Father
Affairs In Order
Word Count 758
I last saw my mother in Covid times, when I stood among pale blue hydrangea bushes and waved goodbye to her on the balcony of her Memory Care unit. Minutes later, I got a call from a lawyer saying one of my father’s lovers, Barbara, had died and named me as the Executor, which was news to me.
I was born with a caul inside the amniotic sac, in what is known as a veiled or mermaid birth. Legend says this should prevent me from drowning, but it did not prevent me from becoming unhinged at the task of getting my mother and Barbara’s “affairs in order.”.
Sometimes, overwhelmed by the paperwork and emotions of thinking about my father’s passionate adventures while grieving for my mother, I would call my son across the country to hear his voice. We often lie to each other.
What My Father Knew
Word Count 3520
One late afternoon in 1993, I picked up the kitchen wall phone and dialed my father in Florida. We spoke rarely—once or twice a year. I didn’t call him because his wife always answered the phone. He didn’t call me because—well, I don’t know.
I was twenty-five that autumn, living in the rural township of Center City, Minnesota, with my husband and children: Sophie, a feisty two, and Max, a round-bellied baby just past colic. Our drafty Victorian home, all gingerbread and sloping floorboards, overlooked North Center Lake and—although I didn’t yet see this—all that wide open blue made for a painterly but desolate view. I was lonely in those years, full of longing. I imagined, as many do, especially in the liquid dreamscape of new parenthood, that I might finally speak to my parents about certain lost things, like my childhood. On this fall day, I wanted to understand what my father knew about my stepfather Mafia, the other man I called daddy. The man who, with his strong hairy hands, shaped me into the woman I would become.
The Good Father
Word Count 1510
I think my father has left the lake. He was in there for the first few years after his death. I could see him whenever the angled sun threw sparkles across the water’s surface. And I could hear him, always the same message, telling me that I was loved and that everything was okay.
But this summer Dad is barely present – just an occasional glimmer. I believe he has moved on, no longer feeling the need to hang around.
How he loved this cold, murky upstate lake. It was the one constant in his life.
By the time my father was six years old, his mother was gone. Not dead, but she may as well have been. Isabel, my father’s mother, was locked in a psychiatric ward, and she would never come home.
“The Genius”
Word Count 1230
From the La-Z-Boy in my Granny’s house, my dad turned to me and said, “Don’t squander your gifts. You are a genius.”
Being an altogether unremarkable seventh grader, I didn’t feel like a genius, but who wants to argue with a genius who calls you a genius? So I nodded.
“The thing about geniuses is that they aren’t understood in their time. Everyone thinks they should be banished or burned alive.” He hunched forward on the chair with a toothpick in his right hand, intermittently picking at his teeth. “All great artists are tortured by life or at the least, deeply misunderstood.”
From my place on the sagging couch beside him, this seemed true. I thought of my mother singing through all her illnesses, my aunt Lois the painter who was a depressed vegan, my father with his drug issues, Emily Dickinson dying alone and unpublished, George Gershwin with his fatal brain tumor at thirty-eight, and Yeats who had loved an actress named Maude Gonne who never loved him back
Small, Comforting Lies
Word Count 1428
It’s Father’s Day. My father descends his apartment’s basement stairs to do laundry. He bangs his calf. He doesn’t remember doing it. Somehow, even though he is on blood thinners, a blood clot forms. Also, because he is on blood thinners, he bleeds internally within the leg, but the blood has nowhere to go. It’s trapped by the fasciae puts pressure on the nerves and the muscles. The pain is intense, radiating down to his foot, up to his thigh. He cannot walk. He cannot bear any weight. The ambulance comes, and paramedics carry him down the steep stairs of his apartment. After twelve hours, he undergoes an emergency fasciotomy, in which a surgeon cuts through the tough white membranes, lets out the blood, saves his leg.
My father is in the ICU for six weeks, waiting for the two twenty-inch gashes to close. They do not. Finally, the surgeon agrees to a skin graft. In the meantime, my father suffers from ICU psychosis. He accuses me of never coming to visit, though I come every day. He cannot remember where he is, cannot read the signs I post in his room telling him he is in Fox Hospital, room 241.
I Barely Knew the Man
Word Count 1219
I was eight when my father left the planet. For years, I was under the impression I was younger when he died; when an old friend with an interest in ancestry offered to dig into my heritage, the first thing I had to reckon with was the actual year of his death. How is it possible I don’t recall our final two years together?
I do remember how I learned he was dead. It was Easter vacation, I’d spent the night with a friend. She lived close by and I was accustomed to traveling independently between her home and mine so I was cranky the morning her mom insisted on walking me home. Inside the apartment, there were people I didn’t recognize milling around.
“Your father’s dead, “ my mother dramatically announced from the couch. Instead of responding, I walked straight past her to the third bedroom my dad called his office where I dialed the number of my best friend. When she picked up, I told her my father was dead.
A Hundred Years From Now
Word Count 967
My dad didn’t talk much when I was a kid but when he did, practically everything that came out of his mouth was a cliché. A conversation longer than three sentences was usually 75% clichés, 19% conjunctions (used to connect two or more clichés), and 6% real words. A typical dinner conversation might run something like this:
"My violin recital is next week, Dad, and I need a new dress."
"Do you think I'm made of money?"
"Um..."
"Money doesn’t grow on trees, Gail."
"Dad..."
"These kids are driving us into the poor house, Rose”.
"But..."
"Finish that pork chop, there are children starving in Europe”.
Love, Love
Word Count 805
Crossing Dune Road to the tennis courts for our 9 o’clock reservation, I thought about all the sporting events my father and I had seen together over the years. As an only child, I became both his daughter and the son he never had. Although my mother dragged me to dancing classes and piano lessons after school each day, weekends were totally devoted to my father and tennis. Now that I was in college, it was a treat to come home for the summer and play together every day.
My father was an exceptional athlete. While I wasn’t a “natural,” after countless lessons with excellent tennis pros, including the retired British champion Fred Perry at a hotel in Florida, I’d become a good “club player.”
Who’s Your Daddy?
Word Count 1066
My daughter has no father. She was conceived via donor # 210 thirty years ago when I was with a woman determined to have a child. We procured semen via a facility in California. All semen was screened for disease or abnormalities as this was considered the most stringent facility in the country. After reviewing dozens of multiple-page profiles, which included physical attributes, family health history, education, hobbies, typical daily food intake, and a very thoughtful personal statement, we were convinced #210 was “the one.” He seemed the best match to our genetic history, complexion, and hair color. Of course, no photo or state of residence was included, but we did later find out he was from Long Island and a lawyer, which was exactly what my mother would have wanted!
I Have Only What I Remember
Word Count 132
I am the child of a man with large hands—
fingers long and tapered, nails neatly trimmed
to a blunt finish. The left forefinger bore the scar
of a long-ago accident; I wonder if it ached
when he signed each £7 birthday and Christmas
check. As a teen, I wished my father dead;
Why Do You Hate Your Father?
Word Count 1032
When I was ten years old, I asked my mother why she didn’t divorce my father. “Why do you hate your father so much?” she asked, her eyes wide. I shook my head in response and walked away, thinking to myself: Why the hell wouldn’t I?
My father always wore a similar outfit: polished leather boots, a button-up collared shirt, and an expensive Akubra hat that hid a widening bald spot. His jeans were ironed by my mother with an intentional crease and fell loose over non-existent buttocks, held up by a brown leather belt below a prominent beer belly. The skin on his right-hand index and middle fingers was stained yellow to the knuckle from his two packs of Winfield Red per day, as though coloured by yellow highlighter.
All My Fathers
Word Count 1196
My friend, Libby, leaned over and said in an ironic voice, “The Greatest Generation. I have my doubts.” She was a creative director, frequently deployed to win over haughty deans, university presidents, and in one case, the Secretary of the Treasury. A thousand miles away, her father was struggling in late age, with ivy growing inside his windows, and refusing help. He was one of the original Oak Ridge boys, she said, a maker of the earliest atomic bombs.
My Father
My father was of that generation, too, and believed wholeheartedly that it was The Greatest Generation (TGG), not because of the bombs particularly, but because it was the generation he belonged to. That’s one insight into his blustery character. There are other, sadder ones.
Unwanted Child
Word Count 1493
My grandmother told me that she tried everything she could to abort my father when she found out she was pregnant. In 1945, it was considered indecent for good Catholic Italians to get pregnant at the age of forty. It meant she was still having sex with her husband. Besides, she already had two grown children. She contacted the local mid-wife who knew all the old ways of the old country. She fixed potions for her to drink and elixirs to insert. The baby continued to grow.
In desperation, she threw herself down a flight of stairs and, in her words, jumped off the top of the refrigerator. Nine months later, my father was born to a mother who had tried countless times and in countless ways to kill him.
Unhealed Wounds
Word Count 920
When I was an adorable preschooler, with long blond hair flowing down my back, my father called me ‘princess.’ A few years later, I grew taller and rounder. While eating a bowl of ice cream one day, he walked by and said, “Did you get enough there, Piggy?” It’s still there, like a tattoo on my heart.
I took music and dance lessons. We went on vacations. The summer I was 13, it was a Caribbean cruise. I met up with a couple of other girls my age. Given free rein to roam the ship with them, I promised to leave a note in the cabin about where I was going.
The Norwegian crew members could be found painting and doing maintenance around the ship. Striking up a conversation on one of our jaunts, they told us they were 18. Marilyn liked Erik, and I liked Bjorn. Erik had a moustache, and Bjorn a bit of auburn in his hair, with freckles across his nose.
Pappy’s Cough
Word Count 816
My father’s cough would start with a hard thump to the right lung, rattling his chest and kicking his shoulders forward. The force of his cough built slowly like the low sputtering rumble of a dormant furnace fired up on the first cold day; his breath would catch suddenly and then race roughshod through his windpipe. Each cough would rise, fall, and spin in an exasperating, inconclusive cycle. He would wince, his handsome, affable features tightening into a hard little fist of a face. He’d snap his head back, annoyed enough to spit.
“That’s some cough you’ve got there Pappy,” I’d say, like a character from the funny papers of my childhood, hoping not to sound too fretful. “Maybe you’ve caught some bug that’s flying around here.” I was keen to blame the insufferable humidity, a record-breaking ice storm, whatever excuse the current season had to offer.
Never Leaving
Word Count 2060
The aisle of the sleeper car was narrow. As I walked, I had one hand on the wall. The conductor pointed to my compartment; it contained a seat that pulled out into a bed, a toilet, and a four-inch square television that was playing Agent Cody, the kid's movie. I had packed a black dress for the funeral, although my father was still alive, a few casual clothes, and eight two-milligram Valiums. I had my laptop, an envelope of my father's writings, four issues of the New Yorker, and Wallace Stegner's, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. I opened to the first page: The train was rocking through the wide open country before Elsa was able to put off the misery of leaving ...
My husband was on the platform outside the compartment window. He waved and blew a kiss. I started to cry. He mouthed: What's the matter? I picked up all my belongings and rushed out to him. "I can't do it," I said. "I feel claustrophobic."
"Just calm down. Read your book."
The Man Who Hated Himself
Word Count 749
In the crinkle-edge black and white snap shot my father is holding me still.
I am eleven-months-old, wearing a red coat. My grandfather squeezes the button on the Kodak Brownie. The photo is faded now but his copperplate cursive caption is still sharp: Christmas 1954.
My father is just back from the Korea. The rest of his life hasn’t happened yet.
When he is fired the first time, I am nine. My two younger sisters and I are piled into the Dodge and deposited with our grandparents in Rochester, New York. My mother and father drive back home so he can look for a new job.
That summer our grandfather tells stories about working in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. “I says to the boss, you can’t talk to me like I was some Eye-talian or Pole,” he says and clutches the neck of the sweating bottle of Rolling Rock. “I didn’t come across in steerage.”
Sailing Home
Word Count 844
The day after my wedding, my father and I sat in the backyard of my Brooklyn apartment drinking beer and talking for hours, relaxed in a way I hadn’t often felt with him. It was July. He chain-smoked on a lawn chair while I sweltered on the wrought iron staircase that led to the terrace above. He sounded happy about the family I had found, a life created so differently from his. Then he told me he never should have had children.
I didn’t know my father well. When I was barely two years old, he fled New York City for small-town Ohio and I didn’t see him often. I felt shy around him, our conversation stilted. He tried to tell me about himself but mostly my father spoke of people he admired: writers, musicians, filmmakers, the guys he played chess with. It all sounded fairly meaningless to me.
No Pedal Boats
Word count 837
I’m 10 years old. My mom, my sister, and I are having dinner in Saugatuck, Michigan with another mom and her two boys. Saugatuck is filled with galleries of beautiful paintings and sculptures, but from a kid’s perspective, the best things about Saugatuck are the ice cream shop, the penny candy store, and the pedal boats. The pedal boats are so easy to steer, the adults let us kids go out on the river all by ourselves. We only go out for about 20 minutes, but it feels like freedom—no adults telling us what to do.
After dinner, we want to do something fun. The obvious choice is the pedal boats, but the boys’ mom says, “ No way.” It turns out, the boys’ dad, who isn’t even here, has a rule: No pedal boats. He thinks they’re too dangerous. We think this is ridiculous.