Father
Photo by Isabel Ames
He wears a tight, white Abercrombie & Fitch shirt. He speaks loudly, obnoxiously, to a restaurant full of diners who glance up and back down uneasily. He tells the cool air that he is hungry, that he has been fasting the whole day—hasn’t even drank water—and brandishes an unopened water bottle around in the air, presenting evidence. The lean muscles in his arms and chest stretch his shirt this way and that.
This man sits himself confidently at the table directly to our left, and immediately involves himself with the people on his other side, a party of four Indian thirty-somethings. He leans sideways across his table so that he hovers over theirs, and talks with an accent I cannot place, something European.
He speaks as if imparting wisdom—about his ex-wife who left him, about the wheelchair she uses, and something about Jesus. He does not care that they avoid looking at him in the same way that I avoid looking at people who ask me for money I do not want to give. Between each fact he sits back into himself, thinking, before clearing his throat to add something else.
At the table closest to the entrance, a friend and I keep our heads low as we have been conditioned to do in situations involving men who forgo social cues. I stare hard at my clean silverware and will him not to speak to me.
“I’m paying for their meal,” he says, pointing at us with one hand and flagging down the waiter with the other. The nature of his beckon—lacking eye contact, patronizing—reveals a presumption that it is the waiter’s moral duty to obey him.
I feel his gaze. “I have two daughters, you know. Two twin daughters. They’re all grown up now. But they won’t talk to me anymore. They tell me not to come home, they say, you know, ‘Our mother, too. She hates you. We hate you.’”
His eyes are wide, and he speaks as if he is telling another man’s story, a story he finds hilarious and unbelievable.
“But don’t worry, I will sleep at the hotel. I have money. I do not worry about that.” He wears a watch that makes me think he is telling the truth.
He refocuses and gestures at us again, nodding.
“I’ll pay for your meal because my daughters don’t want to see me. So you’re my daughters for now.”
He laughs, “Get whatever you want, because it’s on me, you know. Get everything.”
He looks away, to the table at his right, and points at the plate closest to him.
“What is that?”
“Chickpeas.”
“Hmph.” The buff man asks the waiter for chickpeas.
—
Usually, I find this kind of behavior, particularly from older men, repulsive. This time, something that forces me to imagine my own father in his place, intruding into a restaurant to tell anyone who will listen about how his daughter—an intelligent, beautiful young woman—hates him. He would admit once overhearing his daughter laugh while detailing the exact intensity and breadth of this hatred to a friend. He would also talk about his life before her birth, and how full of calamity it was. It would be a story of never-ending suffering, and it would describe losses and abuses of all kinds. He would probably be drunk. I picture this and I am humiliated. I wonder if the loud man’s daughters are ashamed of him, too.
I wonder if their apartments are also littered with unopened boxes, expensive things he has bought for them, things that have nothing to do with them and which they do not want. I wonder if the man also says, at every chance he gets, that his daughters’ birth was the greatest day of his life, and if he, too, couldn’t bring himself to cut the umbilical cords for fear of hurting them. I wonder if his daughters also stopped saying “I love you” to him when they were 13, and if they think about this with regret while looking at VHS footage in which he bounces their small bodies upon his strong legs and laughs with a joy that only fathers understand. I wonder if it makes them cry.
—
The man eats and shows me his driver’s license, slaps it on my table and eagerly pushes it towards me with one finger, providing proof of his age, 63. He is proud to have been born on the same day as Princess Diana. He repeats himself, as if I don’t believe him. I see that he is from New Jersey.
He reminds us that he is not trying to pick us up, that he is old enough to be our father, and that this is why he is paying for our dinner. He mentions that his daughter works on the 69th floor of the Empire State building, and that he loves her even though she doesn’t love him. He makes a joke about the number 69.
—
I think about my father and how he loves his daughter even though she doesn’t love him. I think about how he is far older than 63, about when he will die. Often, I think about him as if he is already dead.
Photo by Isabel Ames
Some nights, I sit on a particular bench at the Brooklyn Bridge and mourn his imagined passing, visualizing the way I will fall to the ground and weep when I hear the news. I will grieve terrifyingly and disgracefully to make up for the way I reprimand him every time he mispronounces the word “salmon” or breathes loud enough for me to notice. In order to immerse myself in sufficient sorrow, I turn to a memory in which he sits on this bench, holding my mother’s bag for her, tightly, for fear that someone might try to take it. Sweat glues blonde hair to the top of his pink head, and the sky is orange behind him. He smiles.
In that same spot, I work on a letter whose honesty arises only from the pretense that he is already gone. I will never show this letter to him because I am not willing to present such a sad man with an inventory of the ways he has wronged his family and how they have wronged him back; those are the kinds of divulgences my cowardice and I save for a time when he can no longer respond.
The letter begins, “I forgot about all of my happy memories with you.” It is filled with words that describe me as “vicious” and “cruel,” and phrases like “failed you” and “never forgive myself.” It apologizes for many things—misdeeds and acts left undone—and contemplates what it means to devote, to deserve, to understand, to miss, to betray, to hate, and the like.
The letter also disproves the oppositional nature of love and hate. Its characters masterfully walk the line between love and hate and reveal their divide to be nonexistent. Rather, they are two forms of passion, and when thought of this way, love and hate find opposites in indifference or apathy. I am comforted by the idea that an indifferent, apathetic individual would not spend their nights crying over someone on a public bench, and that following this logic, the way I feel about my father is closer to love than perhaps I had once thought.
Many things are not included in the letter, such as how I acquired the scar on the back of my thigh hopping a chain-link fence after my father threatened to kill himself. It forgets about when my small hands could only hold one or two of his large fingers, and about how overjoyed I was to be clinging to him so. Similarly, it avoids the time I watched those thick fingers quiver upon the steering wheel of a truck we drove across America, accompanied by the clinking of poorly hidden bottles sliding across the floorboards.
Other, impalpable moments—represented by things we did not, could not, would not do for each other—are missing.
The letter ends, “I’m sorry,” and is signed, “Daughter.”
—
In the morning, apart from the bench and its phantoms once again, I ignore his texts and tell him I am too busy to call. I tell myself, shamefully, that only after he is gone will I open the hundreds of emails he has resorted to sending me.
I think about love, wonder what it is.
—
Luckily, the man who has barged into this Punjabi restaurant on the corner of First Avenue and 13th Street to break his fast defines love as “sacrifice.”
I think about Job. I think about how God bet Satan that even if Job lost everything, Job would still love God. God let Satan kill Job’s oxen, his donkeys, his sheep, his camels, and his servants. God let Satan kill all of Job’s children. And yet, according to the Bible, Job still loved God.
To give and lose and give and lose and to empty yourself still—that cannot be love, I think. That is addiction. I think about everything that my father sacrificed for plastic handles of Smirnoff, and everything I have not sacrificed for my father.
To the loud man, love also means that “when someone is down, you pick them up.” I think about an Al-Anon meeting where I learned the phrase “gratitude is a verb.” It means that if you love something, you will act like it. You will keep your car clean, you will eat vegetables, you will hug your father more than once in five years, and he will not have to ask you to do it.
—
The well-intentioned hostess, who has been monitoring the man from afar, tells us that the table we had previously asked for in the back of the restaurant is now ready. I consider signaling that we’d like to stay, but I don’t. We move away from the tragic man, and let the hostess explain why his daughters, once again, are leaving.
He does not protest, dropping his head instead. As I walk away, the thought of his familiarity with moments like this makes me ache.
—
Quietly, he continues eating. I do not—cannot—look back at him.
Inside my stomach, sorrow and her daddy play “Ring Around the Rosie,” and I hear them sing to me about how we all fall down.
I hear the man wish someone next to him a happy birthday before finishing the rest of his meal quickly. He pays, tipping 20%, and exits.
I wait until long after he is gone, until after his table is cleared and re-set, to turn my head back towards his former seat. I think, curiously, that the space and its stillness looks worse, dead, without him.
When we ask to box up our leftovers, the waiter tells me that our meals have been taken care of.
—
Later, I hide in a corner thinking about the man in the tight, white shirt and my father and what I have done to them. With my eyes closed, I tilt my head upwards and beg the universe, for their sake. I do not know what I am begging for, whether I am begging something within or beyond, but I do it nonetheless.
This piece was included in our inaugural print issue, Taboo. To explore this edition of MEUF Magazine, please visit the issues page.