Page 54 - WTP XII #3

My father didn’t like me, or so I’ve always chosen to believe, which meant I joined a long list that included his father and brother, bossy women, asser- tive women, most men, blowhards and braggarts, bul- lies, stale bread, cold beer, Picasso, organized religion, zealots and politicians.
Dad was an artist, a prolific and skilled painter, sculp- tor, jewelry maker, and craftsman who continued to produce work into his eighties, albeit unsung and un- known. He shuffled off this mortal coil over ten years ago, without a parting word for anyone, clutching any secrets or regrets he may have harbored to his bony bosom as stubbornly as he had in life.
“He was on the spectrum, right?” my older sister will sometimes posit.
“Which one?” I will ask.
“Highly functioning autistic? Highly functioning As-
perger’s? Highly functioning something.”
Terms that weren’t in the lexicon back in the 50s and 60s when we were growing up. Dad was just Dad.
As adults, we hope for some explanation, to discover he was missing a vital father component, by birth or conditioning—the empathy gene perhaps. We resist admitting what seems more likely, that he just wasn’t that interested in being a husband or father.
He wasn’t abusive. Just distant, unreachable, what we might now call emotionally unavailable. I can’t recall a hug or other intentional touch. There were no endearments. An I love you would have been more freakish than snow in San Francisco.
He seemed most content when left alone. So, we gen- erally did just that. And as often happens when one parent is required to be task master, disciplinarian, General Factotum and Surgeon General (titles Dad assigned to our mother), we idolized our distant, taci- turn father and craved his approval and attention.
My sisters and me—I’m in the middle—are all well past sixty now. When we’re together, reminiscing, one of us will occasionally ask, “Do you think he loved us?” A question that hangs in the air, unanswer- able.
The youngest, ever the optimist, tends to break the silence. “He must have, right?” she’ll say, or “I’m sure he did, he just...”
She was always Daddy’s favorite (my opinion), per- haps because she was so unlike him. Trusting to his suspicious, bright-eyed and perky to his squinty cynic.
My assigned role on these occasions is to scowl and heave a beleaguered sigh, prompting one of my sis- ters to say, “Oh God, you look just like dad.”
We miss the old curmudgeon.
Regardless of what he may have thought of me, if anything at all, my father is in me. I carry his DNA— flat feet, bunions, sensitive stomach, thin lips and square jaw. He’s in me in other, less tangible ways too—beliefs, values, aesthetic sensibilities. And he’s all over my face, in expressions and reactions only my sisters now recognize.
~
After retirement from teaching art in a San Francisco middle school, Dad moved to the outskirts of Sonoma with his second wife. She made it clear that, in mar- rying our father, she was not assuming the mantle of “stepmother.” For all their years together, she re- mained “Dad’s wife.”
Their home was a ninety-minute drive from Sacra- mento, where my sisters and I gravitated after col- lege. During his final decade, we visited more often than in previous life chapters, when we had all been variously consumed with marriages, children, di- vorces, careers.
We shared a hopeful desperation. That there were thoughts and feelings our father would eventually share—that he was proud of us, that he loved us in his own quiet way—something, anything.
I longed for words from this man, evidence of emo- tional attachment, any iteration of the heart-warm- ing, affirming scenes I’d wept over in films and books.
47
The Green Man
doRothy Rice