Later, in the car, headed toward the high school, my father identifies the mystery caller. He flexes and bends his gloved fingers around the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. January is turning to water all around us. When it freezes again, it will be dangerously slick. I remember seeing the parking lot of the Rite Aid rush into my face last year, and the sting of it on my palms. “The person who called,” my father says, “was a woman.”
There’s a silence from him then that seems to suck the air in the car into it. I look at the side of his face. My father’s hair is silver now—the color of dirty money. He’s handsome. He does not look weak. When did he stop looking weak?
“Yeah?” I ask, and I know I sound surly. I’m a teenager. I’m not sure where my little-girl sweetness went. Like the weakness of my father, it simply vanished. I woke up one morning and it was gone.
He swallows. “Well. She is a textbook saleswoman I met at the office. She wants me to go to dinner with her.”
I laugh out loud, then cover my mouth with my glove.
“Does that upset you?” my father asks, still looking fixedly into the firing squad in front of him.
“Hell no,” I say. “Why shouldn’t you go out with women, Dad? I’m thrilled you scored a date.” I even touch his hand on the steering wheeclass="underline" that’s how much of an open-minded and supportive eighties kind of kid I am.
My father laughs a little to himself then, and it sounds like the laugh of a panicked man on a packed elevator, the needle dropping too fast, but not fast enough to scream yet: He still has to keep his cool.
“Good,” he says, lightening up. He’s wearing a tan coat over his blue suit and a red wool scarf around his neck.
“She’s nice,” he offers, tossing one hand in the air in my direction, as if throwing confetti, and I recognize my moment—this intimate space we’re in and its potential for personal profit. Don’t all teenage girls come equipped with radar for this?
“But, Dad,” I say, “if I don’t like her, do I get to give you as much shit about it as you give me about Phil?”
He checks the rearview mirror, puts the car into park in front of the high school, and sighs. Then he looks at me and says in a docile voice, thick with tongue, “I guess I should quit giving you what-for about Phil,”—making quotation marks in the air around “what-for”—“is that what you’re saying?”
I raise my eyebrows and hum, “Mmm-hmm,” and try to sparkle at him as I give him a quick kiss good-bye and bound out of the car.
I realize now that I’m playing the part of a vivacious daughter with a stern, worried, widowed father—although my quite-alive mother could very well be waiting for us right now back at the deserted ranch.
Would she care if, when she came back, my father had a girlfriend?
Was my mother a jealous wife?
Had she ever been? Had my mother ever had that feeling I used to have when I’d see Phil leaning up against his locker, some other girl—maybe Bonnie Pinter, who never wore a bra, whose lips were always wet and parted in a kind of permanent blow-job invitation—giggling into his face?
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he’d say when I accused him of flirting with her. “She’s a hose bag.”
But I’d feel as if someone had stuffed my throat with cotton. I couldn’t stand to think of him thinking of someone else. I could turn a corner in the hallway of that high school and see him standing in the glare, talking to Mickey, just Mickey, my best friend, and find myself riding that downward slope in my stomach, like a child on a tricycle, out of control, rolling down a hillside while something inaudible screamed inside me.
Had my mother ever felt like that?
When my father takes off his glove to wave good-bye, I see he’s taken off his wedding ring. Just yesterday, at the dinner table, it was there.
I FEEL SURE THAT MY MOTHER WAS NEVER JEALOUS, SURE SHE did not think for one moment that another woman could take an interest in my father. To her, he must have seemed like the last man on the face of the earth any woman would want. Isn’t it why she left in such a hurry, didn’t even bother to take her purse?
Getting stuck with him wasn’t even worth money, or credit cards, or lipsticks to her.
But he had been a jealous husband.
Once, at his golf league’s end of summer picnic, my father drank three beers too fast before the hot dogs were done and, flushed, sweaty, longing to brag to his buddies about something—all of them richer men and better golfers—he’d blurted out, apropos of nothing, “My Evie hasn’t gained a pound since we got married.”
The other wives at this picnic gasped, feigning admiration, hyped-up envy, when all they really felt was dull loathing for my father, his boorish bragging, his drunken flush, and for his wife’s slender body, sighing at her, “Oh, you make me sick,” as if it were a compliment as their horny husbands looked her over slowly, and the hot dogs sizzled in their skins, and a mirage of fertilized heat hovered above the green. My father’s cleats glinted in the sun, which set itself like a big red face in the west. Annoyed, my mother chewed a sour ice cube out of her vodka tonic and shot a look in my father’s direction like a spray of silver thumbtacks in the air.
But what my father noticed was the looks the other men sent her, not the one she sent him. He wanted to brag, but he didn’t want them to covet. He didn’t understand why they would. Didn’t they know she was his? He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew all about Thou shalt not stare at thy neighbor’s wife, and wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be polite.
And what were women to my father anyway? Hadn’t he always been the kind of man who sees a rolling pasture, forty acres of wildflowers and red-winged blackbirds flitting from cattail to cattail in their brilliant epaulets, and thinks what a nice golf course it would make, where he would lay the sandtraps, what it would be like to ride those mowed, green hillocks in a cart?
So, on the drive home from the picnic, he sulked.
My mother looked out at the passing landscape, all blurred edges in the twilight and August fog, and refused to ask him what was wrong—a little woozy with vodka, waiting for him to talk the way you wait for the dentist to stuff a piece of cotton between your lip and gums.
“I don’t like those guys looking at my wife,” he finally blurted out.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t point me out, then, and encourage them to look,” she said.
Silence.
He was thinking about golf courses—
Blackbirds and cattails and loosestrife once grew wild in the hills all over Ohio.
But what my father wanted was a smooth ride in a small motorized vehicle over domesticated pastures, plastic golf flags snapping in the breeze as they led you cheerfully from fairway to fairway, hole to hole.
THE GRANDMOTHERS MADE A BIG FUSS OVER MY FATHER AND me for Christmas. They stuffed our stockings with athletic socks. They made rice pudding. They played carols on the stereo all day, as if to drown out the white noise of a winter afternoon with shouting.
“HARK the herald angels sing . . .”
All day, a standing rib roast hissed and spit in the oven. The smell of scorched flesh, the domestic torture of a burning cow made our mouths water for hours before we ate it.
Phil came over with Mrs. Hillman just before the grandmothers piled the table with meat and relishes and pudding and bread, and they pretended that Mrs. Hillman was not blind, and that my father did not treat Phil like a mortal enemy—staring when Phil wasn’t looking, then looking away when Phil looked back.