Authors: Frances Kuffel
Dad was listening to a book about Magellan’s voyage to the Pacific while I made Christmas dinner for him, Dot and me. My mother’s disinterest in his books-on-tape was such that he either would have put his earphones on or retired to their bedroom to listen. One nice thing about being alone with him was getting to hear the story of Magellan’s death, the price Europeans would pay for the cloves and cinnamon I was using liberally, how the fleet hobbled home in one ship with eighteen of the original crew of 270.
I wouldn’t mind being married to a man like Dad, I thought. He’s curious, a fact-collector, prone to tangents (“Giggle—Google; whatever—sixteenth century Brunei, wouldja? Were they Moslems then?”), a foodie and a traveler. He even loves to shop. I thought about that afternoon five months later when I signed an over-the-top Father’s Day card, “And that’s why I never got married.”
I haven’t gotten married because I haven’t met the right man who wants to marry me. But there may be some truth in the sentimental excesses that my brother must have rolled his eyes at while reading that card to Dad. Three thousand miles away, my father was still a great boyfriend because we are who we are to each other. He never put me to bed with a fairy tale when I was a kid, preferring to answer any questions I’d come up with lately. My questions tended to be about the atom bomb and cancer and how one dies from poisonous mushrooms, which made for some bad dreams but possibly also prevented me from being too much the little princess who sprouts into the beautiful bride. Maybe I dashed too far down Dad’s road less taken and never learned the arts of girlishness with him, but he nourished my authenticity, my selfness.
Likewise, I was purely myself with my girlfriends, and in my sneaky bad-girl giggles with Kevin and Will. And if Will and Dad had known me all my life, I’d gotten close to Celia in chance meetings with our dogs at night, and meeting Bette or Jean and Ben had been like seeing parts of myself in a mirror for the first time. And each time I talked to Kevin, it was the first oh-my-God-where-have-you-been-all-my life feeling that bubbled up from deep in my belly. Intimacy, I thought as the three us sat down to roast duck and stuffed squash, is possible and as simple as nectar from a petunia, and it deepens with time. No fake cheerfulness, no denying the demon depression, no reason not to think I will be enjoyed.
• • •
As I thought about first meetings, I couldn’t escape Dar, although he was the other living proof that deep understanding between two people can be terminated. I hadn’t spoken to him in more than half a year, but I sent him one of the couple of dozen Christmas cards I managed to write between final essays and failing to wrap or send gifts to my family. He hadn’t emailed me either, so I wondered if we were at a mutual impasse or if he was busy and trusting.
A wiser person would have skipped the card and not picked up the telephone.
“Frances! I was wondering when you’d call. How are you?”
“Okay. How are you?”
“You know. Busy. Statistics kicked my ass this semester. And everyone in the family is broke, so instead of giving presents we decided to paint one room in each of our houses for each other. I’ve been back and forth to Gilbert and Randolph and Fountain Hills with piles of drop cloths and all our gear. It’s been crazy. When can I see you?”
I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. His question was more about him than me. When could he find a break in his schedule?
“I could drive to Scottsdale,” I said in a voice low enough not to betray tears. “Maybe we could have lunch.”
“That would be great! I get off work tomorrow at two. How about a late lunch?” He gave me directions to a strip mall. I started to write them down and then quit. If I couldn’t speak a few sentences without wanting to cry, there was a good chance I was going to have a whale of a stomachache tomorrow, much too ill to get more than twenty feet away from the bathroom.
“How’s your dad?” he asked. “How’s Daisy?”
“Dad is obsessed with Magellan and Daisy’s with her Uncle Benedict and Auntie Jean, behaving much better than she does for me. How’s your mother? How’s Gulliver?”
“Mom’s good. Gulliver has been naughty, though. Each time we’re both out of the house, he goes into Mom’s room and sleeps on her bed.”
“You could shut the door.”
“Mom used to do that but it’s unsatisfying to me; I want a training solution.” One of Dar’s minimum-wage jobs before he found his philanthropic calling was training dogs. Gulliver can high-five, down-stay, and die very slowly. It was good to know the perfect Gulliver had a failing.
“Mom got him a bed for Christmas. He likes it—as long as I’m in the room with him. I don’t know where he got the idea he could get up on the furniture.”
“Wouldn’t you, if you were a dog?” I asked. “I mean, a doggie bed is nice, but your mom’s double bed is sweet.”
“I have to figure this out.”
“You should get a tiger to sleep on her bed when she’s not home.”
“Yes! That might do it! I’ve been scheming ways to booby trap the bed. Hadn’t thought of a tiger.”
“Or a shark. That would scare him off. As long as it doesn’t cause a fishy smell in the house,” I went on, considering. “I’m sure if you’re consistent about bathing and brushing it each week, and taking it to the groomer to have its anal glands and toenails clipped, the shark won’t smell too bad.”
“A shark should do it.”
“Glad I could help,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at three?”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
• • •
At two the next afternoon I wandered out of the guest bedroom in my pajamas to make a peanut butter sandwich.
“You better hurry if you’re going to Scottsdale,” my father said.
“I’m not going.”
“What’s with you and Dar these days? You don’t talk about him much.”
I sat down and turned off his four-track tape player. The monotone reader ceased his narration of the weakened Swiss banking industry. “I’m in love with Dar. He’s not in love with me. I’m crawling out of this depression and I don’t think it would be good for me to see him. I’m fat and sad and have nothing to say.”
“Humph.” He leaned forward to turn his magazine back on. “I never did see you and Dar together.”
What did that mean? I could “see” Dad and Dot together—for a while. They were great old friends and enjoyed going to Sunday brunch or having dinner together, and they liked Glenn Miller and . . .
For a while.
Then I thought of Ruth, Dad’s next-door neighbor. She was big and big-hearted, always bringing food over and inviting him to go to the pool with her. It was thank-Jesus-this and Jesus-done-that and her cooking was terrible. I had forbid my father to take up with Ruth and he nearly gagged laughing.
I could not “see” him with Ruth. He could appreciate Ruth’s kindness but she put his hackles up only a little less than she riled mine.
What did Dad “see” when Dar and I were together? The age difference? My weight? His self-containment? My moods? I was perplexed because in the big things like religion and politics, which I knew Dad and Dot had to bury, Dar and I agreed straight down the line. Dar was obsessed with
The Andy Griffith Show
and I could sometimes spend a day flaked out with whatever city’s housewives happened to be on TV, but where our tastes were different, we could appreciate the other’s sensibilities.
Or did he not sense a spark that’s different from “getting” someone? How cruel if that was true. I mean, Dar and I could have parsley sex (a nice relish but not the meal) but what could Dot and Dad do with their chemistry? I knew for a fact that they weren’t counting the hours until I left so they could get back to business.
Dar was in transit from Maryvale and I left a faint message of illness and regret on his cell phone and went back to bed and my Kindle and apricot jam on the pillowcase.
• • •
He called around five that afternoon. He was volunteering at an animal shelter the next day and going to a party that night but maybe I could drive over for breakfast the day after that? No, I said. That was my second day before leaving and I wanted to be available for Dad’s last errands and tasks. He was quiet a moment and said, “I get that. You have an infinite number of breakfasts in your life but not many Christmases with your father left.”
I was relieved. Enough that when he asked about the autumn I told him how grim it had been and then confessed, nearly in a whisper, “One reason I’m not frothing to see you is because I’ve gained so much weight.”
“You know I don’t care about that.”
“But I do. It’s been hard for me to be around people because of it.”
He sighed. “I know how you feel. I need to lose some weight, too, but there’s so little time to exercise.”
I hate that response. The difference between a forty-year-old male needing to lose 40 pounds is not in the same ballpark as a fifty-three-year-old female needing to lose nearly 140 pounds. But I let it pass. “Don’t they have a gym at the university?”
“Yeah, but, well, you know—”
He was busy. I think Dar was born busy. He probably came busting out of the womb with a Post-it note to paste on his mother’s chest saying he’d be back for his next feeding but would be over at someone’s house building a website or training a mastiff. I’d known him in the one un-busy spell in his life, when his apartment lease was up and he was waiting for a sublet in Florida where he planned to get straight, rethink his life and un-depress himself on the beach. When that failed and he found himself in hock to American Express, he headed home to his mother and promptly got busy again.
“You look fine,” I told him. “You look the same as always in that Facebook picture.”
“Maybe you’re too hard on yourself with this weight and food plan thing, Frances.”
My throat had a lump like Gibraltar in it. I always feel better when I’m abstinent. It should be an end unto itself. But with Dar, it was about my weight. So he could lose a few? He’d turned his life around in five years, was working on a master’s degree and training abandoned pit bulls to be golden retrievers. I was living on an adjunct’s pittance and random dog gigs, getting fatter. I desperately wanted to show him the other me—the thin, mountain-pounding me, the one that when I wasn’t smiling didn’t look like I was actually scowling from the fat pulling my mouth down, the one who rode the Cyclone at Coney Island ten times in a row, screaming with my nephew, just because I could finally fit. In a way, Dar had never met me.
I sniffed loudly. “I wish I was too hard on myself. If I was, I might get my ass into a 12-step room and find my ass fit the chair a lot better. I don’t like not being able to do things.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. You’re on meds, though, right?”
“Prozac. I’m up to forty milligrams. I’m better, but I have a way to go.”
“You’re gonna be fine. Frances, I gotta take a shower. I’m driving some friends around the bars tonight.”
“I have a Christmas present for you. I’ll mail it.” Last year I gave him a cotton candy machine, NIB from eBay, and he’d been as excited as I’d hoped he’d be.
That was before we’d gone to Santa Fe.
This year I got him a
Mayberry R.F.D.
cookbook. If I couldn’t win his heart, I could harden his arteries.
“You shouldn’t do that. Just let me know sooner when you’re coming. I will always find time for you. That and your Christmas cards are our tradition.”
“I’ll mail it,” I said again. I wanted to skip over the finding time thing. Until I was better—thinner, at peace, out of love—it was I who refused to give Dar the time to form any new opinions. “I’m glad you liked the card. It was a photo I took in Prague.”
“I think my mom’s gonna frame it, she loves it so much.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“I will. Have fun with the rest of your visit, okay?”
“’Bye,” I whispered, and hung the phone up as gently as if it were an egg.
• • •
There were a few dozen emails after my failure to show myself at Christmas. Gulliver continued to get on his mother’s bed and I suggested giving the shark a whip or a cattle prod, at which Dar cyber-snickered. “Be careful what you feed me,” I wrote back to his laughter. “I can live very well on a steady diet of whimsy.”
“Well, I want you to live very well, so I’ll feed you a whimsy buffet if that’s what it takes,” he replied a few hours later. Why did we flirt when he didn’t love me?
On Valentine’s Day, always a horrid day for the single woman and, probably, most men, he emailed that Lady Antebellum, whose idiot song “Need You Now” we had searched the radio for across the high desert of New Mexico and Arizona, had done well at the Grammys.
“This really is the perfect Valentine’s note.” I remembered him scrolling through the dial searching for the anthem of friends with benefits. “And now I have enough information to look them up on YouTube. She looks
exactly
how I pictured her—like a postmodern Tennille, although not quite so toothy. I don’t think this group knows what ‘antebellum’ means, do you? Because if they do, that means they’re geniuses, singing Underground Railroad songs of love. Hope you get a big Whitman’s sampler in a red velvet box,” I ended.
Five hours later, after classes were over and he could check his texts, he wrote back, “What I love about you, aside from your ability to determine a woman’s exact features through the radio, is your ability to capture the commercial essence of American Valentine’s Day in a closing wish.”
I made a joke in return as my glasses collected my tears. Email is fabulous for hiding behind jocularity, I decided. Later that day he came home and found the Christmas present I’d finally mailed off.
“I love the Aunt Bee cookbook! So awesome. I immediately shared it with my mom and she was pretty excited, too, and told me again her favorite trivia tidbit about Aunt Bee: ‘You know, she died a pauper.’ A postmodern, less toothy Tennille—heh. And carpetbaggers of love! I do enjoy your wit. And I wish you some fun.”
He loved parts of me the way mammals love salt. These days I had no one to bring out the silly in me. We were at the sticking place.
These exchanges lasted a day or two and then lapsed for a month. In March, Dar asked me more about why I’m susceptible to the Black Dog and I wrote the kind of letter Ashley Wilkes probably wrote Melanie Hamilton on each anniversary of her death. “I would like to tell [my younger self] to truly believe in herself, to be happy with who she is. I’d tell her not to be afraid and I’d tell her what decent, respectful, basic treatment is and that she should kick anyone who didn’t give her that. Being afraid and going along is the bane of my existence. I’d make up blind dates for her and I would hope she’d have a kid or two. I’d encourage her to save for old age. I wish she knew she was okay, that she didn’t have to remain the mistake she was in utero. But I’m 54. It’s too late.”