A Good Father

As she drives she explains to me that she married my father because she knew he would be a good father. I listen by closing my eyes to her words. I take in her scent. It is a subtle scent, not flowery or over powering. It reminds me of when I was a child, and she would tip- toe into my bedroom and I would awake to her as she kissed me good night after coming home from a party or dinner with my father. It was the perfume she wore for special occasions. I breathe her in, now. She is my mother. She is wonderful and beautiful yet she causes me great anxiety.
The night before I had complained to her about her over dressing while she laid out her clothes and rubbed face cream into her freckled face. When I was a young child I would try and count all her freckles on her face, but now I have come to realize that her freckles are fading with age, and I cannot tell if some are age spots or if some are still freckles. My mother has beautiful creamed skin. She does not look like the other Italians in our family with their olive skin and black hair and eyes.
I watched her under my bangs, as I sat on her bed while she languidly rubbed the last of the face cream on to her freckled arms. There was stillness to the silence between us, her eying me from her bedroom mirror as I picked at my finger nails, pretending not to notice her staring at me. She wanted to talk to me about something last night, I knew. I sensed it but I flopped down on the bed and started going on about how she didn’t have to dress –up, and how she always makes a production about everything. When I met her green eyes in the bedroom mirror I saw her tears.
Now as we drive she wears a pleated, navy blue skirt, and a white silk blouse, with one of her silk scarves wrapped around her neck. The scarf was one my father had bought her that past Christmas, a Hermes with big lily flowers painted in gold and white. The perfume she wears is Joy, a symphonic floral. It comes in an elegant square bottle and it is from Paris. To me, it does not smell of flowers, but an earthly manifestation. To breathe it in, I feel as if I am touching the center of the universe. I am feeling my mother’s core. My mother’s essence bottled and stored. When I was a child I would dabble the perfume behind my earlobes and feel her presence, feel her strength, feel as if I could do anything in the world just by breathing in this scent that has become my mother.
She has a thing about French stuff. She use to sell French wines for a living but she hadn’t married a Frenchmen, nor knows a word of French. She speaks Italian, like the rest of our family as her second language, because in her world everyone should speak a second language. I can’t speak Italian. I can barely speak English correctly, as I am told by my father, but I have attempted to bumble my way through four years of French, a language she wanted me to learn.
“Couldn’t you have worn sweat pants or a pair of jeans like a normal mother?” I whine, pulling my black sun-glasses over my eyes. “I mean for god-sakes, we will be in the car for 8 hours, who the hell is going to see you, for Christ-sakes.”
“I don’t see were God or his son has anything to do with my dressing,” she snaps.
It is a warm humid summer day, a real Chicago summer where the heat makes you
sick to your stomach, like drinking warm coca cola, a stickiness that makes you want to vomit. This was the only time we could make the trip to Ohio because it was a convenient time for my mother. She felt well enough to make the drive. I am already sweating. It wasn’t going to get any better because our car does not have air-conditioning. My mother didn’t feel the $ 300 dollars to fix the air-conditioning for our “big adventure” was worth the investment, but buying a $300 dollar outfit for the occasion was.
My mother ignores my comments and continues to tell me her story. She mutters something in Italian as she tries to remember where she was in her story before I interrupted her. I tap my fingers on my lap, wanting to turn on the radio, and tune her out. I close my eyes and let the hot air blow on my face from the open passengers’ window. I am the little prince, flying from planet to planet. I am touching the sun with my fingertips. My mother’s voice takes me to a place where nothing else matters, where my joy comes from knowing when I open my eyes I would see her, and she would tell me everything I ever wanted was in the palm of my hand. When I was little for my bed time reading when I was around six she would read me the story of the Little Prince, not in French of course but the translation version in English. It gave me nightmares. I would awake in the middle of the night screaming. My mother would run to my bedside and comfort me, and tell me that it was only a story, the little prince a finds his way home. She would take me in her arms and tell me everything would be alright and in the morning we would go on a big adventure together. I would fall asleep in her arms, her words lingering within my dream state.
Sometime I wonder when she gets stuck with words and forgets to complete sentences if it has to do with the recent chemotherapy treatments she has to undergo to fight that ‘bloody thing,’ her words, that now grows in the womb that once housed my sister and me. If I could, I would lacerate the damn thing that has entrenched itself in my mother’s womb. I would kill it if I could. I’d tell it to fuck off and never come back. I told this to my mother when she informed the family last winter she had cancer. She laughed and told me to watch my language as she delicately twirled her pasta on her fork, and swallowed hard and said that only the uneducated use foul language. There were no tears that evening; it was as if she was introducing a new family member, which later with all of the late night trips to the hospital and discussions on the next step in treatment, it really did feel as if there was another person in our family—an intrusive one, but very much a part of the intimate circle of our family of four.
I yelled that sometimes fuck is the only word to describe a particular situation, and plus Shakespeare was the first to coin the phrase. If there were too be no tears that evening, there would be a lot of swearing and yelling on my part. I could not believe how calm my mother was being about “the bloody thing” that was growing inside of her. I could not believe how calm my father was being as well. I wanted to jump up from the table, and shout for a reaction. But I stayed seated, and laughed at my mother’s commend on my erudition, for knowing that Shakespeare had coined the word fuck.
It was all so surreal, and ironic her telling me to watch my language, coming from a woman who when pissed off will shout every curse word, in both English and Italian, and use every hand gesture that goes along with it. That night she did not curse, she did not cry. I watched her eat her pasta, elegantly, smiling over at my father, who sipped at his wine, and looked out the dining room window that reflected the next apartment to ours: cold red brick that separated our two worlds. We did not know our neighbors. I wondered that night as I reflected on my father’s blank stare what they were eating, and if anyone in their family had cancer. I fell asleep that night thinking of the Little Prince and how scared he was with his adventures to find his home again. I cried myself to sleep, squeezing my eyes so tight, in my darkened room, a million points of light reflected through me. I was infinite in my own space. I was outer space. Darkness had invaded my home, my safety, my love for my mother. I pictured “the bloody black thing” growing in my mother’s womb. I blasted it with my mind. I wanted it gone.
I am wearing for my college visit a red silk short skirt and a black blouse with black boots and a black leather jacket. I refrained from wearing my fishnet nylons, and opted for black tights. My mother’s comment when seeing my outfit was that I was going to sweat wearing an all-black outfit in the middle of summer. She was right of course and I was already sweating as we made our way on to I-95, but I was punk-rock, and I had an image to uphold.
None of my clothes are from French designers; all of them had been bought at local thrift stores. My mother does not understand my look. She does not understand how she has made it her job to refine my tastes by instilling culture from our world travels together and influencing me with being proper and well- groomed by sending me to France for the last three summers to educate me, and in her words “to instill a sense of class, as well as to get me away from the ordinary.” I tell her that I know how to use a bidet. She laughs, and shakes her head and says “a $6,000 investment and that is all you got from three summers in France.”
We cross into Indiana. I turn up the radio. She turns it down. I start to sing to myself, she interrupts me and tells me to listen. I want to take a nap, to block out the mundane landscape of the 1-95: the brightness of everything, and the unspokeness that lingers between us. I glance at her profile as she concentrates on the endless expressway. She continues to tell me about how she first met my father. It was at a party. She first noticed his well- tailored suit he was wearing, and despite that at the time he was a social worker for the city of Chicago, and broke he still dressed as if he had some money. My mother was also a social worker at the time.
Sometimes it is hard to piece together my mother’s stories. She often goes off on a tangent, like now as she tell me that she didn’t want to go the party at first, but had nothing better to do, and she had gotten into a fight with her mother, and wanted to get out of the apartment. My mother did not have her own apartment at this time. She lived with my grandparents as the custom of Italian families until she married my father. I can picture the fight they had—things being shouted, maybe even thrown, my grandmother crying at the kitchen table that nobody loved her and my mother running for the door. My grandfather would be on the couch, his false teeth lay out in front of him, watching T.V, ignoring the fight, and if it got too loud he would turn up the volume on the T.V to block out the yelling that was going on between my mother and my grandmother.
I want to ask her what she was wearing but instead I picture what she might have been wearing; a black dress with pearls, something smart and well cut. Or maybe something green, to match her red hair. Her hair was probably piled high-on top of her head, and she was wearing a low heel pump. Again, I glance at my mother. It bothers me that I didn’t get her petite nose. I do not understand why she married my father who has such a big nose. Did she not realize that most daughters inherit their father’s looks? I say this to her as she drives, interrupting her story, at the point where she is telling me that she was there with a friend, and at first she thought he liked her friend, but he asked her to step out on the porch to have a cigarette with him. My father has recently quit smoking for my mother, to help fight the damn thing that has taken over her body.
“Why you are telling me this, she asks. “You have a beautiful nose.”
“To you,” I say, looking out the window. I press my forehand to the glass; all I see is a vastness of land. I feel overwhelmed and sick to my stomach. I want to roll down the window. But I can’t for the hot air of outside will do nothing to elevate the pain I feel inside. I unfasten my seat belt and crawl to the backseat, and lay down on the backseat, pressing my cheek to the vinyl seat. I close my eyes to my mother words. Somewhere around one of the turns is my college. A place that I chose from a poster I saw on one of my high-school hallways. I have this intense feeling to be somewhere else. I cannot explain my pain to my mother. It over takes me, it is physical, mental, and emotional. When I think of the thing taking over her body, sometimes at night I gasp out in pain as if I am suffocating, as if I too am dying. I am dying. I feel it, I too feel her pain. I am like that. I try to move out of my own body. At night, I pretend, again I am the Little Prince flying; flying away from the internal void I feel whenever I think of the black thing taking over my mother. However, to pretend that everything is normal, it is just another journey, another trip I suppress my feelings of dislocation, and continue my journey with my mother.
‘You are so god-dame dramatic,” my mother shouts. She pulls at my hair from the driver’s seat, not turning her body or taking her eyes off the road. It is just her arm, and extension of her body that I feel pulling at my hair. “Get back up here and keep me company.” I do what she says. I refasten my seatbelt and continue to listen to her story.
“I married your father” she continues, “not for his nose, but for his brains, and his kind nature.”
My father is very smart, like my sister, academic challenges come easy for them. My father is a thinker. I too am a thinker, but not logically, like my mother we tend to go off our gut feelings, intuition she likes to say. When I was accepted to college she told me she had a good feeling about the school. I had made the right the decision. There was no logic in my application. I saw the ad, liked where it was, and because it had an Equestrian program I applied. I didn’t even research the school. I ride horses. I have since I was six. Horses are my way of being, and my mother and father have invested thousands of dollars in me, not to be a great rider, but because they both knew it made me happy.
My mother knows that horses are the only creature that can truly calm my soul. When I touch them all my worries, all my insecurities, all my fears vanish. For a brief time I am invincible. I am infinite; my fingertips are only light and feel. This, I have confessed to my mother, and she is the only one that understands my love for the horse. She is the one that cried with me when my first horse died. She held me, and let me cry and she told me to love so hard is a good thing. To let a love take you over is a good thing, to feel the pain of love is a good thing.
She made it possible for me to ride my horses. She took me to my riding lessons. She bought me my first saddle. She came to all my horse-shows. She got up at the crack of dawn to give me something that no other could give me. She did it because I am her and she is me, and despite my anxiety over my mother—she is my mother, and I am a reflection of her—I am her extension to life.
There are some days I feel nothing, but when I ride, I escape from the mundane reality that my mother is dying even if she will not admit it, even if she continues to move her legs and mouth, even if she continues to think she will blast the bloody black thing from her womb, give birth to it, and everything will go back to normal. And yet while her womb grows swollen and painful, I can only watch in silence. There is nothing I can do, but ride my horses, and go to school, and pretend.
I glance at my mother again; her glasses are perched up on her hair. It is not her real hair. It is not her thick red hair that I would grab hold of when I was a child and pull at thinking it was a wig. I would laugh at her hair, telling her it reminded me of Bozo the Clown because it was so red. She laughed too—saying I was Bozo, and I would say, no I don’t have red hair. Now my mother wears a wig. She lost all of her red hair, six months ago. I heard her cry to my father through their closed bedroom door. I heard him say that he had not fallen in love with her hair. He had fallen in love with her brains. I heard them laugh, and then the muffle sounds of their love making. My parents I know still make love. I know my father fell in love with my mother’s wit and charm, and her intellect. I know he feels her pain every day, but he is a stoic man, and he does not show his emotion like my mother or me. My sister is a shadow in all of this—I do not even know she is around most of the time. I see her at the dining room table while we have dinner, but I have no words for her. Our sense of grief is too overwhelming to even communicate any love we might have for each other.
My mother does not believe she is smart. She feels she is a failure because she dropped out of her graduate school for a man. The man was not my father, but a Jewish boy who would not marry her because she was a catholic. My mother confessed to me once that she never felt complete. She always felt lost, and maybe that is why she traveled so much, she always felt she was running out of time, but when she became a mother is felt whole. She said to me that finally she understood what Plato meant in his writings on love—“that we all seek a union of one’s soul in order to form a union that will make one whole again.”
My father studied philosophy in graduate school, the study of the soul, as Socrates writes. My father was a solider, and came home from war, knowing that some questions can never be answered, and his pursuit for higher education did not resolve any of the hard questions of life for him, it only reaffirmed for him why he was an atheist. When I think about the soul, and god, and love, and the meaning of this life, I scare myself. I scare myself into not thinking. I think of jet-black dots, taking over my soul. I think I am drowning from my own fear. I feel too that I am running out of time. I feel as if I want time to stop, to take a breath, to relax for a moment and regroup, and then very slowly start again.
I have for months been taking bits of my mother’s hair that I find in the bathroom sink or on her bed pillow. I put them in plastic baggies, hiding them in my underwear drawer. It is as if I am a kleptomaniac, an impulse I do not really understand. I wait until no one is around and then I steal in to her room, and brush all of the hairs into little baggies. I do not know what my mother would think if she ever found my baggies full of her lost hair. She already thinks I am a bit weird with my punk rock look, and sulky personality. She hopes I will outgrow both. She tells me that once I get laid I might be less sulky.
I don’t want to talk about my father, but it appears important for my mother to tell me her story of falling in love. I am fine with it just as long as she does not tell me about their sex life. My mother is very open about sex with me. I was told on my last trip to France that under no terms was I to lose my virginity to a Frenchmen. It is a running joke with my family, because there was no chance I was going to lose my virginity in France because the boy I had fallen for turned out to be gay. I think my mother in some way planned it, willed it; some secret mother power still protecting me even while I was thousands of miles away. When I had complained to her that I was unlucky in love, and that is why out of all the boys I had meet on that trip I had fallen for a gay boy, all she had to say was “ there was no logic to love, and love does not make sense even to your father.”
My father didn’t agree with my mother sending me away to France every summer through my high-school years. In fact they had bitter fights over it. He said I was too young, and due to the political turmoil going on between the Arab nations and the world, and the recent hijacking, he was concerned for me, being that I was only fourteen the first time my mother packed me off to be stay with some family in the south of France. I was to be their Nanny for the summer. I was not scared. I wanted to go France I thought I might find my true love, which might be the older cousin, or the friend next store. I was fourteen with braces on my teeth and my chances of finding true love that summer was remote. The kids hated me, and I spent most of my time riding their horse. When I reported back to my mother her only comment was that things have a way of working out. What a better summer then to be in France and riding a French horse, plus improving your French.”
My father wanted me around, he wanted to know I was safe, not trumping around the French country side on some strange horse. I wrote to him every week, explaining that he had no worries. I had fallen in love, again, with of course, a horse. He wrote back saying that was the best love to have. In the end I came back alive, and improving my French no more than if I had spent the summer hanging out in Chicago, and riding horses at the local stables in Morton Grove. I learned that summer that memory is magic, and I even now as I listen to my mother I think of that horse. I think how I galloped him through the hills of southern France. I breathe in his scent. I remember how he felt under my fingertips. How I cried when I left to go home, knowing I would never see him again. He was a big chestnut with a flowing brown mane. He made my summer, and I spoke perfect French to him.
I continue to stare out the window listening to my mother talk. I picture myself riding a horse across the openness of the land that parallels the expressway which we drive. I picture myself as a frontiers woman, making my way into a new territory, staking my claim to a new land. I picture myself any other place then listing to my mother’s words. Her loquaciousness is exhausting to me. I feel selfish for not wanting to hear about her love for my father. I am ashamed for not being more interested, but all I can think about is myself, and what I am going to do without her. How will I define my own being without my mother’s guidance?
“I first noticed your father’s hands, my mother continues. ‘You know your fathers hands are well defined, well - manicured, not stubby, and fat like some men’s. I think on this, and have to agree with my mother. My father has very nice hands, strong, with nicely shaped finger nails that match his strong hands.
“He was smoking a cigarette and going on about the labor movement, and how we all had to organize a union. And all I could do was look at his hands, and wonder what they would feel on my body.”
I close my eyes, and listen to the car wheels along the express way. I like telling stories. I like making stuff up to get a reaction out of people to see if they will believe the story. I like making up stories to tell my mother. When I got back to Chicago from my first trip to France, I told my mother that I had gotten drunk on red wine with a boy from town. We had met on one of the bridle paths while I was riding. He had stopped me and asked my name. He took me to a clearing where sunflowers grew along the side of the road, and kissed me. We met every day until I left to go home. My mother at first believed me, asking me what his name was, and what he looked like, and as I explained to her that his name was Pierre, and he had brown hair, and hazel eyes, and he was tall, and spoke perfect English. My mother eyes grew wider, and she took off her glasses, setting them on the kitchen table, and as I continued to tell her the story about finding true love in a field of Sunflowers—she interrupts me and says—‘Lynn, that is beautiful story, never ever forget it, but I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Why?” I had asked.
“You would never have gotten off the horse.”
We had both laughed. She was right. I would have galloped past him, and laughed that his name was Pierre. I am told I have my mother’s laugh.
I think of the story of the Little Prince, and when he first meets the fox, the fox says to him, “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” I continue to listen to my mother tell me her story, and I think of my father. I think of how love is invisible, and how with one touch, one glance, one first kiss, everything changed for my father.
“I fell in love with your father that night, she said with a sigh. I fell in love with the cadence of his voice and the softness of his kind hands, and how he talked to me not at me, as if I was his equal. But it made no sense Lynn, it took me off guard. I was at the time dating a man, who did not want have children, but I wanted to get married and I wanted children. I always knew I wanted to be a mother.”
Despite the darkness in the car, I know my mother is crying. Recently she has been crying more—she has always been a sappy crier, the type that cries over touching commercials, endearing movies, inconsequential stuff that I would never cry over, but lately, I find her crying more, especially over my father.
“How did you know it was love?” I ask her.
She swallows her tears, “he told me on the porch that he wanted to be a father. It was like our paths crossed, as if I knew that he was the one, as if I knew this was meant to be.”
I reach for my mother hand, in the dark. I do not want her to feel alone at this moment. I feel alone for her. I feel as if her love for my father is what at times keeps her going. Her love for his brain, and his tender nature, I know it is a passionate love they share. My father too has said the he married my mother because he wanted to be a father, and that is the only reason to marry. I wonder if fatherhood answered some of the questions that philosophy could not. For my mother, she did not dwell on the questions of life, she felt them. She felt them too much. She felt the ugly black thing growing inside of her every day—a thing that would not produce life, and thing that would take her life. A thing that would kill her.
“You will promise me Lynn one thing,” she swallows hard as she makes the turn into my college driveway, “When I am gone you will take care of him.”
My mother and I have had this conversation before. The first time was in the hospital. And now as we sit in the car in the dark, she brings it up again. “Lynn you have a stronger nature then most, you process your emotions differently than most. “
Again I let her talk, it is her story, and I am the audience.
“Lynn, promise me,” she asks again.
I think of my father before we left on our trip. His grey-blue eyes showing his concern “make sure if she gets to tired you do the driving.” I gave him a hug, told him that everything will be fine, everything will be great. I could tell he did not like me going away again. I could tell he was only doing it because my mother wanted it. I picture myself riding my horse, jumping into fields of the unknown. I picture myself as the little Prince, blasting off into space—I hold tight to my mother’s hand in the dark. I will myself not to cry. I breathe her in. She is huge and infinite. She is my mother.