Someone comes in the store behind us — I feel the short burst of warmer air — and bypasses the vegetable section. I recognize, just from the dimmest shape at the periphery of my vision, Catherine’s long gait.
“So tell me what exactly you’re a professor of, smarty pants,” Mrs. Caffrey asks, her good humor returned to her.
“I have to run. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop by Neal’s shop on the way home! It’s the one with the lighthouse on the sign.”
I duck down the middle aisle where I saw Catherine go, but it’s empty. At the back of the store, Brad Goodale is behind the meat counter, just where I left him in the early eighties. He’s slicing up something for someone I don’t recognize. In the last aisle there are two men my age, studying the yogurt. I rush past them to the front and see that one has his finger hooked in the other’s belt loop. Despite my frenzy I smile, happy that change has come even to Ashing. I reach the register just in time to see the thick dark hair, more cropped than I remember, beyond the door, turning left into the parking lot. I think of chasing her but I don’t think desperation will help my case. And I feel nothing but desperate at this moment.
“Guess she forgot her list,” Mrs. Goodale says as she rings up Miss Perth’s small batch of groceries.
I stare out the plate glass, breathing heavily, still struggling with indecision. I should go stop her before she leaves the parking lot. But is she, in the end, good for him? Wouldn’t he be better off with someone more disciplined? But without someone he may simply self-destruct. I move to the door. And then I see her car, the little burgundy BMW, and on the back a new bumper sticker that says: I’D RATHER BE DIVORCED.”
My father is watching the news in the den. It’s strange to see him back in that room with his ashtray and his drink, as if he never left it for the sunroom and all those years with Catherine. A couch has replaced the recliners that replaced the couch my mother took to Water Street. The room looks almost back to normal, though the slipcovers are made of a nubby wool, something my mother wouldn’t have chosen. He bends his head down to watch the television, his eyes straining up just beneath their hoods. A woman is discussing affirmative action on some courthouse steps. She speaks articulately, quickly, trying to get the most words into her few seconds of time on national TV.
“Why are black people always talking about black people?” my father says in his disgusting version of an African American accent, though the woman speaking has the regionless accent of a newscaster. “Have you noticed that?”
“Because in this country they are defined by their skin color, and they’ve had to fight for every basic right that we get automatically by being born white.”
“Fight for their rights? This woman is fighting for inequality. This woman wants a black C student to be chosen over a straight-A student. She’s fighting for their right to cheat.”
My retort constructs itself swiftly. I’ve got a lot of ammo now on this question, yet none of my knowledge will help me win a fight with my father. He will cling to his position even when all reason fails him; he will cling to it as if it’s his life and not his opinion that is in peril. He will get vicious and personal, and every negative thing he ever felt about me will pour out of his mouth. Ridding my father of his racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric would take a long time. It would be a whole reeducation. His prejudices are a stew of self-hatred, ignorance, and fear. If those feelings could be rooted out and examined somehow, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink so much to squelch the pain of them.
“You don’t have much of an answer to that, do you?”
Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice? Would he understand that to argue would be futile, would wound me deeply and do nothing to change him?
“I’m going to get dinner started.” I can hear my mother in my tone with him. “Do you want me to call you when I’m ready to make the hollandaise?”
“The what?” Then he remembers. “Okay. Sure.”
But when it’s time, he slouches against the counter with his hands in his pockets, staring but unseeing as I whisk the egg yolks in a saucepan and add cubes of butter, one at a time.
“It’s so easy, Dad. The only trick is to get the flame as low as possible and keep stirring. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot. Here, you take the whisk.” He takes it and, in a fairly good imitation of me, flicks the wire bulb through the thickening sauce. Hope swells in my chest. I have this idea that if he can make his own hollandaise he’ll be okay. And if he can learn to make both hollandaise and wash his clothes, he won’t need a wife at all.
At the table, A-1 sauce slathered over his rib eye, hollandaise over his asparagus, he is grateful. And very drunk. “You’re a goddamn good cook, you know that?”
I sleep in Elyse’s room, my old room. The rug is green, not yellow, the walls stripped of the daisy paper and replaced by a blue sponge wash. Out the windows are the same trees, though. Pine, beech, oak. One for each window. I get into bed and shut off the light. All my books are in the car. I have nothing to read to make me sleepy.
“Who we got here?” my father would say every time he came to say good night to me in this room. He’d yank Piglet up by the ear.
“No, not Piglet,” I’d giggle.
He’d wind up and hit Piglet in the face with his fist. “Pow!” he’d say. “Right in the kisser.” Piglet would go flying. Then he’d find all the rest of them scattered at the end of my bed and on the rocking chair and, one by one, speak kindly to them, wait for my false protests, then punch them across the room. I’d laugh and laugh.
In the morning I stand in the middle of the bathroom for a long time. It was here at the sink that my mother told me about her plan to leave my father. Eighteen years ago last week. I was wearing a white sleeveless nightgown. She was scared. I can see that now. Her lips were the color of her skin. Her eyes were filled, the brown trembling. She stood right there at the sink, holding her toothbrush, smelling the way she did in the morning, slightly sour. And now she is dead. Has been dead for years, though it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like she is just off with Paul somewhere. In all my dreams she is away, just about to return. I am often on the way to the airport to pick her up, or on my way to Water Street to clean before she gets back, neither of which I ever did in real life.
Paul writes regularly, calls on my birthday, asks me to visit. I write back sporadically, rarely remember his birthday on time, and never visit when I come to Massachusetts to visit my father. I think I will, and then I don’t. I wonder if he’s on the Cape right now. He spends as much time as he can there, he wrote in his last letter. He and my mother rented a little house in Truro every summer, and last fall the owner sold it to him. The letter was filled with exclamation points, which was not his style, so I knew how excited he was about it.
Now I get back into Elyse’s bed and wonder if I ever wrote back to congratulate him. I have no memory of it. It sets off a whole pageant in my mind of people I’ve let down or underappreciated. An old feeling, a weightless unease, creeps into my limbs. I need to shut my eyes and sleep it off, but I hear water rushing through the pipes for my father’s shower. Morning is always the best time to be with him.
Today, though, he is sullen when he comes down, making his coffee without his usual songs or whistling, calling the dogs sharply to their bowls, opening the sports page and cursing some Red Sox player I’ve never heard of. He’s even angry at his own foot, which he slips out of his moccasin twice to scratch. I notice he has a hole in the toe of his sock. It’s unlike my father to wear anything torn.