Authors: Liz Murray
I slept so well on those nights with James, knowing that I was completely safe.
I had lost my family, but I was building another one. Between Eva, Bobby, Sam, Fief, Danny, Josh, James, and Jamie, I had a collection of people in my life bound together by love. These were the people I leaned on to get through.
Not that Lisa and Daddy weren’t my family, but after Ma passed, we’d drifted from one another. Lisa stayed with Brick, and Daddy was in the shelter system. I think a lot of hurt went unspoken between us. I felt that Lisa blamed me for leaving her alone with Ma at the worst possible time. And Daddy and I hadn’t been the same since I was taken into St. Anne’s. Something essential had broken between us, and it felt as though with time, he was just getting further and further away. I felt as if I had failed him by not going to school and by getting taken into a group home. However irrational, I felt that I’d left him. And then, when he’d lost the apartment on University and hadn’t even told me, it was so painful for me because I knew it was proof that we weren’t close anymore. I wasn’t his little tomboy who played with trucks and helped him sneak past Lisa late at night. I was lost to him.
Without a shared living situation to connect us, Daddy, Lisa, and I spun out of one another’s orbits and made independent lives of our own that barely even touched. By the time I finished my first year of high school, the truth was, we barely knew one another.
Painfully, we made the most awkward attempts to be together. We sat through holidays and forced birthday celebrations at a favorite dessert place of Daddy’s in the Village. I worked at NYPIRG a second summer, and with my savings, I paid for the cake. These celebrations would always play out the same way. Daddy and I would arrive early, Lisa shortly after. Daddy and I would chitchat, but provide no real details about what was going on in our lives. When Lisa arrived, we would be seated. Being seated was the worst part because there is no such thing as a table for three. There would always be one empty seat at our table, as if to announce clearly Ma’s absence. And because it was often one of our birthdays, a waitress would carry out a cake glowing with candles and the three of us, who no longer really knew one another, would sing in celebration of each other’s lives.
Lisa’s birthdays were the hardest, for the way I could see Daddy’s nervousness peak then. He was always so anxious with her, even more so than he was with me. The only other time I could recall seeing him that anxious was in my faded memories of our brief encounters with our older sister Meredith. He seemed fraught with guilt and eager for escape. I couldn’t take my eyes off Daddy then, clasping and unclasping his hands, fidgeting through birthday songs with his forced smile, and the absurdity of his reluctant singing. It knotted my stomach to watch. I hoped Lisa didn’t see it. And I was grateful she didn’t know that I had to call Daddy to orchestrate the whole event to begin with. How he would send me to the drugstore to pick out a card for Lisa, from him. “I’m bad at that stuff, Lizzy, and kinda low on cash right now. Pick out something nice, okay,” he’d ask. “Thanks, Lizzy, you’re the best.”
But it was no easy task to pick out a birthday card from Daddy to Lisa. What could I possibly pick? They were all designed for men who had lived up to their responsibilities as father, cards decorated with shimmering monikers of Dad, Daddy, sayings like, “This card is from your loving Father.”
“Through all the years watching you grow, it’s been my joy to raise you.”
But he hadn’t, not really.
“To my Daughter on her birthday, the light of my life.”
I didn’t want to insult Lisa, or to embarrass him. So I came up with my own solution. Neither of them knew it, but more than once I found the perfect card from Daddy to Lisa in the sympathy section of the card store: “
Been Thinking About You,”
or
“On This Day and Always, I Remain by Your Side,”
cards that expressed love but left room for the implication of tragedy and distance. These were the only greeting cards that captured Daddy’s role as a father. My role, as Daddy engaged me and as I accepted, was to minimize the awkwardness of these moments, to facilitate the experience of a holiday gone smoothly for all of us.
For the same reason, when Lisa would look away or go to the bathroom, I always slipped Daddy the money to pay for our “celebrations.” The waitress would come with the check and Daddy would reach up to grab the black leather fold, inserting cash. “I got it,” he’d say. “Happy birthday, Lisa.”
It’s not that we didn’t love one another—we did. I just think we didn’t know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren’t prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we could with what we had.
A few days after my eighteenth birthday, we met up at our regular place to celebrate. I arrived on East Eleventh Street first and Daddy showed up a few minutes later. Together, we waited for Lisa.
“How’s school?” he asked, picking our safest topic.
It was going well. He knew it was going well. That was probably about the only thing Daddy knew about my life. He fumbled for more small talk, and surprisingly came up with something he’d read in the paper: “You know, Lizzy, they are doing remarkable research on AIDS and AIDS medication these days. They think they’re close to finding a cure.”
Normally we avoided any topic that could lead to one of us mentioning Ma. The confusion must have read on my face, because when I looked at Daddy again, he turned his head away, pretending to look for Lisa. But he did not change the subject. “With the medication they have now, the quality of life for someone who’s got it. . . . It’s so much better than it used to be. You really can live for a long time.”
I was trying to figure out how to respectfully tell him to talk about something else when he let it out. “I’ve got it, sweetheart. I’m HIV positive. I was diagnosed in April.”
April? It was almost October. All that time, and he hadn’t told me? Even with the distance between us, how could he keep this to himself? It felt like someone had punched me in the chest—my heart started pounding and my face grew flush. I looked up at him, my only living parent, and was struck by the idea of losing him, too; the idea of even more loss. Standing on the sidewalk beside him, my world drained of color.
Out of the throng of people making their way up the sidewalk, Lisa emerged. Before she came close, Daddy leaned over and quickly whispered, “Please, Lizzy, do me a favor. Don’t tell Lisa.”
We sat down to cake on Eleventh Street and I listened to Daddy and Lisa strain through conversation. My head was spinning. I tried to look normal. Get Lisa’s birthday cards, make reservations, call and remind him of the holidays, “I’m HIV positive, Lizzy, don’t tell Lisa.” That night, he joked and laughed harder than I had seen in a while, harder than he really meant it, I suspect. When the cake arrived, glowing with eighteen candles, they both sang me happy birthday and Daddy gently squeezed my hand below the tabletop—one awkward touch with his own shaky hand. The physical contact was out of place coming from him, and I know it took a lot for Daddy. In his gesture, I could feel him reaching out to me across our distance, assuring me silently, “
I know, Lizzy, and I’m with you.
” I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was captured by this image: my father clapping his hands before the smoke of my extinguished birthday candles, so vulnerable and still full of life right in front of me, for now. I wanted to grab on to him, to protect him from AIDS. I wanted to make this stop happening to our family, to keep him safe and to make him healthy again.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference . . .
I did not make a wish over my candles. Instead, I chose to forgive my father, and made a quiet promise to work on healing our relationship. I wouldn’t make the same mistake that I’d made with Ma, I would be there for him through this. We would be in each other’s lives again. No, he hadn’t been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he’d disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.
The irony is, despite all the years I spent avoiding it, school became my refuge. For my remaining two semesters at Prep, I squeezed into my schedule as many classes as I could possibly take, and I fell in love with the process of using my education to rebuild my life. I began to relish the sense of achievement I took from completing long hours of course readings, and I savored the creative process of ever so carefully constructing essays on authors like Shakespeare and Salinger. Deciding exactly how to fit which words into which sentences felt like a puzzle to solve, a challenge made compelling by Perry’s enthusiastic class discussions on character motivation, syntax, and even his bold assertion one afternoon that “grammar saves lives!” “Punctuation changes everything,” he proclaimed in white chalk across our blackboard. “Let’s eat, Grandpa!—versus—Let’s eat Grandpa! To Grandpa, these are
very
different sentences,” he teased, making the class erupt into chuckles and groans. I smiled widely at Perry then, filled with joy by his exuberance.
But I know I didn’t love school for school’s sake. I had never really been what people call an “academic” person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments—readings, essays, or in-class presentations—was inseparable from my relationships, both with my teachers and with my new friends at Prep. If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.
Like those study nights at Eva’s place, when she, James, and I would work sprawled out across her living room, our books and papers littering the tabletops, couches, and floor. We’d study side by side, passing the hours together. I’d curl up on the couch, my head resting on James’s lap while he ran his fingers through my hair. Sometimes we’d make faces at each other, or laugh at one another’s stupid jokes while I read for class, and James flipped through his book on Japanese Kanji. Diligently, he’d practice writing neat rows of characters on dozens of fresh notebook pages. Eva cooked for us, typically making pasta with chicken, peas, and carrots in creamy sauce. And on days when we could afford it, she’d cook with extras like portabella mushrooms or scoops of avocado on the side. For my part, I always liked to show up at Eva’s apartment bringing food to share, making sure that I had something to contribute. Despite my full schedule, it wasn’t difficult to make time to stop and get a few things; the grocery store was close enough—on Twenty-sixth Street, just off of Eighth Avenue, two blocks from Eva’s place.
On one particular evening after night school, when I was on my way to Eva’s place from Union Square, I devised a small plan. As I had on many other occasions, I would stop in the supermarket, slip groceries into my book bag to steal them, and then exit discreetly through the sliding doors. This way, Eva, James, and I could pig out while we watched a movie on Eva’s couch later that night. The three of us would be well fed and cozy in our pajamas, and it would be perfect. Eva had already gone shopping and because I had no intention of showing up empty-handed, from a pay phone on Fourteenth Street I’d promised Eva a pack of chicken cutlets and a jar of Parmesan cheese (both items I knew I could slip into my bag in mere seconds). It’s not that I didn’t have money to purchase the food. In fact, I carried with me everywhere I went my savings from my second summer working at NYPIRG. But money equaled survival, and I did everything I could to conserve it. So that night, just as I had done many nights, I entered the supermarket with absolutely no intention of paying.
At first, the plan was going smoothly. I had both items in hand and was searching for a place to hide them in my bag when, to my surprise, I stopped myself. It was the sight of the manager that triggered me. He was a short, thick, Latin guy wearing a tie, with a pen tucked behind his ear. I saw him reading papers off a clipboard in the distance, checking a shipment, managing several employees. He was sweating. I looked over at the cashiers ringing up groceries, and then over at an older woman filling her cart with bags to bring home. I stood and watched each of them and realized, I didn’t want to take anything from this store; something about it felt wrong. Here was this manager working hard to make this business work, and for the first time, I could actually see that. Standing there, I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it before. Holding that jar of powdered cheese and those chicken cutlets in my hand, ready to steal, I suddenly felt off, creepy.
Earlier into my current semester at Prep, there had been an incident of someone taking a student’s wallet. A town meeting was called, and Perry led the discussion. “It’s not the wallet that is our biggest loss,” Perry said. “A trust has been broken in our community. This creates a question of whether or not we are safe with one another. It’s going to take a while before we can build back that trust. It’s a hurt to our community.”
The cause and effect of one person’s actions onto a larger group of people, at that moment in Prep, was clear. But as far as out in the world was concerned, the idea had remained abstract to me. Until, that is, I found myself standing in that supermarket, considering yet another theft in a long line of thefts, and my eyes found that store manager. Before Prep, I had never been a part of what everyone kept calling a “community,” and the idea that what I did impacted anyone other than myself, than my small circle, had not been real to me. I felt like an island.