Denial (28 page)

I am in a small town with one of those gas stations where you fill your own tank and pay afterward. I insert the nozzle into my car and wander up to a low-slung building where I will pay once my tank is full. There is one cashier and a long line.

The buzz of the fluorescent lights penetrates my skull. I push the sound away. I notice that the cashier wears a name tag that says “Ahmed Khan,” just like the name of a friend of mine. But unlike my friend, this Ahmed is Indian, not Pakistani. As I wait, I think about what it means to be a new immigrant. I feel a wave of love for my country. Then I wonder how Mr. Khan was treated after September 11.

I observe the customers waiting in line. My attention is drawn to a young father whose daughter is already drinking her Fanta while her father waits to pay for his gas and a Coke. Caffeine, I
think to myself. Good for you when you drive. I decide to make myself a cup of tea. I pour water from the urn, put a Constant Comment tea bag in the heavy paper cup. When I notice the hot tea burning my fingers, I put a sleeve on the cup.

The person in front of me in line is an overweight lady wearing sweatpants. I am too old to wear sweatpants, I tell myself. I resolve not to wear sweatpants in public anymore, but of course I know this resolution won't last.

“Coffee is a dollar forty-nine,” Mr. Khan tells the lady in front of me. She is already sipping her coffee; I can smell the pleasant scent of hazelnut-flavored coffee. After I graduated from college with a chemistry degree, I considered taking a job with a company that manufactured flavorings. You could smell the factory from far away. I had seen this woman earlier at the urn, considering her options, adding two packets of Equal to her coffee.

Fake sugar collects in your eyeballs, I think to myself. I have a vague recollection of a study at MIT, but I am not sure—does sugar collect there, too? My imagination doesn't stop at her eyeballs. I think about perfectly formed crystals of Equal lodging themselves in her arms and thighs. I see, in my mind's eye, tiny castles, glimmering like jewels, miniature replicas of the Bundt cake I plan to bake tonight for my son's birthday party tomorrow. She sighs and hands Mr. Khan a five-dollar bill, making it clear with that sigh that Ahmed Khan is charging her way too much. Foreigners. I imagine the castles, emerging through her clothing, becoming more spectacularly turreted with each sip. Mr. Khan hands her the change, which she counts theatrically, to make obvious her concern that Mr. Khan might rob her. What would it be like to walk around becastled like this? I wonder. Now it is my turn. I sign the credit card receipt and return to my car, prepared to make my way back to Boston.

I get in my car and drive off. I am puzzled by a loud crash, the sound of an M16 clattering to the ground. Well, of course it
wasn't an M16. Still, there was that sound. Calmly, I stop my car and get out to investigate. I see that I forgot to remove the hose from my gas tank, that the handle has come loose from the hose. I walk back to the low-slung building to confess my crime to Mr. Khan. There is still a long line, but I interrupt his transaction.

Mr. Khan instantly shifts gears. He phones a person whom I imagine to be his boss, while irate customers wait. I hear Mr. Khan speaking rushed Hindi to an older man. I can hear the older man's loud voice.

Mr. Khan becomes visibly alarmed by whatever it is that the older man has told him. His English becomes nearly unintelligible. “Your good name,” he stammers. “Here,” he says, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I write my full name. “Your domicile.” I write my address. “License. And birth date,” he demands, as if wishing to humiliate me, to punish me for my part in the terrifying response of his boss. I do as I'm told. “Mobile here,” he says, pointing to the only spot left on the small scrap of paper. I give him everything he requests, plus my credit card. I urge him to write down the number, telling him I will pay for any damage. I slink back to my car, suddenly aware that the interview was harder for me than I anticipated, harder than I realized even after it was over. Somehow, although it is a very simple route back to the highway, I get lost, distracted by the heavy feeling in my limbs, the familiar feeling of shame. Shock and shame. Such a familiar combination of feelings for me. What shocked me the most was how familiar Erik's complaints were. He is suffering from being like me.

I will talk to more soldiers after Erik. The stories break your heart. But they are for another book. I learned what I need to know from talking to Erik.

I
have given my father the transcript of our interview so that he can make corrections. He has many objections, he tells me by phone. There is a tension in his voice that makes me consider the possibility that I should stop writing, or at least never publish this book. I am so deeply saddened by the burden of having to be the bad daughter.

I wait until he has read the entire manuscript. Then I wait until he is ready to talk. Weeks go by. I am on tenterhooks. During this dry period, we are in contact mainly through my son, who visits his grandparents every week. When my father is ready to talk to me, we agree to meet at his house so that we can go over his concerns in detail.

Both my father and I have prepared ourselves for this conversation with notes. He has a list of his objections to my draft; and I have a list of my proposed improvements. I notice him clutch
ing a piece of paper. I think that he is sad. He is controlled when he feels most vulnerable. It unhinges me a bit to see him like this, but I urge him to begin.

“I am personally affronted by your characterization of my behavior after your rape,” he reads, holding his sheet of paper at an awkward angle. Perhaps he needs new glasses.

His eyes stay down as he continues to read. “I thought our conversation about your rape was private. I did not know you were going to put it in a book,” he says. “I am a private person. I don't want to publicize myself.”

The way he enunciates “your rape” cuts at my heart. In the moment he says it, I have the feeling that he wants to distance himself from an ugly, lewd thing that happened to me, resulting from a flaw in my character.

And yet, I am certain that my father does not mean to be unkind. On the contrary, I finally understand that my father comes across as cold and dismissive when something hurts. It is not because he feels too little, but because he feels too much. Nonetheless, I feel myself begin to float, as if my spirit were about to fly out the window while the rest of me sinks into some dark shameful place underneath the surface of the earth. I will myself to stay in the room with what is going on between us, to hear and feel whatever it is that my father wants to say to me.

I notice the sunlight falling on the stone wall in the back garden. A tufted titmouse lands with a soft
thwack
at my father's carefully tended feeder, which he has engineered to maximize the access of birds while minimizing the access of squirrels.

“You agreed to be interviewed,” I remind him. When these words come out of my mouth I recognize my defensiveness, but I cannot stop myself. “I told you I was interviewing you for my book, but you didn't believe me.”

He doesn't respond to my interruption, but continues with his script.

“You painted a one-sided portrait of me. You made me out to be some kind of Nazi.”

That word! I have hurt him. I knew this when I came here, but the shock of that word slaps me awake. I will have to bear my father's pain. How is it that he hears me this way, when I wanted to show him as a person harmed by the Nazis?

He looks up now to object, “There is no indication of how difficult you were, how many times you ran away.” He is speaking with the hypercorrect intonation you can hear in his voice when he is agitated. I am afraid of my father's rage, but even more afraid of his pain.

I did keep running away. I was “difficult,” as my father says. But why does he continue to blame me for this? Wasn't he partly responsible? My father's new home, which came with a new stepmother, did not feel like mine. I felt unwanted, and perhaps I was. So I ran away. There was that night in the graveyard. Other nights, too, always outside. I remember, now, a night I spent in a birch forest at the top of a hill, a forest that I loved during the day, at Punkatasset, a town forest. I used to ride my bike there after school and then find a sunny spot to read. But it was dark and cold that time I arrived at night, with shadows cast by the moon. I was shocked to find myself actually petrified. Petrified, I suppose, of my own shadow. But I awoke at dawn to the familiar wood, now brightly lit, that euphoric white light. And then I forgot the whole thing, until now.

He looks down at his list again. “There is no mention of your disruptive intransigence.”

Later, I will realize how much this dismissive phrase hurt me. Must I take the blame for all the upheaval of those difficult years? Did no one else in our family bear any responsibility?

I tell my father that my “disruptive intransigence” did not come up in our interview, and for that reason those words are not in the text I gave him to read. I explain that I have done my
best to stay true to what he said and what I said that day; that although this is not a work of social science, it is a habit I acquired from more scholarly work. I promise to make sure that readers learn about my disruptive intransigence.

I remember whipping myself up into a mutinous rage when I was thirteen years old, repeatedly telling my father and the whole world that I hated him. This act of insurrection was inspired by my father's seemingly arbitrary decision to remove my sister and me from Lisa's home, where we had stayed for two years, even after she and my father divorced. I blamed him—wrongly, it turns out—for wrenching me away from my second mother, less than ten years after I had lost the first. I could not accept and did not want to live with a third mother, so different from the second one, and so different, too, from what I remembered of the first. I sensed and was terrified that the feelings I had about taking on yet another mother were reciprocated. I was argumentative and angry, “disruptively intransigent,” though inside I felt abandoned. Something seemed unnatural about the situation I faced—too many mothers, too much shifting of beds and homes at what felt like my father's whim. When we arrived at our new home, I would not sleep in a bed, but instead, slept on the staircase. I do not remember how long my insurrection persisted; my memories of past pains are hazy now, and unlike the rape itself, there are no police records to consult.

My father did not respond to this unprecedentedly mutinous act. He remained impassive in the face of my shouting, and let me sleep on the staircase. At first I was relieved. But then I grew alarmed. My father had been in the navy. Was no one in command of this ship? No one prepared to squelch my mutiny? I realize, now, that my father must have been utterly confused as to how to proceed. It was Lisa who wanted me out of her house, but my father couldn't tell me that. She had set some conditions for my continuing to live with her, and my father found those conditions
unacceptable. He wanted to protect me from the truth. Although he didn't tell me, I understood one thing, at least: I was unwanted, and rightly so. I was a difficult child, for reasons that no one understood at the time, least of all me. My young second mother had given up my father, who was significantly older than she, for a younger man, some ten years older than I. She and her young husband wanted to build their own family, without the detritus of my father's past life. So there we were in this difficult time—each of us wounded, half blind with pain, wounded and wounding. My wounding took the form of a shouted insurrection. The grown-ups, at least in my father's home, used covert methods—smiles and denials. But I was the sort of child who felt her way through the world, and the damage was done. It was this capacity to feel too much that made me intransigent. It was not a good way to commence one's relationship with a new stepmother.

Once again, my eye is drawn to my father's bird feeder. Chickadees are so common that I rarely pay attention. But if you look closely, such beauty! The black cap and scarf, the white face, the elegant tail. My father spends a lot of time caring for these birds. He is building a birdhouse now with my son. They have drawn up architectural plans, and are planning to begin construction next week. What an extraordinary grandfather he has turned out to be.

He continues.

“There is no acknowledgment of how much Gwen [his wife] and I tried to help you during your troubled childhood. How much we have tried to help you in your troubled life.”

The words “your troubled life” are so cruel, and so bizarre, that I find a way not to react. I will feel about this later. No wonder I wanted to sleep in the woods, or among the dead. Perhaps he actually means “troublemaker,” or “troubling.”

I don't know if he fully realizes this, or the power of my love for him.

I do not believe that my father truly believes that my life could
be summarized as “troubled” any more than anyone else's in our family, including his own. This period of insurrection, after all, occurred nearly forty years ago, just before and immediately after the rape. But my father's recollection of this period of our lives, and my intransigence, seems to haunt him every bit as much as it haunts me. And now I wonder, Does my father believe that I am judging him for not coming home to us right away? Morality is beside the point, I want to say to him; you made a rational decision, uninformed by your emotions. I've done that, too—so many times. There is a reason that God gave us feelings, as annoying as they often are. Emotions guide us, every bit as much as thought, even though they would seem to muddy rationality. I had consulted a therapist to escape from feelings—but now, it seems, I've discovered their utility.

I hear the drum of a woodpecker. This sort of tapping-ticking sound is hard for me to bear in moments like this. I have learned to recognize that when a tapping sound enters my consciousness harshly, like this, I must be distraught.

“A downy woodpecker,” my father says, pointing to the wood on the far side of the house. “He lives over there.”

He continues with his critique, not just of my transcript of our interview but of my character.

“You lack social skills. You have no social graces.”

There is no point contesting this description, as I know it to be utterly on the mark. For a moment I see myself completely alone, abandoned by friends and family, pushing a shopping cart with my few remaining belongings. I hear the words “Honesty is the best policy.” Is it really the best policy? Or is it just that I am too awkward, too lacking in social graces, to be a nice person? My honesty, no doubt, is what has led to my “troubled life.”

I recover my equanimity. “Has it not occurred to you that we are similar?” I ask my father, laughing. “That I might have acquired this trait from you?”

I see his lips move, a bemused grin, but he is not quite ready to concede the point in full. He wants to differentiate his style from mine, or at least justify himself. He tells me that his “propensity to speak the truth” is common for scientists of his generation. “It's the culture I grew up in,” he says. “It seems ridiculous to dissemble.”

For my part, my propensity to speak to truth led me to say something so rude at dinner last night that shame roused me from sleep in the middle of the night. I was asked if I liked the wine. I did not. Why didn't I just say that I did, like a normal person?

Perhaps it has to do with having grown up during the Depression, my father hypothesizes. Or coming of age during World War II. He tells me that he recognized himself in a paragraph in Richard Feynman's autobiography, in which the physicist says something about the irrationality of lying because the truth always reveals itself in any case.

He is especially troubled, he tells me, that I quoted from an e-mail he sent me fifteen years ago, which I saved and which I intended to quote from, in which he explained what he was doing in Norway and why he did not want to curtail his trip.

“I was responding to your pointed questions,” he says, by which I think he might have meant leading questions. “And I did not give you permission to quote me. I see this as a betrayal of trust,” he reads, as if laying the groundwork for a lawsuit.

I feel a hollowness in my stomach at the thought that my father might be planning to cut off all relations with me. Will he, once again, “move on,” live for the future, leave the painful past behind, abandon me? But there is something incongruous about my father's delivery. He seems to be playing a role, or perhaps that is my wishful interpretation of his puzzlingly gentle demeanor.

He turns to our mountain-climbing trips. Now there is pas
sion in his voice. I understand now that it is the discussion of our climbing trips that troubles my father the most, more than anything else he discussed. He looks up from his paper.

“I did not go climbing because I wanted to endanger myself or others. I wanted to meet a challenge! It seemed incredible to me that a person could be comfortable when it is below zero. I wanted to experience that,” he says.

I've been in subzero temperatures and I find it quite cold. Somehow, despite my father's best efforts, I grew up to be “candy-assed,” at least in regard to cold. But of course I know what he means. If you walk fast enough on a steep trail, you will remain warm, even at below-freezing temperatures.

He looks down at his list.

“I learned how to be a leader—I'm a qualified leader of groups in the mountains.” I tell him that of course I know he is a certified guide.

He continues reading. “I like to meet challenges—including talking to you about this now.”

I smile. “I agree. You are very brave,” I say.

My father's list of complaints about my character suggests that he might be prepared to disown me emotionally, as he has before. I was, no doubt about it, a difficult child. My father admits that he gave up on me entirely when I was a teenager. He hasn't told me, but I know it to be the case, that he gave up on me more than once. Still, I don't believe that he means to abandon me this time, even if I fear that he may have been toying with the idea.

“How many trips did we take in the mountains? Can you imagine what it was like for me to take a car full of teenagers up to the mountains again and again? Why didn't you talk about the other trips? There were tens of them, perhaps a hundred. Why did you select the least pleasant ones to talk about?”