If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (12 page)

When Harriet’s turn rolled around, she stood as the others had all stood. But when she spoke, she stared out over our heads, as if alone. Her hands clasped in front of her, she said nothing at all about me. Not that I was cool. And not that we had been friends. She only said that the most important thing to remember was that wishes
made correctly
do come true. Always.

“Even when you think it’s impossible,” she said. “Even when you think that it’s too late.”

Then she looked at me. With those eyes that seemed so powerful they could will away anything in her path. She just stood there, motionless, staring into my eyes, conjuring with her gaze her own determination, those tales of her capture, the smell of crushed flowers and lemon juice, the feel of my words seeping through my skin, spreading out into my veins. The fantasy of putting things to rights. She looked at me until I could feel something like belief again take root. And then Harriet Elliot blinked; and I was gone.

Gaining
Ground

M
Y DAD DIED
on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
. But it isn’t truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.

It was about a month ago, and you’d think I’d have figured out by now which way to put it. Harris says the whole worry is stupid, the whole question of how to put it, because it makes it sound like I’m debating some point of causality, as if the two events were in some way related. Linked. Which they obviously were not. The water ran electric because the house was not properly grounded. Because my electrician is an asshole. And always has been. And ought to be shot. Or at the very least not be an electrician anymore. My father died because he walked in front of a train. On purpose. Like in a movie. Like Anna Karenina. Because he was a whack job. Mentally ill. And always had been. No connection. Unless you think having a lousy electrician you don’t fire and a lousy father who offs himself is some kind of connection, which even I do not think. So in the end it’s just timing. And timing is nothing, meaningless, a slim quality to build any conclusion around.

That’s Harris’s point, anyway. That timing isn’t everything, like people say it is. It’s bull. And that’s Harris pretty much all around. Harris is a piece of work. Forty-seven years old, pretty fat now, he’s got these lingering tufts of leftover hair sprouting all over him, any which way. He’s got skin like badly mashed potatoes. He’s got eyes like he knows perfectly well he’s wrong. About everything. All the time. And couldn’t care less. He works in quality control at the local paper plant. Which is a joke, since neither quality nor control, nor any imaginable combination of the two that does not involve adding the words “lack of” or “out of,” can be applied to him. And he is just who you would expect to take you on about something like this. Just exactly who you would expect to pull the plug on trying to find meaning in anything. While he leans into my fridge, scrounging, foraging, investigating, making himself at home, taking it upon himself to debunk phenomena like coincidence. Like timing.

I used to be married to Harris and I know Harris well. Last year, just about halfway through realizing he had turned into a walking, talking laundry list of human decline, I threw him out. Harris. His cigarettes. His underpants. His poking through my food. His need to talk me out of things. Out he went. Still, he comes back around to see our daughter, Allison, who’s four now. Or at least that’s why he says he comes back. That is why Harris claims he is still always around. The fact is, though, that there is only so left he’ll ever agree to be. Only so thrown out. Only so gone he ever gets.

“Don’t you believe in anything?” I asked him, right while he walked suitcase number one out my front door.

“Nope,” he answered me, standing there under a streetlight, his luggage kind of tilting him with its weight. “Nope.” He shook his head. “Not a goddamned thing.” And Harris, he just walked away, as they say, into the night.

H
e was the one I called. When it happened. My father. The water. All of that. About which fact I have nothing to say. Except that old habits die hard. And that if I could remember which part I told him first, I might have some idea about this whole how-to-put-it question. Either I told him my father was dead, and then that I had been bathing Allison when the bathwater shocked us both. Or I put it the other way around. I know that Allison was screaming bloody murder, dancing this awful naked wet jitterbug of fear around my bedroom. Wouldn’t even let me towel her off, because she didn’t want to be touched. By anything. Ever again. Ever. And I had this phone in my hand. This phone that had rung just as I was reaching for it, so I just answered it and said hello. And then a man asked me, some man on the phone asked me if I was my father’s daughter, because if I was, there had been an accident. It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.

“But I was just going to call you,” I said. Then I heard what was being told to me, and I asked, “What kind of accident?” And then I took that in. The train, the dead, the my-father-is-over part. And then I called Harris. And told him something. I’m still just not sure exactly what. But I know I told him to come. I know I did that. So this one’s on me, I guess.

Having a parent die who is crazy is different from having a parent die who isn’t crazy. I know because I have had both kinds, and they have both died. My mother was just so normal you couldn’t even be in the room with her and Dad both without losing all belief in God. In anything. In anything that made sense of anything. It just all seemed too impossible. Which, if you ask me, is why I married the king of nothingness in the first place. Why Harris’s essentially unpleasant view of the world as a random and pointless sphere held some appeal. I mean, she was nice, my mom. She was pleasant. She was a mom. Picture a mom. Go ahead. You get the idea. Picture her cooking meals, coming to assemblies, chatting on the phone with her other mom friends. Walking the dog. Making your teacher smile at pickup at the end of the day. Making your teacher like you more. Nice. Normal. Smart enough. Pretty enough. But not too pretty. A real mom.

Now you explain my father to me. What he was doing in that house with her. When he was there. Or in those wedding pictures. Or on my birth certificate. You go ahead and make some sense of that, because I have pretty much given up. My earliest memory of my father was of visiting him in a linoleum room, little windows, bars on them, long tables, scattered with art supplies. Construction paper. Clay. Pipe cleaners. Glue. I must’ve been about Allison’s age. Four, maybe three. I know I’d met him before that, because it wasn’t like we were introduced or anything. That’s just the first image I have of him. In the Art Room. At the Place. He had made a picture for Mom. A collage she admired like it was mine. Which it easily could have been. Red paper, shiny foil shit glued on it. It ended up on our fridge. And there was a woman there on a sofa who stared at me the whole time. That’s all.

That’s the whole thing. My first memory of my father. Except he isn’t even in it. Not if you look carefully. He isn’t there.

When I met Harris, in a bar about ten years ago, I was just twenties, young twenties, and he was the first person who ever said to me “So what?” when I told him about my dad. I was going on and on about how bad it’s been, about this horror and that, how many times he was in the bin, how long he stayed, which birthdays Dad missed, and what graduations he ruined. And Harris, he just hoists a beer and shrugs: “So what?” I guess that was love. Not his saying it. Me hearing it. “So what?” I heard freedom in that. Like a great big chalkboard eraser getting rid of all that shit. So what. That won me over. Until I got sick of it. Then really sick of it. And then threw him out.

I mean, it’s hard to build a whole life around someone saying “So what.” Frankly, I think nine years was a pretty damned good stretch.

S
o I called Harris that night, and I called my same asshole electrician too. But the difference was that when I heard the electrician answer the phone, I just hung up. Then I pulled out the yellow pages and went for the biggest, glossiest, most expensive ad I could find. The kind of ad that has about sixteen phone numbers listed, according to time of day. Emergency and all. And that was the one I called. Because this was an emergency. I mean, for God’s sake, if electric water isn’t an emergency, what is? For one thing, not my father at that point. That much I had taken in. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help him. Which was actually not news; there had never been anything much I could do for him. But it was official now, in some way it had never been before.

“It won’t kill you,” the guy said who answered the phone, and right away I liked that I had never heard his voice before. I kind of trusted that quality in him. “You’re not in any danger. The house isn’t going to burn down. And you aren’t going to be electrocuted if you need coffee or something. Water. Maybe wear rubber gloves. Wear rubber shoes. Sneakers, maybe. I’ll come in the morning. By eight. I’ll be there at eight.”

“That’s good,” I said, hearing Harris let himself in downstairs. “That’s great.”

T
he whole father-daughter thing with Allison and Harris gets me down sometimes. Sometimes it’s like I should have done better by her, gotten her a better dad. And sometimes it’s just facing that there’s Harris in her, Harris genes, Harris thoughts, Harris God knows what that’s hard for me. Like her being upset when he moved out. Like her being so happy these days when he comes around to see her. Like him being able to reassure her that night, when everything I did just made her scream and dance around. It’s like I spilled something on her. Harris juice. It’s like she’s stained. Like there’s something that connects them, wherever I send him to live.

“You gotta go anywhere?” he asked when I came downstairs, those great big hopeless eyes of his staring right at me. And there she was wrapped in a towel, a towel Harris found who knows where, happy, happy, happy sitting on his lap. “You gotta deal with anything?” he asked, and I shrugged.

“Where is he?”

“Morgue. Hospital,” I said. “Morgue, I guess. In the hospital. I don’t know.”

“They need you to identify him?”

“No one said. I have a number to call.”

“You should call it then.”

Allison had her head turned away from me, buried in Harris’s big chest. Her hair was starting to dry, springing into its little curls. My curls. Her father. Harris. It’s all just unbelievable sometimes.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go call now.”

M
y mother died just right. Which is to say, it was horrible. She got a terrible disease, had a series of unspeakable treatments, fought like hell, and lost. It took about a year, and it was just the worst thing ever. It was so miserable, it worked. It counted. It hurt like hell. Like death is supposed to do. My mother died and everything was sad. Ba-
buh
ba-
buh
ba-
buh
ba-
buh
ba-
buh
. Perfect. Her name was Alice, and I had Allison the next year.

This wasn’t like that.

The man on the phone said that yeah, I was supposed to come identify my father, and I was supposed to tell them a funeral home to call too. To take him away after I gave the okay. While he talked, I flipped from
E
for
electrician
to
F
in the yellow pages. I went for the biggest ad again, and gave him the number.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know those guys. They’re good.”

“Good,” I said. “See you soon.”

And then he said what I suppose I should be glad he said. He warned me about what I was going to see. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

“Huh. Yeah.” I kind of let that point in. That aspect of this night. “Yeah, I guess he would be,” I think I said. And that was pretty much that.

O
ne view is that Harris is too rational for me while my father was just the opposite. Completely irrational. The kind of guy who notices one day that the newspaper on the porch is lying at a funny angle, and then it’s just counting backward from ten before he’s back in the Place, doing Art. Just a matter of days before my own little masterpieces are crowded out by his creativity on the fridge. That’s the view that says Harris was a reaction against my dad, but kind of an overreaction. And that’s the view I take when I think that there has to be someone out there for me. A man. That Harris is too this, and my father too the other. And that what I need is a middle man. Not a pathological debunker. And not a lunatic. Just someone who thinks, Well, yeah, maybe things mean something but maybe they don’t mean much more than that. And maybe sometimes nothing means much of anything at all. But maybe it does.

I want a man who thinks the way I do. It scans. It’s short. But it does scan. Ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
ba-
duh
.

I
’m not going to talk about what I saw at the morgue. Not now. Not ever. But it was him. He was right there this time. And trust me, there were no art supplies. No glitter, no glue. Just my father. In this memory, he is there. They gave me his watch, his wallet, and the medical alert bracelet he had on, with my name and number engraved on it. A Timex, seven dollars, and my own I.D.

Harris had Allison all tucked in and dreaming away when I got home. He asked me if I wanted him to stay. I didn’t, but I thanked him anyway. Because he had helped. And because he didn’t ask me any other questions before he left. Part of me was thanking him for that. For just not going into it. Not being all that interested in the whole thing. His strongest, maybe his only, attribute. So what? His great attraction. At times like this, I still get the appeal. He grabbed an apple out of the bowl on my counter and let himself out, with the fattest part of the fruit headed toward his enormous mouth.

Marriage is a funny thing. Even when it’s over. Maybe especially then.

I
n the morning, when Allison woke up, she came in to find me in my bed, just like every day, and climbed under the covers beside me. I wrapped my arm around her, at first just out of habit, but then I started kind of feeling her, feeling for the shock that had rippled through her the night before. I stroked her, I squeezed her, checking for some change in her skin, in her flesh, in her bones. Something left in her of the way that she had jumped and screamed. Something left of the current that had flashed through her. But nothing seemed different. Nothing at all. I tucked her little shoulders under my arm, and let her head relax onto my chest. She had screamed to me, “It stings, it stings,” and I had snapped at her to stop complaining. “Oh quiet!” I’d said. “Stop being such a baby!” Yeah. Mother of the year. That’s me. And then
bzzzzzz
, right through my own arm.