ABIDE

Around the new year, my father began seeing someone. She was a family friend, a widow whose husband had died the year before my mother, also of cancer. My father and this widow had so much in common, simply in terms of what they’d lost, that their bond must have felt destined, possibly even ordained. My father took to preening, taking stock of what he looked like. He went out in the evenings. Some nights, he didn’t bother coming home. After a time, when his relationship no longer seemed to be simply a means of compensating for the loss of my mother but a source of happiness in and of itself, I began to feel threatened. Not for myself. I felt threatened because this new woman, a perfectly kind, respectable, loving woman, had managed to find a place of primacy in my father’s heart—the place I’d wanted him to guard, at least a season longer, for my mother.

I dreamt over and over, in countless variations, that my mother stood facing my father and his new companion. Finally, understanding that she’d been replaced, she retreated, returned to wherever it was she had been. No—first, she’d linger a moment, joining Jean and me in wordless commiseration. Then she would go. She was always silent, watching with such a calm understanding that the dream felt unbearable. Waking, I began to pose foolish riddles to myself: what would my father do if she did come back? Whose side would he choose? What would he prefer, given the choice: the old life or the new? I knew this was not a choice in which I was directly implicated, yet when I allowed myself to suspect that, on occasions, he did seem more inclined toward this new life, I was made to suffer. Perhaps because I was a product of the old life, every indication that the new life mattered felt like an indictment. I stewed over these musings, understanding perfectly well that the logic fueling them was flawed. Jean must have felt the same way because she and I bickered with our father frequently about how quickly he had shifted his focus from our mother and her house and the two of us there in it to this new woman who commanded so much of his attention.

Sometimes my father and I would pass from this bickering to a heated debate. We’d yell, then pause for air, then hurl our feelings at one another, urging, daring the other to respond. Sometimes, these arguments would go on for long stretches, until the anger would dissipate and we’d find ourselves just talking, or talking and crying. Jean would sit there silently, uncomfortable with the mess of our feelings, angry at both of us for letting things go so far, though those were precisely the times I felt that my father and I were for the first time in my life breaking down the barriers to a more genuine knowledge of one another.

I’d never spoken so freely or so honestly with my mother. I’d never had the occasion, having hidden from her everything that would have brought our most starkly differing viewpoints into contact. I hadn’t known how to do anything else. The idea of debate—of vehement disagreement that gives way to understanding—was something it had taken college, and all the theories I’d thrown myself behind as a way of testing out my beliefs and the power of my intellect, to acquaint me with. Before that, I always shrank away from disputes, not understanding what they were good for. Whenever my brothers had argued politics with my father, the exchanges had always deadlocked, with nobody shifting from where they’d started. The room had filled up with an ugly heat that the parties in question had eventually fled. When my parents had debated with the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses who sometimes came knocking, they’d done so with the belief that they were defending the one true God against false idols and that everything rode upon not changing viewpoints, not backing down. My parents had stood firmly on our side of the threshold and the proselytizers had stood firmly out there on the porch, and eventually someone had conceded that the conversation had run its course. In contrast to all those stagnant arguments I’d grown up watching, living out what felt like a genuinely dialectical approach to conflict made me proud—not just of myself but also of my father, as though he and I were learning the terms of a language we could share. Those times, I’d harbor a satisfaction: I am an adult now, I’d think. I was a child when she died. Now I realize what was really going on: that, bit by bit, fighting with my father helped me forgive him for needing to go on living his life among the living. And it helped me to forgive myself for having been too young, too inexperienced at life, to have opened myself up with a similar honestly with my mother.

I wonder if my father felt similarly liberated, if he was at all relieved by this chance to show his children who he was or needed to be. I don’t know how to describe the deep visceral jolt—the queasy mix of shock, shame, and dread—that swallowed Jean and me when he held up the gauzy negligee he had purchased as a Valentine’s Day gift for his girlfriend. It mortified me, but it also, very quietly, reminded me that I could finally just be myself with my father, who had, after so many years of working to be more, finally let himself become an ordinary human man. That same mix of feelings, felt all at once like a cold blast—shock, shame, and dread, followed immediately by something like permission to become more fully and unabashedly myself—arose one winter afternoon when, going through the garage pantry in pursuit of the last jars of our mother’s homemade preserves, Jean and I happened upon the place where my father had chosen to store his supply of condoms.

Before winter gave out, I decided to throw a party. There had been too much sorrow in our home, too many gatherings fueled by loss. I invited my college friends who’d landed in the Bay Area and the high school friends I’d reconnected with since my return. I wanted a total convergence, and not just of my own worlds. Conrad had by then taken a position in Pittsburgh, and Wanda had moved back to LA, but my father had agreed to be there, and so had Jean and Michael and his family. I’d wanted to cook and drink and play music in the house in a way that brought some of the life back to it. I remember sketching out menus in the days leading up to the party, just like my mother would have done. When the night of the party arrived, we stood talking in darkened rooms, the dim lights an uncanny testament to the spirit of that time, when we were still running on empty, trying to replenish something we’d eventually have to learn to live without. A couple of high school friends had brought a bottle of cream tequila with them, and I recall the timbre of my own forced cheer, trying to get everyone to join me, to drink and eat and dance so I’d have a reason, once they all left, to fall into a deep, blank sleep.

Nobody had said much about my mother. I suppose enough time had passed so that everything had already been said, or been written in cards and sent, or else left awkwardly unsaid. I’m sure someone must have offered a word or several of condolence, which I’d tried to smooth over or rush along, out of my own exhaustion with the rituals of grief. One guest whom I’d never liked much at college—she was unceasingly competitive and blunt-minded with a slightly bullying personality—had spent most of the night talking about her upcoming wedding (I wasn’t invited; I’d never even met her fiancé), though she had found time to get in a jab about the Super Kmart she’d driven past on her way to our house. Perhaps the night was simply an attempt to pull myself back into the world everyone else still dwelled in.

I had other friends who knew what it felt like to live without a mother. Too many others. The girl whose mother had driven the burgundy Saab. And Qiana, with whom I’d walked the two blocks to high school until it became clear that waiting for her each morning would invariably make me late. Her mother had died within weeks of my mom, from an illness that had plagued her quietly for perhaps the same length of time as my mother’s cancer. And there was a girl I’d been close to briefly in the fifth grade, whose mother was there and then all of a sudden was not. And another whose father was a pilot and whose mother had once let us drink a bottle of champagne at a sleepover on New Year’s Eve. And Rose, who wasn’t a girl but a woman and who was like a sister to my sisters. They all knew what it felt like to have a dead mother. How did they describe it to themselves, this state? I barely knew. Once, I spent the evening with two of them out at the ranch that one girl’s father, the pilot, had inherited upon his wife’s death. It had been in the family for a long time, and someone needed to take it on, so he’d left his suburban tract neighborhood and moved into the big house at the end of a long row of mammoth cypresses, the same trees as grow in graveyards. The three of us motherless girls had decided to take a walk in the orchard, and because the stars were out, or because we were all three together for the first time since everything had changed, we’d started talking about our mothers.

“I think she’s there and here at the same time,” someone said, tipping her head up toward the sky—a sky the trees seemed to push farther back so that the distance we looked up toward was even less fathomable, less within our grasp.

The words came out of my mouth before I even knew I’d wanted to speak. “I know she wanted it to be exactly like the Bible says, but I think it has to be different.” How far-off everything felt. Not just my mother and not just the answers to the questions her death had set into motion. I felt remote even from a clear sense of what I myself believed. A breeze moved through the trees. “There’s just so much out there…” I trailed off.

We tried talking our way to a sense of what we believed. We tried talking in a way that might make us feel both looked after and utterly free. Standing there, with our shoes sinking into the ground and the wind rifling the orchard leaves, with the smells of fruit and rot and the sounds of nocturnal animals going about their nocturnal rituals, we tried to say some of what we thought or felt or wondered. We tried, but it was too soon, or else the dark had rendered foreign all we thought we knew, and so we didn’t ever manage to speak of how irremediably broken we all were. Perhaps we didn’t need to.

In our silence, the darkness began to close in. I felt it all at once, like a presence that knew more than I wanted it to know and pushed up against me with the heft of that knowing. I wanted to run back through the muddy orchard rows not just to the bright, ordinary light of the house, but to a time and place when someone would be awake in a different room, calling out to us now and again, saying, Isn’t it time you girls were getting to sleep?