To All the Keychains I’ve Loved Before

Notes on traveling, estrangement, and the keychains I bought for my father

Photo: Matth/Adobe Stock

In the winter of 2014, my pop and I are finally in a cab traveling to the center of Dublin, my pop’s birthplace, his home. While he looks out the window and takes inventory of what has changed, the taxi driver asks where he’s from. My pop’s accent is faint; no longer the thick brogue of his youth spent carousing in pubs and drinking pints, it’s been thickened by a country of coffee and wants. My pop says, with pride, “I’m from right here. Dublin.”

Our trip was planned after months of persistent badgering (“Show me your home, your parents’ graves, and where you grew up”), a call on Christmas Eve that had me predicting our imminent doom (“We could die before we’d see your brothers again; we’re not getting any younger”), a daylong delay due to a plane with mechanical failure, and a combined total of seven hours of sleep in two days.

Next to him, I made lists of all the sites we needed to see. Not realizing what it must have been like for him to come home and find himself a stranger. People trying to figure your accent, decide where you fit. For me, this is another country ticked off a list. Another place to go.

In the countryside, my pop goes quiet. Looks outside of the tour bus we ride and registers the expansive land as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. Had Ireland always been this beautiful? Had he taken his homeland for granted? He grows sad, because how could he forget all this beauty, the kind that brings you to your knees when you think about it?

He is home and he is not home, and I watch him trying to navigate the space between the two.

My pop was not made for roaming. His was a world of habit and routine, with a home on Long Island, a car winding down Glen Cove Road, the same coffee from the same deli every morning. Consistency was his comfort, while I was itinerant, never content to remain in one place. You’d never find my pop on a plane, in the air, even when I offered to pay his way. In the nearly 40 years he’s been in this country, he’s left it twice.

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Whenever I traveled, which was often, my pop asked for a simple souvenir. “Bring me a keychain,” he’d say. A summary of a place I’ve seen. Keychains were the only souvenir he wanted, and he’d stack them in a jar and marvel at the places he’s never been.

I’m 17, taking the Greyhound alone across the country to visit a girl I’d known only from her letters. It’s 1993, and the guidebooks describe a state so expansive that it registers just beyond my reach. My friend and I drive through Los Angeles, Encino, Long Beach, and Anaheim. I tell my pop about our car breaking down in Compton and the boys on the block giving it a jump and how everyone cheered when we got it moving.

“What’s Compton like?” my pop asks, to which I respond, “It’s like the Bronx with sunshine.” There’s no keychain from Compton, but my pop settles for one of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland until I tell him that Mickey tried to feel me up. He says, “I always knew that mouse was a bastard.”

“Get me a keychain with a palm tree,” my pop says. I’m 18, boarding a bus to the beach in Sarasota, and I apply sunscreen like my body is some kind of Jackson Pollock painting. I’m torched. Sick and lying on the floor. My friends ply me with wine coolers, and we eat chicken and shrimp in a shack that advertises an “early bird special.” I’m the kind of woman who will make bird sounds sotto voce until my friends tell me to settle down. Quit it, Fee. Enough. Later, we are drunk and naked on the beach. Rolling in the sand. When we leave, we are sleepy, blistering brown, and red. I grab a bunch of keychains at the airport and tell my dad that Florida reminds me of Red Lobster.

I’m 20 when I board my first overseas flight. For $250 round-trip, we fly to London to visit our roommate who’s studying abroad. We stay in a hotel that’s not a hotel in Kensington, where heat costs a pound per hour. We shiver under the covers and sleep until evening and go out to the bars and wonder why they close so early. But there’s Guinness and Italian men and fresh bread in paper bags. We visit the Tate, British Museum, and Big Ben. I think of my pop walking the same streets as I did when he was my age, wondering if we saw and felt the same things.

I bring home a metal keychain of Big Ben, and my pop nods his approval. “This is a good one.” I ask him to tell me about his English mom, who died when he was young, and his face pales down to bone, and he shakes his head, changes the conversation, and asks if we want to go to TGI Fridays.

The first, second, and third time I go to Paris, I tell my pop I got sick on the chocolate, street crepes, and cheese. “So much cheese. You wouldn’t believe it!” I walk through the Louvre, the Picasso Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, Notre Dame, Sacré-Cœur, up the Eiffel Tower, and uphill in Montmartre, where a man asks if I’m Peruvian and could he paint my picture? By myself in a bar, where I speak Spanish to a man who speaks French; another man asks if we could fuck because he lives nearby. I politely decline and fall asleep, alone, with an almond croissant.

I tell my pop all the hotels in Paris are mouse-small and the men are forward. When I give him a pile of glittery keychains from all the places I’ve been, his eyes are like Christmas. I ask him if he’s ever been to Paris, because everyone I know who lives in Europe takes the train between countries, and he says no, Dublin is the only city he knows.

In Prague, I cross the Charles Bridge and pay $5 to hear concertos during the day while I drink good beer and reel from bad wine, rude Germans, and suspicious pasta. I don’t tell my pop that I slipped into a dance club alone and danced with boys wearing makeup until I fell out of the club and into a taxi to find my hotel room door open and German porn blasting. I wondered if people in a five-door radius think I like anal sex.

I give my pop a keychain and a book by Kafka and say that someone snuck into my hotel room and bought porn. “Fuckers,” he says.

I fly to Russia for a writing program, and my ears and head never adjust to the altitude and white nights. Everything is in Cyrillic, George Bush is president, and everyone hates Americans. I never know what day it is, and the only food I eat is pizza. We cruise the Nevsky Prospekt, get lost in the Hermitage, snap selfies with our heavy cameras in front of the Church of Spilled Blood, dodge gypsies, roam the Summer Gardens, buy bootleg CDs, run in the rain to the opera, cry through a ballet, visit the Museum of Oddities. We sat in silence with the boys on a riverboat and get drunk at two in the afternoon and resolve never to talk about the dead baby museum again.

Before I left, I told my pop about my trip, and he looked at me like I was going to Mars. To him, Russia is far beyond what he can conceive or see.

I write bad fiction and try to learn Russian and instead read Dostoyevsky while everyone tells me that the star, really, is Pushkin. Still, I visit the museums of dead men and fall in love with Nabokov all over again. I read four of his books in four days. We drink vodka in apartments, workshop shitty drafts with Aimee Bender, wander the streets and ask for the time, unsure whether it’s 4 p.m. or 4 a.m.

At the airport, they confiscate a plastic keychain of Catherine’s Palace that I picked up at a tourist shop on the way to the airport. I’m out of rubles and patience, and can I please get on the plane already and go back to a place where night divides the day?

My pop asks what Russia is like, and I say, “Too grand for type.”

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In Taipei and Taichung, we eat pork pot stickers, rice, and vegetables. I’m with my best friend at the time, visiting her family for her grandmother’s 90th birthday. Everyone speaks Mandarin and Cantonese. We are in a bath, and everyone pauses and stares at the white girl with curly hair. We are on scooters, and everyone pauses at the light and gawks at the white girl gripping her friend for dear life.

In Taiwan, I roll 20 deep with a family. I’m an introvert exhausted from jet lag when my best friend’s cousin tells me at the night market that the tattoo on my lower back means “livestock” in Chinese. Later, I’ll ask a co-worker to verify this, and she’ll text the character to her mother, and her mother will text back, “Why does your boss have a dead animal on her back?”

We eat so much Chinese food that my best friend shouts, “CAN WE JUST GET A STARBUCKS?” We walk six miles to get bad coffee and spend $20 at a day spa and come home to her father on a rage rampage, and my friend is crying while her mother is asking me what I’d like for dinner. We are all leaning against the door her father is kicking.

When I’m home, my pop eagerly awaits his Made in Taiwan keychains bought in Taiwan and asks what’s China like. I say the Taiwanese don’t consider themselves Chinese, and my dad furrows his brows, and I furrow back and explain it’s complicated. I tell him about my best friend’s father and how she reminded me so much of my mother, but my pop shuts down. He no longer wants to trade stories about her — that time in our home, for him, is over.

“So, what’s Taiwan like,” he says. I think of my friend and her father kicking the door and the livestock and all the pork and my mother and why doesn’t my pop want to talk about the woman who held us together, and I say, “Delicious, cruel, hot, expansive, and complicated.” It’s my first taste of Asia, and I will spend most of my adult life infatuated with Japan, South Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and India. But by then, my pop doesn’t ask for keychains anymore. He’s done with traveling.

Maybe it was Spain, Germany, or my first trip to Hong Kong when my pop says enough. Basta. He’s had his fill. My visits home to Long Island have become shorter and infrequent, and one weekend I visit him and the keychains are gone, thrown in the bin. I don’t know why, but this brings me to tears, and I cry in the bathroom and in the car and shout in Macaroni Grill, “WHAT THE FUCK DID I DO?” “Nothing,” he says. We’re back in the car, his eyes on the road. My pop becomes a house with all the lights out. He’s locked down, flashing “no vacancy” signs. Impenetrable. I keep asking what I did. I did nothing. But there’s this distance between us — a whole dark country — and I’ve no passport or ticket or airport transfer, and I don’t know the language or how to find my way in and out.

I’m not a crier, but I howl my way into Penn Station. For years, our shared stories about how we survived the war and wreckage that was my mother bonded us. She was what we had in common. She filled the empty spaces. And after years had passed and we tired of hashing out old memories, the keychains formed new stories. Happier ones. They became a reason to come home. They filled the spaces my mother once occupied. At Penn Station, it finally occurs to me that our relationship is fragile, barely held together by memories of which he plays no part. Maybe he wants to roam — not on planes or holding passports, but on the familiar roads he knows and has come to love, away from me.

My pop and I didn’t speak for five years.

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I’m in New Haven on Christmas. I call my pop, and we say hello. We talk like the past five years never happened and that’s how it’s always been — we never talk about the things that divide us, swallow us whole.

Did I remind him of my mother, a country from which he fled? I ask him this, remind him that we’re both refugees. He shakes his head. Stares at the road. Says, “I don’t know.”

I fly to Tokyo, take the train to Kyoto and Nara. I fly to South Korea, Bali, Thailand, Singapore, back to Europe, and all through India. I stop at the airport and finger the keychains. He doesn’t want them anymore. So I tell him stories. I try to find the equivalent of a keychain, a tidy summary. Words that fit.

When I move to Los Angeles from New York in 2015, the gulf widens again. He doesn’t say what bothers him: my leaving. “You’ll see me more now that I live across the country,” I joke. We’re in Cold Spring Harbor. It’s cold, and we’re staring at the barnacles. I wonder if he thinks that’s what we’re like, bound to another. Feeding off each other. Not sure who’s predator or prey. My mother has just died, and it’s complicated. I need to leave. I can’t take all the history.

In 2016, on a telephone line, I tell my pop, “I think, I might just, end my life.”

We haven’t spoken since.

But he accepts my Facebook friend request. I see him surrounded by people I don’t know, and I feel like an investigator trying to piece it all together. His whole other happy life.

I’ve known him since I was 12. At one point, he considered adopting me. Because while we weren’t blood, we were family. I think about him in the car singing James Taylor off-key. I tally the drives we took, the food we ate, the time spent in Dublin fighting, fighting, fighting. Trying to figure him out. Desperate to fill the empty spaces. What went wrong? What had I done?

I tell a friend that this hurts worse than my mother passing away, because I never saw this coming. I’ve loved him longer than I’ve seen her. But part of me wonders if my staying away is mercy. If, to him, I’m his New York — too much history.

Is my distance merciful?

Ten years ago, in Dublin, we’re at the airport, and I point to the rack of keychains. “Let’s get matching ones,” I offer, and he shakes his head. His face darkens. Falls to blight. He tells me no — it wouldn’t be right getting a memento from a place that’s your home.

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My pop and I no longer speak and it breaks me in ways I still don’t understand. Perhaps we were meant to know one another for a moment in time. Perhaps we were meant to serve as one another’s shelter from the storm that was my mother. Over the years, we hung onto those memories, the nostalgia of trauma, because that’s when we were most close. When the world was simple and I wasn’t an adult. Before he perhaps realize I wasn’t the daughter he wanted me to be.

When I unpack in my new home, there’s a wooden box from Bombay Company. My pop bought it for me for my college graduation. Had my name engraved. Inside are pictures and postcards and torn tickets from museums in London. But in the corner there’s an “I Love New York” keychain. I survey the keychain. I don’t know why I got it. New York is my home—I’m not a long-term tourist like I am in Los Angeles. But it hasn’t been home for the past nine years. And whenever I return it feels less like an old friend and more like a stranger.

But I must have gotten the keychain for him, I must have forgotten to slip it into his hands.

One morning I wake early and stare out the window, the actinic sky all cool blue and icy white, thinking my pop is somewhere staring at that same sky or falling asleep through it.

I feel the plastic of the keychain in my hands to remember my pop and the life we had. What a lifetime ago, it seems.

Or maybe it’s something I feel but can’t quite articulate. New York, my pop — all of it, strangers. No longer home.

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