. He loved that book.
And I had another memory of him that I always held close. I’m out in the driveway, maybe four years old, barefoot, wearing a long white nightgown, following him out into the darkness. He kneels, and points to the dew drops on the blades of grass, sparkling. “Fairies,” he said. “That’s the fairy world. See ’em all?”
I could see them then, hundreds of beautiful tiny fairies, living out the scenes from their lives in each of those silver globes. It was as though he himself had created this glittering magical world, all those miniature balls of light filled with life, and I would have never known they existed if he hadn’t showed me. I played this scene over and over and over in my mind. But I never saw the fairy world again. He had to be there for it to exist. I spent my entire childhood waiting for him to come home, knowing he would, and knowing it would be good when he did.
Meanwhile, he was with us, in my mind and also in the house. His presence, and the proof he was a wise and interesting man, lived large in every room: everything good in our life was from my father. His art books and engineering manuals sat next to sets of Mark Twain and Ogden Nash in walnut bookcases he himself had built. The rocking chair I thought of as mine, from my babyhood, was built by him, too, and the orange swivel chairs on casters, contemporary and suave, in our dining room that my mother loathed, he had bought for us, without her permission. Records
of musicals, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Man of La Mancha, that I was not supposed to listen to, but had memorized in fourth grade, those were all his, too.
In the bathroom his bottle of Old Spice lived behind a translucent sliding door in a cabinet over the counter. The light inside that little cabinet made it seem like a little cathedral. When I climbed up, and pulled out the bottle, and took off that red cap, I sniffed, and there was my father, come to life like a genie. The strong, spiced scent of him would linger on my fingers the rest of the day. Because of all this evidence of him, I believed I knew him well, and because I knew him so well, and treasured him, more it seemed, as the years unfolded, than my mother did, I felt that he and I were very close. I deeply approved of the orange swivel chairs! They were wonderful! I grew up with the certainty that he longed to return equally as much as I longed for him to return. I couldn’t have imagined a world where it could be otherwise.
I memorized his crisp brown poplin suits, hung opposite my mother’s clothing in their walk-in closet—each had its own personality. To this day I can call to mind the tooth and texture of those fabrics, and the malty dusty odor of his clothes. He was stylish. He was well-educated, a CPA with an MBA from Northwestern, my mother liked to brag. I always thought of him as one of the better kind of fathers, educated and dazzlingly handsome. Rooting through a box on the top shelf of their closet one day, I’d found a portrait with his name written in pencil, in cursive, on the back: Frederick Sellers. In the photo, a young man in a crisp dress shirt and plaid suit jacket, his thick black hair flung up into a swoop like Elvis’s, with lively dark eyes shining, grins mischievously. My beautiful father.
But when I was ten, my mother moved us from Orlando to Daytona Beach, into a condo where my father was living, but we saw him rarely there and when we did, he and my mother fought, violently. There were shouting matches, broken plates, a jagged
hole in the wall. My mother moved us back home a few months later.
One Saturday afternoon the following summer, a large brown Oldsmobile careened into our driveway at an odd angle. A man sprang out and began hollering at my mother. He wore a T-shirt, dress pants, and dress shoes. He had on a necklace, and silver bracelets on each wrist. His hair was tightly curled, a brassy halo around his head. He held a tall, tall silver can of beer. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest. She begged him to keep his voice down. He said, “God damn it, Patty. God damn it.” There was a hushed but heated discussion. Then, he poured the can of beer over her head, and she stood there, grim-faced, taking it. He peeled away. My mother locked herself in their bedroom and she didn’t come out for days. I understood the man was my father, but I couldn’t comprehend how he could have turned from the brilliant man I’d known in my mind all those years, into this man. In my mind, it worked like this. I knew who he really was, and if I could just reach him and know him, he’d click back into being that man who’d been my father in my imagination, and in our house, absent-but-present, all those years.
When I was eleven, I learned from two neighbor girls, sisters, that my parents were divorced. How would these girls know and not me? I dared not ever mention this to my mother. I did not hear from my father which was now deeply concerning. My haggard mother went to work for Kelly Services, a temp agency, and when I entered junior high, things worsened. My mother had always forbidden me to talk on the phone, to have friends—too fraught, too dangerous. Now she accused me of sharing private information about our family with the neighbors. The phone was being tapped, and the house surveilled, and this was because of things I had said and done. She said she didn’t trust me anymore. But I hadn’t done anything wrong!
I was a good girl, shy, studious, and desperate to please her, and the accusations undid me.
She would not permit me to shave my legs or my armpits, or to wear make-up, denim jeans, the color black, tight clothes, short skirts, or use hairspray. When I argued against all these rules, she used my protests (“the histrionics”) as further evidence of my untrustworthiness. I was not allowed to date until I was eighteen and out of her house. Without friends, fashionable clothes, a flattering haircut, hot rollers, Midol, telephone access, lip gloss, I sensed I would not make it to eighteen.
Each time I threatened to move out, she said. “If you move out, you can’t come back. I’m not playing that game. So, think carefully. Think very, very carefully.”
It took almost two years of calling Information regularly, but one day, out of the blue, the operator said yes, she did have a listing for Fred Sellers. Would I like to be connected?
Yes. I would very much like to be connected.
When I told my mother that my father had agreed to let me move in with him, I did not tell her what he’d actually said, that I could maybe stay with him on a trial basis, and I had to pay rent. (I was fourteen years old—did he not know?) I was ashamed to tell her because it made it seem like he didn’t really want me to move in with him, that I was perhaps not actually the light of his life. But it sounded so grown-up: She lives with her dad. An aura of sophistication, mystery, and boldness would surround me. There would be shopping, restaurants, movies, television and a phone. I would wear heels and cute, tight clothes, get a boyfriend. In spite of deep doubts, and my hurt feelings, I couldn’t live with my mother and I forced myself to pursue this path, this father, even though I knew things were off.
The apartment where he was staying was a dingy concrete block building on the west side of Orlando, much grimmer than what I’d expected. It felt like stepping off a cliff, getting out of her truck, saying good-bye to her, watching her drive away and not look back.
Inside the apartment, I set my suitcase and two paper bags of belongings on the scratched and stained yellow linoleum floor. On the counter was a stack of old pizza boxes. In the sink was a rickety tower of dirty pans and dishes. Overhead, the fluorescent light buzzed. I stood across from him in the grotty little kitchen, waiting for him to welcome me. He leaned against the countertop, smoking a cigarette, looking at me, almost as if I were a stranger. He looked so different from how I always thought of him. His hair was dyed gold, and longish now, tightly curled in a perm that puffed out even more than it had last time I’d seen him in our driveway. He wore a white dress shirt, dress pants and shiny shoes. His blue tie was loosened at his neck. He was holding a thick, pebbled glass of ice and clear liquid in the palm of one hand, the cigarette between his fingers, leaning against the counter but also swaying.
“What the hell is all this,” he said, looking over at my suitcase and paper bags of belongings on the floor by the door.
“Daddy,” I said, fighting tears. “Ha, ha, ha.” I commanded myself to be cool. Don’t be like her. Don’t be a baby. This is grown up life. I waved away the cigarette smoke and stepped towards him. I was almost as tall as he was now. I hadn’t realized my father was not a tall man, maybe five-nine. I wrapped my arms around his chest. I felt it immediately, the thick strap across his back, and then, as I pulled away, my hands grazed the thin straps over his shoulders, almost as though he was wearing a bra. My head felt cottony with smoke, fear, confusion. Words that flew through my mind compression, truss, brace, tumor, hernia. It seemed he was
suffering an illness, had just undergone surgery, and he wanted it to be kept secret so I would not worry. Maybe he had to wear this brace, this elastic bandage, to hold himself together while he healed.
He took a long sip of his drink, and he looked away.
The most significant, overwhelming imprint of the moment was this: I knew, in every cell in my body, I was not to speak of this, and that I was not to even know anything about this part of him, and to have a relationship with him, I should not know anything about this strange thing that felt almost like a bra, whatever it was, whatever it represented. Do not know. This was a visceral, electric transfer from his body to my body, a contagious shame far beneath the level of words, and therefore even more potent.
We did not eat out that night, as I had expected. He instructed me to heat up a frozen pizza. He went out the kitchen door, carrying a tumbler of gin in his hand, sliding into his car, starting it, and steering all while holding the drink aloft. I watched through the window as he flew down the dirt road in a cloud of pink dust blooming in the dark.
In the fridge, the bologna was long expired, and the cottage cheese had a green film. There was a glass gallon-size bottle, with its own built-in handle, of vodka, nearly empty, on the counter, and two more just like it on the floor, full. I did some of the dishes and straightened the piles of mail on the little aluminum table. Fortune, The Economist, intermingled with Playboy, Oui!, and Hustler. I made neat piles. I covered up the things I was not supposed to see. And I assumed these magazines, the nasty ones, were coming to one of the previous residents in the apartment. But that night, I found in the little bathroom piles of those magazines on the floor by the toilet, and on the back of the toilet. They were stacked in the hallway, and his nightstand table. On brown paper wrappers I saw his name, my father’s name, again and again, Fred Sellers. I wanted to peel them off, one by one.
That night, I set myself up on the recliner on the glassed-in front porch and made a nest under two afghans I’d pulled off his bed. Across the dirt road, running high alongside a drainage ditch, was Interstate Four. I ached to call my mother and tell her there was no edible food, could she bring some? But I would not call her. She’d come and get me, make me move back in with her, or worse, she would refuse to come. I didn’t have anyone else to call. I didn’t know anyone besides my parents.
If I was hungry, I don’t know if I would have even known, such was the feeling of overwhelm. I fell asleep on the porch in the recliner by pretending the pulse and steady rush of traffic surging past was the ocean.
From that night on, when I noticed evidence of the straps—a glimpse of the outline through his tee shirt, or the strange feeling of the bra when we hugged, I didn’t imagine, ever, it was an actual bra, like the kind I wore. My father was an accountant at Martin Marietta. He wore nice suits to work, a tie, and dress shoes. He was in a rough patch, clearly, but my beautiful, brilliant father wearing a woman’s bra wasn’t something I could comprehend.
He introduced me to various girlfriends and occasionally, one of them was there in his bed in the morning when I was getting ready for school. They left their make-up behind in the medicine cabinet in our little bathroom and I helped myself, snagging the Clinique sample sizes and trying out lipsticks, the weird yellow moisturizer, and mascara. They left behind faded flowered dresses which hung in his closet next to his suits, along with the clunky, large pumps that co-mingled with his businessman shoes on the floor.
I never saw my father in heels or a dress. I don’t remember when I first noticed his fingernails were painted with pale pink polish. I thought: Fingernail fungus? A medical condition of some kind? I don’t remember the first time I noticed his ankles were
encased in what looked like pantyhose. Was this support hose for varicose veins, like my mother’s? I never imagined the hose went all the way up, to the waist, like mine did. I understood my father in pieces, and the pieces didn’t add up, so I did not add them up, and I pretended I didn’t see, because I knew that my obliviousness was necessary for us to continue to be a father and a daughter. The first decade of my life, I’d known him as brilliant and powerful and adoring—and that knowing didn’t just dissolve, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
This selective vision, seeing my father through a pinhole in a scrim, mostly worked inside the tiny apartment but when we were out in the world, I was constantly anxious he would be seen. Others wouldn’t understand how to not-see in the same way I did. I was ashamed of my embarrassment of him, and also incredibly protective of what I sensed was his bottomless fragility. I held the menu over his hands when the waitress took our order to try to block her gaze. In the grocery store, I insisted he let me hand the cashier his credit card. I wouldn’t go to a play with him, or to a ballgame, on the rare occasions he insisted I do something with him, even though the main reason I had moved in with him was to be out of my mother’s house, and in the world.
Being with my father in public was like being with an unleashed llama in public. He was loud, unabashedly friendly, and extremely garrulous. He had a loose and rambling gait, a bold Southern voice, and he would canter into the pool supply shop or the pharmacy or the Towne Pump and start talking to the room, walking in talking. He would yammer at anyone, and at great length. He could spend an hour talking to a random drifter who’d set up a make-shift campsite at the edge of the Winn-Dixie parking lot, while I waited in the hot, un-airconditioned car, tapping on the horn at fifteen minute intervals, which he simply ignored. Or he beckoned me over, dragged me over. “I want you to meet someone girl-child, now why you wanna act that way for, all moody-like in a sulk?”
When we moved from the dingy apartment on the west side of Orlando to a house with an odd small pool out front, porn videos now constantly played on the television in his room and now, also on a television he’d placed on the dining room table. I would wake up in the morning, walk from the living area where I slept, into the dining room, and there he’d be, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee from a Jadeite mug and drinking gin from a tall glass filled with ice, smoking a cigarette, while the porn stars moaned over and over, and I’d walk up to him, pat him on the shoulder, not notice the straps, his nails, the ankles encased in pantyhose.
“Good morning,” I’d say, looking for the controller to shut down the VCR.
“Burning daylight,” he’d say. “Been trying to roust you out for hours now!” He ordered me, every morning, to sit down at the table, and to listen. I had to get to school. I had to get to work. I did not have time to talk to my father. But he would grab my wrist, hard, and pull me down, and not let go. “I need to talk to you!”
He’d come in at three in the morning, so drunk he could barely make it across the living room, feeling along the walls with his hands, then launching into the middle of the room, banging into the coffee table (my desk) and he’d collapse on the edge of my sofa. He would start crying. I felt his hands feeling around for my legs.
No, no, no, no, no. Not that. No.
On those nights, I’d extricate myself from my sheets, his hands, and silently, quickly, I walked out the front door barefoot, in my pajamas, into the night. Or I locked myself in my bathroom.
That door had a good lock. More than once I slept in the tub.
Git out here, he’d howl through the rooms, careening, sobbing from the depths of human despair. Git back here
One day when I was a senior in high school, he was tending the pool, adding chemicals, wearing a tiny green Speedo, and I was
suddenly aware his chest was shaved, and his arms and his legs. At first, I thought he was being prepped for surgery.
The stacks of magazines grew taller, on every table, every chair, the floor in each of the small rooms. The porn videos never stopped playing. I did not have anywhere else to go. And I had my own bathroom. I swam multiple times a day in the weird little pool. I had my own money from an array of part time jobs. I bought cute clothes, and lip gloss and eye shadow and hair spray. I worked after school, and on the weekends, and he was often out, and he traveled a lot, sometimes for weeks at a time, and I pretended I lived on my own. When he was home, I was constantly pretending I didn’t see, while constantly trying to figure out what was what.
During geometry class and calculus, while my classmates solved equations with letters and numbers, I fell behind as I obsessively tried to solve for the x that was my father. Was my father gay? Something different? Why did he wear women’s things? He loved Some Like it Hot and La Cage aux folles—men dressed as women was funny to him. (Those videos, along with Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks, were stacked among the porn on the VCR. I couldn’t watch any of my father’s videos, even the good, classic movies. Watching required a kind of sustained looking and seeing I could not yet manage.)
He had so many different girlfriends, Donna, Ruby, Louise, Miriam, Jeannette, Linda, all of them coming and going in that house. But he traveled with his buddy, Bob Glover, another accountant. Every couple months, he and Bob would disappear to an accounting conference, or a lobbying convention, for a week or two at a time. I’d seen Bob a few times in person, always briefly, when he was picking up my father. He was a short, slightly stocky man with blonde hair and blue eyes, always wearing a suit, always friendly and polite. His nails were not painted. His ankles were covered in regular socks. Who was Bob Glover to my father? What was underneath?
I couldn’t ever look at the porn on those screens in our house— it was revolting, and I averted my eyes—but I assumed it featured men and women, because the magazines piled everywhere featured naked women, not naked men. At school, I overheard the raw conversations where boys seemed to need to constantly deride certain people, teachers, students, stars, as faggots, trannies, dykes, lesbos, and homos. I heard kids talking with intense glee about faggots getting beaten, and on Friday and Saturday nights, boys trolled the strip where the homos hung out, to harass them.
I worried about my father being seen by my classmates. Even more, I worried about him getting beaten or killed by others. Sometimes, I skipped school, in order to go to the downtown Orlando library, where I pored over psychology textbooks trying to understand my parents, paranoid schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, cross-dressing, trying to understand anything at all. The one person who knew the answers, I could not ask. This was our folie à deux. We could only have a relationship if I didn’t see him.
When I was in the same room with my father, the effort it took to not see his make-up, and fingernails and pantyhose, and the effort it took to pretend no one else saw, either, and the energy required to not speak of these things and to not even know of these things, combined with the constant work required to stay out of range of his hands, which grabbed my bottom, hard, and hit, hard—that, too—plus the terror I experienced when he walked out of the door, drunk out of his mind, and got in the car, and drove down the middle of our street, out into the night, not knowing when he would come back, or if he would ever come back, and the awfulness of when he did come home, that night, or some nights later, and plopped down on my sofa, reeking of alcohol, smoking, setting his lit cigarette on the sofa itself, burning yet another hole, and then, his weeping when I pushed him away,
and got up, went outside to walk, in the middle of the night, for safety—it was too much. I could not wait to get out of that house and get away from him. But I never wanted to hurt him. I wanted to love him from a safe distance.
I was seventeen years old when, against his direct orders, I took a Greyhound bus to Florida State, enrolled myself, used my savings, and made it through, all the way to a PhD, continuing to work an array of jobs, while going deeply into debt. I painted for my friends a portrait of a festive father who was larger than life, a wild raconteur, a complicated, charming eccentric straight out of a Southern gothic novel. I never spoke about his drinking around the clock, his violent temper, the lengths I had to go to in order to keep my body safe, not even to my boyfriend—especially not to my boyfriend.
Once, an acquaintance happened to see a photo I’d taken of my father on one of my rare visits home. In the photo, my father is standing in the kitchen, wearing fitted denim overalls, a sleeveless red tank top, dress shoes, and a large floppy straw hat. He holds his cigarette lightly between two fingers.
“In the 1970s, we would have said ‘he’s a homo,’” this person remarked to me as he studied the photograph.
I was taken aback. I didn’t see my father in the photo that way at all. My father didn’t look like the gay men who were my friends in Tallahassee. He didn’t look anything like my friend Charly’s father, a successful performer in New Orleans who glamorously rocked women’s clothes. The dresses in my father’s closet were flowered shifts from K-Mart, cheap shiny polyester blouses, the shoes were blocky pumps a librarian would wear, the bras, grandmotherly. I never saw him in these clothes; I felt his underthings when we hugged. But those dresses were always there, from the beginning.
I avoided the drunken holidays but when I was in college, I returned to help him whenever he had to have a surgery, and each
time he got married (three more times). Before he had the stroke, he wrote me letters, which he always signed, His Greatness. We spoke on the phone (he spoke, and I listened). When his health declined, and he could no longer live alone, he refused all of my offers of help. One summer afternoon, I arrived at his house, insisting we get things in order, tour assisted living places, arrange for nursing care. That was when he told me I wasn’t his daughter and after that visit, he announced he’d cut me out of his will. He was then taken advantage of by many people, men and women who lived in his house. In the end, I called adult protective services, who found him tied down in the back bedroom. The “caregivers” had been forging his signature on checks, and all of his money was gone—all of it. When I finally got the guardianship moved through the courts, he was malnourished, the house was rat-infested and condemned, unsellable.
I could not bear to see him, or any of this in person. I orchestrated everything by phone and fax, for ten years.
When I flew back home to Florida that day, with my burning questions and the worn childhood copy of A Hole is To Dig, and all my yearning to connect and to understand, I was in my late forties. By then, I no longer felt the urgent adolescent need to have a label for my father, a box in which to place him so that I could understand who he was, and who we were together, all of which I’d so desperately sought as a girl growing up in his house, under his rule. I wanted to be with him, for once in my life, without the draperies of fantasy between us. I wanted to feel what it would be like to be with actual him. And I wanted to hold his hand, and to ask him, gently, lovingly, in the service of knowing who he was, to come closer to him, what had the women’s things meant to him.
I wanted to ask him about Bob Glover, that genial moon-faced Southern man from Pensacola, who traveled with him. Who was Bob to him? How did these things fit together?
That evening, after the long day of travel and spending that time with my father, meeting with Dawn, walking the corridors of the facility, wanting him to wake up, worried I’d come too late, I lay in my hotel room bed out near the airport, musing on all of this, unable to sleep. I was worried about how complex the relationship was, and would always be, even after his death— there would still be so much damage. And, I was worried about him. When I’d first seen him that morning, there in the facility, dressed in men’s clothes—no bra, no hose, no nail polish, and sporting a businessman’s conversative haircut (above the ears!) I’d been so startled. I had never seen him this way, except maybe when I was a tiny child. It had always been so hard to be out with him amongst others, because he was always wearing these things but now it was so weird not to see him that way. I was worried about how uncomfortable he might be, forced to have hair on his arms and chest, and with no access to the things that bound him to himself, things he probably needed to feel safe, to feel whole, to feel him. I didn’t want him to suffer, and I imagined a kind of gender and sexuality rights campaign for our elders, and took notes on how I might work with others to create a vision for geriatric nursing care that treated the whole person, in all their complexity, with deep valuing of the fullness of human experience. I did not sleep.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this opportunity to really talk to my actual father, for the first time in my life, without the pretending-not-to-see and the ocean of alcohol separating us, denying intimacy. I wanted both of us to stop pretending not-tosee so we could be together, for real, before he died. I wanted this more than anything, and it was so familiar: the old waiting for my father to come home.
In the morning, I went to him. I drove my red rental Kia through the swollen, heavy Florida air, toward the facility. My plane departed that afternoon—I’d leave directly from our conversation. As I walked into the long, low one-story building, I wished I were staying for months, or more, and at the same time I was tempted to turn around, dive into the car, and just drive straight to the airport. I’ll be back, I told myself. I’ll come back a lot now. This was the first time in my life that I had seen my father sober. It was very likely I might have never once been in his presence when he was not drunk. Even though he had dementia now, and our communication had been brief, the day before, he was, in many ways, sharper than ever before, and so much easier to be around. It had been, for me, a profoundly significant and moving day, being with my father, as we’d never been. This visit felt like the beginning of a relationship, not an ending.
I signed in at the desk. But something told me not to wait. This was my last chance. Say everything Ask everything
Breakfast was cleared away, the wailing woman did not appear, though I kept watch, and late that morning, we sat in the empty dining room next to each other.
He asked about my mother, as he always did when we spoke, his voice filled with deep concern. He wanted to know where she was, and he wanted to see her.
I told him again: she had severe Alzheimer’s. I told him the good part was she forgot to be paranoid. She seemed so much less afraid, and more at peace, in many ways. His eyes filled with tears.
I pulled out the book. A Hole is to Dig. I held it in front of him. The cover of this volume, first edition, is palest green, and the trim size is a small square, the shape of a cocktail napkin. He squinted, hard, and grabbed at it with his good hand.
“Ah be goddamned,” he said. “I be goddamned!” He looked like a person who had been kept in a dark closet for years and was just now coming out into the light. He leaned forward, riveted. I read slowly, and loudly.
“A face is so you can make faces,” I shouted. “A face is something you have on the front of your head.” His eyes sucked in the pages, his face inches away from the book. “Dogs are to kiss people.” And then, I spoke the refrain, “A hole is to dig.”
“Ha! I’ll be goddamned,” he said, slapping his good leg with his good hand. He stared at me, intently, leaning forward, drooling slightly. I dabbed at his chin with a napkin.
“Do you remember? We loved this book.”
“Yeah,” he says. “No!” He shook his head, and then started coughing and then it seemed like he was nodding off. We’d only read a few pages. He said he had to lie down. I pushed him back to his room. His roommate was gone. I turned off the television and, in the silence, I helped my father get up into his bed. He looked exhausted. I stood close and took his good hand in both of mine. He said something, but I couldn’t understand a single word. He was so tired, he couldn’t make words that even I could understand.
“Daddy,” I said. “I want to ask you something, okay?” I leaned over his bed, holding his hand.
He shook his head no. Later, he said.
My body was sweating all over. An aide passed, came back, peeked in, and I asked for a few minutes, and I closed the door behind him.
My father was laid out on that hospital bed, his torso at an odd angle because I lacked the proper technique for helping with the transfer from chair to bed. I stood close to the bed, but this time I did not take his hand
“Fred,” I said. “I just always wanted to know something about you. Okay?” He closed his eyes and I jostled his shoulder. “Were
you gay? I’m not judging. I’m just curious. Was Bob more than a friend?”
He drew his head back into the pillow and looked me in the eye. “What?” He looked massively confused. Then, he snorted. “No!” And then he shook his head back and forth, sincerely, “No, no, no, no, no.”
The no didn’t sound like protesting overly much, it didn’t sound defensive, and it didn’t sound like no means yes and yes means no. It just sounds like . . . no. Then, I asked him about the pantyhose and the nail polish.
He couldn’t hear me. In the end, I had to shout. “Why did you wear women’s clothes?” It felt like these words were echoing throughout the nursing home, and all of Central Florida.
He looked at me, intently, as my heart pounded in my throat. Then, after a long moment, he said, “You knew about that?”
And my father turned away, rolled onto his side, and closed his eyes, and dropped into a deep sleep.
I told him I loved him. I put my lips to his ear, and I said it over, and over, and over. I did not know if the powerful tug I felt was love. It have might have been the fierce longing for love.
When I returned from that trip, I did not tell anyone what really happened: that my father had revealed to me a disconnection from reality so profound it would eventually cause me to question everything I’d ever thought about my parents and my life. I didn’t say I read two pages of a children’s book, that my four-year old self had brought to my father, likely in order to get the love she was still hoping would come her way. I imagined myself thoughtful and present, wise and grounded, like the author of the essay who had inspired this trip, a devoted child, caring for her frail dad.
I told my friends a poignant, reassuring story about finding grace and healing and forgiveness at the end. I told people—I told myself—this: I flew home to Florida after a long time away, I hugged my father and we laughed and cried together. We finally had some really great conversations, and it had felt so good to be with him, for really the first time, sober. I explained I was going to be going back regularly, for more of this end-game loveliness.
I never went back.
My father passed away—pneumonia, a complication from the lung cancer treatment.
It would be another decade before I would begin to come to grips with that visit, and his revelation, and what we did not ever talk about: My father was often monstrous. He inflicted unbearable emotional pain, abuse and neglect. He never helped me. And I pretended I did not know about that. I protected myself from him as fervently as I protected him from him. I could not comprehend the scope of his limitations, not because it would have crushed him, as it turns out, but because it would have crushed me.
Why did it take me six decades to see my father more clearly, to start to begin to come to terms with the fact of the damage? Because that is how long it takes. Distance, and death, and decades of discovery—write it!—were required to atomize that father I constructed, by necessity, as a girl.