Kalamazoo & Beyond

Talk

by Cheryl Peck

I met my father in the spring of 1977 in the cab of his truck on the way to Sunday morning breakfast at his mother’s house. I was twenty-eight, he was fifty. I had lived either with him or within a sixty mile radius of his house my entire life. Our family had been making the same Sunday morning pilgrimage to his mother’s house for as long as I could remember, although I tended to avoid riding with my father because he never talked and I therefore felt obliged to, or because I found my own matching silences sullen and uncomfortable. And then, on that particular day, he began to talk.

My father is a quiet man. He has a long established history of disappearing when strong emotions flare, and my mother was a woman of strong, volcanic emotions. Later he would turn down his third offer of marriage because he had already “spent too much of my life in the garage." When I met him, my mother—his first wife—had just died, an event so…permanent…and so unlike the vibrant woman who had dominated our lives that both he and I were wobbling uncertainly toward an unfamiliar and not particularly welcoming future.

Somewhere between Hodunk and Electric City he started talking. He talked about his feelings. He talked about his doubts. He talked about his affections for the woman who had been my mother’s caretaker while she was ill. He was embarrassed to be attracted to a woman six months older than me, his oldest daughter. He was unwilling to tie her down to an older man who would undoubtedly sicken and become dependent on her while she was still a young, active woman. And it bothered him that—however unhappily—she was married, and he did not want to be responsible for the destruction of her marriage. He did not gush forth with an outpouring of emotions, but rather outlined all of these elements clearly and precisely, and I could see that he felt strongly about all of these things. And it seemed that he was, in one way or another, asking me for advice.

I was ill-suited to advise my father on issues of the heart. My own heart had just recently taken a strange and uncomfortable jog to the left, following a bent where I now understand it was always designed to go, but which, at the time, I still believed was a recoverable deviation. My hold on ‘normal’ was far too tenuous to go gaily dancing off into the netherworld of lesbianism.

Nor had our family ever been one to share intimacies easily. We never learned how. My mother was born to a mother who believed staunchly in cleanliness and good behavior and who, while unquestionably loving, was not one to tolerate much deviation from the norm, and to a father whom she adored, but whose work for the railroad required frequent travel. My father was the only boy in his family and a bitter disappointment to his father (although the man never talked enough to explain why,) and a son locked for life in the prickly and often coded affections of his mother. They were all Midwestern farm people; they did not waste words on such fleeting and foolish things as emotions. Life was about work, crops, and livestock. In our own immediate family we kept our grudges quiet until, in a burst of fury, they raged out and seared our victims like blasts from a flame-thrower and then were never mentioned again. I don't deal with naked emotions any more gracefully than the rest of my family. Faced with exposed feelings, we all try to look solemn and non-committal until they are politely covered again. Some of us are more graceful at this than others. Some of us freeze with that Oh, God, don’t do this to me look on our faces.

The day I met my father I was taken completely off-guard. I had been sitting in the cab in the semi-uncomfortable silence that had been our milieu since I was about six and finally understood that my constant chatter annoyed him. I stopped chattering. Eventually I stopped talking to him altogether. By the time I was a teenager I pointedly ignored him those rare times when he was around. He was an outdoorsman and I was an indoor child, so it was easy enough to stay out of his way. I imagined that he hated me. I imagined that I hated him. Whatever I needed him to know I told my mother, and this conversation-by-proxy worked until my mother developed a brain tumor that affected her speech and we were forced, however awkwardly, to talk to each other. Still, even her illness and her eventual death had not led to the kind of interpersonal relationship with my father that books had led me to expect. I’m not even sure why I was in the cab with him that day. After her death I sensed from him a peculiar feeling of loneliness, of being just hopelessly, unutterably lost, a feeling I did not expect to soothe, but which, for the first time in our shared lives, I understood.

And then he started talking. He seemed to assume I knew everything that had gone into this story before—that he had dated this woman, that they were on the brink of a romantic relationship which was the source of his angst and uncertainty. As he spoke, he seemed much younger than he had ever seemed before, as if he had frozen in late adolescence when he met my mother.

The man I met in his cab that day was nothing like the man my mother described.

Or, he was and he was not.

The man she described to me was her husband of so many years, the man whom she both loved and resented, was devoted to and blamed for her own unnamed unhappiness: a man caught in the endless circles of her own emotional process.

This man was in love. He was charmed, infatuated, beguiled. He was in the throes of a romance, pure and clean and untested by time or the burden of all of those things that linger unsaid for too long. And he was a man who had just lost his life partner, who had gone through the exhausting, grueling endurance test of her death and who was embarrassed and self-conscious about having ‘moved on’ so soon after she left us. (This would, of course, prove to be a weighty part of the emotional kudzu that would drag and pull on his second marriage, but none of us knew that then.)

This was a man who talked. A man driven to consider and weigh his options out loud, without ever seeing the astounded and incredulous expression of his audience. Perhaps he believed it was what he was telling me that caused my jaw to drop slightly and that dazed who the hell are you? to wander across my face. He explained his feelings in great detail that day and in the next several months, as if I could have given him any insight into his behavior that he did not have himself. He was struggling to do what was right by the woman (women) he loved. I have no doubt that he loved her. I have no doubt that he examined every angle of his feelings and his obligations to her.

I met her. Met her children. I even met her then-husband, a man who clearly loved his children and a man who was wondrously fascinated by his own maleness. He was an affectionate and giving father and the product of his own environment, where women were clearly an erosive and emasculating force. I was pleasant to him the few times we met. I was definitely a feminist, probably a lesbian, smiling and joking with a good-ole-boy from Kentucky.

Later I would learn she resented that: she felt I sat on my father’s picnic table in the backyard and flirted with her husband. Like she wanted him. Like I wanted him. (Like it would seem normal to anyone that she brought her husband along on her dates.)

He and I talked about tire swings and the transmission in his Grand Am. He wanted to sucker me into a conversation about my father dating his wife. We never talked about that, either.

He was even dating someone else, but he did not want to let his wife go. He told her should leave his house, but he was keeping the kids. She agreed. She moved in with my father, bought a couple of gallons of paint and a brush, and began painting over my mother’s influence in their house.

There was not enough paint in the world for that.

My mother was a strong, very verbal woman with a gift for making her dissatisfactions clear. My father’s girlfriend was shy, unsure of herself. I think he liked that about her: for once he had a partner with whom he felt he was on equal footing. He tried very hard to understand how she felt, to give her a platform on which she could express herself. At least in the beginning he did.

I don’t know what happened. It was not my relationship. Once my father made up his mind, he (rightfully) shifted his conversations with me to conversations with her. And then, gradually, as the tensions began to build, he stopped talking to her as well.

Their relationship ultimately did not survive, falling apart gradually under the burden of things unsaid, feelings unexpressed, but it was also a relationship tested, in its duration, by an extraordinary number of outside pressures, few of which any of us could have predicted at the outset. She would come to me and ask, “What’s wrong with your Dad? Has he talked to you?”

He had not, of course. I had discovered it was my job, as his oldest (and unmarried) child, to drop by every now and again and stand around quietly in his presence until he felt obliged to talk about whatever might be bothering him. While he was with her he rarely called me. If I did not show up, I just never learned what the problem was. When I did show up, as often as not he talked about his cannas, his iris, the tomatoes in his garden, the hope chest he was building for her niece. He talked about work, which was what my father did. He worked. He had his full-time job, and then he had the maintenance and repairs to do for himself and his mother and his new girlfriend’s extended family. He talked about mowing lawns and repairing his potential brother-in-law’s steps. He might toss out a clue here and there about his relationship like a shiny coin tossed out on the walk, and I tried to admire it appropriately, but it was a long way from What do you think I should do?

The options in their relationship died in a car accident. Her husband drove to the school to pick up his daughters and he was broadsided on the way. He died instantly. His family in Kentucky threatened to sue for custody of the girls. She was living in sin with my father: they were married quickly and quietly because he thought he had to. He took in her children because he thought he had to. She left him for a month or so to give him room to make up his mind, moved back in. He told me almost nothing about this, beyond the fact that each of these incidents happened in sequence. He was shutting down.

You cannot make my father talk when he does not want to talk. There is no silence as stubborn, nor as profound, as his when he is all done talking. (“What are you thinking?” my partner demands of me and I struggle to find words that say, “I’m not thinking at all. There is nothing in here but loud, deafening noise and this little whisper, ‘make it stop’—but there is no thinking in here at all.’)He was old enough to be her father. She had young children: his children were grown and he was done raising children. He felt guilty that he had been an inadequate father for his own children, and he did not have the skills to deal with children who were not, and never would be, his—but none of us had learned that yet.

We told stories about what he was like, our father struggling to make them funny, leaving out the times when he would not talk to us or we had committed some unexplained sin for which we may or may not ever have been forgiven. There were five of us and each of us saw him differently. We hesitated to reveal too much of our own feelings in a group for fear we would offend another sibling’s memory. He did not deal well with teenagers, never had. We took the first step-daughter who passed into teendom—and consequently mysteriously out of favor—to a skating party. We took her aside. We reassured her. It’s not your fault. It’s nothing you did. He’s just like that; he did the same thing to each of us. A few years from now you will suddenly realize he is talking to you again, that you are okay again, and that will be nothing you did either.

The marriage and all of the relationships that were built on it, did not last long enough for that to happen. He and his second wife separated. Her children moved away, still hating him. Still hating us because we never talked to them or welcomed them into our family.

For our part, we were amazed by how vocal they were about their anger. We were dumbfounded to be held responsible for things we never said. We had done our best; we had tried harder to reach out to them than anyone had ever tried to reach out to us. After they had gone, we looked around at their absence, and as the silence fell around us, none of us could think of anything to say.

I was standing in his bedroom, watching him gather his things. He was packing for a weekend boat trip on Lake Michigan. I was going along for the day. He found a packet of papers, which seemed to distract him. He held them in his hand as if unsure what to do with them. Everything in my father’s life has a place. That these papers did not meant they were new. Not entirely processed.

“What is that?” I checked, because he would not have let me see them if they were unimportant.

“The divorce,” he said. He gave me that what-can-you-do expression. Regret, perhaps. Embarrassment. Acknowledgement of failure.

If I had not been there at his house that day, he would never have mentioned it.

Cheryl Peck is a University of Michigan graduate and a retired state employee. She has published two books of non-fiction, Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs and Revenge of the Paste-Eaters and one book of poetry, Splitting the Difference. She has previously published a non-fiction piece in The Smoking Poet.