“It’s answers I’m after, not him.”
I arrive at the restaurant first. I don’t know if my father’s going to show because he’s dead and because he hasn’t ever come to see me when he said he would when he was alive. The lunch was his idea, the details on a cream-colored invitation sent through snail mail requesting a meeting. It’s a nice place, one I am surprised my father chose or even knew about, because my father is tight and he would have been happy going to Joe & Nemo’s, the hot dog place he took my mom to on their first date. This place has four shiny stars and a menu full of fish, steaks, pastas, and fine wines. The tables are far enough away from one another so no one can hear us. There’s even a maître d’ in a penguin suit who seats me at the table, a good one, by the window, far from the bathroom and kitchen.
I hope he’s not going to be wearing those awful ice-cream-colored pants he favors, those big shirts. I don’t know how the dead change, but I wonder if he’ll be fat the way he used to be so that he has to cram himself into the seats and even then, he might be so larger than life, (ha, that sounds funny), he spills out over the armrests.
I don’t know how I feel about seeing him. I rustle in my seat and play with the linen napkin. I know I won’t cry because I really cried enough when he was alive. I won’t hug him or even touch him, but I remember he smells like tobacco because he’s always poking Q-tips into his pipe and his skin is clammy. If he’s the same as he was alive, he’ll probably yell at me but, as always, not tell me for what. Maybe he will punish me with silence or kick a chair over and leave it to me to apologize to the staff in this fancy place.
It’s answers I’m after, not him.
He walks in, and I’m stunned by how young he looks, or maybe it’s just because I’ve grown old. He’s actually wearing a suit, and it’s a little baggy on him, and I wonder how he lost so much weight. Maybe death does that to you. Maybe the food’s not so good there. He’s wearing a black tie on a white shirt, which seems appropriate. I can see the comb marks raked across his gray hair. He smiles and squints, his hazel eyes blink, just like mine, but he doesn’t hug me or kiss me or say anything sweet. Instead, he sits down opposite me and puts his napkin in his lap and reaches for the menu, not looking at me.
“I found them after you died,” I tell him, and he looks up at me. “Found what?” he says. He turns the pages of his menu, frowning.
“The potato chips in your coat pocket. The candy bar wrappers in your jacket.” Before he died, my father was on a restricted diet, dangerously obese with blood pressure so dramatically high it could win an Oscar, while I was always swizzle-stick skinny. He was supposed to take pills for it. My mother put him on a diet. He ignored both of them.
“I liked them,” he said. “I wasn’t going to deny myself.”
“I found them,” I say again, louder now, and this time, as if the staff knows exactly what we want, a steak and potato appears for him, a vegan pasta made of zucchini and cashew ricotta for me. “You like that?” he says, shaking his head. He starts salting his steak so heavily it has a coating. “Hey, don’t you give me that look. I’m dead,” he says. “I can eat whatever I want. You and your mother. All this about food, for Christ’s sake.”
I remember my mother cooking him lean meats, plain chicken, giving him fake butter or no butter. Instead she chose olive oil because it was supposed to be good for you. She didn’t love him, never had, but had married him on the rebound, carrying a torch for the man she had really loved for most of her life. But every night, she cooked for him and we all had dinner together. The day he died, she took out a meat loaf, a new recipe that was leaner, cleaner, and she cried, “This was his dinner.”
I swallow hard. “My letters,” I tell him. “I found them, too.”
In high school, when I had my first boyfriend, my first kiss at seventeen with a bad boy so glorious I could have inhaled him like a drug, my father came out in boxer shorts and bare chest and big belly, and while my boyfriend blinked at him in astonishment, my father yelled at me. “Where have you been?” he shouted. I gently shoved my boyfriend out the door, his kiss still on my mouth, and told him I’d see him the next day and the next day and forever after. “You will never see that boy again!” my father screamed. He threatened to drive me to school and pick me up to make sure he knew where I was, to put a monitor around my ankle, and then my mother came in and looked exhausted by all of it. “Henry,” she said. “Henry.” She took his arm and led him back to bed.
Every morning, I called the summer camp where I worked and coughed into the phone and told them I had bronchitis. “Gee, it’s going on so long,” the director said. “Get better soon because the kids are asking for you.” I didn’t care about the money. Then I took all the side streets and walked forty-five minutes to my boyfriend’s house and up to his small blue bedroom, his rumpled bed, his lean lick of a body, the way he loved, loved, loved me. Once, there was a sleepover at the camp and I lied and we slept out on an abandoned ski slope all night long. I came home with forty-five mosquito bites on my feet, but to me, they were badges of honor.
But back then, I worried that my parents knew. I felt my father watching me, threatening. My mother would snap at me, too, but only because she didn’t want to deal with my father. I couldn’t deal with the stress, with what might happen if my father found out I was sleeping with my boyfriend. “Let’s run away to California,” I begged my boyfriend. He smoothed my hair. “We can’t,” he said.
I began crying all the time. In my room, at school, with my boyfriend, who now couldn’t deal with the consuming suck of my sorrow, plus he was a hormone-fueled seventeen-year-old, amazed by all the girls who wanted him, who brought him books of poems, who put their hands on his hips. Girls who didn’t have terrifying fathers. Of course, he broke it off with me.
I had a nervous breakdown, or at least I thought I did. I began crying more, so much, I even worried myself. “Now, you just stop this,” my mother said, and I cried harder.
“I think I need to see a doctor,” I told my parents. “You talk to us,” my father told me. “No daughter of mine is seeing a shrink.” My mom took me to a social worker, because it sounded less ominous, but my father refused to go with us, and the social worker told her, “I want to see the whole family here.” I wanted to throw my arms about him. I wanted him to be my father. He was hope.
But when we left the room, my mother said. “Your father will never agree to this. Let’s just forget coming here again. It’s no use.”
Now, I pick at my fake ricotta cream. It’s silky on my tongue. “Why did you do that with my first boyfriend?” I ask him.
“I didn’t like that boy. He wasn’t Jewish.”
“But I loved him. I loved him. And I was only seventeen. I wasn’t going to marry him.”
“I’m your father, and you listen to me.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t listen. I didn’t listen.” I tell him that I had kept seeing my boyfriend, even after we had broken it off, off and on, for three years afterward, sneaking away. I told him I saw him in college, that we are still friends. That I slept with him over and over for years until I got out of college. I wait for his shock. He shrugs.
“I’m dead. What do I care?” he says.
“I’m your daughter. That’s why you care.”
I ask him what it’s like being dead, and he shrugs. “I have no real use for it,” he says. “It’s one big stinkeroo. Just like life was.”
“I don’t think that,” I tell him. I tell him how I married young and then divorced. I told him how I had become engaged and my fiancé had died two weeks before our wedding. I told him about Jeff, my husband, how before we had kids, we sat down and decided to do everything the opposite of how I had been raised.
My father pushes the steak away. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he asks.
“Why weren’t you a good father?”
“Don’t give me any of that,” he says. “Ever think it was you?” I feel as if he slapped me.
I remember a summer, when I was sixteen and I wanted to go home from the Cape because I hated the beach, the sting of the salty air, the way the sand breaded me like a cutlet. I hated being away from my boyfriend, and my father told me I had to stay with him and my mom at the ocean. I had lashed out. “Why?” I asked. And when he said, “Because I’m your father,” I said, “Oh, really? Who is my best friend? What is my favorite class in school? What books do I read? Some father.” And then I took my things and slapped out of the cottage. And as I left, my mother cried, “Don’t leave me alone with him.” I saw her face, pleading, like I was the only hope she had left.
My father now puts down his fork. “Your mother didn’t love me. I knew that,” he says. “But if I didn’t have you, then I had nothing. You had to stay. For me and to prove something to your mom.”
I had run from the cabin and walked along the beach. I had no idea which direction the train station was, and I had no money, but I had my thumb, and people hitched back then. I was young and pretty, and I was wearing a tank top and shorts to show off my long browned legs. I could get a ride. I could fend for myself.
He came for me in the car, crying. I had never seen my father cry. “Get in,” he begged, his voice knotted with grief, and I did. He started talking almost immediately, more than he ever had told me. He said he hated his own father, who wouldn’t pay for him to go to law school or med school even though he had the money, how he was never loved, not even by his mother or his brothers. He was sobbing so hard I put an arm around him, even though I didn’t want to. He was gulping tears, and I said I would go back to the cottage with him, and when we did, the first thing I saw was my mother’s face. Her disappointment that I was back. “If you weren’t here, I would have divorced him,” she said. I heard the longing in her voice, the surprise that she couldn’t get what she had wanted.
“Did you ever love me?” I ask my father now. I don’t remember being taken anywhere by him. I don’t remember hearing I love you, I’m proud of you. He never told me I was pretty or smart or fun to be around. Instead he called me “an animal” when I burped or farted. He looked at me with disgust.
“Of course I loved you,” my father says. “What did you think?” I think how girls who grow up without fathers don’t know how to have relationships with men. I think of my friend Judy, who was a daddy’s girl, and how her father always hugged me when he saw me. He always asked about my classes, my family. Once, he bought Judy a baby blue cashmere sweater, and he must have seen the yearning in my face, because he bought one for me, too. My parents made me return it. “We’re not taking charity,” my mother said. Judy’s father never returned the sweater, and every time I was over at their house, I wore it, even in the summer.
I used to dream that Judy’s father would adopt me and my parents would let him. “Bye,” they’d say with a wave. “Have a fun life.”
This is what I remember. One time he took me on a roller coaster. I screamed the whole time.
When I was a little girl, I had bad dreams. I would sleep beside my mom, comforted, and one day she came to me and said, “Your father is hurt that you sleep beside me, but not beside him.” I was six years old and terrified. I had to sleep in my father’s bed, separated from my mom’s by an end table. I was careful not to touch him, not to let him touch me. In the morning, he got out of bed naked, and I stared at his penis. He saw me and snapped, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for looking?” In kindergarten, I drew paper dolls of my family, everyone naked, my father with a long sock-shape between his legs that touched his knees. The teacher called my mother. “She has a big imagination,” my mother said.
I never would sleep with him again.
“The letters,” I say again. My father beckons the waiter for more water. Months before he died I felt confused. My father never called me at college. Never wrote me. So I wrote him. Two long letters that I watercolored designs on the edges. I don’t know why, but I wrote that I loved him. I told him about my life, my boyfriends, my dreams, as if it might change things. It was a totally pretend letter, but I thought it might make him really see me.
But when he died, I found the letters in his dresser, still sealed. He had never even bothered to open either one of them. “Why not?” I ask, and now I’m practically crying. “Why did you keep them if you weren’t going to read them? Why the fuck not?”
“Watch your filthy mouth,” he says.
We’re finishing our meal, or rather he is. I haven’t been able to eat. “Do you miss me?” I ask, and I know my voice is a plea.
He calls for the waiter, the check.
I reach for the bill, and my father takes it from me. “I earn good money,” I tell him. “I’m a novelist.”
“And I’m your father and I’m paying.”
He tips the waitress the exact right amount because he was an accountant, and then he stands up. “It was nice seeing you,” he says, and I want to hurl myself on him, sobbing, Nice? Nice? What does “nice” mean? Don’t they teach you things in the afterlife? Why didn’t you love me, why wasn’t I enough for you? Why did you have to repeat the pattern your dad did with you? I want to call him a bastard, to tell him good, I’m glad you’re leaving. Go, go. I want to say that maybe we have horrible people in our lives to show us who we never want to be. I want him to say he loves me now, that he’s sorry for how he was, that he regrets everything, especially keeping me silenced so I couldn’t ever tell him how I was hurting.
Instead, he waves and steps out into the blinding light. “See you,” he says, and I don’t know what that means. I wait until I cannot see him anymore, until it seems like just another day, another restaurant. I remind myself that my husband, Jeff, and I had never ever thought to hit our son Max, had never raised our voices or even snapped at him. We had never chased our son around with a belt. We had never denigrated him or told him to shut up or mocked what he said or kept him from friends. I remind myself that Jeff is affectionate and silly and kind and devoted. My father never changed.
But I did.
I motion the waitress and order chocolate cake. I eat it slowly, savoring the sweet, and then I find my cell and text both Max and Jeff. I love you, I say. I just wanted you to know.
Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Cruel Beautiful World, and eight other novels. A book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and People, she teaches writing online at Stanford and the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, as well as working with private clients. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Real Simple, and more, and she was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, as well as being a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the Nickelodeon Fellowships. Reach her at www.carolineleavitt.com.