Give Him the Word That I’m Not a Rover

“Give Him the Word That I’m Not a Rover”

I’m not really sure how one begins telling a story like this one.  Maybe I should begin with my childhood.  Maybe I should tell you that I was the only child of a woman who grew up believing that she could never have children because her body would reject new life over and over again.  Or maybe I should tell you that I was my father’s second daughter, third child, and that he eventually left us all.  Maybe I should reflect on happier times, times with my grandmother and grandfather, my mother’s parents.  Maybe I should reminisce about how my grandmother taught me to cook or how my grandfather would spend hours telling me about his own childhood.  Or perhaps it would be better to begin with the present, slowly working backwards to the beginning.  Maybe I should tell you that I am a mother myself now.  Maybe I should tell you that I’ve been married to my best friend for ten years, that I love to read, that I’m a private person.  Maybe I should tell you that I’ve already told you more than I tell my closest friends.  But I believe in being honest with my reader, and I will tell you that I don’t know what this story is or where it’s going.  It’s too close to me because it’s my story.

Being an indecisive person, I will meet the present and my early childhood somewhere in the middle.  I was fifteen as 1999 drew to a close.  Our kitchen was filled with bottled water, boxes of canned green beans, carrots and corn.  Tuna fish, spam and other various forms of canned meat sat in front of the harvest gold range.  We couldn’t even open the oven door, but that didn’t bother my mother.  Not being the domestic type, she hadn’t used the oven since at least 1992.  My uncle did not believe that the new millennium would usher in the rapture or the beginning of dooms day, but he was concerned that life could become more complicated for a while after the giant disco ball fell in Times Square.  Computers could crash.  People would panic.  If the grocery stores were raided by people who needed to get their Oreo fixes, we needed to be comfortable.  Enter approximately two hundred plastic-sealed Belgian Waffles and one hundred forty-four Starbuck’s Frappuccinos.  Obviously the ball dropped, and the world remained constant.  My mother always refused to waste food, and since the Belgian Waffles and Frappuccinos had an approaching expiration date in February 2000, I was pressured to quickly consume my half of the ration.  Yes, that’s right, one hundred waffles and seventy-two Frappuccinos in less than two months.  I will never look a barista in the face again. 

I wish that my millennial woes had ended with the breakfast of less-than champions, but it did not.  Being the prepared-type, my uncle wanted to make sure that we were not only fully stocked with artificial meats, processed foods, and waffles that could possible be the genesis of a war, or at least a conflict, between the United States and Belgium, but he also wanted to make sure that we were clean.  In his foresight, he stocked our garage with twenty industrial-sized garbage cans filled with water, stating repetitively that this water was not for drinking but for bathing.  As I reminisce on this part of my life, I realize that he stocked neither his home nor my grandparents’ in a similar fashion.  Maybe he hated my mother. 

I think that at this point in my story, I ought to tell you a little bit about my mother.  She has a good spirit.  She is kind and loving, but she is quite unstable.    She holds on to things for far too long.  In clinging to the past and its fading memories, she often devalues the present and ignores the responsibilities of everyday life.  This type of existence often damages those who are close to her while contributing to her own increased stock of problems.  Long after Dick Clark had counted down to the New Year, the garbage cans filled with water still sat in our garage.  One evening, close to Easter, one of the plastic seams split, and water filled the basement of our house.  Reluctantly, my mother abandoned her memories, retreated to the basement, and we began emptying the remaining cans of untouched bath water.  One by one they were either emptied out the backdoor or spilt into the puddle created by the original rebel Y2K bathtub.  This insurgent, however, would have made the French Revolutionaries proud, for he spilt out his guts directly on a large red rug.  Our garage was filled with blood.  We sloshed through the thick red liquid as we annihilated our remaining captives and disposed of their remnants.  The blood at our feet served as a reminder of the martyr who laid down his own life to see his remaining comrades lightened of their burden and laid to rest in the woods behind the house.  When we finished with our prisoners, we were left with the dark red remnants of what had happened that night in the garage.     

As my mother sloshed through the ankle-deep water in her fur-trimmed house shoes, I pictured myself in the midst of the Battle of Armageddon.  My soul was on the line.  I quit helping her.  The garbage cans had been disposed of, and all that was left was the bloody water of disillusionment.  I stood back, and I watched.  It was two in the morning.  She raised the garage door about eight inches and began to sweep the tinted water out of the house.  Occasionally the clotted liquid would rush back in at her feet, but still she swept.  The striking of the broom against the floor created an iambic rhythm that contributed to the eeriness of the scene.  She asked me what I thought.  She asked me what the neighbors would think.  What would they assume if they saw the dark red liquid trickle out from under the cracked door, down the hill, and into the woods?  Would they think she had killed him?  My father had been gone for two years at this point.  He simply left one day.  He got into his car, and he left.  She asked me if the neighbors would think she had killed him.  She told me that she would have had a right if she had.

As my mother stood sweeping the blood-red liquid out of the garage, I felt estranged from her.  I leaned against the heavy wooden desk that had sat on the other side of the basement since before my birth and simply watched her slow constant movements.   How could she joke about my father dying?  I knew she still loved him.  I knew she still loved him because she would not let me hate him.  If ever I said an ill word against him, she reprimanded me.  If ever I claimed that we were better off without him, I was reminded of some isolated interaction that he had with me as an infant that now lie outside of the boundaries of my memory.  I was reminded that he loved me.  I was told about how he used to stand over my crib and sing “Mr. Sandman” to me as I fell asleep.  I was assured that he cared for the child that he had abandoned.  My mother mourned my father when he left her for another woman and another life, and she forced me to mourn for him too. 

When I was pregnant with my first child, I was still wondering why he left, why I could not somehow make him feel fulfilled.  I hadn’t seen him for nearly ten years, but I still felt like that child that he had rejected.  The drive to Georgia to see him again was uncomfortable and awkward.  When I walked into my aunt’s, his sister’s, house, he was sitting there quietly, as if nothing had happened, but he had changed. 

I remembered him as tall and handsome, a strong man who could conquer the world if only he could quit holding on to his demons as easily as he quit holding on to me.  He was smart and charismatic.  He could walk into a room and grab everyone’s attention, but now he was broken.  Not even a shadow of what I so clearly remembered remained.  What was left of his once thick black hair was now wispy and gray.  His back was crooked and head bowed.  He too knew that he was broken.  But the changes in his voice affected me the most.  The dominant masculine voice that, as a child, had made me feel insignificant was now weak with a strong high-pitched nasal tone.  He had destroyed every facet of himself.

That night when I was back in the hotel, I wondered if it had all been worth it.  He had left his family to hold on to another woman, but she had never wanted to hold on to him.  She left him once they got to Georgia, and he was either too ashamed or too proud to return to his family.  It’s strange how similar shame and pride are in their ability to destroy.  In self-pity, he isolated himself and held on only to his vices, drinking himself into a stupor day in and day out, refusing to eat or communicate with those who still so desperately wanted to hold on to him.  Finally, his body succumbed to the trials through which he put it.  His brain could no longer withstand the trauma of his abuse, and it started to deteriorate.  One by one, he lost his memories.  He could not remember a conversation for more than half an hour, and slowly his mind forced him to let go of the past several years of his life.  When I saw him again, he did not recognize me.  He thought that his little girl was still eight years old, innocent and ignorant of her father’s sins.  He held on to that image of a child who adored him and only wanted his affection in return, but she was gone.  I was left in her place, and I finally realized that the father that I had been holding on to for so many years never fully existed.  Like the child in his mind, he was merely a phantom, and I could finally let go of the man who never wanted to hold on to me.   

I suppose that brings me back to the present.  I don’t often dwell on my father’s situation now.  He is still in Georgia, and he is still ignorant of the life that has passed from his grasp.  He is seventy-four years old, and he lives in an assisted living facility.  My aunt and brother occasionally see him, but my sister and I have not been back since that visit eight years ago.  He still believes that I am eight, and he is unaware that between his three children he now has four grandchildren.  He is frozen in time.  The events of the past twenty-two years are nothing more than rapidly fading impressions of which only traces remain.  This palimpsest of memories with which he has been left serves to haunt him, offering an unattainable manuscript of his lost life.  He remembers the man that he once was, but he cannot recall how he became the man that he is today.  He is isolated not only from those who once cared for him, but also from his own existence.  He has roved into obscurity.