The night before he left Texas, my dad took my sister and me to dinner at a restaurant with a name I always liked: Daddy Did It Fish House. The name seems ironic now, but it didn’t then. I was twelve years old, and I’d been to oodles of restaurants in the year since my parents had separated: Whataburger and Two Pesos and questionably hygienic oyster bars down near the Ship Channel where the half shells were served on beds of slimy green ice. In other words, all the places my mother never wanted to go. She didn’t like Daddy Did It, either, because she thought the name was stupid and catfish and hush puppies were redneck foods. Compared to most of the places we went that year, Daddy Did It was the Ritz, with chairs that weren’t bolted to the floor and utensils that didn’t come wrapped in cellophane.
Dad had rented a spare room in a friend’s apartment on Lower Westheimer, near the Galleria, in central Houston. He slept in a sleeping bag on a bare mattress on the floor. Everything he owned was still at our house, including most of his clothes. When we visited, Devin, four years younger than me, tucked in beside him on the mattress and I slept on the couch in the living room. He’d talked for years about getting out of Texas and living closer to the beach. Now Dad’s things were in a moving truck, and tomorrow he and my soon-to-be stepmother were lighting out for Southern California.
At dinner Dad showed us grainy Polaroids of his new apartment and gave Devin and me, as going-away presents, boxes of cards already stamped and addressed to him. I recognized my stepmother’s elegant cursive and tried to connect her handwriting and the address on the envelope to my father’s name. “All you have to do is write inside it, fold it up, and drop it in the mailbox,” Dad said. “We’ll be pen pals.” The idea seemed such a perverse reduction in status, from parent to pen pal, that he immediately took it back. “You can call me anytime you want,” he added. That promise made us all feel a little better. The waitress brought out the food and refilled our water glasses. When our plates were clean, Dad gave us each a handful of pennies to toss in the giant washtub at the front of the restaurant while he settled the bill. Devin closed her eyes and wished upon every coin. I tried to bean the oversized goldfish trolling along the bottom of the barrel. The fish darted from each penny I threw.
The divorce stipulated that my sister and I would spend four weeks a year in California. A week at either Thanksgiving or Christmas, and three weeks in August. I thought of our first trip to see him, for Thanksgiving, as an adventure. Dad had only been gone for three weeks, not long enough for me to miss him. His apartment wasn’t much larger than his old one, only two bedrooms, the second one occupied by my stepsister, Stacie. Devin slept on the trundle mattress that slid beneath Stacie’s bed while I once again sacked out on the living room couch. I didn’t mind; there was comfort in the familiar, even if the couch was rattan and creaked beneath me every time I shifted my weight. The balcony off the kitchen overlooked the swimming pool in the complex’s courtyard as well as, if you moved to the left, the parking lot of the supermarket, where each morning at three o’clock a garbage truck emptied the Dumpsters. The dining room wall and the floor behind the love seat towered with moving boxes full of my stepmother’s mysterious possessions. Very few things had come from our house in Texas, and this apartment, like the place in the Galleria, felt temporary, as though Dad were on an extended business trip. Before moving, he’d talked up California as the cradle of movie stars and endless summers, of a quintessential Americana, and that first trip he was intent on showcasing all that Los Angeles and Orange County had to offer. In five days’ time, in addition to celebrating Thanksgiving, we swam in the ocean, spotted celebrities on Rodeo Drive, toured the Queen Mary anchored in the Long Beach Harbor, ate at the oldest McDonald’s still in operation in Downey, and spent an entire day at Disneyland. The constant pace and activity only amplified my feeling that California was a place to go on vacation but not a state where people actually lived.
Something had changed when I returned later in August. Dad had unpacked his boxes, married, and settled in to his new job. And it was summer: The sun was bright and warm, and the ocean, forbiddingly cold and gray during our first visit, shimmered like a sheet of blue foil. I swam in the Pacific every day. Sometimes, all day. We ate our meals at home rather than at restaurants, often on the little balcony, and whenever Dad wasn’t at work he went without a shirt, as he had when I was little. It occurred to me that his old self, his real self, had been pushed underground for the last few years and had finally begun to reemerge in California, fifteen hundred miles from where I spent most of the year. It dawned on me that he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back, and the thought of living apart from him, which I’d already done for so long, became suddenly intolerable. I wept at the idea, and wept harder at the airport when it was time to fly back to Houston. I’d just turned thirteen and could sense the people around me at the gate, watching me bawl. I was embarrassed, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
Most boys my age were learning to resent their parents, their dads in particular, and did whatever they could to avoid them. But I was desperate to see mine. I began to hoard small moments of time. Events that would have been mundane under ordinary circumstances—eating dinner, riding in the car, watching TV—became freighted with importance, simply because I recognized how quickly they would pass, and how long it would be before we saw each other again. The end of that first summer trip coincided with the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, an event MTV commemorated by airing the original three-hour documentary movie of the festival. Dad and I stayed up late two nights in a row to watch it, and when I got back to Houston I used the money I’d made mowing lawns to buy up as much of the music as I could. Not only the big names, like Janis and Jimi, but the smaller acts, like Richie Havens and Country Joe and the Fish and Canned Heat, musicians only the diehards cared about. After school, I lay on my bedroom floor beneath the ceiling fan in the listless September heat, the music spinning in my Discman until I had every song memorized, hoping it would somehow form a tether, like a tin-can telephone, between my father and me.
During our long months apart, Dad and I talked on the real phone, too. We had a standing phone date on Sunday evenings, the official call made from the kitchen phone while my mother did the dishes or swept the floor. Other days I called him from a thousand clandestine locations, mostly from pay phones scattered around my neighborhood. I’d call collect, say the phone’s number when the operator asked for my name, and wait for my father to answer. He knew to write the number down, decline the charges, and call me back. Pretty soon I had my regular spots. There was the phone outside the Safeway and the phone in my high school between the gym and the entrance to the auto shop, conveniently hidden behind the Dr Pepper machine. I often skipped class to call him, knowing he’d be in his office.
Distilled to only a sound through a telephone, his voice had the power to evoke the entirety of his presence. His cropped hair and mustache, his shirtless torso stretched out on the couch, his distinctive, slightly musky scent, one I could still detect at the back of his closet years after he’d gone and my stepfather had moved in.
But it was his voice I loved most, his voice through the phone receiver like a late-night disc jockey through a car radio, low and measured and calm. From the time I was thirteen until I moved to California for college, on a swimming scholarship, most of our relationship unfolded this way: over the phone in short, piecemeal conversations that lasted only a few minutes. He made good on his promise to always answer when I called, but since I called him at work, it was only a matter of time before he had to go. The so-called lessons of manhood that television and movies depict as being imparted during campouts and fishing trips and ball games, with hair-mussing and arms around shoulders, were for me largely received at a pay phone. Leaning against that Dr Pepper machine, I told him about my driver’s test, my SAT scores, the first girl I kissed. I also confessed mistakes other kids tried to hide, like the time I jabbed a broom handle through the front door of the house and blamed it on the UPS man. The conversations were short, but they weren’t idle chatter. My father had left his children and moved three states away, and the question of what it meant to be a parent under these circumstances—the yawning distance between what he’d once expected of himself and the realities he now had to confront—was a central concern. Whenever I recall these conversations, I can hear him grappling toward some understanding of why things had gone the way they had, and the lessons that might be learned from one’s decisions, be they mistakes or strokes of luck. At fourteen and fifteen, I couldn’t quite discern his regret at having left, or his determination to stay involved in my life, but I could nevertheless sense that he was trying to tell me something. Important things were being conveyed. Lessons in miniature. I hung on his every word.
To grow up longing for a father is to grow up preoccupied with fatherhood itself. Years before I ever wanted kids, let alone believed I was equipped to handle their care and feeding, I spent a good deal of time puzzling over the rights and obligations of the job. Most of my fantasies were either revisions to or embellishments of my own childhood. All the fun stuff like learning how to ski and surf and light a fart would be preserved; I’d just never, ever drive my kid to the airport and put him on a plane back to his mother for eleven months out of the year. When I met my wife, I knew instantly that we were destined for the long haul. I could practically see Katherine’s perfect nose and dark eyebrows recast in the faces of babies, children. Her children. Mine.
I let it slip that I sometimes thought this way, and it became a game we played together while we drank margaritas on the front stoop of the house I rented in Salt Lake City or rumbled around the mountains in her Jeep. What our kids would look like. They’d have her good eyesight but my long eyelashes. Girls would get Katherine’s feet; boys would inherit my swimmer’s shoulders and long arms. Any child of ours would be a good swimmer because, well, duh. We’d prioritize contact with nature, fluency in at least one foreign language, and concern for the poor, even as we encouraged the kids themselves toward heights that would ensure they’d never know hunger or disappointment. Katherine and I agreed we’d make great parents. Better than our own parents—a given for most young couples who have no idea what they’re talking about, but also better than the other sorry schlubs we spied around town, ferrying slimy offspring in minivans littered with goldfish crumbs and deconstructed juice boxes. Jesus, we’d laugh to each other, how do people live like that? Surely we’d do better. Of course we would. We might possibly make the best parents ever.
You’d think, with all this dreaming and scheming, I would’ve been ready for fatherhood when it happened. You’d be wrong.
Katherine and I were in graduate school, in debt, and married for less than a year when we joined the nine percent of hapless idiots who conceive a child on the pill. We were so dumbfounded that it took four drugstore pregnancy tests and a trip to the county health clinic for a blood draw before we came to grips with the fact that we were totally screwed. Two years later, having tapped out a large chunk of my thesis with a baby sleeping on my lap (I’d learned to type extra quietly), I landed a teaching job at a bucolic little college in Appleton, Wisconsin, a hundred miles north of Milwaukee. We were packing boxes to move when Katherine handed me another ominously stained plastic stick. This time we’d beaten the NuvaRing. I laid my head on the kitchen counter and turned my face to the sink in case I puked.
Katherine shrugged. “At least you have a job this time.”
We left for Wisconsin two weeks after I turned thirty. I had three university degrees but had never had health insurance. Our first baby had been born on Medicaid, due to expire when he turned two, which he would the day after we arrived in Wisconsin. The college offered insurance, but with a monthly premium that took a Paul Bunyan–sized bite out of my take-home pay. Worse, our new plan categorized pregnancies as “preexisting conditions” and subjected buns-in-the-oven to a 280-day waiting period before coverage kicked in. To get around the bureaucratic roadblock, we kept our expanding family a secret until after I’d arrived on campus and filled out all the requisite paperwork with human resources. As soon as our insurance cards arrived in the mail, Katherine called the nearest obstetrician’s clinic and asked for the earliest available appointment. Any doctor, male or female, young or old, would do as long as he or she could get us in fast. When the receptionist inquired if she was pregnant, Katherine replied, “Well . . . maybe.” The receptionist took the hint and found a slot for us the following week.
The doctor was a diminutive Filipino man with the flinty stare of a prizefighter who had, unbeknownst to us, delivered half the babies in town. He pumped my hand when he shook it and scolded us for waiting so long to come see him. When I told him the baby had been conceived on birth control, as had our first, he set his hands on his knees, leaned back in his chair, and rifled out a volley of laughter. “It happens more often than you’d think,” he said. He slapped his hand over my shoulder. “Some people are especially receptive to pregnancy. You two must be a good match.”
“My boys can swim,” I said. I was still freaked, but I’ll admit it: I felt a jolt of pride. We had friends who’d struggled for years to get pregnant and had dropped some serious cash in the process. I’d somehow scored on not one but two hall-of-fame goalies. That had to be a record.
The doctor looked up from Katherine’s medical chart. “How many children are you planning on having?”
“I don’t think we can go through this again,” I said. Katherine nodded vigorously. We’d end up like the old woman who lived in a shoe if we stayed on our current path.
“I’d recommend a more permanent measure,” he said to me. “Once you’re certain you’re finished.”
“Permanent measure?” I asked.
He made scissors with his index and middle fingers. I cupped myself and winced.
“Oh, please,” Katherine said. She settled back on the table and lifted her feet into the stirrups. “He can tie my tubes after I deliver. I’ll already be in the hospital, so what the hell.”
“Good,” I said, wheeling my chair toward the head of the exam table while the doctor lubed his gloves. “This way I can father more.”
“Not with me you won’t.”
“I don’t think I could afford it anyway.”
Katherine patted my cheek. “Sweetie, money would be the least of your problems.”
Our sons, Galen and Hayden, were born slightly more than two years apart—Galen in Utah and Hayden in Wisconsin, where we still live. They were hazy ideas for years, then too real all too quickly, and I found myself colliding into parenthood as though it were a car accident. No amount of foresight or precaution, regardless of how many videos you watch or practice tests you take, can quite prepare you for the real thing. You just brace yourself. Which means I am, like so many American fathers, full of good intentions, simultaneously thrilled and scared shitless.
Fatherhood, as I’ve come to understand it, is an endlessly moving target, especially when it comes to boys. Especially now, at this quixotic juncture in America, when the country came fewer than 100,000 votes away from elevating the first woman to the highest office in the land but instead opted for a man who speaks and acts like the golden-haired love child of Gordon Gekko and Rodney Dangerfield. What does it mean to parent boys against such a backdrop? Do the old lessons of manhood, handed down to me via pay phone—and before that handed down to my father at the foot of a high school dropout who rode a tank ashore at Utah Beach and worked his way up from itinerant salesman to vice president of a major hardware company—even still apply? If the answer is no, as I suspect it is, what new lessons ought to replace them? How fast do I have to learn them in order to impart them to my sons?
Men, manliness, and masculinity have been the subjects of major reconsiderations in the years since my boys joined the world. The very word, masculine, has taken on such a pejorative aura, conjuring forth images of dick pics circling the Internet and presidents landing on aircraft carriers, that the entire enterprise of helping boys grow into men, which they will inevitably become, seems less certain and more imperiled than ever before. I want to do right by my sons. I want them to grow into strong and courageous young men, confident and successful adults. What parent wants any less? Yet there’s a fine line between strength and chauvinism, confidence and arrogance.
I hope I’m doing the right things, but I’m never quite sure.
As a dad, I’m supposed to be the one with the schematic for life’s problems. I’m supposed to have the answers. But every time I stumble into what I’m confident is a Big Fatherhood Moment, when circumstances require me to step up and dispense wisdom and time-tested paternal know-how, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still a kid on the lam from class, hiding out beside a pay phone, calling across the miles for someone to make sense of things, to whisper in my ear, Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay.