All the Houses (2 page)

My parents had long since divorced, and my father now lived by himself, which I'd fretted about in an abstract way before then, but after his surgery it was like I'd had an extra thing installed in my own heart, a black vein full of worry. “I'll just come now,” I told Dad over the phone. “I'll get a flight tomorrow.”

“You don't need to do that. The doctors said I'm doing well. They're transferring me to rehab in a couple days.”

“Have you talked to Mom?”

“She called. She was already planning to be in town next week, so she'll stop by, I think.”

“I'll come next week too. You're just going to be sitting in that rehab place.”

“No reason you should have to sit there too. Why don't you come at Thanksgiving? I'll buy you a ticket.”

“I'll buy it. You don't have to buy it.”

“Just e-mail me some dates.”

I couldn't tell how he was doing. I tried to ask him, for example, whether he was in pain, and he would answer by listing the medications he was taking. Vicodin, Lovenox, Plavix: oddly menacing names all built from the same kit. “I'll have to get one of those geriatric tackle boxes for all this junk,” he said. He would make jokes about how he was an old man now, but I suspected it was true, the surgery had marked the close of middle age for him, and now here was the next (the last) act. Although he said he was fine, his voice was thin and evasive.

I would tell him the same thing, that I was fine, but in fact I'd had a tough year. My boyfriend and I had broken up, I'd briefly dated another man who revealed himself to be an awful and disgusting person, and then I promptly dropped into a depression like it was a hole in the sidewalk. I began to dread leaving the apartment. I would stare out the window at the sunburned man on the corner, who would arrange fruit in upturned straw hats of the same kind he wore on his head, jumbo strawberries and pineapples so sweet you could practically smell them from my bedroom. He sold these marvels for not very much money at all, the prices marked in childish handwriting on pieces of cardboard. As summer wore on, I'd spent more and more of the day in bed, watching C-SPAN. I looked forward to the speeches of Senator Byrd the way other homebound women might look forward to
Guiding Light
or
Oprah
, and I sent long e-mails to my sisters complaining about Congress and the Bush administration and Karl Rove and so on. How boring it was to be depressed! And in this case, the boringness of my depression somehow got all muddled with the boringness of our nation's capital. I had bad ideas about how to jazz things up. I'd been trying, fitfully, to make the switch from production crew person to writer, and to that end I'd found myself a manager named Phil Franklin. He would call, and I would float notions for movies, say, a film in which malevolent robots from Dallas take over the White House. Or a television series called
Appropriations
, about short, ugly male lobbyists and their hot wives.

Phil was a decent but impatient man who had prominent ears that he was self-conscious about and that he would try to hide by wearing one of those snap-brimmed tweed caps—which only made him look goofier, since the L.A. weather for the most part wasn't tweed-cap weather. And anyway the ears stuck out from under the cap. This futile cap nevertheless seemed right for him, as Phil was theoretically capable of listening but was always half-covering his ears, generating too much interference to listen for very long. I couldn't make it through a sentence without hearing him start to type on the other end of the line. Granted, the quality of my pitches might have had something to do with it. We had agreed on a brand, the Helen Atherton brand, a quirky-funny-girl brand, not compatible with robot political thrillers. “People don't go to Sur La Table to get their oil changed,” Phil told me, and I couldn't decide whether he was being sexist or just unhelpful. “They go there for kitchen shit,” he said.

The real problem, though, was that my whole sensibility had not aged well. In my twenties, everything had been funny, everything had been absurd. Back then, “quirky” had positive connotations. But some time after my thirtieth birthday, I started to feel as though I were parodying myself when I tried to be amusing, and besides, I wasn't as quick as I'd been, or as up-to-date. My timing was off. My jokes became barbs. I felt like this somewhat desperate single woman who was trying too hard. Not a summer month went by that I didn't spend a thousand dollars going to somebody else's wedding. Occasionally I would call one of my sisters in tears, and I would talk about leaving Los Angeles, because it was the only way I could think to change my life. “Maybe I should just move,” I'd say.

There was a time when they would encourage me to hang in there, but lately they were more likely to offer suggestions of where to move, such as Missoula, Montana. That came from Maggie, who must've had some fantasy about Missoula. And Courtney hinted that D.C. was a different place now than it had been when we were growing up. I might like it if I gave it a chance.

Hell to the no, I thought when she said it. Ever since I was a teenager I'd made my own special thorn out of Washington and its faults. The segregation, the small-mindedness, the wonks. The “Where do you work?” The acronyms in response. The weight of institutions and of so much self-inflation. The blazers, the pearl necklaces, the bow ties, the stuffed shirts, the eager-beaver bullshitters. The rules and regulations. The righteous nonprofits. The low, drab buildings and the alphabet streets, the statuary, the Potomac, the traffic circles, the Metro, the Tourmobiles, Wisconsin Avenue, Mazza Gallerie! My lame hometown, that is to say the soft, white, northwestern portion of the city where I grew up. Throughout high school and college all the futures I imagined for myself unfurled themselves elsewhere, anywhere else, Rome, Missoula, Mongolia, the moon, if only because I thought nothing good would ever happen to me in Washington, D.C. Nothing bad either. Nothing at all.

And yet. From time to time I would feel a tug and know that I was leashed to the city, leashed in some way I didn't understand or like. Some might call that tug a homing instinct, but is there actually such a thing in humans? And if so, is it really that we want to go back to the place we came from, or is that wish just a proxy for the desire to go back in time, to return to childhood? All I can say is that as I grew older my contempt for the city loosened, it was like a lid that I could lift up, and underneath it was this lousy longing to go there. A part of me did want to return home, the home that was still, in spite of my having lived in other places for fifteen years, Washington, D.C. All I needed was a reason, and when my father had surgery I knew that I would go back and help him while he healed.

I didn't leave immediately. I figured that I might stay in D.C. through the holidays, and so I had to make arrangements for a long absence. Then there was the fact that by moving there, even temporarily, I'd be doing precisely what Courtney had been telling me I needed to do. I'm not proud of it, but because my older sister had instructed me to go, I delayed going. We had these ridiculous conversations. I would ask her, “When should I come?”

“It's really up to you,” she would say.

“Won't he need someone at the house with him? I could just come. I'm kind of between things anyway.”

“If you want to—”

“Well, I'm saying, if he needs somebody—”

“If you're asking me whether he'll manage without you, the answer is yes. If you're asking me whether you should come see Dad who just had heart surgery—”

“He told me to wait until Thanksgiving.”

“Of course he would say that.”

“I'm trying to figure out the best time and how long to come for. If now's the best time—”

“I can't tell you what to do.”

The rehab place where my father had been sent was called the Renaissance Center. Naturally I pictured the staff prancing about in doublets and breeches, gnawing on big turkey legs. I couldn't get Dad to tell me much about what it was actually like there. I would ask him questions you might ask a child. What did he eat for lunch? Had he made any friends? Never had he been more opaque to me. I couldn't muster much to say, but I hated to hang up the phone and think of him returned to his wheeled bed, the emphysemic who shared the room, the TV. I asked Maggie, Do you think he's depressed? I would be, she said.

On the day I finally left L.A., the sun was wearingly sharp, and the bougainvillea had metastasized, and suddenly I felt sure of my decision. I was going to Washington! It did occur to me that I was going not just to help my dad and maybe not even primarily to help my dad. Westward ho, that had been me in my twenties (pun intended), but now the winds were all blowing the other direction, to the east. In the nation's capital, I would practice restraint. I would wear small gold earrings and date men who wore blazers. I would read the front section of the newspaper in its entirety. I would live like an East Coast city-dweller, without a car. These were the sorts of ideas that accompanied me to the District of Columbia, ideas of an entire new life I would lead, for a month or two at least. And! (I told myself) I would work on a Washington screenplay I'd started a few years earlier, neglected but not forgotten. I would reinvigorate it with on-site research. With boots on the ground!

Suddenly my boots—ankle boots—were on the ground. I had boarded an airplane, a red-eye, and instead of sleeping dropped eighteen bucks on three flagonets of Jack Daniels, which, I told myself, would be the last of my drinking for some time. It was a more serious city, Washington, and I intended to approach it soberly. And there I was, a woman in an out-of-season and out-of-style denim miniskirt stepping off a plane at Dulles, tipsy, stricken, already asking myself
What have I done? What have I done?
—already sensing the walls on every side of me encroaching, and the curved roof above my head about to come crashing down.

And there they were to greet me. All the Washington fathers. The terminal was full of them. I mean the men of Northwest and the near suburbs, men of the jogging paths, of the offices and lacrosse game sidelines, in their parkas and loafers. Analysts, economists, attorneys, administrators, lobbyists, consultants, chiefs of staff. A tribe of which my own father was a senior member, by age if not by rank. He'd insisted on taking a cab out to meet my flight, he said it would be fine, he had nothing better to do, and after following a stream of groggy Angelenos to the baggage claim I found him waiting there to claim me, my lanky, hapless father, smiling so brightly it made me want to look away. Baggage, oh yes. His broad face had a way of letting on more than he knew he was letting on, and no airplane cocktail was shield enough: my heart jumped up, the teenager in me shoved it back down, and I shut my eyes for a second, beholding there the reddish blooms of a detonating headache. I reminded that teenager to love him as I opened my arms, and we squeezed each other quickly.

He looked better than I'd feared he might. I'd worried that he would be stooped and drained and sallow. The person before me had the same pinkish skin he'd always had, and he was standing up straight, though he did seem diminished, he'd lost some muscle, I thought, and he took small, careful steps, moving with a guardedness that I also saw reflected in his eyes. Still he tried to lift my suitcase off the carousel, which was such a typical thing for him to do that I almost let him.

“I got it, Dad,” I said, cutting in front of him. I started toward the doors, toward ground transportation. He stopped me with the “Helen!” he'd been barking at me my whole life, the pronunciation of my name that means “stop.” He pointed the other way. “I brought the car,” he said.

“I thought you weren't allowed to drive yet.”

“Do you know how much a cab costs, all the way out here and back?”

“You can afford it.”

“It's just driving. It's not like I went for a jog. They said four weeks, it's been three…” He flapped one of his arms out to the side, as if to dispense with the remaining days.

“You shouldn't have done it,” I said, with a sharpness that sprang out of me, unbidden. He was already taking slow, pawing steps in the direction of the parking lots. Once, I'd followed those same legs around the hardware store, only they'd been so much larger then, his stride gigantic. I insisted I would drive.

It was almost November, and Virginia was nonsensically beautiful, the trees draped in their fall finery, and I wanted badly to smoke, though I hadn't had a cigarette in years, or months at least, months that felt like years. Signs for Langley, McLean. New buildings dotted the road, dark gray boxes with mirrored windows. At LAX I'd seen at least a dozen uniformed military personnel, tramping around the terminal in their desert camouflage, buying
People
, eating frozen yogurt, and as we passed the mirrored buildings that, my dad had explained the last time I came home, were full of homeland security contractors, I thought of those soldiers whom I'd watched with curiosity and fleeting shame.

Whenever I came back to D.C. to visit, which I did once or twice a year, I found I didn't explicitly remember how to get to most places, I couldn't have given directions to anyone else, yet if you put me behind the wheel of a car I could generally find my way. Somewhere inside my brain was a subconscious map of the city (or certain parts of it), along with who knows how many other Washington imprints. Out of the corner of my eye I saw how tightly Dad was gripping the door handle, as though he were expecting me to crash any minute, and meanwhile I was on the verge of a different kind of crash. A distress signal trilled from within. My head was starting to hurt, which must've been the whiskey's fault, or mostly the whiskey's fault.

 

 

I remember a weekend afternoon when we sat at the kitchen table, Dad and I, with a big black cassette recorder between us, its heads spinning. My seventh-grade English teacher had given the class an assignment to interview an adult about his or her life and write a report, and I'd picked him. I asked questions like: What was your favorite subject in school? What were some trips you went on when you were a kid? Who were your friends? He put his elbows on the table and answered carefully but not directly, circling around the question until he landed on something that mattered to him, a story he thought was worth telling. That was the first time I heard him talk about Gerald Sayles, his favorite professor in college. He also told me about the time he and a roommate drove all the way to Guatemala, which was incredible to me, not merely that they drove there but that it was possible to drive to Guatemala at all. It was this trip, he said, that had been his introduction to Central America. I called my paper “The Biography of My Dad.” Three pages, handwritten, double-spaced. It had seemed to me far more grown-up and significant than any school assignment I'd ever completed before. And I remember how the Dad I interviewed seemed distinct from the Dad I knew, my first perception (muddy, prepubescent, wordless) of the difference between people as we come to know them and people as the subjects of the stories they tell about themselves, which are not about the lives we see them living but about their most cherished departures from regular life.