One day around my grandmother’s birthday, my father, Neal, Oliver, and I went to visit her at her assisted-living home. My father’s mother, Charlene Schjeldahl, was turning 102, but her mind was as sharp as ever. For the year prior, I’d tried to bring or mail her at least a book every month. Reading had become her main activity aside from playing Scrabble with my aunt Peggy or working the Daily Star crossword puzzle with my aunt Ann and cousin Mary Ann (Grammy often finished it first). On one visit, she’d recited Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” to me from memory.
On this trip, I brought her donuts, a book by Roz Chast, a Norway guidebook, and Tommy Orange’s There There, because she’d recently become interested in Native American literature. My father did not bring her anything, and he did not talk loud enough for her to hear him, so she mostly just smiled at him as he talked and then said, “What?”
Soon, my grandmother and father had stopped trying to converse and were in opposite corners reading to themselves—he Roz Chast and she the Norway guidebook.
Finally, I said, “We should get going.” My father leapt out of his chair like he was a surgeon and a donor organ had just been located.
At various points, he has been estranged from each of his four siblings, and he has never forgiven his mother for her lack of warmth when he was young. In my father’s defense, I know that people are often very different as grandparents than as parents, that it’s entirely possible that Grammy had been a monster to him and an angel to me. Still, she seemed so eager to be close to all of us now, and she was so loving with Oliver.
“C’mon,” I said in the elevator to my sulking father. “Grammy’s a hundred and two! You’re seventy-seven! And she’s apologized! Can’t you cut her any slack?”
“You weren’t raised by her,” he said.
No, I was raised by you. I thought back: my father driving into a boulder and almost killing us because he wouldn’t listen to everyone in the car saying that it was too icy to take the shortcut; stranding Oliver at age ten alone at a town pool the one time he was put in charge of him; putting me on a city bus to go to a birthday party at age eight without quite telling me where the party was. I must have looked like an Edward Gorey cartoon standing there in the West Village in my party dress, holding a present, lost.
I always wished that when I was young he’d just picked, once and for all, whether to be smart and thoughtful or arrogant and callous. Instead, he’d be one thing for a week or two and then, without warning, the other. Unlike Grammy, he’d never changed. As a grandfather, he ran alternately warm and scalding, just as he had as a father.
Once, when he went to a war museum, he brought Oliver back a reproduction army satchel, a bull’s-eye souvenir that Oliver carried with him to the playground for years. But when on a bright summer afternoon Oliver raved to him about how much he loved To Kill a Mockingbird, my father shut him down, saying, “It’s no Huckleberry Finn.” (Neal and I now use this phrase all the time. Dinner tonight? It was fine, but no Huckleberry Finn.)
Earning my father’s approval has never been straightforward. One time I went to St. Marks Place to retrieve a spare copy of my Brooklyn keys because I’d locked myself out of my apartment. He’d lost many keys, wallets, and passports over the years and seemed delighted that I’d shown myself capable of such a blunder. As I trudged up the stairs, I heard him shout down the stairwell, “You are my daughter after all!”
This is why as a little girl I felt pride in my bad handwriting. My father’s illegible scrawl was legendary, and I copied it. I found an old report card from elementary school: nearly perfect grades, all “Excellent,” except for handwriting: “Satisfactory.”
Starting when I was thirteen, I worked—at the farmers’ market, as a babysitter, at the local comic book store. My parents spent most of every summer in the Catskills, leaving me alone in the apartment for months at a time starting when I was fourteen. I wanted them to go. I preferred the company of my friends.
My best friend, Asia Wong, stayed over for a few weeks that first summer. We both had jobs and took classes and drank and smoked but spent most of our nights walking around the city for hours. We had long discussions about, for example, which of us was Barbara Hershey in Beaches and which was Bette Midler (“No, I’m the wind beneath your wings!”) while ignoring NYU students who were trying to pick us up.
The night before I was to start high school, I was in the apartment making myself buttered noodles for dinner, and I felt suddenly, horribly alone. Asia was home with her family. My parents were a three-hour drive away. I’d been acting like a grown-up for years, but that night I felt very young and very scared. I cried until I was almost sick, wrote Sylvia Plath–inflected poetry about suicide, and pondered methods for a couple of hours. Then, eventually, I pulled myself together and went to sleep. I got myself to my new school the next morning on time.
That year I started hanging around, like a stray dog, the family of some kids I babysat. They were part of the same New York intellectual class as my parents, but to me their relative domesticity made them seem unbelievably exotic. There were three children. Their mother put her kids’ clothes in the dryer on winter mornings so when they woke up—to a tape of Beatles songs—they wouldn’t have to put on cold shirts. The father was a journalist, writing stories about exciting topics like dinosaur bones, boxing, and drugs. He often brought his family on reporting trips. All through high school I slept at their house in Brooklyn twice a week so I could babysit at night and then take the kids to school in the morning.
By the time I was sixteen, I was babysitting for them and other families and working as an intern at SPIN and Esquire. I also tech-directed school plays and had a boyfriend. I barely saw my parents at all.
As a teenager and into my twenties, I did hold out hope that I would eventually receive from my father what I’d heard called an amends—a specific apology for things he’d done and left undone. I thought that if he sat down and made a long list of things he felt sorry about, then I could forgive him and we could move on. When I asked him, years later, why he had never made an amends to me, he said there was something you could do called “a living amends,” where you just started living in a new way. I thought that sounded like a cop-out.
In my twenties, I decided I could just go ahead and make his amends for him. I could look into his heart and see that he wished he’d been a better father. I could become a ventriloquist, whispering consoling words to myself.
That strategy helped me, but nothing seemed to help him. He appeared sad and anxious. I once told him he should try to write about his life. I’ve taught memoir seminars, at which I always express my belief that if you tell a story in an honest enough way, you can free yourself from shame. He said he could never write a memoir because his memories were like a train yard full of third rails.
My mother says my father opens doors and drawers but never closes them. She’s always following behind him, closing things. She’s been complaining about it for fifty years. Still, she does it, because she doesn’t want to live in a home full of open cabinet doors and gaping drawers. When I found these O’Hara tapes, I saw an open drawer. The past year it’s like I’ve been trying to close it. Or perhaps I am just flinging open more drawers and cabinet doors—searching them for answers to questions about who my father is, who Frank O’Hara was, why people liked Larry Rivers so much, and how I can wring a happy ending out of all this.