13.
Perhaps growing wings is what fathers do.
Maybe it is written somewhere that, at an undetermined time, every father will feel an ache in his back. He will sleep uncomfortably, tossing around in bedsheets that used to feel warm to him and soft. He will spend his private time craning his neck toward the mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s been itching him lately, perhaps only two small nubs at first, right on his shoulder blades, and later the look of two feathered joints. I can’t imagine the fear in these men. I can only imagine their choice. A creature with wings must use them, of course, or else go the way of the dodo.
So these men finish up that last cup of coffee. They wait until no one is watching.
They take to the sky.
Like Lindy’s father, for example, who sprouted his wings far too late. He became an unfortunate hawk, the poor man, circling the blue above Lindy’s head from the night that she was raped until the moment she left him. He was a strange sight soaring over the movie theater parking lot. A distant squawk from the branches of Piney Creek Road. All of this to ultimately become a rueful and bitter bird, a tattered and woeful-looking thing plucking out his own feathers when he finally returned to his perch and found Lindy gone.
But he is not the only example.
The terrible Mr. Landry is who I’m thinking of now, sitting squat and thick-winged on the storm gutter of his dark and musty house. He was like a fat owl who allowed none to pass, a hunter with a head that spun completely around. And yet the true danger of men like him is that they are so still, so quiet, that you forget that they’re out there until late at night, perhaps, when you are waiting for something to cook on the grill or enjoying a peaceful time with your family. It’s in times like these when you hear the owl’s call and it chills you, like a voice at the far end of a tunnel. Who cooks for you? the owl says. Who cooks for us all?
This is a question left unanswered until it’s too late, because predators like him are mere shadows gliding across the dark lawn. In your ear, maybe, the suspicion of wind. Then you are gone, swooped up and eviscerated before you reach the birds’ nest. Make no mistake. He will chew you up in this place, the owl will. He will cough out your spent bones.
All of this imagining just to get around to my own father, I suppose: a canary who felt a need to escape his clean wire cage. A man who, like so many others, flew the very coop that he himself had made.
How else to describe it?
Thin and tall, my father started going bald before I knew him.
In the pictures I’ve seen from right after my birth, from the hospital, his thin hair is swept neatly to the side and gelled, already concealing the truth of him, I suppose. And there are people out there who will claim to remember moments like these, when they were just an infant in their father’s embrace. I have friends who’ve told me stories from when they were one or two years of age, and recited to me the tender beauty of it.
Impossible. Ridiculous.
I was ten years old when my father left, and I have few substantial memories of him living with us at all, as if it was in fact his departure that flipped on the switch of my consciousness. Maybe some vague image of the two of us washing his car, sure. Maybe the both of us standing by the pool in our swim trunks. Still, these visions were likely given to me only by the old photos that my mother kept in our albums. Nothing real in them. No connection to the moment as it happened. I understood that.
Yet, as if to convince me otherwise, my mother would often say things like Surely you remember the time you two fell asleep in that hammock? Surely you remember when you caught that catfish at False River? Surely you remember horseback riding with him, snug in the same saddle, at that business convention in Butte? I didn’t. Listen, she’d say, surely that pool party where he taught you to swim? No. The time you locked yourself in his car while he was washing it? Not at all. So Here, here, she would say, and scramble around for the album. Let me show you the pictures.
Yet the closest I ever felt to my father in the years right after he left us were the times I would walk through a department store, dragged along by my mother on a shopping trip after school, when we would pass through the men’s section on our way to the mall. The smell of shoe leather. Yes, there was something in that. The whiff of a specific cologne. There was memory there, too. So I would raise my head vaguely at these scents, something deep in me stirred, and look around.
I would expect nothing. And I would receive it.
But it is too easy to crucify men like this. If every disappointed son and daughter got their shot at revenge, I imagine, there would be only a handful of men above fifty left walking the Earth. Who would be president? Who would we blame? So what we must do instead, when we deal with our fathers, is stick to the facts. When the legions of us (and there are legions of us) stitch back together the men who once held our mothers, who once made them promises they surely intended to keep, we must not let emotion get in the way.
So I can tell you this. My father was a realtor.
Having a hand in the suburban sprawl of places like Woodland Hills, he was wealthy by the time he hit forty. With this wealth came the American Dream as it existed in the 1960s and ’70s. The big house. The three children. The country club. The tennis wife. The Mercedes.
Then, the brightly colored wings.
My father’s feathered pair led him out of our picture window to a familiar place not too far away—the Fairview Golf and Tennis Club, where he perched on top of a cash register manned by a perky eighteen-year-old girl.
Laura, a name that has been forever soiled for me, was blond and flawless.
A freshman biology major at LSU at the time, she must have found something scientifically interesting about the canary that appeared on her register whenever she worked. I can’t blame her for this. Her job at the club, I’m sure, was unfulfilling. The bird’s song, I know, was persuasive. He was, after all, a salesman.
There’s no mystery as to how these things happen.
And other than those times when she innocently provided me with golf balls at the driving range, with sno-cones at the club’s snack window, my first real contact with Laura was in 1990, about five years after my father left us. This was during the time that Lindy was not speaking to me, the tail end of that dreadful year of silence, when my mother called my father back to duty. He’d moved to a small town called Prairieville, Louisiana, since their divorce, a place maybe fifteen minutes away from Baton Rouge that was just beginning its own housing boom, but he might as well have moved to Wisconsin. I rarely saw him, and when I did it was for some holiday or special occasion where there was enough distraction (presents to be opened, a cake to be cut, a song to sing) to keep us from talking deeply about anything. I didn’t know what he thought of me in those years and I didn’t know what to think of him. I knew only that he’d hurt my mother and my sisters, and that he’d hurt me. Yet I had no idea how to change any of that. What child does? So, I didn’t try.
Instead I spent my energy on things I believed I could change, like my appearance, and like Lindy’s opinion of me. This preoccupation led my mother to confess to my dad that she’d become worried about the music I listened to, the way I moped about the house in black T-shirts. She told him a boy needs a father around, and that the holiday visits and gift cards stuffed with money were no longer cutting it. So my father showed up one Saturday morning.
I should have seen it coming, as my mother had been cleaning house for a week. She’d gone to the beauty parlor and gotten a new haircut. She’d woken up early that Saturday and walked through the house fully dressed, dusting end tables and putting on mascara in the reflection of the kitchen window. I ignored her, of course, and was so unprepared for his arrival that when his Mercedes pulled up in our driveway, I almost didn’t recognize it.
“Okay,” my mother said. “Okay okay okay.”
The two of us watched him through the kitchen window, now bald as a stone and looking fit, as he walked up to the front door like an appraiser. He stopped and kicked at a piece of the walkway that had apparently come loose since he’d last seen it. He stared at the roof as if checking for damage.
We opened the door without waiting for a knock, my mother and I, and he said, “Hello, Kathryn. Hello, son.”
I’d like to think now that I returned him a zinger.
I’d like to think now that I was fully aware of his lack of interest in me as a teenager, and that I was angry about how easily he’d released me from his daily life. “Hello, sperm donor,” I should have said back to him, or, “Hello, ghost.” But in reality, I only remember feeling awkward about my strange and new hairstyle when my father first saw me, the way I’d shaved the sides of my head to impress Lindy. I remember feeling uncomfortable in the new rock-and-roll clothes I’d been wearing since Lindy went dark, too, about the silver hoop earring in my left ear, and about the way I hadn’t really thought of my father in months.
And so I only said, “Hey, Dad.”
His plan was to take me fishing. He said he knew a place.
My mother had already packed a bag of outdoor clothes, unbeknownst to me, culled from some laundry she had been doing, and mentioned to my father that she was planning on cooking a roast that evening. “I’ll have it stewing in the pot all day,” she said. “If you’d like, you could eat dinner with us when you get back.”
My father patted me on the shoulder and said that he was taking me for the night instead. He said we had some serious bonding to do, and not to expect us back until we’d caught every single fish in Louisiana.
“Oh,” my mother said. “Okay.”
After all those years, she still loved him. All three of us knew it. So, no need for me to recount for you the look I saw unfold and lie dead in her eyes when she realized that yet another meal she’d imagined between them would have to be eaten alone.
My father and I spoke little on the way to the place. It was nearly a three-hour drive. He asked me about soccer, which I told him I’d quit. “What?” he said. “You’re the best player they’ve got. I thought you loved soccer.” He was right about this. I did love it. But that seemed irrelevant compared to what I thought Lindy might like in those days. So “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I kind of grew out of it.” My dad looked somewhat disappointed to hear this news and, as if to change the subject, asked me about girls. I told him there was one girl who was all right, but she had some baggage. “Well, there you go,” he told me. “That’s all you need is the one, right?”
My father smiled blankly as he said this, and I guess this was my trouble with him.
Was he stupid?
This is a legitimate question not often asked about fathers.