My father was in his late forties when I was born, my mother a decade his junior. After so many years when she’d been convinced that she’d end up alone, the relief of his interest blinded her, and it wasn’t until she was married to him and pregnant with me that she realized she didn’t want him. But, like the jobs she lingered in until she turned too disgruntled to function, she stayed. She picked fights with him over trivial things. In turn he saw critique in her most bland observations, often answering with avoidance or overreaction. Recently, Mom told me it was like she ended up with two kids when she’d bargained for one, that she’d married Dad for a sturdiness she’d expected him to offer. But he’d looked to her for that same thing, and when neither of them had it, disappointment became their shared language, and they held fast to what didn’t work rather than hold on to nothing at all.
Dad was also, for a brief time, my best friend. In terms of the way each of us focused our attention tight on the other, but also in our shared, petulant need. Dad got hurt when I didn’t laugh at his jokes. I got hurt when he treated my sadness as comedy. But he transformed the hours after school with trips to the department stores to try on clothes we couldn’t afford; his favorite albums blared at home until neighbors complained. There were dinners of sugared popcorn. Snow days where we scavenged through drawers and coat pockets until we found enough money to go to the movies, Dad crying when things didn’t work out for the main character, also when they did. But when he lost a job or when he and Mom were stuck in a barbed rut, he’d stay in bed all day or drive around until he ran out of gas or eat in front of the television with an urgency that looked more like injury.
There were a few bright pockets between him and my mother. The dinners where he told a terrifically funny story and she coughed with laughter. At Mom’s sister’s wedding, the two of them danced close and shared a single piece of cake with a frank interest I found thrilling and embarrassing. Another time, after Dad dropped a chunk of weight, I noticed them looking at each other with famished attention. Mom stood behind him when she didn’t know I was in the room and pulled at the skin on the back of his neck. He pressed her against the kitchen cabinets so hard utensils rattled inside drawers. In those moments, I tried to disappear, what they seemed to want being just the other person, their mutual interest a hard, tight circle.
But that all ended an afternoon shortly before my thirteenth birthday when Dad ran a stop sign he insisted wasn’t there so that I ended up in the hospital with a broken arm and a shard of glass wedged into my forehead. Unscathed, he fled to his friend Daryl’s in Milwaukee. And with Dad gone, my mom found a new hobby: being aggrieved. Her distress grew each week Dad stayed away, turned into her swan song when she learned that Daryl had recently found religion, and while sleeping on his couch, Dad had, too. When he finally visited us several months later, Dad talked about sinners with the same alarmed suspicion people used then when they mentioned the Soviet Union or AIDS. Mom stayed in her room the whole time, while part of me waited for Dad to admit he was kidding, Candid Camera–style, though he never did. Instead he brought me holy cards, the Jesus on them handsome in a 1970s-pop-star way.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, Mom came home from work and told me I’d be staying with Dad for the summer, though I hadn’t seen him in close to a year. When I pressed her on it she said, “Sometimes you’re too much, Gordon.” I didn’t know if this was in reference to the question I’d just asked or me in general. Either way, I went to stay with him. He worked at a mattress store then, one he’d soon get fired from for talking to customers about the church too much. He used that phrase—the church—more often than he said hello.
Dad lived in a tiny, barely furnished one-bedroom. A single Bible verse was taped to the fridge next to a postcard from Montana that the former tenant had left. That postcard bothered me. Its picture was fine: blue sky, sharp mountains. But its message was to someone named Nancy, and when I asked Dad who that was, he said, “I don’t know.” His formerly shaggy hair had been tamed into a crew cut. He sat at his kitchen table in just an undershirt and boxers (his apartment had no air-conditioning).
“It was there on the fridge when I moved in,” Dad added. “We should change.”
I asked why, though I knew we were going to church. Next, I asked if church was air-conditioned, waiting for some inanity about the Lord keeping us cool, but Dad let out a smiling sigh and said, “I forgot about the way you ask questions.”
“I didn’t know I had my own particular way,” I said.
“I’ve missed you, Gordon.”
I told him I needed to take a shower, and I tried to jerk off thinking of Marc Nilsen from the winter before, a boy who’d picked me up then dropped me with an ease I’d been undone by, then my friend Cheryl’s dad (in most of my fantasies about him, I either asked him for help with a math problem or he asked me for help fixing his boiler, sex some sort of mutual aid), but horniness didn’t stick.
As we drove to church, the car’s air-conditioning blaring, Dad thanked me.
“For what?” I asked.
“For getting in a car with me after what happened. For coming this summer.”
“Not like Mom gave me a choice,” I said.
He laughed, though I sensed a woundedness that laugh was meant to cover, so I added, “But I was happy when she told me. I think she was hoping I’d see it as punishment.”
“She does have an interest in punishment,” Dad said.
Seeing his pleased relief, I added things that weren’t true: how after she told me and I didn’t protest, she got annoyed, how I’d half expected her to say she’d changed her mind. It was strange how little I’d thought of Dad in the two years he’d been gone. I’d never written or called, even on holidays. As we turned into the parking lot in front of his small cinder-block church, its lawn a competition between leggy azaleas and crabgrass, it hit me that I’d hurt him, that I’d woven myself so tightly in my own role as abandoned that I couldn’t consider what lay beyond its knitted pattern.
People in the parking lot smiled when they saw Dad. One woman asked, “Is that Gordon?”
“Indeed,” Dad said.
The woman’s name was Mrs. Mueller. She had a folksy drawl and a sturdy, no-nonsense frame and asked about the bus ride from Minneapolis.
“Your father’s been so excited to have you come, you know,” she said.
“Me too,” I answered, and, sensing Dad listening from a few paces ahead, added, “I’ve missed him,” less interested as to whether or not it was true.
It’s easy to just remember the uncomfortable couch I slept on, the endless hours of worship, especially with all that’s happened since, but in those months, what had been fun and light about my father returned. There was a weekend he borrowed bikes from a friend that we rode everywhere, my large father surprisingly adept as he leaned deep into turns. Nights when neither of us could sleep (the two fans he had nothing against the humidity’s gluey weight), and we sat at the kitchen table sweating in just our underwear as he taught me spades and gin rummy, some other game that involved slapping hands. When he came home each night, he asked about what I’d gotten up to with an open curiosity I found suspicious first, then kind, and I told him about a walk I’d taken or the groceries I’d gotten us, and he said that on his next day off he’d take me to the public pool, which he did, Dad doing cannonballs that rocked across the water until the lifeguards whistled and he put up his hands in apology, though when he came back to our towels his face was red from held-in laughter.
Dad asked about what brought me joy—he often posed that question. I talked about my few friends, mentioned Marc whose mom my mom had worked for, but only said that we had the kind of friendship where we didn’t have to talk to understand each other. I felt ashamed of the truth I’d left out, Marc on top of me, his dick so far into my mouth I felt my uvula trembling against it, the time sex hurt badly but I wanted him to keep going even when he said, “There’s blood,” and I answered, without knowing what I meant, “Blood makes it better.”
Dad seemed interested in everything I said and did. One night, eating ice cream sandwiches on his building’s porch, an occasional car drifting past, he asked if the sofa I slept on was enough for me, and I knew he was, with a roundabout cowardice I hated but understood as one of our shared traits, asking if I might want to stay beyond the summer.
Then Brian, one of the teenagers at church, caught my attention. He played the piano during services, was cute in an awkward, earnest way. Brian was kind to me. He invited me to his young persons’ Bible group where he talked with wide-eyed sincerity about passages and prayers. I began to sense something beyond Christian fellowship when Brian lent me a bike or a bathing suit, a polished presence whenever I sat next to him, so unlike Marc Nilsen who months before told me where to sit or lie down. Brian wanted my attention, seemed scared of it, too. That made me mean to him at times, dedicated at others. One day, he picked me up and I told him I wanted to drive though I didn’t even have a learner’s permit. His face flushed, though I waited it out and he relented, yelping when I barreled toward stop signs or veered too close to the median. When he dropped me off later, I leaned in to hug him. I felt his rabbity pulse, the damp heat from under his arms. I squeezed him hard until he pushed me away and said, “What we think we want isn’t always good for us.” I stood on the curb as he drove away.
At dinner that night, Dad offered his usual blessing. At its end, he added that he was glad I’d found a good friend because kind people deserve one another. But I toyed with Brian, and I knew that when I’d been the toy, the person playing had the power to make a day perfect or wretched with a gesture or a few careless words. As Dad finished his prayer, I vowed to stop messing with Brian, knew, too, that I’d probably break that vow. I ate the lasagna in front of me fast, even though it was so hot it burned as I swallowed.
Six weeks into my stay, Dad and I were invited to a barbecue at his manager’s house. I’d grown tired of Brian’s steady, puritan attention, his startled look when I caught him staring, so I agreed to go. The barbecue was at a suburban split-level. The manager punctuated most things he said with a fluttery laugh, his guests primarily families with young kids. A few of those kids asked me to play tag with them. I did for a while, but felt stupid so I lied and said I had to stop because of asthma. An hour or so into it, the host, whose name was Arthur, said, “You should have a look-see.” Dad stood. He told me to follow him. It was a hot, still day. A trio of kids splashed in an aboveground pool. We walked through a side door and into a small basement apartment with carpet the color and texture of oatmeal, and shoebox-size windows.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Arthur said, fluttering out a laugh, then walking outside.
The apartment had a combination living room–kitchen, two bedrooms down a narrow hall.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Thinking I’m ready to upgrade,” Dad said. “A room for each of us.”
I tried to picture Dad’s furniture in these rooms, where in the smaller bedroom my bed might lie, and felt a hollowness close to hunger, though I knew food wouldn’t staunch this feeling.
“Does Mom know?” I asked.
“Nothing for her to know as of now,” Dad answered.
“You’re asking me to stay?”
Above us, the muted whoosh of the sliding door sounded and feet drummed across the ceiling. I knew I’d tire of Dad and his church, but having him to tire of, his hurt and sanctimony when I strayed, even that took on a sunset’s tinge. He examined cabinets before turning to me with Brian’s same doting shyness, and said, “I’m saying this is here, if you want it.”
I told him I was hungry.
We went back to the barbecue. I ate fast, barely chewing. Chip shards and tight nuggets of half-chewed meat ached as I swallowed. I was about to get more food when one of the kids waved to me from the pool, telling me to come in. I took off my T-shirt and climbed into the water.
“Didn’t you just eat?” a second kid asked.
“He ate a lot,” a third added.
I looked at the kid’s freckled face, his expression of pissy, ginger confusion, and said, “You sound like you’re obsessed with me,” then slipped under the water.
Dad’s church was unlike the few I’d been to before. People there shouted and stood when they were taken hold of by the spirit and often cried in awed appreciation. They also spoke in tongues. Sounds spewed from mouths of women who were otherwise mousy. Men who never said more than three words in a row unfurled rivers of indecipherable language. It lifted people from chairs. Threw them onto the floor. When it went on too long, I worried they’d stay that way forever.
One day it was my father’s turn. He raised his hands in the air and barked out strange sounds. Tears sped down his cheeks. His stunned focus looked almost sexual, though it was brighter, less fraught. Though I’d felt something similar in Marc Nilsen’s basement the winter before when he pinned me down and stuck different parts of himself inside of me, there was something about how my father could access this feeling whenever he wanted that I wanted, too, an immediacy, a cleanness. He dropped to his knees. Parishioners swayed and touched his shoulders. Mrs. Mueller nodded in praise and Dad’s voice fell into a register so deep I felt more than heard it.
The next afternoon, I asked Brian if he could teach me. He told me that speaking in tongues was something to surrender to rather than learn, and I saw hope on his face that I was moving away from my terrible impulses. We’d just finished a meeting of the young persons’ Bible group he ran, wiping soda spills from a table.
“I might stay,” I said. “With my father, I mean.”
I told Brian about the apartment, the room I’d have, the tiny window that would show the passing shoes of the people upstairs. He looked terrified. I stepped toward him, our faces inches apart. Brian crossed his arms.
“You shouldn’t confuse God’s love with other things,” he said.
The lights above us buzzed. A poster behind him said, You’re in God’s Hands, a pair of large hands cupped and fuzzy in the background. I smelled the soda on Brian’s breath, saw his eyes glazed with worry.
“You need to fight it,” he said.
“Fighting doesn’t win,” I answered.
He looked disgusted and terrified before he gathered himself. “Thinking that way leads you down paths you don’t even see.”
But I liked that not seeing. It was one of the few real, good things I could think of, like the surprise years later when men noticed me, their attention a narrowed valve, a balance between movement and pressure.
“If you don’t want to be my friend,” I said, surprised at my bald-faced manipulation.
“I’ll always be your friend,” Brian said, and asked me to shut the lights off when I left.
On the walk home, a thunderstorm unleashed itself. Rain tripled the weight of my clothes, and turned my T-shirt translucent. At home, Dad saw me and laughed with delight. “My soaking boy,” he said, and pulled me in for a hug. When he let go, my wet shadow marked him.
“I think you should tell Arthur we want that apartment,” I said.
“I’ll talk to him in the morning,” Dad answered, and told me to shower while he went to get us a pizza.
I pictured Brian in that tiny shower with me, our feet entwined as if dancing, shoulders knocking shampoo bottles to the floor, and tried to believe that once he let himself do what he wanted, he wouldn’t feel wicked or afraid but surprised at having waited so long.
Arthur told Dad that there were repairs he needed to complete, that we could move in in October. Dad reported this when he got home from work.
“Poor Nancy,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I pointed to the postcard on the fridge. “She’ll be left behind.”
“Ha,” Dad said, then told me he wanted to stop by the church. When I didn’t get up, he stared at me.
“I’m going, too?” I asked.
He nodded, and we walked out to his car. I asked if the new place was near the church, too.
“When we go places,” Dad said, “you should pay attention.”
Boredom soon crept in. There were days where Dad talked too much about Leviticus and Corinthians, dinners with church friends who, if they weren’t talking about sinners, droned on about items on sale at the grocery store. Insomniac nights when Dad read scripture out loud or insisted that, at three in the morning, we scrub the toilet or organize the refrigerator or vacuum until the people downstairs complained. I missed Mom then. She often treated me as a nuisance. She also left me alone. When Dad was at work, I walked through parks covered in brown August grass, the heat so intense the only people there were teenagers smoking on a jungle gym. I waved, but they ignored me.
One day as I walked, Brian drove past, stopped, and offered me a ride. We went for milkshakes. I drank mine fast so that the bridge of my nose ached. I appreciated the pain’s distraction. When Brian asked what I’d been up to, I said, “Sinning.” He looked wounded and afraid and told me he was late for something.
“Lying’s a sin, too,” I said.
“I am late for something,” Brian told me, and dropped me off at Dad’s. Dad had just gotten back from work. He stood in front of the whirring box fan, the skin on his face pushed back by the breeze, and I wondered if staying with him was a mistake, though Mom’s was just a different version of a letdown, so I lay on the sofa and pretended to nap, listening to the fan and the traffic grinding outside, the vibrations from Dad’s footsteps.
A few weeks later, in the midst of the preacher’s sermon on how we were loved but unworthy, I grew restless and wanted to feel something else, so I opened my mouth and let out a noise. The sermon continued. I stood up, opened my mouth again, hoping for sounds like the others I heard, guttural and ancient-sounding and urgent. But what poured out of me was soft and nasal, packed with pauses and a repeated “Um.” I closed my eyes, hoping that would help, that whatever spirit hovered just above, like a rattled insect, would land. I moved into the aisle, on my knees, and wished I could stop though it didn’t feel like something to bow out of. I opened my mouth again. Different iterations of blah, blah, blah. The spirit might come, show Brian he was right, that if I let it in, I would no longer imagine his dick and ass, the way his breath might feel against my neck. But that was desperate pretending. I shifted into English. “I want the wicked thoughts to leave me,” I said, my shooing motion answered by a few tentative hallelujahs. I cringed at the word wicked, sure I’d never think things through enough before starting them. All eyes were on me. I tried again. Words in Spanish came, followed by the few phrases of Korean an exchange student had taught me, then the nonsense sounds of a Michael Jackson song. I croaked, stopped, tried again. “I want,” I said, unsure of what to say next. I started to laugh at my wild failure, the pipe dream that this might have worked if only I wanted it desperately enough. I opened my eyes. People looked at me with embarrassed fury. The preacher put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Thank you,” his face lobstered with an anger he tried and failed to hide.
At home that night, Dad hit me for the first and only time. He slapped me across the face, raising his hand to hit me again. But when I nodded for him to do it, he put that hand down.
“You never even told your boss we were taking the apartment, did you?” I asked. It was the first mean thing that came to me, but Dad’s startled recognition made me wonder if I’d stumbled on the truth, stumbling the primary way I’d moved through the world. I kept going. “And you were never going to tell Mom I was staying, because, despite God being your best friend and all, the thing about you is that you’ll always be afraid.”
I felt as if I’d won, though I hadn’t wanted to win, a part of me still hoping for the boring distraction of Brian’s prayer meetings and Sundays next to Dad teary eyed with the need to be forgiven. “You’ll always be afraid,” I repeated, words that bounced, returned to me.
I tried, half-heartedly, to mock-speak in tongues, but it felt too stupid. In going back to Mom’s, at least I wouldn’t have to pretend to put stock in goodness or joy or agree with Mrs. Mueller when she talked about how things happened for a reason, when they just happened and happened and happened and happened.
I started to cry, didn’t want Dad to see it so I sat down fast, resting my head on my knees. I stayed that way until his bedroom door clicked closed, then packed my bag, pulled the Montana postcard from the fridge, and hitchhiked to the bus station. I was picked up by a middle-aged man who looked so repulsed when I put a hand on his knee that I waited to get hit again, though he just made me get out of his car.
I made it to Mom’s, but she was at work. When she got back, she said, “Didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”
“Didn’t think I’d be back at all,” I answered.
“Ha,” she said, and lit a cigarette.
I asked for one. She told me they were bad for me.
“I know,” I said, and she handed me her pack.
As we smoked out the kitchen window, she asked how Dad’s had been. I talked about the prayers he recited and the terrible couch I slept on. Mom’s frowning relief grew, so I left out anything about the apartment I’d thought he and I might move into or Brian who wanted me but wanted to be saved more. Or how, when Dad had burped out strange, confident noises, I’d envied what he believed he was doing.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“You know how to feed yourself,” Mom answered.
“I do,” I said.
She went into her room. I found bread and cheese and figured it would do, that at least I’d feel full for a while.