knowing it was just another one of his lies
MY FATHER LOST his job, and then he lost his room at the motel, and then Marc agreed to let my father come stay with us in Boston for a while. He arrived on my porch in the early morning—his face thinner, his clothes hanging loosely off his frame. He carried a duffel bag in each hand, one packed with clothing, his reading glasses, and his netbook, and the other with two pounds of loose tobacco and a U.S. postal scale. He’d packed envelopes filled with tobacco seeds, which he harvested from the plant that grew on my grandmother’s windowsill. He planned to sell the seeds on eBay, along with two copper hammers he’d milled at his last job.
He apologized for waking me up.
I could smell the sour hint of alcohol on his breath, but I bit my tongue. I’ll take-care of him, my mother had said so candidly, as if we were talking about the family dog.
While Marc and I worked, my father spent hours riding the Red Line train between Ashmont and South Station; he collected cans out of the trash to return for their five-cent deposits. And on the trash days in my neighborhood, he combed the streets for discarded treasures that he brought home and proudly showed me: a pair of barely worn slippers, ten yards of fabric, a functional DVD player, a wooden wine rack, a Pyrex pie dish. He gave me first dibs, and I kept the dish.
It reminded me of the years in Florida my father spent junking, hauling broken electronics and appliances out of the garbage to fix and sell at the flea market. He’d had all the collection days memorized for the wealthiest neighborhoods. Sometimes, Grandma let us go junking with him and Fran. We left before sunrise. At the convenience store, he bought us bottles of Yoo-hoo and bags of Fritos, and then my sister and I played lookout, hawkeyed, watching for the familiar glint of crystal or milk glass. On one lucky day, I found a bootlegged copy of the Animal House soundtrack, which became my favorite cassette tape. I spent months crooning the songs around the house.
Sometimes Grandma let us go with him to the flea market, held in the parking lot of an old drive-in movie theater. The curving white screen sheltered the market from the sun through the early afternoon. We helped our father arrange his wares on fold-up tables, then wandered the market ourselves. The other vendors gave us Hershey’s kisses and M&Ms, and he bought us hot dogs and cheesy fries and soft pretzels from the concession stand.
Those fleeting moments, we felt like family.
On my way home from work one day, I spied two cords dangling over the lip of one of my neighbor’s garbage cans. I lifted the lid off the top and pulled two printer cables out of a broken wicker basket. He could sell these, I thought, tucking them inside my purse.
When he collected enough junk, we loaded his treasures into my granny cart, the one I used for groceries, and we wheeled them down to the neighborhood secondhand store. The store was piled wall to wall with junk, and only a narrow aisle down the center of the store was open to customers, so we had to walk single file through the store.
“We got some good junk,” my father said, approaching the counter, and he started pulling things out for display. The owner dug through the top layer and reached into his pocket as if to make an offer, but then he reconsidered and shook his head. “I just got the second notice on my rent,” he said. “I can’t afford to buy anything.”
My father complained the whole way home. The owner of the thrift store didn’t know what he was doing; he didn’t understand the value of the things my father had found. “I could make him a lot of money,” my father said, “if he just cleared the real junk out of there.”
“Maybe you could ask if he wants a partner,” I said.
He paused as we passed a municipal trash can and dug out two aluminum cans. “Maybe I’ll open my own thrift store.”
But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He started spending more and more time away from the apartment.
Some nights, when he was too drunk to come home, he slept under a bridge downtown.
One morning, he staggered home with a fresh black eye and someone else’s baggy tank top. “It was his favorite shirt,” he mumbled when I pressed him.
“What are you talking about?”
He told me a kid on Spice had punched him, then felt guilty and had given my father the shirt off his back.
My father created an OkCupid profile, and he met a hypochondriac who lived in Vermont. He told me he would be going to stay with her for a while, to look for love. A few weeks later, she bought a pair of cheap rings and told him they were going to get married. My grandmother bought them a car. But their relationship didn’t last. He put salt in the eggs and brewed the coffee too strong, and soon he was back with me again.
He nested in the spare room. He found a set of shelves on the street and filled them with shipping materials and for his eBay business. We brought one of my old roommate’s computer desks into the room so he could work on his Android apps.
One night after my father passed out, Marc cornered me in the kitchen. “What’s the plan?” he asked. He had become impatient with my father’s constant coming and going; impatient with the nights he came home drunk.
“What do you mean?” I asked, avoiding his eyes.
“We need a plan. How long is he staying this time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
He touched my arm. I felt myself recoil but tried to hold still.
“We could be happy,” he said.
I said nothing; I walked upstairs. I wasn’t convinced we could be happy. I wasn’t convinced I would ever find a way out from under my father; if I would ever find my way to air.
“I MISS FRAN,” my father confessed one day, a gentle buzz shining in his eyes. It was clear from the way he always talked that Fran had been the love of his life.
“I do, too,” I told him.
“You know she was a fucking cokehead,” he said, his voice twisting suddenly with an accusing, vindictive edge.
I nodded, but I hadn’t known. He seemed hurt—as if I had been willing to overlook her addictions but not his. But looking inward, I knew that if I had met Fran as an adult, I might not have loved her the way I had loved her then.
THAT FALL, WITHOUT telling Marc, I applied for an MFA program at the University of Arizona. The program was reputable, fully funded, and both close enough to and far enough away from my mother’s family. With my application I submitted some of the early pages I had written about my mother.
The program accepted me in the spring. I surprised Marc with the news and tried to make it sound like a fun adventure, though he could tell I was leaving with or without him. We made tentative plans to move to Tucson together, but then his boss offered him a position outside Philly. He said he could move to Tucson a year later, after he got more experience under his belt. When he told me he was moving to Pennsylvania, I realized I would have to move with him, because I could not afford to stay in Boston alone. I sobbed uncontrollably for days.
We moved temporarily into a senior-living community, like my grandmother’s, where he worked as a network administrator. I didn’t bother finding a job. Instead, I lay on the couch and eavesdropped on the neighbors—an elderly man who played the piano and a woman who yelled at her cat. I stopped showering. I read obsessively and spent all day building messy metropolises in Cities: Skylines.
A FEW WEEKS before I moved to Tucson, I borrowed Marc’s car to visit Eileen in Pittsburgh. I brought her one of the bonsai saplings—a little cocktail stick of a black pine—that Marc and I had started from seed in our crisper drawer.
The night I arrived, Eileen made chicken and dumplings in her slow cooker, and we ate while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race on her couch.
We painted an accent panel on one of the walls in her living room a shade of blue-gray.
We visited the National Aviary and wandered slowly through each habitat—the wetlands and its pink spoonbills, the grasslands and its sparrows. We passed a pair of roadrunners anxiously pacing the perimeters of their glassed-in enclosure and made disapproving sounds. We entered the rain forest exhibit during a feeding, and an employee gave us a few dried mealworms, which we held in the palms of our hands. I raised my hand over my head, and a golden-breasted starling—emerald headed, cobalt backed, with a long, scissoring tail—landed on my pinky, and another on my finger, to snap the worms off my palm. Eileen stood beside me, arm outstretched, but the birds visited every hand but hers. Laughing, she dumped the mealworms over the rail.
We walked along the Allegheny River one evening and watched a small flock of tubby cedar waxwings hunt insects over the river.
We ordered rum and cokes at Eileen’s favorite rooftop bar, and the alcohol dislodged something in our throats. Later, we lay side by side in her bed and whispered secrets at the ceiling in the dark. We felt closer than we had ever been.
Her boyfriend, a man in his middle age, took us to see Inside Out. They both ordered drinks at the bar. My sister and I were the loudest in the theater—laughing and crying by turns. After the movie, from my place in the back seat of his car, I watched their hands—interlaced, thumbs stroking the backs of each other’s hands.
Every morning, I drove her to the methadone clinic; she was trying to get clean again. I waited in the car.
One morning I watched her sleep, flat on her stomach—her shoulders warming in the sun. I stared at the tattoo, two twined feathers on her shoulder blade, that she had gotten as a teenager after a fight we had. A bead pinched the end of each feather, and our initials were inscribed on the beads.
The last morning of my visit, we sat beside her garden, a small tilled patch behind her apartment building. She knelt in the grass to idle-pull weeds. “I want to live,” she said, sounding optimistic about her recovery. “I want to know what my tomatoes taste like.” A chirping cardinal hopped from branch to branch above her head.
I RETURNED TO Philly to find two bags of garbage leaning against the counter in the kitchen. They hadn’t moved since before I left. I picked up a sock in the living room and found three brown casings, like thick grains of wild rice, on the floor. I scooped them into a glass jar to see what might grow. Days later, the apartment was full of them—beautiful bottle-green blowflies with little white feet. They buzzed inside the curtains and butted their heads against the windows, full of light.
We took the screens out of the windows and tried to flush them out of the apartment, but each morning, a new crop emerged. I spent hours crawling around the living room to hunt the young—hardened pupal casings sheathed between carpet fibers and protected by the shade of sofa, chair, and lamp—and the recently hatched, with soft wings and gray bodies, that clung to the baseboards and cabinet doors. I crushed them between my fingers before they gained flight.