The Lost Father (45 page)

“So what did you do with them then?”

“I threw them out.”

“Where? You didn’t take them off right there, I hope, where everyone could see.”

“I went into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet.”

“Well, next time you leave them on and come home. I could have easily mended such a rip like that. But you shouldn’t be climbing fences, Mayan, you never know when a splinter just gets into your skin or those metal pieces stick up and they get rusty, you don’t know all what’s there, you could get infection. Tetanus. And Mayan, you know you should never flush a thing like that. Think of the poor plumber.” Paddy Winkler had been a plumber and the life of their conversation was a mutual commiserating dismay and inexhaustible amazement at the objects people put into toilet pipes. He found them all and took them out—in their various states of decay. Because of Paddy Winkler, the house was full of Kleenex boxes. He contended that, due to harsh chemicals used in the production process, toilet paper should never touch the face.

“And he should know” was always her last word about that. Two of Paddy’s grandchildren worked at the paper mill.

Later, she came back to talk to me. “Mayan, has your ma told you at all about menstruation?”

She hadn’t but I already knew from books in the library. “Yes, Gramma.”

“And you know all about that.”

“Yes, Gramma.”

“Well, good then.”

There were certain things my grandmother wouldn’t talk about. What she really meant was, you could just lose your virginity on such a fence and then what would your mother say? I could feel her resolving to watch out even more.

That night was the first time I noticed doing something I still do. I talked while I was warming into my bed, pulling the blankets around me, readying for sleep. I said, “Safety.”

D
RIVING ON THE EMPTY ROAD
, I felt like calling Stevie and asking what went wrong. So I stopped at a gas station lot and dialed his number in Berkeley, but the phone just rang.

A little red sign in the shape of an arrow said Spring Green and I turned left. It was the middle of the afternoon. I hadn’t planned this. But I’d always wanted to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s school. I thought his grave was there too. No one I knew had ever been to it, living in
Wisconsin all those years. Pat Briggs had seen all the Chicago work and he’d heard Wright speak, but none of us had been here. This made the day feel more like a small vacation. I could take an hour for something that had nothing to do with my father. It was a curving farm road, low round hills on both sides. Farms, when they became visible, were set far away, napkined by neat, vast fields.

The farms looked rich and lush and large-siloed. I passed through a remote town, with its own main street, a restaurant and a clothing store that seemed to carry goods from a generation ago. Small hand-painted signs announced the Taliesen School. Because of the weather, a mixture of sleet and rain, fog billowed up from the ground and hung in creases of the hills and the building seemed to float like a kind of castle.

I took a tour, paying ten dollars to a woman with sensible shoes. With four others, I walked through the buildings. The main hexagonal room, with a grand fireplace, unused today when a fire would have warmed us, showed the erosion of years one would expect from wood and clay and stone. Water seeped in splits of the wood, the windows didn’t hold tight. “Money,” our guide whispered, and she shook her head every time we passed something cracked. “Dirty men,” I remembered Merl saying.

Outside, I stood under an eave waiting for the rain to break so I could run across the gravel to my car. There was a bucket of workmanlike umbrellas, mud-spattered yellow canvas. I stole one. It could have looked like I was borrowing it to walk across to my car, then to drive it back; a person could’ve even believed I meant to use it then forgot, but it was not anything like that. When I took it I knew. I wanted to.

I stood in the rain under the umbrella at his grave, where his stone lurched, monumental and plain in this landscape. It was a large stone, ragged at the edges, a stone that could have been a plank upended, a bridge over a creek. Mamie’s was only a marker in the ground, overgrown with moss and grass.

A man and a woman.

Later I found out, he wasn’t even buried there. His body had been dug up and moved to Arizona by the later wife.

Driving back on that small road, I stopped on a bridge that had a little silver machine full of corn to feed ducks in the creek underneath. The ducks’ feathers were ruffled from rain. A dime bought a handful and I threw the kernels, puckering the water’s surface. The
ducks darted and rushed, pecking their beaks underwater. I used the pay phone across the bridge. I felt like calling my old boyfriends and asking, Why didn’t you fall in love with me? I called Paul first and got his machine. I asked him to write me a letter and explain. What a message to leave on a machine.

I kept on doing that on the road. I stopped at phone booths and little motels and called old boyfriends and asked, Why? Why did you stop? What’s wrong with me?

That was my litany all across America. “This sounds crazy but I want to know.”

I began to sense Madison. Dry cattails, some half frozen in the water, stood, stiffly guarding lakes. I wanted to stop and eat while it still seemed far enough away to be easy. I pulled up to a trucks top place and before I went in, I took the box out and locked it in the trunk. I picked a soft booth by the window and ordered eggs. Outside the window I could see the quiet snow.

“Have you called the medical school and told them you’ll be late?” Timothy said, on the phone.

“No, not yet.”

“You should do that.”

“I’ll just lie and say my mom’s sick.” I’d been using that excuse for years and it was always true.

“You don’t have to give away that much. Tell them there’s a personal matter keeping you in the Midwest.”

T
HERE WERE
certain things I knew my father wasn’t. My father was not a pilot, for instance, or an elementary school teacher. It was like sunglasses, umbrellas and health insurance. Now I had all three.

W
HEN MY MOTHER
had gone away and left me with my grandmother, she called almost every week. She worried about my virginity. She saw it as some silk purse, all I had, about to be stolen.

“You’ve got to be careful with her now, Mom,” she screamed to my grandmother on the phone.

“It’s still here. It’s not a sow’s ear yet!” I yelled.

“Shht,” my grandmother whispered. She too considered virginity no laughing matter.

My grandmother, though, studied dresses. She took an interest in
my hairstyles. It took me a long time to understand. My mother, wherever she was, had ambitions for me. My grandmother recognized the years I was in from her own: this was courtship.

I got a hold of
The Joy of Sex
. The problem was I couldn’t check it out of the library. I couldn’t face Marion Werth and her polished pointed fingernails at the counter. And besides, there was nowhere I could hide it at home. So I read it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and tried to remember things. There were long sections about tricks from Asian prostitutes. I read the chapter about sleeping with a virgin. It was assumed the man was older and not. I remembered just what it said. I was ready.

But the boys weren’t. They were all Catholics. That may have had something to do with it.

Even Stevie. Stevie climbed into my window at night. When his brick house sucked into the dark and returned to the landscape, he jumped out his low window and walked across the road, his head down and hands in his pockets.

My grandmother went to bed earlier and earlier. We both pretended I didn’t notice. In our house, we’d both be in our pajamas right after supper, at seven-thirty, before the light left. I was the one who pulled closed the thick living room drapes. We both pretended that I’d stay up only a little longer to study. I watched my grandmother climb up the stairs with real keenness. She was getting too old to take care of me. She tried to hide her unsteadiness but I saw the lurch of her wrist on the banister.

She always reminded me to lock the doors. She felt bad that she was turning in first and that I would be up by myself. Every night, she meant to stay up later, but she was just too tired. Her body felt the mandatory order of dreams, already impinging. “Be sure and check the door” was the last thing she’d say.

She had already tried both doors twice. I changed from my pajamas back into my school clothes again. I hated being barefoot at eight o’clock. Bare feet on the carpet made me feel like a moist little kid. I couldn’t have friends over, it would’ve been too weird and I couldn’t really talk on the phone either, we just had one and it was in a corner of the kitchen, right under her bed. So I studied out of boredom and ate. I’d eat a cold pork chop left from dinner. I’d finish off the peach pie. I was always hungry those years.

And it was hours before Stevie would come. His family was young.
From the curtain I could see his father stretch in the small living room like a sulky lion. I’d be done with all my homework and whatever I was reading and more by the time Stevie shoved my window open. Sometimes I’d be asleep on top of my bedspread, not from exhaustion but the sheer boredom of waiting.

We’d mess around for a while and whenever I tried to bring us to it, he stopped, gasping. “No! I’m not gonna do that to you! You don’t really want that! You’d be sorry. Just think you do now but you really don’t. I’m not going to do that.”

Stevie lasted years. Now I thought I really could have loved him if I wasn’t always gone on other people. Still, there were his feet. Once, he came to visit me in California when I lived there with my mother. I was always bugged about his clothes and, I didn’t know, his teeth. Underneath he was hard and straight and right. I knew that. But whatever we’d felt as children in the old barn, that was gone, completely gone.

I
WAS APPROACHING
the outskirts of Madison and I had to begin to think of things that were real. I had an address more than ten years old, who even knew if that was still good. People moved. In 1974 I lived on South Elm Drive with my mother. Nobody could have found me from that address anymore. And after that, I went to college and moved almost every year. I stopped at a gas station and called Madison information and asked the operator for the address too and sure enough, it was the same. Some people’s lives were that way.

I asked the boy at the pumps for directions and he gave them to me, he knew the street, it was all coming out almost too easy. It was four-thirty, quarter to five, a home time of day.

I found myself hurrying back to the car, as if I had a real destination where people were waiting for me, setting a table.

H
IGH SCHOOL
had been the world. We had everything. I was only alive during my day there with the other kids. In California, I had no other life that I believed in.

I was okay in school but not that good. And it didn’t mean much. I lived not for the classes but for the breaks between them, the ten minutes we had to get from one room to the next, and of course, for
lunch, which was the height of the day. I always felt a pang when the one o’clock bell rang. Then there was nothing else until tomorrow.

The nuns in Wisconsin hadn’t understood me and then the lay teachers in Beverly Hills didn’t either. But only Sister Mary Bede who tried to teach us Latin in Racine had the nerve to say anything. She tried to warn me right before I moved away. The really popular kids, the nuns let go because they didn’t make the grades. But I did sometimes. Sister Mary Bede read the grade on my paper and looked at me and shook her head.

“I’m afraid you’re falling in with the wrong people,” she told me.

“I don’t think that will happen, Sister,” I said.

“I pray for you every night,” she said, reluctantly handing me back my test with the perfect score. “And for your poor grandmother. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, it would be a shame to throw that away,” she said.

“I won’t throw that away, Sister.” We both had our hands on the test paper. It lay on air between us. I grabbed it away too fast then, tugging it out from her dry fingers. I wanted to leave. Behind me I heard her sigh and the slow rusp of her sweeping, the broom across the linoleum classroom floor.

I had something new that day. One pant leg rolled up. I started that in Racine, when I got my district test back. The tests there were so easy. They didn’t expect us to go to college. And they wanted to pass us, laying a hand on the tops of our heads, without having made us feel bad about ourselves. When I came to school that day with one pant leg rolled up, everyone stared. But since I was moving to California, they thought maybe I knew something. By two weeks later, the whole school, including older kids, rolled up one pant leg.

Just a few people took Latin in Beverly Hills High and the room was in the worst building, near the typing class. The teacher was a regular old woman who was fond of breaking out of grammar and telling us how each of her daughters had found her husband. For each one, it had been hard.

One thing I think would have been different if I’d been normal: school wouldn’t have meant so much. The rest of my life I barely lived. All I cared about in my nights with my mother was that nobody from school would see us.