Wild

The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There is his love of Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers. There are the chocolate bars he brought home from his job in a grocery store. There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world. But even that is marred. He said this only when he was trying to woo my mother back, when he was claiming that things would be different now, when he was promising her that he would never again do what he’d done before.

He always did it again. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.

My mother packed us up and left him and came back, left him and came back. We never went far. There was nowhere for us to go. We didn’t have family nearby, and my mother was too proud to involve her friends. The first battered women’s shelter in the United States didn’t open until 1974, the year my mother finally left my father for good. Instead, we would drive all night long, my sister and me in the back seat, sleeping and waking to the alien green lights of the dashboard, Leif up front with our mom.

The morning would find us home again, our father sober and scrambling eggs, singing that Charlie Rich song before long.

When my mother finally called it quits with him, when I was six, a year after we’d all moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, I wept and begged her not to do it. Divorce seemed to me to be the very worst thing that could happen. In spite of everything, I loved my dad and I knew if my mom divorced him I’d lose him, and I was right. After they broke up the last time, we stayed in Minnesota and he returned to Pennsylvania and only intermittently got in touch. Once or twice a year a letter would arrive, addressed to Karen, Leif, and me, and we’d rip it open, filled with glee. But inside would be a diatribe about our mother, about what a whore she was, what a stupid, mooching welfare bitch. Someday he’d get us all, he promised. Someday we’d pay.

“But we didn’t pay,” I’d said to Vince in our second and final session together. The next time I saw him, he’d explain that he was leaving his position; he’d give me the name and number of another therapist. “After my parents divorced, I realized that my father’s absence from my life was, sadly, a good thing. There weren’t any more violent scenes,” I said. “I mean, imagine my life if I’d been raised by my father.”

“Imagine your life if you’d had a father who loved you as a father should,” Vince countered.

I tried to imagine such a thing, but my mind could not be forced to do it. I couldn’t break it down into a list. I couldn’t land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like the whirl of white on the YOU ARE HERE poster behind Vince’s head. He was one giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I feared I’d never find myself inside that great white swirl.

“What about your stepfather?” Vince asked. He glanced at the notebook on his lap, reading words he’d scrawled, presumably about me.

“Eddie. He detached too,” I said lightly, as if it were nothing to me at all, as if it were almost amusing. “It’s a long story,” I said in the direction of the clock that hung near the YOU ARE THERE poster. “And time’s almost up.”

“Saved by the bell,” Vince said, and we laughed.