Letting Go
When I think of my father I always think of his beard. Or the absence of his beard, since I was in high school. The day he shaved his beard was the end of my childhood. He was no longer teaching high school history and English then, he was wearing a three-piece grey pin-striped suit and working for Merrill Lynch as a stockbroker. I have a photo of him, in this attire, standing on our back deck on 75th Street. Mom was probably up in Seattle, working at Digital Equipment Corporation, Caitlin was standing next to a barre at Pacific Northwest Ballet, flexing her feet. Josh was somewhere out with friends, kicking a soccer ball up at the park by Strohecker’s or splashing in the muddy green water of the Columbia.
My father asked me to take a couple pictures of him with his Nikon, outside on the deck to the right side of our house. I was taking a photography class that summer as I never seemed able to fill up my hours. I would sleep as late as I could, 9 or 10am, and wander into the kitchen looking for cereal or yogurt. I never ate fruit in those days. Bananas, apples, and oranges were all mysterious and undesirable to me. Occasionally I would nibble at a summer strawberry or blackberry, or if someone peeled it for me, a slice of fresh peach. I associated fruit with labor, when Mom would take us to my grandparents’ house, or out to Hillsboro or beyond Dundee, where berry farms and peach trees lumped up the scenery with their rows of green, red, black and brown. We would carry our boxes and pails out to a set of rows far from the other pickers and drop into the dirt and shadows. Our hands grasped for one berry after another, yearning for a cluster, slipping the occasional warm sweetness into our mouths.
I waited for the phone to ring that summer. A friend asking if I wanted to play tennis, take a picnic to Washington Park, or one of the families I babysat asking if I was free that weekend. I was always free. I would sometimes walk to the top of our street and wait for the Tri-Met bus, #57 headed for downtown. I would sit by myself, or if it was crowded, wrap my arms around a pole. I watched as we passed the streets I knew as well as the length of my legs and began the descent between the set of hills on either side of Highway 26 that preceded the tunnel into Portland. I would get off on SW 10th street and climb the steps of the Multnomah County Library, where twenty years later I would perch on the same stone steps with my two children, waiting for the Rose Parade to pass us by; the floats decorated with hundreds of multi-colored roses, ambassadors and princesses and rodeo queens waving left-right, left-right at the crowd, their beatific smiles rewarding us for our patience.
I preferred the marching bands. The girls and boys in their matching leotards, skirts and pants, their spurts of energy as they performed a short routine and then collapsed back into formation for a walking-rest. The trombone and drumming you could hear coming from blocks away, a thrum building upon itself like ancient troops in formation nearing the border.
My father is looking at the camera with his mouth slightly open, as if he was telling me something. How to set the filters perhaps, or where to stand to capture the angle, the best light. He was not a vain man, and there was an ironic lift to his chin, as if he had only reluctantly agreed to pose. He still had his beard, and it was trimmed neat at the edges, different from the messy bird’s nest I remembered pulling on when he held me on his lap in the summer evenings in Cambridge. I remember never wearing shoes then, and my dirty feet twisting against his dark jeans, my cotton dress sticking to my legs, the frequent nakedness of his chest in the humidity, and the peace I felt in the twilight resting there against it. The other people at the halfway house were all shadows and laughter, the burst of fireflies, and the crunch of grass under sandals. My mother was somewhere in the house. Her presence was always known to me, as constant as the apple tree in our backyard that bore fruit annually, despite our lack of attention. I remember how the lawn beneath it would be smattered in light green droppings, turning into a mush of brown as we all let the bounty linger there into fall.
Soon after taking the photos of my father, I came home late from babysitting one night to find him smoking on the deck. In the darkness I sensed that something had gone missing, like a furtive cat, chasing a bird into the neighborhood behind us. My father turned to greet me and brought the cigarette to his lips. That is when I saw. The shape of his chin, the alabaster smoothness of it, his teeth when he smiled, yellow-stained and crowded. The moon was in crescent and the smell of rain edged the air. A car spun on gravel outside the front of our house.
“You shaved your beard off,” I mustered. He blew out smoke, a small, tender trail that hung in the air.
“Yes, it’s more professional, as a stockbroker anyway, don’t you think?”
He had never needed my adulation. He was aware he was not my hero and did not pretend to be something more. He hoped however for my forgiveness, and to be considered fondly, as ridiculous as that would have sounded to even himself if spoken out loud. There would have been no one to listen then, and there is no one to listen now.
There were so many instances I had tallied up until then, age 14 or 15, where he had done what he wanted, careless of others. He never spoke of any of it and when asked, he would close his mouth as if he had swallowed the sharp tip of an arrow. My father had spent his whole life it seemed to me, hiding any emotion that would belie the exactness of his self-immolation.
I had been holding on to his beard as some portent of possibility. The innocent image of my father as a younger man, when he may have begun briefly to trust himself, to confide in others. To care for his children more than he cared for his own poorly defined sense of self, his need to be admired and desired, a vast and cold emptiness that was never filled. A time when he didn’t behave badly, his heart confusing his mind. Plots devised and execution of them that he could never reverse.
“Is that the only reason?” I asked. And in that moment, I slipped out of my childhood self, and into my middle-self -- the young woman who would spend thousands of days trying to discover who she really was, apart from her father, apart from her mother, apart from her siblings, apart from everything she had thought she could count on, and everything she had lost. It was only much later that I realized how the body can feel emotional damage as if it has undergone physical surgery, where there are knives and scissors and drugs to put you under so that you don’t remember the cutting, so that you don’t feel the ache of the missing organs, the stitched-up wounds, the vacuumed tumors, the lost and replaced blood -- until you wake up. And there you are, looking down at your bedsheets, gripping on to the side rails, observing the change of weather out your window, and the pattern of beeps on the machine next to you, with only one choice in front of you, one primary focus. To heal.