{"id":144013,"date":"2020-04-01T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144013"},"modified":"2020-04-02T09:38:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T13:38:56","slug":"fathers-sway-above-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/01\/fathers-sway-above-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Fathers Sway above It All"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My father: my savior, my best friend, my confidante. Funder from afar of gymnastics lessons, giver of \u201ckissies\u201d over the phone, called me Princess, called me Peter Pan, photos of infant me sleeping on his chest, love of mine, I love you, dad. I call him with my good news, I call him with my bad. Picture him this way first, eyes squinting to nothing when he smiles. See his Vietnam photo with his hand raised like a wave or maybe saying stop<\/em>, baby-man in combat, up all night forevermore drinking it away. Understand our lineage: newspaper clip from the early 1900s, Clem Bieker given ten lashes on his bare back for \u201cwife-beating\u201d but the whipping post did him no good. Say it runs in the blood, say it\u2019s a generational disease, and it is, it\u2019s all of that, our curse. Understand my father\u2019s boyhood, hiding under tables while his father beat his mother. See him old now, body stooped, still unable to sleep, half a mind at war, ready for the next bomb to explode. See him hold my son with awe, hands shaking, hear him ask about my daughter, whole voice alight. See him this way first because it\u2019s how I see him, somehow, despite everything.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

After my mother left me when I was nine, I was made to give a testimony in front of a judge about our life and answer questions. I answered every single one truthfully. I don\u2019t remember what I said, only that I was honest. That\u2019s what my father told me to be. I was not in trouble. I just had to be honest. \u201cTell them what she put you through,\u201d he said on our drive there. He had appeared the day before as if my desire itself had conjured him, picked me up and bought me new clothes for the occasion. Clean socks pulled up to my knees, a pale-yellow cotton shirt. Nothing smelled like me anymore, or like my mother\u2019s cigarettes. There he was, my father, with me, there for me, saving me. He had flown to me from his job an ocean away, and it was time for the truth about my mother\u2019s alcoholism. It was time to remove me for real, court approved. He had to make a grand gesture now that she had actually left, his letters with survival instructions at the bottom no longer enough for me to get through the dysfunction: If things get too bad there, remember\u20149-1-1.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Riding with my father, in the haze of my mother\u2019s new goneness, I wondered, has he changed? Was it all a dream, the things he had done in front of me, the way my mother and I had once ran from him, hid under a semitruck in the parking lot of a state fair watching feet walk by, holding our breath for each set of feet because they could be his, and would he kill her this time? The man next to me crunching cinnamon Altoids could not have done that, or could he? Maybe it was my mother\u2019s fault after all, making him that way. She pushes my buttons, he always liked to say, as if my mother had a special ability to summon the monster inside him. But she did seem to have that special ability. I had seen her say the very things we both knew would set him off many times. The traumatized child\u2019s brain just wants logic, wants predictability. I was no different.<\/p>\n

When my mother did not show up to the court hearing, I was given over to my father. I remember my grandmother and the way she looked at him with admiration. She liked to say often that my father had \u201cstepped up.\u201d But he felt it would not serve me to move around so much with his job. He worked long hours shifting to new projects every few years, and who would watch me? He\u2019d have to hire a nanny. He\u2019d have to look at me each day and figure out what to do with me. This scared him. He did not want to be around me so much, for fear of what could happen. I understood the fear clearly. I, too, did not want to be around him for more than a visit. For longer than it would take for the pork chops in canned tomatoes to be eaten; for several visits to Madame Tussauds and Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not!; to collect double samples at Costco and call it lunch; to buy a half a year\u2019s worth of school clothes and, his obsession, a good winter coat, the puffier the better\u2014he might not be able to conceal himself any longer. During the testimony, I was honest, but I never mentioned my father. It felt easy, good in fact, to leave him out of the story completely.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s absence in my life has always haunted me more than my father\u2019s abuse, which is why I suppose I wrote a novel about a mother leaving a daughter. The father is off the page, a figment of memory, a floater in the eye. For a long while I have not been interested in fathers. I should say, I have not been interested in examining my own father through writing. Didn\u2019t I sign a pact long ago during that car drive to the court house, perhaps a silent agreement to let it go, let it be, be cool baby? Women are all nuts, he liked to say, and he\u2019d look at me special as if to say, but not you<\/em>, and I\u2019d laugh along with him, exempt from the women he meant, all those reckless button pushers.<\/p>\n

But now, I want to write this out of love. Love, I have learned, does not mean staying hidden. Sometimes love brings it all up, gagging and ugly, to the rock-strewn shore.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

After the judge awarded my father custody, I settled in at my mother\u2019s parents\u2019 house. My father, back at work an ocean away, began a routine of Sunday-night phone calls. I didn\u2019t want anything more. Each night I looked forward to bedtime when I could go deep into my world of imaginary siblings: my twin sister, Claire, and our older brother (whose sole purpose was to bring around cute older boys and whose name now is not a part of my memory). They understood our parents and our situation. I was not alone when they were there and we could huddle under the covers. We knew in our bones that our mother would eventually return for us and it was consolation enough to drop me into a thin and ragged sleep. We were like children in movies, wise and crafty, so much smarter than the adults.<\/p>\n

At my grandparents\u2019 I ate chicken sandwiches on whole wheat bread for lunch and drank cool, clean water from glasses with little stars on them. My grandmother penned a swooping heart on my lunch bags. Home lunch like the rich kids. I didn\u2019t hang out at the liquor store after school each day anymore, watching the little TV in the corner for hours on end while my mother looped her skinny arms around the owner\u2019s neck, sometimes sitting on his lap behind the counter. The owner\u2019s wife would emerge from the back to offer tea-leaf readings while my mother drank big plastic cups full of whatever they could spare that day. She was like their child and I was an accessory of hers that was very, very good at staying quiet.<\/p>\n

I wanted sometimes to break away from my grandmother as we headed into Savemart to shop for our wholesome groceries, and let the owners at the liquor store know I was still alive, that my mother had left and was with a strange man in Reno, but we were not dead. They were always worried about her dying. I\u2019d send him heart messages: Don\u2019t worry! I\u2019d mind-transport Claire over to tell him, and later she would report back that everything was fine.<\/p>\n

But eventually, as years passed, so much more time than I ever imagined my mother would be away, I didn\u2019t think of the liquor store quite so often. I didn\u2019t think of those three years I was alone with my mother after she had left my father or the times before that, the things I\u2019d seen my father do to her when we lived in Hawaii. Did I remember the time I begged the police to help us and my mother looked them in the eye and said there was nothing wrong in our home, black eye glistening? In a community college English-class journal my mother\u2019s concerned teacher writes in the margin, You need to leave him! Think of what this is doing to Chelsea. <\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/em><\/p>\n

In time, the before-life was reduced to small shocks, little daytime nightmares like it all had never even happened, or if it had, it had happened in some other realm, separate. My grandparents\u2019 house was lovely with blond-wood vaulted ceilings, a huge white-tiled island in the kitchen, a certain smell that even now, the house gone to other people and horrifically remodeled from its beautiful airy state, I wish I could smell once more. The smell of order, the possibility of biscotti baking, natural light twinkling off the glass prisms hanging in the dining room window. A mansion to me then, a palace. My mother had always made me feel like her accomplice, a partner in the show of her life and not a child at all. But now I had escaped. My mother was still out there in the shit but I had become accustomed to my fine nutrition, breathing unsmoked air and wearing matching separates from the local department store my grandmother loved, Gottschalks. Also, I had a deeper meaning now, something neither of my parents had, something that I had tried to push on them for the majority of my youth, mailing Bibles with desperate pleas that they get saved tucked into the pages.<\/p>\n

Church was nonnegotiable with my grandparents even though each Sunday morning before service my stomach would cramp and pull me into my knees on the ride there, begging to turn around. We never turned around. I can\u2019t go, I\u2019d wail. Can\u2019t stuck in the mud, my grandmother would say, her outfit pristine, her hair a gorgeous architecture of blonde swoops. I was so unassuming that the youth pastor reintroduced himself to me each week, as if he\u2019d never seen me before in his life. From the bleachers in the kids\u2019 group, I\u2019d sit alone or with one other girl named Ally. If she was not there, the entire thing was ruined. But slowly, in that huge gymnasium with booming music, it began to seem my old life could barely have occurred at all. And here was another way paved in gold. I took to the story of the Lord as if my life depended on it.<\/p>\n

If I wanted to ever breathe properly, to ever achieve my goal of salvation, I had to let someone off the hook. I could not manage an expanding anger for both parents at once. And God was here to say that I wasn\u2019t really entitled to be angry at anyone at all, and I should just forgive. And my father was never the person society, or perhaps biology, had taught me to long for in a mother anyhow: protector, mender, teacher, soft and loving warm shoulder, there at bedtime, desireless body housing the solutions to my needs. My father could have any number of desires, but my mother\u2019s desire was in direct conflict to my safety, in conflict to the idea of \u201cmother\u201d I had been taught I deserved. She desired alcohol and terrible men, it seemed. Her desire was not desire, of course, but addiction, but the labels don\u2019t matter in the actual movements of living and growing up. Action, regardless of origin, looks like want.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Anything fathers do that is not abandonment or abuse is lauded as extraordinary. My husband, wearing my son in an Ergobaby and pushing my daughter in the stroller could stop traffic for miles, people screaming and clapping out their windows at him for being such a wonderful and resourceful man, caring for his children!<\/em> And when I do the same thing, on a daily basis, and do it in the grocery store, boob in baby\u2019s mouth at the same time, I get no response, or perhaps even: \u201cHe\u2019s too big to be in that thing still, isn\u2019t he? Or, \u201cUh-oh, someone needs a nap,\u201d when my daughter howls for fruit snacks, the comment not directed at my daughter at all but instead at me, the thoughtless mother who didn\u2019t nap my child at the right time. But my husband, holding a screeching animal of a kid, is endearing, astonishing, a man caught in an act of selfless courage.<\/p>\n

\u201cFathers,\u201d Mona Simpson so beautifully writes in her novel My Hollywood<\/em>, \u201csway above it all, tall trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My daughter loves workbooks. We do them together. Recently a lesson presented itself about the difference between facts and opinions. Here\u2019s the fact I do not use as an example, but I think it: Growing up my father beat my mother. It is the opposite of opinion. In church or with my grandparents, I tried not to think about it. In church, I was told that God heals the past completely, so I took this to mean \u201cforget it all.\u201d Or else I would be the punished one, the one at fault. But I am coming to understand that we do not, will not, forget. Things rise. Lately they sit on my chest at night, pressing me down. I feel them move into my hands sometimes, a tingly shake. I write these memories into essays, and delete the parts about my father. But now, I want to get it all out. I don\u2019t want to carry it any longer. Can I put it here? I hope.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My mother and I called my father the \u201cticking time bomb.\u201d After an explosion, a beating, a display of violence, my father would have about two days of remorse and denial before he began to climb toward the red zone again and the bomb would go off. It was so predictable. All she had to do was smile at the waiter. All she had to do was buy herself new Jordache jeans. All she had to do was exactly nothing. My mother and I spoke of my father like we were necessary passengers on his ship, like comrades working side by side. I was her equal, her protector. I held hope we might get away from him. My mother seemed to wax and wane with her seriousness about leaving, something I could not understand as a child and something that infuriated me. Back to that system of logic: If someone hits you, you should leave that person. It felt true to me then, watching her be brutalized regularly. When we finally did leave, when I was six, I thought yes, now real life can begin. But being beaten for years and years and told you are worthless, worthless scum leaves its mark. My mother, without my father around anymore to remind her of these things, sailed into further destruction. Sailed farther away from me.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an adult woman. I\u2019m in my thirties now and my partner does not beat me. He has never laid a hand on me, has never said, Fuck you, or called me a worthless slut, or a bitch. He has never cut my clothes with a pocket knife or wrapped the long strap of my purse around the steering wheel of the car as I drove on the highway. He has never dumped my bag out on the ground in a crowd, he has never hit the back of my head exclusively so that the bruises wouldn\u2019t show under my hair. My husband has never done that. My father did that to my mother. Did he? Could he really have?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to be trapped anymore by the story of my father. My good father, my father I love, the story of my father that we painted over the past once my mother was no longer around. I wonder if my hands are big enough to hold the two truths of him\u2014what he has done and what he has done. I do not see a bad person when I look at him. Only sometimes do I see him spitting on her crouched body, throwing a plate against a wall, pushing me out of the way so he could get to her. Sometimes I see both the good and bad side by side, inseparable like two snakes entwined. I know that my father\u2019s goodness does not negate his actions, though when I was a child it seemed it did. On our biannual visits, sitting on a bench in San Francisco, cracking crabs and eating with our hands, laughing and telling jokes, I wondered if I had completely made up the years of abuse. He was able to settle into this idea, too, I\u2019ve always believed. He liked the way I would never mention that time. When he said, as he still to this day says, \u201cI just wanted us to be a family, but your mother didn\u2019t want that,\u201d I would nod. But has he forgotten? See his hand shake while he opens another beer. See him, in a rare moment of lucidity, desperately trying to explain where this part of him comes from. He looks like someone peeking from behind a curtain, but only for a minute. The show must go on. Play any Van Morrison song, mention where we used to live in Hawaii, say the words of the past, and his tears will come up wild and forceful and he will go silent, look away, away. See him sitting alone in his red truck all day long nodding in and out of sleep while the radio plays on. You tell me who can\u2019t forget.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chelsea Bieker\u2019s debut novel, <\/em>Godshot, is out this week from Catapult.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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