When my sisters would call home during this time, the first thing they’d ask me was, “Is Dad over there again?” and if I said “No,” they’d say, “Thank God. Let me talk to Mom.”
And thinking back on it now, I suppose that even she had glimpses of the farce of it all, the idea that two people can ever “go back,” because on nights when they returned to familiar marital flirting, scooting around each other in the kitchen, I’d later hear them fighting as he walked out the door.
“It’s all or nothing,” she’d say. “You can’t just do what you want.”
This was a concept my father did not understand.
So, he continued stopping by, sometimes bringing over bottles of wine and videotapes he’d rented from a store that a friend of his owned. The night that remains the most vivid to me was centered on the movie Airplane!, already a decade old at this time and, to my father, a classic. He had nearly all of the lines memorized, and he and my mother would laugh at jokes I didn’t get. This was adult stuff here, this movie, despite the tame rating and childish props, and it operated on a level for them that I was unable to access.
When a particular scene in a disco came on, for instance, they lapsed into utter flashback. My father paused the movie and said, “Come on, Kat. I know you haven’t forgotten my patented lightning-strike move.” He got up from the recliner and cleared a space on the floor. He shot his pointer finger up toward the ceiling.
“Sha-zam!” he said.
“Oh, lord,” my mother said and laughed. “Don’t remind me.”
This, however, was his mission.
My father grabbed a record off the shelf and played it. He let their story unravel.
“You wouldn’t know by looking at us,” he told me. “But your mother and I used to tear up the dance floor.”
“We took one disco lesson,” my mom said. “You hated it.”
My father smiled and took her hand. He pulled her off the couch. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t remember it like that.”
The album he played was something by Diana Ross, I believe. It held no magic for me.
Still, I watched the two of them dance.
My father pulled my mother close to his chest, his necktie loose. He tapped his foot to the beat. “Ready?” he said, and spun her awkwardly around the room. My mom laughed and pretended to be embarrassed by it all, saying she couldn’t remember the steps. This was apparently true, as the next few minutes devolved into nothing more than repeated lightning strikes by my father, which neither of them tired of.
I started off to my room.
“Hey,” my mom said. “You could learn something here. You may not know it, but your father’s always been an excellent dancer. That’s one of the first things I noticed about him.”
“Is that right?” my dad said.
“You know it is,” she said.
I fell asleep that night with the music still playing, their sporadic laughter sliding underneath my door, and when I woke up the next day I, as per my usual ritual, looked out of my bedroom window in hopes of a Lindy sighting. This was like breakfast for me. Sometimes I would see her in a bathrobe and slippers, going out to get the morning paper for her father, although this hadn’t happened in months.
It also didn’t happen this day.
Instead I saw my father’s Mercedes still parked in our driveway. It was as strange to me as a desert landscape. I felt transported. And I would be lying if I said that I was cynical to it all at that moment. My sisters may have been if they’d seen it, but, like my mother, I suppose, I still had the tug of a dreamer inside me.
So I hurried up and got dressed. I thought perhaps a small piece of life fixed and began to shuffle all the old memories of my father into a pattern more pleasing to me than what I’d carried for so long. He was not altogether a bad fellow, I thought, when you looked past a thing or two. A real man, after all, never means to hurt anything.
I smelled coffee when I entered the living room.
I fancied bright presents under the tree.
Then, when I got into the den, I heard the lock on the front door turning. I walked into the foyer to see my father still wearing the clothes he had worn the night prior, his tie now slung over his shoulder. He held a cup of coffee in his hand and his shoes were untied. A key ring dangled from his pinkie finger.
“Dad?” I said. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t even look at me.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked him. “Is everything all right? Surely you’re not leaving.”
He had no answers to these simple questions. So, like the man I knew, he said the first thing to come to his mind.
“Son,” he said. “Please. Don’t call me Shirley.”
Then he walked out the door.
The two of us back to square one.
I spent the rest of that morning picking up empty wine bottles and washing their dirty glasses from the night before. I couldn’t stand to look at the stuff. My mother stayed alone in her room until supper that night and didn’t speak much when she emerged. This type of thing became a habit of hers, staying in her room and crying, as the biggest disaster of all came next.