Climbing Back to the Friendship We Used to Have
The long and winding relationship with the man I consider my father
We are our terrific photographs. We are a life in sepia. We are two people who should’ve never been family, yet here we are. Decades past, practicing our remember whens, and it often hurts because I remember all the beautiful good, the mess, the wreck, and the tears in between. And it occurs to me that I grieve the past and grief is nothing more than hurt with no place to go.
It is 1989. We live in a basement apartment in Long Island and it rains bathwater from the apartment above because the boys in the band forgot to turn off the spigot or they leave it running or they’re intent to make their house a river. Finally, my mother and I are alone and there’s no man to intercede, no cocaine to interrupt (or so I think), and we fold into one another, mother and daughter, until she comes home with handwritten letters and talk about a man from Ireland, a man who exercises race horses at Belmont, across the street from the diner where she works, and he calls her Brooke, like Brooke Shields, and I am 12 and laugh and say you look nothing like her.
We are rough women. Skin like parchment ready for ruin.
And so this man moves in and he makes me braciole steak and box macaroni and cheese and he’s young—maybe 30, maybe less—and we cultivate a closeness that happens as a result of being abandoned by the woman we both love. A woman who takes taxi cabs to Brooklyn to buy bulging bags of snow. Old friends, friends from around the way will tell me, yeah, I saw your mother. Coping coke. But the man keeps frying the steaks and the apartment keeps flooding and I bake a tray of brownies for my mother, who takes a whiff of them and slides them into the garbage.
I am a child who aches for an impossible love.
And the years march on and we move from a basement to a one bedroom apartment and I sleep in a sunroom with no door and room for a twin bed. I spend most of my time playing R.E.M.’s “King of Birds” in the living room. I spend more of my time writing stories about my mother who bolts her bedroom door shut and all we hear is the television blaring into the evening. All we see are beer cans and peach pies in aluminum tins under bed. All we feel is the fur of a cat she adopted but couldn’t love, a cat that will die of distemper when I’m in college because she locked it in the basement and packed her bags and left. A death I will remind her of when she calls my dorm room. I’ll use words like murder. I’ll tell her she is a woman who can’t even take care of a cat, much less a man and a child. I’ll tell her she isn’t worthy of my love.
I’ll say, you make it impossible for me to love you.
But before college, before the cat crying in the dark, Gus and I ride around in his Jeep. We feast on Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s value meals. We’ll park in front of the library in Valley Stream and pick at our food in the veranda. We’ll flee one Thanksgiving when my mother hurls all the plates against the wall and we end up feasting on hot dogs at 7-Eleven.
We never cry, only laugh.
It is June, 1997. I am dressed in black. Cap and gown. All honors. My pop sleeps in a dorm room for parents who’ve come to witness their children graduate college. We have brunches and lunches and dinners with my roommates and their parents and he’ll go home in the evening and listening to cops on the radio he’s bought because he likes to know things. The morning of my graduation, I’m possibly drunk, and I walk up to the podium, collect my honors, and hours later my pop will tell me he walked away to privately cry. Because he is so proud.
Last night, we exchange text messages about the business we launched in 2008.
We talk about dial-up internet connections and running around Woodbury Commons. I tell him I remember the scent of that time, how the air smelled, how our house smelled, how the gowns I packed in tissue smelled, and I don’t think he understands. And I’ve learned how to limit my feelings, the rush of it, the flood of memory because I can be a lot. I’ve learned how to navigate our relationship after years of silence. It’s not as honest as it used to be, but it’s the best I can get it and I’m content with it because he might be the only person I love. I’m content with the knowledge there are limits to the places I can go. How he’s one of the few people with whom I feel comfortable being wholly and completely me, yet I have to restrain myself.
We talk about the clothes but not of the nights I staggered home drunk, waking him, angering him. Because the one and only thing he ever asked of me was to not see me drunk, and I couldn’t even manage that. Always the wine lips, he said one day in the car in 2000 when the sun was harsh and blinding.
For years, we are barnacled to one another. What we have in common was memory, of having survived my mother. But memory only takes you so far, it doesn’t nourish or sustain you. And soon I become the trophy he trots out. I am working in banking, I am working at a dot.com, I am getting my master’s from Columbia, I am publishing a book. And part of me feels like this was a repeat of childhood where I’m only useful if I can be paraded out and talked about like a show pony.
Sometimes, I only think of myself as the sum of accomplishments. I’m not a person, only what I’ve done and acquired.
To have a relationship with a man I can call my father. To have a huge family make us part of theirs. To have another family I can wholly call my own. I’ve always longed for a big family, for the pitter pat of feet scampering on hardwood floors, for boisterous conversation, for the collective oohs and ahhs when the dishes are unveiled - simply for the fact that I have none of my own. So I take none of this for granted - the fact that a dear college friend folded me and my pop into their large family’s warmest of embraces.
I write the above in 2008 when my pop and I travel to Connecticut for the holidays. My college best friend has brought me into the fold, I am the part of the big family I’ve had until the 2016 election where the chasm between us widens to a point where neither of us decide to cross.
Recently, my pop text’s me and asks about that friend, about Liz, and when I tell him we no longer speak because of Trump, he falls silent.
It is 2015 and my pop tells me he doesn’t want me to leave. He doesn’t understand why I need to move across the country, 3,000 miles from home. I tell him the history is killing me. I tell him I can’t be in the same state in which my mother’s buried. But still, he doesn’t understand. Her death to him is a mark in time, a dull ache of an old wound while, for me, it's an old wound, cut open and bleeding. She is a wound I will spend my life dressing.
When she dies, he asks how I am. I tell him I’ve started a new diet.
In California, he asks how I am. I tell him, I think, I just might, end my life. And we don’t speak for seven years.
It’s Christmas when Liz’s mother reaches out. She understands why her daughter and I are no longer friends but the loss gnaws at her because she knows Liz and I are stubborn, difficult women. She knows we’d rather hold our ground than cave. Her mother and I talk about the Gertrude Stein first edition she gifted me way back when because her children never quite loved literature like I did. I tell her I hold that book close, still, even after all these years.
Her mother tells me I have to compromise. If not her daughter, then Gus, because I will regret it. She’s older than me and she knows this to be true. And so I reach out, a tentative text put out into the ether, and we slowly regain what we have lost over the past seven years. He tells me about the family he has and part of me wonders how he has it so easy—always falling into love so completely. And I become cold and severe until he tells me that I’m part of this family too. It’s that proverbial olive branch and it takes me hours to respond with a thank you because I guard my heart to the point where few can climb in.
Maybe it’s me punishing him for not being able to handle my depression? Maybe it’s me punishing me for being too much? Who can say.
A friend of mine has gifted me her home until April. A place where I can think and write, and I think about all the beautiful space I temporarily have and I tell my pop about it. But I don’t tell him I don’t know where to go after. I don’t tell him I’m no longer the woman who’s always hatching a plan. I don’t tell him I’m a woman staring ahead at a road, unsure of which way to go.
I tell myself I will always tell him I’m fine. I could be suffering, but I’m fine. I could be frightened, but I’m fine.
Okay, as you know I’m not big on charging people for shit, but apparently some kind and delirious people want to pay for more of my work. I’ve fooled you all! So, here’s the thing. You will always get this weekly dispatch for free. No strings. No sales pitch. But for those who want more of me (why???), you can subscribe or whatever. I’m still figuring out what you’ll get, but it’ll be more. I promise. I’ll start sending out extra love next week.
As you can tell, I’m a marketer who’s rotten at marketing herself.