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The Facts as They Are
I am terrified to ice skate. The rink is cold and my small hands shake as I try to tie the long white laces of my borrowed ice skates. My long hair gets in my way, tumbling forward, and I push it back in frustration. I am attending Christy Smith’s 12th birthday party, and I have tried hiding in the bathroom twice; both times I have been dragged back by Christy herself. When the music pumps on, and the man in the glass booth above us shouts into the microphone, “Open skate!” everyone shrieks and dives onto the ice. I cling for life on the sides. I am afraid the ice inside the rink will open up and swallow me. I am terrified of this because my mother told me that this is how my grandfather died. She said that he was ice-skating on a frozen pond in the wintertime and that he fell through and drowned. I imagine him skating with a blue-and-white-striped scarf, his back leg extended gracefully as he slides delicately across the white, chipping ice near dusk, the blades making a thin, clear line to trace him. He reaches a soft spot, and before realizing it, the ice gives way and he plummets underneath, drowning instantly. I imagine his red face, the tiny hole his body makes that he tries peering through. I imagine the bulge of his eyes, the whites expanding with fear. I decide then that I will never ice skate. I have kept to this promise, except to attend Christy’s party, which I immediately regret. The fact is, I am a lousy ice skater anyway.
I am born into the world an only child. My father, a psychologist, counsels heroin addicts and tries to help them stay sober and clean. Addicts call the house at all hours; my mother repeatedly complains that she, and I, cannot sleep. She starts having nightmares that the callers climb into the bedroom window, pry open the back door, and kill us. My father reassures her that this will never happen, and it doesn’t. We move to a suburb and my father becomes a businessman, working for Sibron and then IBM. He works long hours and starts to take his coffee black. He makes enough money for us to buy a house, and we stay there, in Fairport, New York , for over twenty years. In 1980, this feels cozy, a nuclear family anyone could be proud of having or belonging to. When he travels to London, he calls each night and listens to my baby gurgles over the phone.
At age fifteen, on a winter afternoon not far from Christmas, I find myself vomiting into a large utility-sized trash can at The Old Toad, a British-style pub in Rochester, New York. My father stands behind me, as does my first boyfriend, Matt. My mom rubs my back. The waitress turns away each time I retch. This is my first visit to the pub. I am having an allergic reaction to peanut butter that was in my granola bar, but it will take a few months to find this out. To the waitress, and the owner, I am a fifteen-year-old girl who has potentially consumed alcohol illegally with her father, and, weighing under 100 pounds, cannot handle it. My parents lead me, unable to see the whole of the world, into the backseat of the car and take me home, where I rest on the couch. My mother drives Matt home, so my father and I watch basketball on TV.
Coming out of The Old Toad, shortly before my parents move, it starts to snow. My father has called me and my fiancée Dan to ask us for lunch at the pub, his favorite. We agree. At lunch, the dining area is quiet, and I occasionally hear the clang of a dropped fork, the soft lull of the wait staff as they pass time playing darts. My father keeps getting up and looking at the pictures on the walls–the maps of the London subway routes, the King’s Crossing signs in bright, standard red. The only thing my mom eats is the chocolate mousse my father orders for everyone, “because it’s close to Christmas.” It is also close to the foreclosure date of their home.
I am in college, and my father pays my tuition and housing expenses, like the trash pickup every Monday morning, and the repairs needed on my 1987 Saab. I live with five other girls, and a few of them are developing a strange habit of throwing the mail at me when they spot my name on an envelope in my father’s brash and hurried penmanship. To them, it means a check to cover my bills, and they are jealous and they are right. But normally, he also includes a comic strip about cats, or an article about criminals who are gullible, and I post them to the refrigerator. Nearly every housemate chuckles while they search for the containers of leftover macaroni and cheese, saying, “Your dad is so weird.” He is. He is a man prone to wit and sarcasm and he never calls me after 9:00 at night, ever. He loves to get my roommates on the phone and talk to them about the latest documentary he saw, and he loves to tell them jokes. They all notice, though, that it seems my father has a great deal more free time to meet me for lunch or to call me about the news on Channel 13 than their own parents. I notice this, too. When I arrive in graduate school at a small town in upstate New York , about an hour away from my parents’ home, my father calls me and asks me to come home. I oblige. When I get there, he hands me a cell phone and explains. “It’s mine, but I rarely use it, so I think you should finally have one, don’t you?” I nod. “Thanks.” “But, this is all we can do right now,” he says. My mom looks at me and smiles warmly. “I’m thinking of switching jobs, which might mean some different monetary concerns, because I’m thinking of starting my own business from home.” I am not surprised; my father has complained about commuting into the office for years and has been taking more and more days off. I noticed it after holidays, when he lethargically heaved himself into the garage to start the car as snow whipped by him. And the fact is, he hates cell phones, rarely uses one. I am grateful, and leave late that afternoon and put his phone in my glove box, nestled in old receipts and the driver’s manual.
I start writing my thesis in my tiny, tin-box apartment with grimy windows that leak frosty air. Dan and our friend Ben have been planning a camping vacation for months, and this morning we are scheduled to leave for South Carolina. All I need to do is drop my cat Itty off at my parents’ house. When I get there, my father is in his pajamas, pacing. It is ten o’clock. Most people are at work. He should be, too; I had anticipated walking into an empty house. When I walk in, he avoids eye contact and I notice that he’s drinking soda, not coffee. He is also watching a rerun of a Chris Rock stand-up routine, but no one is laughing. I walk Itty upstairs into my old bedroom, and shut the door. I hear her petite mews from underneath the trundle bed. As I turn, my father stands behind me in the small hallway. “I need to ask you something,” he says and ushers me into the master bedroom. “Your grandmother, my mother, well, she’s getting old.” I think of my grandmother; I have only met her once, when I was five. She lives in Minnesota and has never visited us. “Well,” he continues, “she hasn’t been paying taxes on her house, and she called me in a sort of frenzy yesterday afternoon when I was home. She doesn’t want to move; she’s 75. But she wants to keep the house, so I wired her almost all the money I had in our checking account.” My eyes bulge. “I haven’t told your mother yet, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor?” My conscience catches on this. Something feels odd. My mother doesn’t know, which is bad. I swallow. “What is it?” I ask him. “I need maybe just 250, 300 bucks for the weekend. Then I can transfer money from my savings on Monday, and tell Mom.” I think about this. Finally, I agree, stating the parameters, “I’ll do it, if you tell Mom.” The fact of any family is that we try to love one another, and I love my grandmother, even if I haven’t seen her in 18 years. So I go to the bank and my dad trails me and waits in the parking lot. I take out what is almost the remaining balance in my account; I have already taken money out for the trip. I hand it to him in an envelope and he looks shaky. He drives away, but something is wrong. On our drive down to our reserved campsite for $25 a day, something nags at all three of us in the car. We wonder aloud about how this could happen, how my dad could just run out of money. Every night, when we crawl into the tent, instead of telling ghost stories, we theorize about why my dad hasn’t yet told my mother any of this.
Days before Thanksgiving, I start receiving messages from my father’s bank, because a deep-throated loan officer thinks the cell phone I have is still my father’s. He leaves two messages, both about a “refinancing plan.” I call my father and leave two messages on the house phone for him, full with detail about the phone numbers to call and the text of each message. He does not call me back. When I drive up my parents’ driveway for Thanksgiving, my father runs outside in his T-shirt and sweater vest, even though it’s 36 degrees outside. “Hi Samantha! I got your messages.” He pauses and peers behind him at the large living room window. “I’m refinancing the house as a surprise for mom, so don’t say anything, okay?” “Okay,” I say as I pull out the wine I bought and hand it to him. “Ooh, this one’s great–Australian shiraz is wonderful,” he notes. “I know,” I say and wave to my mom in the window, “You told me that.” Inside, my mom hugs me and says, “Craig, what were you doing out there?” His arms are bubble-gum pink with cold. “I wanted to see if Samantha needed any help,” he replies, and slyly winks at me. I smile. The conscience is a funny thing. It is like a nagging grandmother, or the trash that is overflowing. I can see the problem; I just do not want to address it. Finally, not long after my father accosted me in the driveway, I go to talk to my mom in her office. Dan comes along for the ride, and I drop him off at a coffee shop across from the Main Street insurance office where my mom works. I park and walk in, pushing gently on the clean glass door. The receptionist greets me, saying, “Just go on back, Sam. She’s in there.” My mom looks surprised to see me. In fact, she looks weary. Her eyes are bloodshot, and she stands up behind her desk. “Samantha—what’re you doing here?” I sit down and put a jelly bean from her candy tray into my mouth. “Uh, well. Uh, this is hard for me, but I need to talk about dad.” I suck on the raspberry gelatin. She sits down. She puts her head into her hands. “I know,” she says, and my heart starts beating faster. “Well, see,” I say, trying to make things better, “someone from your bank keeps calling me, and Dad said it was because he was surprising you by refinancing the house?” Her eyes widen. “Oh, Samantha.” She sighs and puts her head back into her shaky hands. I stand up and close the door. The women in the office turn slightly to watch. I smile at them. “He wasn’t home when I got home last night,” she tells me. “He didn’t come home until about 7:30, which was weird, you know? So anyway, I hadn’t started dinner yet, and he came in and sat down on a stool in the kitchen. He told me he had been driving around, that he was going to buy a gun, but he didn’t.” She stops to get her breath. “He said that instead, he was planning on driving off the overpass on 490, over Monroe Ave , but he couldn’t do it. He said the only reason he didn’t do it was because of you.” My mouth hangs loose. “I guess he’s been like this for a long time…there’s so much, Samantha. So much. He hasn’t been working, either.” I think for a minute about what I know. “He borrowed $300 from me, last spring,” I said. “He said he gave all your money to– ” My mom interrupts me, “Oh god. He’s got everything all messed up. Our bank accounts are frozen, they won’t let me authorize anything–he’s created passwords so I can’t access anything. It’s his drinking. Every night when I come home, he’s drunk. Every night.” I look at my mom, and then at the jelly beans. They are perfectly oval, and shiny. “How long has it been this way? His drinking like this?” I ask. She slumps down in her chair. “Seven years.”
When I collect Dan from the coffee shop, the look on my face must communicate shock, because people part in line for me to reach him. He springs up, and we get into the car before he asks me, “You want me to drive?” I shake my head. “So, how’d it go?” The sun is setting in a mild, buttery way–spreading itself thick on the tops of cars, beading particles off the tips of the last autumn leaves. I pull onto a side street. I put the car back into first. I pull the emergency brake, and shut off the ignition. I weep. Christmas day. I find myself driving to my parents’ house. Earlier in the week, my mother told my father that she is leaving him and moving back to her family in New Hampshire. He insists that we have one last family Christmas, and Dan is kind enough to participate. The pile of gifts underneath the tree is more like a puddle of torn wrapping paper, some tape, and new underpants. When it is almost over, I survey the items: a pot holder from my dad to my mom, socks from my parents to Dan, lip gloss from my stocking, and a cat water bowl from my parents to Dan and me. My dad hands his final gift over to me. It is square and thin, like an album. For a moment, I get excited. I try to feign happiness as I tear the wrapping off. It is a calendar. “It’s got great pictures,” my dad says. “Yeah,” I reply. There are twelve photos of Europe; each month contains factual information about the particular place photographed. “For all the places you’ve been, or should go,” he says. “Thanks, Dad.” He stands up and walks out of the room.
My mother slowly ventures into the basement while my father is out. She creeps down the steep wooden stairs carefully, and tugs on the light switch to illuminate the bottles of orange soda residing in cardboard boxes. She tentatively takes one bottle in her hands. It is store-bought and should be unopened, but it feels soft; it does not feet as taut as a new bottle of carbonated liquid should feel. She twists the ridged white cap off. The carbonation does not fizzle or overflow. She sniffs: vodka. The bottle smells of vodka. My father, who promised new sobriety and virgin soda, has been making drinks under her nose.
According to Charles Sell, author of Helping Troubled Families: A Guide for Pastors, Counselors, and Supporters, at least 76 million Americans have been exposed to alcoholism in their families. I believe it. I believe it because my grandfather did not die ice skating. My grandfather died in New Hampshire at the age of 27 because his liver failed. My mother was six years old, awaiting the news in the Dartmouth Medical Hospital. When I tell my mother that I am going to start therapy to get help with dad, she finally tells me the truth. My grandfather was an alcoholic. She says he was very popular. He was a high-functioning alcoholic. He stored cases of beer in his trunk. This leaves me with sand filtering through my fingers, the half-truths of what his life was like. I am left with the unmistakable fact that I am four times as likely to develop alcoholism than an individual who does not have alcoholism in her family. These words encapsulate themselves into the grains of sand and taunt me; they are stubborn and coarse.
Alcoholics hide things. They hide receipts, alcohol, money, bottles, affairs, and emotions. The things my father hid are numerous, and come out slowly, like blowing out a fire and finding that underneath certain logs, the splinters are still fused, burning. Under one log, I found student loans he somehow took out in my name during the course of my undergraduate career. Under another log, I find the receipts to credit card purchases on a credit card account that I never opened. Under a tiny flame of burning plastic, my mother finds home equity loans, and refinancing information on their house. But under the big log burning with moss and rot, we find an abyss: $300,000 in debt, a foreclosure on their home, and repossession of their two cars. Beyond that, we find a man shaking on the ground floor of his house, drawing the blinds in the daylight to avoid loan sharks and creditors who pound on the door.
When my mother moves out, it is a sunny day. Her family drives up in four separate cars and a full-sized moving van and shoves every last thing into it, including my father’s filing cabinet full of his secrets. He begs us not to move it. I laugh at him and carry it down the stairs with my mother’s best friend on the opposite end. When everyone pulls away, down the long, straight two-lane road edged with snow and ice, my father turns to me. Water leaks from a hose where they have disconnected the refrigerator and ice-machine. He kicks a bucket underneath the leak. “Well,” he says to me. “What do we do now?” That night, my father tries drinking himself to death. He scratches at Win for Life lottery tickets, and bumps into the walls. He calls me every hour to report that he is still alive. He sleeps his last night there on the hardwood floor of the living room, wrapped in a sleeping bag. My mother has taken the rug.
My father moves into his mother’s house in Minnesota where he sleeps in his old bedroom and drinks whiskey from the bottle. He harasses my mother and calls me late into the night, slurring into the phone. Things that are false taste like steel in my mouth. My grandmother never needed money. In fact, as she writes in a letter to me, she added him to her checking account in 1999 because he was broke. My father stopped paying federal taxes in 2001. He stopped working when he was fired in 1998.
My father checks himself into rehab in Minneapolis. I speak to his psychiatrist while he is there, and my father mails me pictures of his room and the icy campus. In them, my father frames his bureau, full of old pictures he salvaged of me and my mother, our old dog. None of them contain him.
My father calls from another rehab facility. This time, it’s for bipolar disorder. He is manic depressive. He tells me it is a relief to finally know the truth. I sit at the kitchen island with my head in my hands. This is not a relief; it is a life-long illness that was explained away by alcoholism. Now, the hard work of sobriety is nothing against the hard work of a child with a manic-depressive father. He also tells me that he is addicted to Percocet. Then he hangs up.
My mother marries a bipolar alcoholic, and he is my father.
My father has decided to go into the coffee business since he has been loosed into the world from rehab, and because he has met two men in Minnesota who own a coffee chain called “Two Brothers.” He calls me up to tell me that he has to move to Peru to find “the newest target market” there for coffee growers and coffee drinkers. For almost a decade, my father has been making up these stories, these lies that live in his head. And every time I try picturing him in Peru, in a coffee bean field, the golden sun relentless on his small, narrow face, I start to laugh. He also tells me that he bought a new bicycle and he likes his new rental house. I agree to someday visit him there. When I do, I know enough to bring the coffee. He tells me that I will love his dog and the color scheme of the house décor. He does have good taste. He says that everything in the house is either black or white, with a few red throw rugs that he found on sale. He tells me this with such conviction and enthusiasm that I can’t help believing him, even though I know he lives in a world full of grey.
Samantha Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas. Her recent publications include work in Fourth River, Under the Sun and Paradigm, and she has work forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The First Line, and Bird's Eye reView. She lives with her husband Dan in lovely Lawrence, Kansas. © 2008 prickofthespindle.com |
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