“Oh, Dad, I forgot all about you. You got the wrong date, too. You must be lonely without Mom, huh?”
The waitress stood up, caught my father’s eye and smiled. She walked away, and he turned his gaze back to me. “I think about her every day, all day. And will for the rest of my natural life. But don’t worry about me. I have a four o’clock.”
“What do you mean, a four o’clock? Four o’clock Mass?”
“No, darlin’. A wee glass of wine at four o’clock with another lovely lady. Who couldn’t possibly hold a candle to you, my sweet.”
I supposed that having a date with a close blood relative was far less traumatic if it was only one of the day’s two dates. I debated whether to file that tidbit away for future reference, or to plunge into deep and immediate denial that the incident had ever happened. I lifted my coffee mug to my lips. My father smiled encouragingly.
Perhaps the lack of control was in my wrist. Maybe I merely forgot to swallow. But as my father reached across the table with a pile of paper napkins to mop the burning coffee from my chin, I thought it even more likely that I had simply never learned to be a grown-up.
I stayed in bed until Monday morning, venturing out only for quick trips to the bathroom or refrigerator. At some point on Sunday night or so, returning to the safety zone of my bed with the last remaining yogurt, I noticed a stale odor as I crossed the threshold of my bedroom. Not quite a sickroom smell, more the smell of days piling up. And a woman aging as her life slips by.
The phone rang, which on Sunday night usually means one of my brothers or sisters. I looked at it. It kept ringing. Halfway through the fourth electronic jingle, my machine picked up.
Hello, you have reached Sarah Hurlihy. Leave a message if you want to.
“Sarah, pick up. It’s me. Christine. Come on, Sarah. I already talked to Dad.”
I grabbed the phone and burrowed under the covers with it. “Oh, God. What’d he tell you?”
“Just that you’re dating again. That’s great, Sarah. It’s about time.”
“Come on. What else did he say?”
There was no sound from Christine, who is seventeen months younger than I am and happily married with two perfect children. Nothing. I waited her out. Hysterical laughter, deep and infectious and really pissing me off, finally arrived.
“Who else knows, Christine?”
“No one.”
“Oh, come on, Christine. Carol has to know.”
“Why does Carol have to know? Couldn’t I, just for once, know something before she does?”
“Not in a million years.” It drove Christine absolutely crazy that all family information filtered through Carol first. As far as I could tell, Carol’s position in the family was the only thing Christine had ever wanted that she couldn’t get.
“Gee, thanks, Sarah.”
“Come on, Christine. Who knows?”
“Okay. Everyone. Except Johnny because he’s still in Toronto on business. Come on, tell me the whole story. You know Dad never gets the details right.”
So I gave up and confessed it all to Christine, knowing it would be passed along to my other siblings and immortalized as family history. It would be told, at Thanksgiving dinner or on the beach, tweaked this way and that, nudged and kneaded, and retold into infinity. Christine interrupted when I got to the part about Mom. “That old goat,” she said, “his blarney level is so high that he actually believes Mom is pimping for him from heaven. No guilt, ever, now or even when she was alive. The one thing you can count on with Dad is that he’ll see things the way he wants to see them.”
Christine paused. I could hear her sipping something, and I imagined her with her feet arranged artfully on an ottoman, relaxed now that her kids were in bed. “So, anyway, Sarah. Tell me the truth. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate Dad as a date?”
I climbed out from under the covers just long enough to hang up the phone on her laughter.
*
If I didn’t have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted. Instead, I got up, showered and pulled a shin- length denim jumper over a long-sleeved avocado turtleneck. I stared at myself in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door. I hated to admit it, but the muted greens and yellows I’d been wearing were all wrong for me. From earliest childhood, and decades before having your colors done was fashionable, my mother had dressed me as a “winter.” Reds, whites and blues, mostly, to complement my pale skin, dark hair and brown eyes. I thought I looked like an American flag, and resented that Christine, with her hazel eyes and light brown hair, got all the moss greens and bark browns and sunflower golds, like a flag from a more exotic country.
I realized that my mother was right. Sadly, I was only eight months away from being forty-one years old, and I still couldn’t dress myself. That’s why Christine had kids and a husband and I didn’t. I peeled the jumper off, switched to a crisp white cotton blouse and yanked the jumper back on. My skin was no longer yellow. Amazing. Not that it mattered. In fact, not only was there no one to notice, but now I was late for work.
Twelve minutes later, I screeched into the parking lot of Bayberry Preschool. I had seconds to spare, but I could just hear my boss if I passed her in the hallway on the way to my classroom: “It’s helpful, Sarah,” Kate Stone would say, “when the teachers arrive
before
the students.”
June, my twenty-two-year-old assistant, was meditating in the middle of the rug. And I’d been the one to choose her out of a large field of applicants. But, I mean, who thinks to ask,
Do you spend inordinate amounts of time meditating when you should be scrubbing Play-Doh off tabletops?
I flipped on the lights and June stretched gracefully, sending a wave of blond hair shimmering down her back. That was the other thing about June, she was far too pretty. I must have been feeling temporarily secure to have let that slip by. “Good morning, June,” I said briskly.
“Morning, Sarah. Wow, I heard you had like quite the incestuous date this weekend.”
“Who told
you
?”
“Uh, let’s see. Um, your father had dinner with my mother’s best friend’s neighbor Saturday night.” I tried to calculate how many people had been involved in this particular branch of the grapevine for the information to circle around and travel back to me.
Parents began escorting their children into the classroom, saving me from thoughts of relocation or even suicide. Jack Kaplan had a new haircut to praise. Amanda McAlpine wouldn’t release a choke hold on her father’s neck and needed to be peeled away from him. After the weekend break in routine, Mondays are tough on preschoolers. Our system was for June to welcome the children while I grabbed the parents, particularly the drop-and-run types.
Anything we should know?
I would ask.
I’d learned this lesson a couple of years ago when Millie Meehan unceremoniously dumped off little Max, who seemed subdued that day. He perked up a bit at recess, laughing and running around, until he suddenly stopped and said simply, “Ouch.” He clutched his groin area, and stood still, wide-eyed. I picked him up and went inside to call Millie, who’d forgotten to tell us he’d had hernia surgery
the day before
. “I could have sworn I mentioned it,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t forget?”
Jenny Browning didn’t look quite right somehow. Her mother, Bev Henley, was wearing an expensive suit and trying to keep Jenny from wrinkling it as she hugged her good-bye. “Pick me up and hug me good,” Jenny said with authority. Bev picked her up, held her several safe inches away and kissed her on the forehead. Deftly, Bev spun her around and pushed her toward me. Jenny vomited. The sharp, sudden smell was tinged with peanut butter, and I felt the damp warmth invade the front of my blouse and trickle between my breasts. Bev looked as if she’d run if she could, but wordlessly took her daughter back, placing her on the ground beside her and walking her to the sink.
June cleaned Jenny up and sent mother and daughter home. I opened the door to the adjoining classroom and, holding my nose while gesturing to my chest, let them know that I was running home for a quick change. Trying not to gag, I told June I’d be back in forty-five minutes tops. She looked at me sympathetically and said, “Take your time. Oh, before I forget, I’m supposed to tell you to tell your dad that my mother’s friend’s neighbor had a very nice time with him.”
*
At the afterschool staff meeting, I found a seat a safe distance away from the other teachers. I knew I should have changed my whole outfit. I’d rifled briefly through the pile of clothes on my bedroom floor, looking for a skirt that could pass for unwrinkled. I gave up, pulled on the avocado turtleneck, which didn’t look any better than it had earlier in the morning. I threw the sullied white blouse into the bathroom sink, rubbed it with a damp bar of Dove, added some water and left it to soak. The denim jumper appeared unscathed so I decided to put it back on.
I’d been regretting that decision ever since. I kept trying to tell myself, as I opened the windows in my classroom, that the sour smell of vomit had simply lodged itself in my nostrils, or maybe in my memory banks.
Lorna, one of the inclusion class teachers, sat down beside me. “Pee yew, is that you?”
“Apparently so.”
“Well, nice talking to you.” Lorna stood up, held her nose, backed away a few steps. “Oh, by the way, you wanna do something tonight?”
“No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“No money, no energy, no ambition.”
“Perfect. I’ll pick you up at six-thirty.”
Kate Stone cleared her throat pointedly. She was the founding owner of Bayberry Preschool, and she stood now at the front of the all-purpose room, all business. Dangly earrings poked through her thin brown hair, which was streaked with coarser strands of undisguised gray. Kate had started the school when her now-grown children were themselves preschoolers. Rumor had it that one of her daughters was a teacher but had moved across the country to escape the family business.
First, Kate clipped an enormous pad of white paper to a tubular steel display stand. She pulled a red marker from the pocket of her batik print tunic and uncapped it with her teeth. Still using only her teeth, she placed the cap on the marker’s nonwriting end. “Single-word answers,” she said. “What unique qualities do you bring to our team?”
This was my fourth time in as many years going through this particular exercise, so I got a couple of words ready in case I needed them —
dedication, enthusiasm
— and drifted off until about halfway through the next question. “Give me more,” Kate Stone was saying, working with a blue marker now. “The question is, How do we teach? Sarah, we haven’t heard from you yet. How
do
we teach?”
“Modeling. We teach through modeling.”
I watched a nodding Kate Stone write my word in big blue letters and then floated away again. I stayed that way, suspended somewhere between asleep and awake, until I heard my name. “And, finally, see Sarah if you have something you’d like to teach for the Afterschool Outreach Program. Forty-dollar stipend per one-hour class, kindergarten through grade three, eight-week session, brochure information due by next Friday.”
Starting an afterschool program at Bayberry was a smart move. There was a huge demand for afterschool
activities in Marshbury, and families liked the idea that even though their children had graduated from Bayberry Preschool, they could still come back to play soccer or learn jewelry-making.
I’d asked to run the program not because I had any particular interest in it but because I needed the money. With Kevin’s half of the house had come the entire mortgage. For two years I’d watched, detached, as my half of our savings dwindled. I knew I should think about finding a roommate, maybe one of the teachers from school, preferably someone who would never be home. Coordinating the afterschool program would save me, at least temporarily, from having to let an outsider into my house.
At some point during the extended blur surrounding the deaths of my mother and my marriage, it was decided that I would keep the house. Neither Kevin nor my father thought to discuss this with me. My father showed up one day a couple of months after Kevin left, which was a couple of months after my mother died, and handed me a bank check. I wondered if the money came from my mother’s life insurance. I didn’t ask.
“What’s that?” I was looking at the check from a safe distance.
“It’s good riddance to bad rubbish,” my father said. Still holding the check, he put one hand on each of my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead. “God love ya, honey. God love ya and keep ya.”
“Dad. I don’t want your money.”
“One day soon it will all be yours anyway. Don’t make me die first to take care of my little girl. Take it, Sarry, with my blessing.” My father smiled bravely, as if one foot had already gone over to the other side. I was always awed by his ability to add or subtract decades to his life as it suited him. At this moment he looked and sounded more like my grandfather than my father.
“No, really,” I said. I mean, I didn’t even like the house that much. Kevin and I had bought the three- bedroom, fifties-style ranch as a starter home, planning to fix it up and move on to something better. Maybe in Kevin’s eyes that was exactly what had happened. He moved on to something better.
I tried again. “Dad, keep your money. Maybe I’ll sell the house. Maybe I’ll even move home for a while.” After all, my father and I were both alone now. And there was such a nice long history of single Irish- American women taking care of their aging widowed fathers, selflessly putting their own lives on hold, crocheting doilies, inviting priests to dinner.
I glanced up to see my father gaping at me in horror. “That, my darlin’ daughter, is not an option.”
*
It was a relief finally to get out of my denim jumper. I stuffed it into the sink with my blouse, swished them both around, decided to leave them there until some day when I had more energy. It wasn’t until I jumped into the shower that I remembered I’d forgotten to buy shampoo. Again. I twisted the plastic top off the Suave bottle and tried to aim it so that a needle-sized stream of water could find its way inside. Then I covered the top with two fingers and shook hard. The resulting shampoo was watered down and unsatisfying, a perfect accompaniment to the rest of my life.