“Tootsie,” my grandmother used to say, “he isn’t coming back.” She said it often, the way one repeats a popular slogan. She seemed very intuitive then, because I hardly asked about my father. Somehow she had read my mind: I believed that he would come back.
There is something terrific about not knowing your father because it opens up possibilities that just aren’t there with a real mass in your mother’s bed, with a father who hangs his coat in the closet at night as proof of his whereabouts. My inventions of him were generous and he was invariably handsome and misjudged. Oh, how he came back again and again—as salesmen, doctors, soldiers. His voice was the voice of every radio announcer, and I would stare into the orange moon of the radio dial and will him into knowing that I was there, sweet with forgiveness.
“He’s not coming back,” my grandmother whispered, and her words were followed by a haze of smoke from her Lucky Strike, like the trail after skywriting.
In those vaporous days we moved often, and I worried that he would be unable to find us, and that even if he could, everything and everyone would be changed beyond the seduction that memory can work. As I grew older I began to question my mother but she seemed to suffer from a loss of time. “He just vanished,” my mother explained. It was a whole era about which I knew nothing, when men did that sort of thing, slipping away with a certain ease that eluded the law and feelings of guilt.
“You don’t know anything about it,” my grandmother said, and I thought that she was probably right. Yet I wanted to know, and I watched my mother, that blonde, skateless Sonja Henie, sitting in her blue dress on the edge of her bed, perched nervously as if she were on a moving vehicle. Blue was her favorite color and she and my grandmother always spent lots of time assessing other favorites—favorite vocalists, favorite flowers, favorite songs. I wondered: If Russ Columbo is her favorite vocalist, what is his favorite color, and Fred Astaire’s and Leslie Howard’s, and would they all love my mother in her blue dress? And would my father love her, too, if they could begin again somewhere in some other, more favorable, time?
My mother and my grandmother seemed to have no need for men. They supported us modestly with work they did in the kitchen. Sometimes they typed addresses on envelopes, facing each other at rented typewriters in the style of those twin-piano virtuosos who were so popular in the forties. They did whatever was available—pasting feathers on Kewpie dolls, stuffing circulars into those typed envelopes, or cementing silver-and-gilt hearts to greeting cards. Our wishes speed across the miles, we wish you happiness on your day, God bless your brand-new baby boy. Their kitchen was full of piecework and vague hope for the future.
Sometimes I made use of the fathers of friends. Not that those selfish girls were really willing to share. But there were times when I sat next to real fathers in movie theaters, with the exquisite texture of a man’s coat brushing my arm. And I listened to the sounds of their voices with the happiness of a dog that has no use for words but is desperately alert to tone and pitch and timbre.
I began to understand about the injustices in a world where loyal and willing girls were abandoned and others, faithless and disagreeable, were not. Nothing was fair—certainly not the burden of dreams.
The dreams of my father began to change. They became sad visions of lost men on maritime ships or men huddled in bad neighborhoods, the poor clucks who die in war movies, who get kayoed in minor boxing events. Take that, I thought, and that and that. Oh, I’d punish him, see that he was lonely cuddling some tired woman in a furnished room.
All the time I kept changing right along with my conclusions. I looked into mirrors and I assessed myself in the way that a soldier assesses his weapons: fair skin, light hair, and the intensity that I felt burning through my pallor. I think that boys saw this as a kind of wildness, something hot and exciting. They pursued me and girls did not.
My mother and grandmother, who watched the hair-combing, mistook it for vanity. They approved. Vanity in a girl of my age was cute and appealing.
In high school, I met a boy named Arnie Ford and it wasn’t hard to fall into step with that part of my life. “Baby baby,” Arnie said. “Baby baby,” with a compelling finger-snapping rhythm. I was drawn into the back seat of his father’s green Chevy, and the texture of those seat covers will stay in my head forever.
Whenever I see teenagers walking, hooked together in that peculiar meshing way—arms looped around waists, necks, shoulders—I remember Arnie, who was first. It seemed strange that I could do all those things with him, discover all those sensations and odors and that new voice that came from the dark pit of my throat (Don’t—oh yes, oh God) and that my mother and grandmother didn’t know. In their world there could be mingling without coupling, kisses without tongues. They sat at the kitchen table earning our living. I walked past them, struck with experience, and they yoo-hooed and advised me to take some milk and cupcakes before I went to sleep.
Lying in bed, I thought about the slow passage of sperm—the mere chance of it—the rendezvous of sperm and egg like some unlikely event. I fell asleep trying to remember the beginning of myself. Later I awoke, startled, and I could hear my grandmother coughing her cigarette cough in the other room and my mother murmuring to the movie stars in her dreams. Then I remembered Arnie and the way he clicked on the overhead light in the Chevy to check for stains on the seats. I shielded my eyes against the intrusive glare and I didn’t look at him.
“Okay,” he announced. “All clear,” as if I cared about that car.
“Shut off the light,” I said, and Arnie laughed. “Hey, do you know I love you?” he said, and he turned the motor over. The smell of the exhaust overwhelmed the odors of our bodies, and then he took me home.
“What do you and Arnie talk about?” my mother asked once. She knew what we talked about—in her mind’s eye she saw Mickey Rooney and Deanna Durbin movies and balloons of innocent conversation floating over our heads like halos.
But I don’t remember too many things that Arnie and I actually said to each other beyond the outcries of sexual discovery. We were like two earnest workmen, intent on getting the job done. “I love you,” he said. I remember that because he said it over and over again with liturgical zeal, fogging the windows of the car with his breath. If he said it for my sake, he didn’t have to. Just his presence, the evidence of his shirt, his shoes, his comb, eased a longing I could never describe.
I told Arnie that my father was dead. It seemed to be a sensible lie at the time and it gave me a chance to consider that possibility. A dead father was a father punished beyond mercy. A dead father evaded my illusions with the cunning of a con man. What more could I do to him? I decided to let him live and I would let Arnie love me up in the dark. I would let my mother and grandmother be the way they wanted to be, too.
But the weight of judgment and choice became too much for me. My pallor became ghostly, my hands trembled at simple tasks. I thought: if my father were here, he would be my defender and my strength. But there was no one to protect me from my own bad decisions, no one to lead me from the back seats of cars.
Slowly, in the fixed pattern of my life, the groping and touching of hands and mouths became dogged ritual.
“Relax, Sandy, oh baby, just relax,” Arnie begged. I could see the silver shadow of perspiration on his forehead. “I love you,” he insisted, but it wasn’t any use.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“You’re just in a bad mood,” he said hopefully, and he patted my knee and took me home.
“The lovebirds!” my grandmother cried out when she saw us. A cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth and a small burst of sparks fell to the table.
Arnie allowed his mouth to move into a little smile. He was not yet used to the ironies of life.
I sent him home and then I went into the dark retreat of my bedroom and lay across the bed with my clothes on. I could hear the shuffling rustle of cards from the kitchen where my mother and grandmother were playing rummy. I was tired. I won’t think, I said to myself. I won’t think about anything. But I thought of my father and that I would never know him, and my heart banged shut on the knowledge. I thought of my mother and I wanted to blame her, but she never believed she had driven him away. It was the decade, it was the climate, it was their astrological destiny.
I stood up and went into the kitchen.
“Knock with four,” my grandmother said.
“You got me,” my mother answered.
“Listen,” I said, “did you ever hear from my father?”
“But he vanished!” my mother cried out.
“He was somewhere,” I persisted. “He had to be somewhere.”
“Look, he disappeared,” my grandmother said severely. I was a sadistic playmate, bullying her blameless child. “It was different then. He disappeared from the face of the earth.”
They exchanged pleased smiles. They were in love with the drama of their words. Gone! Vanished! My father’s absence was a religious phenomenon.
“What did you do with his clothes?” I said.
They stared at me.
“What did you do with my father’s clothes?”
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“I mean did you burn them or did you give them away? Did you sell them?”
“Sa-ay,” my grandmother began, threatening. She half-rose from her chair.
But my mother still sat there and there were tears in her eyes. “It was such a long time ago,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Forget it.”
“The styles were different then,” she said, and her brow folded.
“Sure, how could you remember?” I squeezed her arm.
“Vests, double-breasted suits,” she said.
“Yes.” I leaned against the sink and shut my eyes.
“Do you feel okay?” my grandmother asked.
I opened my eyes and smiled at them. “Me? I feel great,” I said. I went to the window and looked out at the starless night until I found him. Then I let him go, out of that furnished room, out of that bad neighborhood. I returned him to a decent bed, shooting his seed like comets into the universe.
(1971)