To keep my parents from getting exposed to Covid-19, I tried to give them fewer excuses to leave home. I taught them how to use Skype and Zoom so they could talk with Steve Martin and the St. Marks Place co-op. I brought them dinners. And yet, one afternoon I called over to the house and, yet again, my father told me that my mother was out running errands.
“She’s in town every time I call,” I said. “I told her I’d make those trips for her so she could stay home safe.”
“Hey!” he said. “I go to town too! I went yesterday for cigarettes and root beer and gasoline!”
Not “gas”: “gasoline,” as if he enjoyed the sound of the whole word, symbol of American freedom, the ability to go where you want, when you want: gas-o-line. Stage-four lung cancer, seventy-eight years old, explicit orders from doctors and the governor to stay in, my pleas to be careful—none of it was enough to keep him from doing exactly what he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.
I asked him to give me his next shopping list, and this was it: Ritalin, A&W root beer, 72 percent dark chocolate, and a carton of Marlboro Gold 100s. The wish list of any American teenage boy.
Well, except my thirteen-year-old, Oliver, who found his grandfather’s tastes a source of great amusement. As I walked, masked, to the strip-mall cigarette store to pick up Poppa’s groceries, Oliver leaned out the window of our parked car and shouted across the lot in a voice he’d cribbed from James Cagney’s in White Heat: “Ma! Get me my cigs, Ma!”
One night, a thunderstorm caused a blackout and I arrived at my parents’ the next morning to find four plastic root beer bottles duct-taped together with dinner candles poking out from the tops, wax everywhere. Rather than use a flashlight, my father had crafted a soda bottle candelabra. It looked like an art installation, or a prop from a horror movie—something discovered by detectives in a killer’s lair. As I assessed the contraption, I thought back to all those “genius” emails I’d gotten from his fans. And I felt glad that weeks earlier I’d bought several smoke detectors and hidden them around his house.
The hits kept coming. One night as I cleared the table after dinner at their house, I saw a book I’d given him months earlier sitting in the trash with the food. It was New York Times reporter David Carr’s memoir The Night of the Gun. After getting sober, he goes back and reports out his drug addiction and its fallout, especially the effect it had on his daughters. The title comes from a moment when he’s retelling a story about how one night his friend had drawn a gun on him. The friend corrects the record; it was Carr who’d been waving around the gun. And now here was this book in the garbage. I pulled it out of the trash and cleaned it off.
“Did you mean to throw this away?” I said.
“Yeah,” my father said, without looking up.
“I gave you this book for Christmas,” I said. “I told you that I loved this book, that it meant a lot to me. If you wanted to get rid of it, why wouldn’t you do it while I wasn’t here? Why not throw it away an hour ago or an hour from now so I wouldn’t see it?”
My father seemed confused. Over his shoulder I could see my mother and Neal and Oliver and my parents’ friend Scott trying to pretend they weren’t listening.
“Oh!” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t think about it. It definitely wasn’t conscious.”
“Then you need to get some fucking therapy!” I said—louder than I’d meant to, I guessed, because behind him I saw the others stiffen. I didn’t want to cause any more of a scene, so I went into the bathroom to pull myself together.
All this time, I’d thought we had books and writing in common. I was a fool. He loved books in his own way and apart from me. Did we share anything? I clung to Frank O’Hara as the one thing that was undeniably ours, like a religion to which we both adhered, even if we didn’t go to church together. But now even that felt like a stretch. I bet he’d remember if Spencer gave him a book, I thought.
I went into his office and from the literal ashes of his cigarettes I scooped up several other books that I’d given him off the corner of his desk. I brushed them off and put them in my purse. Then I went back into the main room, where preparations were being made to watch a movie. I made everyone popcorn, putting only the slightest topspin on my father’s as I set it down in front of him.
In the days that followed, he did not contact me. I imagined him dying while we were in a fight. People always say that it’s important to end on good terms. And I knew that if I were to write something about him, it would need a final chapter. Ideally, he would become a doting grandfather and loving father and, having processed every slight and forgiven them all, I would magnanimously put the past behind me. He would die feeling cared for and seen and I would be there for him and my mother. Spencer would be unreachable, maybe in Europe.
But I’d been trying to give us that storybook ending all year, and where had it gotten me? I’d been working nonstop to do right by him, to tell him I loved him and to help him tie up the loose ends of his work, to protect his legacy, to buy him frozen yogurt, to say heartfelt goodbyes so that if they were the last goodbyes, I could be proud of them. After all that, could I live with “You need fucking therapy” as the last thing I said to him? Could I live with Spencer being the good child, for real this time?
I decided that I could. I’d said everything I had to say. He’d said everything he had to say. That was more than most people get. So what if I couldn’t hold his attention. So what if he threw my gifts in the trash? I didn’t see how I’d ever fix any of that with him, but I could at least take comfort in the fact that I had broken that particular cycle as a parent. Feminist, Civil Rights activist, and author Audre Lorde said, “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different,” and I had.
Blake, who was six when Neal and I met, was now a full-fledged adult. He’d been born to teen parents on food stamps and through years of incredibly hard work was now becoming a doctor of physical therapy. After years of getting to see him only a few times a year when he’d lived with his mom in Texas, we now had him near us. And we could finally see him all the time for museums and Coney Island trips and sitting around eating chips and salsa and laughing.
Oliver, a rising ninth grader, still hugged me every day. I knew his teachers and his friends and how he liked his waffles. Reading with Oliver over the years was one of my favorite things—from The Foot Book when he was six months old to Flora and Ulysses when he was six (it’s about a squirrel who writes poetry, mostly about food) to all the Harry Potter books to all the Young Bond books. And having listened to classic British novels as audiobooks for years, his accents and vocabulary were ridiculous. He was the only Brooklyn-raised boy I knew who used words like “whinging.”
When he was in fifth grade, Oliver and I developed a particular love of a hilarious British book series called Mr. Gum, so much so that we decided to write the author a fan letter. We mailed it off to him in care of the publisher. The author wrote back and included a new book as well as his email address. We started exchanging emails, and he said he’d be in New York. He came and spoke at the monthly reading series I organized at Oliver’s school library and then I took him out for lunch and on a tour of Bushwick. When Oliver and Neal and I were in London, Mr. Gum, as we privately called him, gave us a thumb drive of all his favorite Prince bootlegs and took us on a tour of Primrose Hill. I had to explain to Oliver that this is not what typically happens when you send a fan letter.
Or maybe it is when you’re as open as Oliver is—as ready to love and be loved. When my goddaughter Alice was just a few weeks old, Oliver held her carefully as she slept, and if I ever got a tattoo it would be of that moment.
When I saw my father again a few days after the night of The Night of the Gun, at Oliver’s fourteenth birthday party, he hovered while I manned the grill. He tried to make small talk, but I realized the reason he was standing so close was that he was hungry. He seized the first hamburger I spatulaed onto the platter. While he ate, I mentioned that it might be a good time to apologize for throwing my favorite book away in front of me and acting like I was overreacting when I said it was weird.
He said he couldn’t apologize because if you apologized it meant you’d never do it again, and he knew enough about himself to know that he probably would do something like that again. He told me he’d been thinking about his issues a lot, though, and decided there was evil in him, and—
I cut him off and said in the time it took him to figure out how evil he was he could have driven to Price Chopper and bought me an $8 bouquet of flowers and then we wouldn’t have to talk about it again. He said he heard the message loud and clear.
When he came down the driveway a week later for another dinner I was cooking for him, I saw that he was carrying something. I felt a flutter of hope that it was for me. But as he got closer, I saw that what he carried was a bowl of whipped cream my mother had made to go on the dessert.
I stayed mad. I couldn’t believe I could feel so much anger toward a seventy-eight-year-old man who weighed 125 pounds. It hurt my sense of myself as a good girl, someone who always took the high road.
As Neal and I took one of our daily lockdown walks together, I fumed.
“I know how you’re feeling right now,” Neal said. “You’re sort of looking forward to when your dad is gone because then you think you’ll have your life back and you’ll stop thinking about him all the time. But everyone with chronically ill parents thinks things like that. And take it from someone with two dead parents: it doesn’t work that way. When someone dies, it just means nothing new happens. It doesn’t mean you stop thinking about them or being tormented. In fact, sometimes you think about them more, and you’re tormented more, because now you’re just left with whatever happened already and there are no more re-dos. So be glad he’s still alive.”
Midway through the summer, the family I stayed with in high school came over for a socially distant backyard barbecue, bringing with them their three-year-old grandchild—my goddaughter Alice. Watching her running toward me, arms out, I smiled so hard it hurt my face. She and I have loved each other since I first met her when she was a few weeks old. In my backyard, I carried her around on my hip and brought out boxes of old toys for her to play with. I pointed out animals and flowers and made her a plate of food. Concentrating hard on the words, she sang me her new favorite song, “Home on the Range”: “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word …”
Her voice sounded so much like mine on those bedtime tapes. She was bright and funny and, like Oliver, had a natural affinity for big words. She would do great things, I thought, and I would do anything to help her. I reminded myself that I should continue to give her books every year and that one day one of them would be Lunch Poems.
As the sun set, I watched as she played with the toys I’d brought out for her. I noticed that her favorites were the miniature toy foods that I’d been looking for a year and a half earlier when I found the Frank O’Hara tapes. Searching for this simple thing to make her happy had given me my own old toy to play with—a Rubik’s Cube of voices and stories that had kept me occupied for hundreds of hours and that I’d probably be trying to solve for the rest of my life.