He moves with sudden purpose to the bar. It’s not yet 2 P.M. I’ve never tried to control my father’s drinking, never suggested that he not have a drink when he wanted one. It would be like trying to separate a snake from a mouse.
It’s all done with such precision: the ice into the monogrammed glass, the snap of the paper across the cap of a new bottle of Smirnoff’s, the splash of vermouth, the tiny onions jiggled out so carefully. Then the pause, and then the sip, his eyes pulled shut by pleasure. I’ve never noticed what an act of love it all is.
Alcohol has never done anything for me. The first time I got drunk was with Mallory in eighth grade. My mother and Paul were out, and we mixed Grand Marnier with Hawaiian Punch. Mallory got giggly and I got sick. When my mother came home I was still bent over the toilet. She seemed more relieved than angry. “I think you’re like me, honey,” she said, rubbing my back. “You’ll never be able to hold your liquor.” She was right.
The afternoon, the evening, the night spreads out before us. Outside the sky is wide and blue; the sun beats on the grass, on the fur of the dogs on the back porch. Inside is cool and dark.
“Backgammon?” I say, slightly desperate.
“Sure.”
We go into the den, to the cabinet where the games are kept. A hot cedar smell spills out. Backgammon is on the bottom, the fake leather case stuck to the wood. I have to give it a good tug. He takes his seat on the sofa and places his drink on the end table, a fluid gesture I have seen a million times. I pull around an armchair to face him, the game between us on the coffee table. The pieces are heavy, marbleized. The dice thud in their felt-lined cups. I haven’t played a game with him since I was a very little girl.
We set up. There is no confusion about which side is home, my left, his right. He does not say, as Jonathan always does before any kind of game, I am going to whup you silly, just to up the tension. But I can tell by his breathing and the careful straight rows he makes that he is thinking about winning. I never think about winning at the beginning of a game. At the start I am always just thinking how happy I am to be playing a game, what a particular old pleasure it is, what a wonderful detour from regular life, regular conversation. My desire to win comes later, when I recognize that my delight has not put me in the lead. Then I become focused and anxious. If I lose, it feels like more than losing a game, and if I win, the elation is momentary — the other person’s discouragement makes my own enjoyment impossible.
My first roll is a six and a five, lovers’ leap. He tries to blockade my remaining man, but he doesn’t get the rolls. I hit him several times on my way out. Soon I have trapped four of his men in my home.
When I win, he moans, falsetto, but he isn’t angry. He’s barely taken a sip from his drink. We set up the board again.
The dice are with me again. I double him after my third roll and he accepts.
“You’re a little whippersnapper, aren’t you?” he says. “You and your professorship. But I’m not as dumb as I look, you know.” He gets double fives and knocks off two of my men. “I was pretty good at school once upon a time.”
“Were you?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not. I know you’re smart. Maybe not really smart in back-gammon.” I come in on a four and a three, and bump off two of his men.
“You know what I loved in school?” he says.
“What?”
“Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare?”
“We had to memorize something from Julius Caesar once.”
“A soliloquy?”
“I think so.” It’s his turn, but he doesn’t roll. “O conspiracy, sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, when evils are most free?” His neck lengthens as he speaks, reddens, the Adam’s apple sharp as ever, cutting its pale path. “O, then by day where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage?”
“Wow, Dad. Good memory.”
He looks at me like he used to look at Catherine sometimes, a defiant go fuck yourself look. And then he takes a long sip of his martini and the blush drains out of his face.
The next game he beats me. He gets up and makes another drink. He beats me again. He drinks faster when he is winning.
“I used to play this with my mother,” he says.
I wait for more. It’s rare for him to talk about his childhood.
“She used to send me to the kitchen to fetch the maid and she’d change the board around. She was a terrible cheater.”
She was a terrible drunk, my mother told me.
“I’d say, ‘Ring the bell for the maid.’ There was a button under the carpet beside her chair, and all she had to do was step on it and it would ring in the kitchen. But she’d say ‘The maid’s going deaf.’ There was no contradicting my mother. I learned that early enough.”
“How? What would she do?”
“She’d put clothespins on my ears.”
“What?”
“She’d put clothespins on my ears and I’d have to walk to school like that.”
“Dad, c’mon.”
“They hurt like hell, too.”
“Oh my God, that’s so twisted.”
He laughed at the word. “She was twisted all right.”
“Have you ever lived alone before?”
“Let’s see. I had a single my senior year of college.”
“And you ate in the dining hall?”
“I ate at my club.”
“And your laundry was done for you?”
“Every Monday morning.”
“Before I leave, I’m going to show you how to wash your own clothes and make a few meals.”
“I know how to make steak and hot dogs. That’s all I need to know.”
“There’s nothing you want to learn to cook?”
He thinks about it. “Hollandaise sauce. Catherine’s was awful.”
He wants my mother’s recipe. He’s saying he misses my mother’s hollandaise. Even now, I thrill when I find a chink of light in the great wall between them.
When he comes back into the room with another drink, he says, “This is nice.”
“What?”
“Playing backgammon.”
“It is nice.”
“I wish you could stay longer.”
These are words I’ve never heard from him, simple words. This is nice. I wish you could stay longer.
“Me too.” It feels true and then, after a few seconds, completely untrue. Two nights is all I can handle. And I know what he’s doing, how he can put on the charm when he needs something from you.
I beat him the last game, backgammon him, and he laughs as I do it.
“You’re a good player,” he says, packing up the case.
Afterward I drag him up to the laundry room. It looks just the same, the ivory-colored machines, the hampers, the cabinet with the safe inside.
I explain the separation of lights, colors, and darks. There are enough of his tennis whites in there to make a small load, so I toss them in, measure out the powder detergent, read out the cleaning options, and pull the knob. Water rushes in and I shut the lid. We move to the dryer and I show him the dials. I scrape the lint tray clean. He says Mm-hmm and Okay at all the right times, but he isn’t paying attention. He’s behaving as if it’s all hypothetical, like I’m preparing him for an emergency situation that will not actually come to pass.
He points to the old hair dryer standing on its wheels in the corner, a gunmetal-gray helmet my mother used to spend hours under, deaf to the world. I go over and touch the thick metal lip. I can see her foot bobbing, hear the pages of Time magazine snapping. I feel my ache for her grow and then freeze — I can’t miss my mother in front of my father. But she once stood here; we’d all once been a family in this house. It’s like a story, a fairy tale, something told to me, not remembered. Once upon a time a beautiful lady lived with a handsome man in a big house near the sea. They had two lovely children, a boy and a girl. But the beautiful lady was not happy, and one day she took the little girl and all the jewelry and disappeared.