part of our English class, Bower taught us the word ire. Comes from the same root as irate, irritate, irascible.)
There are stories to corroborate my father’s overly calm and collected demeanor even under pressure. Carla (AKA my mother) often told me things she shouldn’t have. She told me that during her many affairs, she was meeting the next door neighbor, Frank, on his lunch hour. His wife and kids had gone to visit the grandparents in Milwaukee. They were having a rendezvous—my mom said Frank liked to call it a “nooner” and she preferred the term “Afternoon Delight” but whatever—they were two married people having sex in the daytime, in his house.
My dad decided that day to surprise my mom—she’d been blue and feeling trapped, having to stay home all the time with the baby (moi). So he picked up eggrolls and combination lo mein at her favorite Chinese place and drove to the house. This was when we lived in Illinois.
Her car was in the garage; the door was unlocked. I was asleep in the crib upstairs.
But his wife was nowhere to be found.
Now here comes the good part, so pay attention. My dad has intuition from all his years peering into people’s psychologies. He knows that everyone next door is out-of-town except for Frank. And he knows Frank has cheated on his wife before, because his wife went to my dad for counseling. So he puts two and two together, walks the short distance to the neighbors’, sees Frank’s car. He stands and listens for a minute on the front step, tries the door, and finds it open. He walks inside their house. (He may not have a temper, but the man’s got balls.)
When Carla told me this story, I was maybe eight years old and she told it in this suspenseful way, like I was supposed to derive great narrative pleasure out of the tale. She did not get, for a second, that it was 1) a story that painted her in a very bad light; and 2) not exactly an age-appropriate tale for her young daughter. I don’t think Dr. Seuss has covered that one: Hop On Anyone’s Pop; The Grinch Who Stole Fidelity; Every Who Down in Whoville has Slept with My Mom.
My father hears action upstairs, but he’s not stupid enough to explore. He just calls out, “Carla, are you up there?” She said she considered jumping out the window and dashing back to the house, pretending she’d been in the bathroom, but she looked and it was a long way down, and she was buck naked.
She and Frank froze, and my father said, “Come on home now, Carla.” And left.
She said she showed up soon after, and Dad gave her a lecture, said he treated her more like a teenager who was acting out than like a wife having an affair. He didn’t seem jealous—just annoyed. “We’re married, Carla,” he said. “Married people don’t behave this way.”
She felt like a kid being grounded. She refused the Chinese take-out and Dad went back to work. That made me so sad, how my dad’s idea of the take-out backfired.
Carla used to enjoy telling me these adventure stories—the close calls and the times she got caught in the act. My dad has never been anything but patient and tolerant. With her. With me.
I guess most kids go through times when they feel closer to one parent than the other. For some, maybe the allegiance goes back and forth. But for me, it’s always been my dad. As early as I can remember, he was the one I sought out. When I fell off my bike, when I lost my goldfish down the drain, when some pea-brain was mean to me after school, it was Dad I went to for help, for answers, for comfort. Carla could be comforting, too. I remember her putting aloe on my back and shoulders once when I got a brutal sunburn. Of course, the sunburn itself was her fault—my dad couldn’t believe she’d forgotten something as crucial as sunscreen. We were at the pool all day. She lathered me up good at first, but after I swam it was all gone. She was drinking wine coolers that afternoon, from a small ice chest. She was reading a magazine. To her credit, when she saw how burned I was getting, she made me put on my long-sleeved t-shirt. It’s a good memory, though. Not the burn or the itching or the way my skin peeled off in strips a week later—but the two nights when she put layer after layer of cool aloe on my back. Something about a mother’s hand, her fingers. The circular motion, the spiral, the pads of her fingertips.
Carla cut hair, though she could have done anything. When I was little, I thought the whole beauty parlor thing was cool—the chair that could be pumped up and down, the plastic cape to keep the hair off your clothes, the dye charts and the dryers and the hair magazines everywhere. You’d pick how you wanted to look and Carla could usually pull it off. She had customers who’d been going to her for years.
Later, though, when I was ten, eleven, twelve, I would think of beauty school, cosmetology school, and I’d cringe. A lot of my friends had professional moms. Kale’s mom, for instance—an OB/GYN. I started to feel embarrassed about Carla’s job.
Then there were her boyfriends, even before the divorce. She was constantly sleeping with someone. On the nights the custody agreement mandated I sleep at her place, she would have guys over. They would get high or shit-faced and I would stay in my room. The next morning there was the inevitable mess and the challenge of getting her up so she could take me to school. Often, she would get the guy to drop me off and I would have to tell some man I didn’t even know how to get to my school. Carla, if it was her day off, would sleep.
I was twelve when I stopped letting her cut my hair. This hurt her feelings. It was cruel. She had always given me great haircuts. I just decided I’d deny her the pleasure of touching her only daughter’s hair.
At thirteen, I asked to live with my dad full-time and she stopped speaking to me.
At fourteen, she wanted to be back in my life again, but I was busy holding a grudge. A couple months later, I reconsidered, but gave her an ultimatum: quit drinking or else we don’t have a relationship. She chose the “or else.”
Sure, you’ll say, how convenient for you to say this now, but it’s true: I was just about to give her another chance. I kept hearing from Aunt Greta how Carla was really getting her act together. She went to AA meetings and quit drinking. She went to some other group for people who are addicted to love and sex. She started taking art classes at the community college and when she took ceramics, she was hooked. From that class forward, Carla became an artist, a ceramicist, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t find out until she was dead how talented she was. To her, it was like cutting hair. She said she always saw someone’s head as a starting point and then she would sculpt their hair into something artful. With ceramics, she did it all—the wheel, hand-built stuff, big, small, thin, thick. She said cutting hair had prepared her for this new skill. She said all this to me over the phone, the first conversation I’d allowed her in all those years. Even then, I let her do all the talking, but I did listen. I heard.
I was supposed to drop by the studio behind her house where she did her work. It was actually on my list the same week she was killed. I’m not sure what was keeping me from going, but sometimes when someone you have decided will never change actually does, it can be a little disappointing. 1) You don’t want to be wrong about something like this; 2) you don’t know if you can trust the change; and 3) it’s just an adjustment. You want to believe what you long ago concluded about the person: lost cause. They turn up changed for the better and you don’t know what to do.
Dad was thrown off by it too, I think. We were more comfortable with the status quo. Our response to her had become habit. As much as you think you want someone to change, there’s a way you come to rely on their being who they are, bad as that may be. It’s familiar and something you can count on. Carla shook it all up, and it bothered us both, though we’ve never discussed it—how she finally changed, not for Dad and not for me, but because she found pottery and because she fell for some guy in AA, finally a guy she wanted to be faithful to. Three days after he proposed to her
