Robert Frost staked out a childhood spot as a swinger of birches. Me, I was a Frankenstein swinger. Long before I became acquainted with the book, and the fact that the scientist (not the monster) was called Victor Frankenstein, I had some pop-culture reference, possibly even Scooby-Doo, to guide me. That and my daddy.
Before the age of eight, I didn’t see my father often, except when he was “on” something called furlough, which I presumed related to the many cats slinking around our household (fur low, low fur, get it?). That said, one of my favorite-est early childhood pastimes when he was around entailed Frankenstein-swinging.
I’d only need say, with gleeful syllables “daddy, Frankenstein,” and he’d stretch his arms straight out and brutishly moan “unnnnnnh” (as I imagined all monsters were wont to do) while playfully lumbering toward me. In this case, getting caught mid-giggle meant being able to grip and swing from the creature’s outstretched arms, knees high and floor miles below, a game that tickled and amazed me. It was like having Hercules as a father — or the Hulk, another love for this child of the seventies. On some superficial level I must have thought “my papa is so strong he can move mountains,” pre-Greek mythology and literary awareness.
Getting caught mid-giggle meant being able to grip and swing from the creature’s outstretched arms, knees high and floor miles below.
So it was that I chanced to muse about my daddy on a recent sojourn down south, by family automobile, to sit with unintentionally estranged family: a gaggle of cousins, nieces, uncles, aunts.
One evening just before Thanksgiving, my partner and I sat in my uncle’s living room finishing up pizza. I’d half-hoped a Cheerwine was available, but Gatorade (uh, well, it is the new South, I guess) served just as well. Only one of my sons was inside with us as we circled around the absent elephant in the room. Talk turned from the humorous (directed at my youngest son) to the sad. My aunt recounted how I “used to sit right there on the carpet, answerin’ all them Jeopardy questions . . . then Uncle Harold came home from work and scared her off.” I’d lived with my uncle and aunt in my teenage years, when my parents had various difficulties arising from addictions and other such strife.
With one son outside forlornly on a hill that overlooked a pasture dotted with deer and the youngest eagerly petting a yappy-but-warming-up schnauzer mix, we discussed time’s inexorable passage. My aunt didn’t remember how long I’d lived with them. Note to self: I probably shouldn’t read anything psychologically into it that both she and my cousin, Melissa, thought it was longer than it had actually been.
The blatant fact was, bridges had been burned, such that you couldn’t tell any structure had ever been in place. My aunt, just like me, was no longer on speaking terms with my mother. “I refuse to talk to your momma,” Aunt Emma told me, “on account of her sayin’ I wasn’t a good mother . . . .” I could tell she was biting back tears, even though her daughter, Jessy, had died more than three years ago.
I agreed with my aunt’s reasoning and told her so: “I understand not talking to my mom. You don’t have to repeat what she said, ’cause it was sickening.”
From my mother, we moved on to a discussion of my ailing father. Only then did my fear-bubble get punctured, when Aunt Emma said, “So your daddy won’t be here neither.” In that split second, an iron apron had been lifted from my soul as it had lain like a patient etherized on a table.
The last one-on-one conversation I’d had with my father, albeit over a telephone, coughed up to me in a kind of percolating miasma. “Why didn’t you call us when you got in?” he growled. Then a dial tone as he hung up on me, for not the first time.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to say one of the many biting but truthful things I could’ve, such as “Well, Dad, I don’t want my young children subjected to your and mom’s arguments, dishonesty, abuse, and toxicity . . .” Just as a sort of deviled-egg appetizer to kick off the hootenanny.
That was well over a decade ago. In that time, no words had been issued in their direction, at least not from me. My father, on the other hand, called my in-laws’ answering machine early this year, when the uncle who’d tried in vain to tutor me in higher math died. He laid all our dysfunction out there on the line in one little sentence. Rue dripping, he snarled, “I thought maybe you’d care to know that [Uncle Terry] died, at least more than you care about us.” Then a parting sarcasm, “Thank you and you have a nice day.”
There’s a line from Plath that goes “Every woman adores a Fascist . . . the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you.” I’m tempted to think all my illusions of daddy adoration are gone.
So at the recent get-together with Aunt Emma, my uncle goes on to tell me that my father is retired and disabled, but both waits on and still enables my mother (“cause she ain’t got no other family,” my aunt reminds us); my mother “clearly has some mental health issues, maybe dementia, she just shuffles her feet like this [my uncle demonstrates].” I can’t feel surprised or validated or even relieved. (Sad and panicked for my future, yes.)
“You know me,” my uncle continued, “I ain’t gonna BS you. You live nearer to [my parents] than any of us. If your daddy goes first. . . .” the voice of Uncle Harold, of whom I’m no longer afraid, trailed off.
Then my aunt’s words lifted me up again. “You know, I think get your daddy away from your momma and he’s a different person. You could have a relationship, if you wanted one. . . .”
That night, though not directly asked, I didn’t agree to be given a back-up key to my parents’ too-large-for-them home. Yet I tell my aunt and uncle I will be a contact point, should something happen to one or both of my parents. But not until after I’ve questioned, not completely unseriously, “I’m not gonna get shot [if one of them needs help and I’m called], am I?”
There’s a line from Plath that goes “Every woman adores a Fascist . . . the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you.” I’m tempted to think all my illusions of daddy adoration are gone. Though in the end I might feel like the brute monster for saying so.
