I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (2 page)

One time my father called to reveal that my mother didn’t like being a stay-at-home mom, she didn’t like being stuck at home with children. “Your mother doesn’t like kids,” he shared. “She never has.”

Another time he called to say he hadn’t been feeling well. “I feel funny lately,” he told me. “I can’t think, I can’t sleep, I can’t concentrate.” His health problems require him to take a variety of prescription drugs. There are the pills he takes in the morning, the pills he takes at night; there are the pills he takes for pain, the pills he takes on an empty stomach or with food. Green pills, red pills, blue pills. “I just want you to know,” my father continued, “I think it’s her. She’s doing something to my medicine. If I turn up dead,” my father told me, “it’s your mother.”

I said thanks, Dad, I appreciate you letting me know, and thanks for calling, and after we hung up, I called my brother Mitchell. “I just got off the phone with Dad,” I said. There was something smug in my tone. Something gleeful and gloating and proud. “Dad called me. He told me if he turns up dead, it’s Mom.”

But Mitchell already knew. Of course he’d already heard. “Dad called me this morning,” he said, and I was immediately jealous and resentful. If I’m second to that asshole on the old man’s list of allies, how special can I be?

 

 

 

 

 

There are things about my father that I just don’t know.

For example, I don’t know how tall he is. I don’t know how old he is. I don’t know what my father wanted to be when he grew up, or who was his best friend when he was twelve.

I don’t know who taught him to ride a bike. I don’t know his favorite color. I don’t know if he ever saw a rock concert or who his favorite Beatle was, or what he would have majored in if he’d gone to college. Business would be my guess, but is that right? Do I have it right?

I don’t know how long he and my mother have been married, or when is their anniversary, or how they met, or the story of their courtship. I don’t know his first wife’s name or how it works that one of the four daughters from his first marriage is younger than me. I don’t know how old he was when his father died or how he felt about the man.

I don’t know how he’ll feel about the words on this page.

I don’t know how to find these things out unless I ask, and I don’t know how to ask. I don’t know what words I would say. I don’t know where I would begin, and what if it turns out there are things I don’t really want to know?

It’s possible there are things I don’t really want to know.

When I’m on the phone with my father, I listen. I say yes, yes. Right, right. Of course. It’s true. How about that. Wow, I never thought of it like that. I agree with everything he says. These conversations last until my mother returns from wherever she’s been—the store, usually—and my father says your mother’s here, let me put your mother on the phone.

 

 

 

 

 

My father is maybe six feet tall and he might be fifty-nine years old. He smokes. He has a two-pack-a-day habit, though he’s tried to quit, more than once. During those times, his temper, while never mild, never gentle, was even shorter, more volatile. Just the words
Dad’s quit
made us speak softly and step lightly. But the time he tried to light that artificial cigarette, the fake one made of plastic and meant to appeal to the smoker’s oral fixation, he seemed embarrassed and maybe even a little amused.

My father likes food: pistachios and peanuts, sausage sandwiches and meatball sandwiches, ham sandwiches and Easter ham dotted with cloves and pineapple rings. He makes his spaghetti sauce from scratch; his chicken noodle soup stops the sniffles, cures cancer, and clears up acne. There are bottles and bottles of booze in our china cupboard, but my father doesn’t drink. One time, I saw him have a beer with his dinner in a restaurant, but I have never seen him drunk. Instead, he drinks iced tea, all day long, all year round, sweet tea, made on the stove top: a saucepan of boiling water, a cup of sugar, ten Lipton tea bags.

My father’s eyes are blue. His legs are skinny. His hair is curly and black, though he’s balding, and has been for as long as I can remember, a bald spot on the back of his head that we measured first with a quarter, then a silver dollar, then the rim of a cup, and now it’s just a big bald spot.

When I was little, I used to give him a pack of Lucky Strikes for Christmas, or a lottery ticket, a wallet, socks, or a package of T-shirts. The T-shirts had to have a pocket for his cigarettes. I rarely saw him wear any other kind of shirt. I have never seen him in a suit.

Around the house, he doesn’t wear a shirt. Every night, as soon as my father came home from work, he took off his shirt. His stomach was large and round and hairy, fat but hard. He had the kind of gut that allowed him to say Punch me. Go ahead. As hard as you want, as hard as you can. I was so used to seeing him like this that I didn’t think anything of it, not until years later when I was an adult, and a friend, flipping through my family album, pointed out there isn’t hardly a picture of my old man where he’s wearing a shirt. Not in Christmas pictures or the pictures from his birthday party, and not in the picture I have of us on my graduation day, me in my cap and gown, and my father, shirtless.

He didn’t bother to put on a shirt when a boy came to pick me up for a date. The rule was a boy couldn’t just sit out in the driveway and wait for me, he had to come in the house and say hello to my father, shirtless and big-bellied, my father who didn’t necessarily acknowledge my date, didn’t always put the newspaper down, sometimes didn’t turn down the volume on the television or even turn his head in the boy’s direction. Once, after seeing the bologna-skin tires on one boy’s car, my father refused to allow me to go anywhere until that kid got a new set. Another boy asked me if my father was mean. Sometimes, I said. Still another asked if my father hated him. I said I didn’t know. It seemed possible, especially since I wasn’t always sure how my father felt about me.

My father worked long, hard hours. My brothers and I grew up to be people who don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when we’re not working. When my father came home from work, he wanted his children to greet him at the door. He wanted a sheet spread across the couch so the couch stayed clean while he took a nap before supper. He wanted a supper that included meat, starch, vegetable, and a stack of sliced white bread on a saucer, a stick of soft oleo in the butter dish. He wanted to watch television in peace.

My father watched Paul Kangas host
Nightly Business Report
on PBS. He watched movies about vigilantes and renegade cops, and he especially liked Chuck Norris movies or movies starring Charles Bronson or anything with Clint Eastwood as a cop or a cowboy. On Sunday afternoons, my father watched football games and he liked
Kung Fu
, the series where a monk named Kwai Chang Caine wandered through the American West, occasionally experiencing flashbacks in which he remembers some valuable lesson taught to him by blind Master Po. My father brought home a VHS tape called
Faces of Death
that showed a scene of people eating a monkey’s brains fresh out of its skull. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to watch it, but the old man told us about the people who, forks in hand, dug right in.

I also have the impression my father liked the film
Purple Rain
, starring Prince, which he must have caught one of the zillion times it ran on HBO.

Am I remembering right? Can that possibly be true?

As far as I know, my father doesn’t read books for pleasure, but he’s always read the newspaper. He likes to look at real estate listings from other parts of the country and compare prices to where he lives. When I travel I always pick one up for him, though I almost never get it mailed, and when I eventually toss it in the recycling bin, I feel guilty. I feel like I should try harder. I should do more.

When I was growing up, my father seemed unapproachable and unpredictable. Sometimes he got really, really furious about something—dust on top of the grandfather clock, for example, or that the pork chops my mother made for supper had been frozen, or the C that I got in algebra—and he’d yell. Or he would throw something. He might ridicule someone until that person cried. He might hit something. He might hit someone.

It’s easy to remember the mean things my father did. The violent things, the hard, angry things. Growing up the daughter of such a man, it’s easy to fixate on those things, to hold a grudge. Letting go of the grudge is much more difficult. One of my brothers tells me Dad’s not like that anymore, the old man has really mellowed out. My other brother says he just wants everybody to be happy and get along.

Such assholes!

 

 

 

 

 

So when I think about my father, I try to keep in mind the other things I know about him, the things I know for sure.

There’s this:

My father could be a clown. He liked tongue twisters, and hearing him mangle them always made me laugh. He could say
A big black bug bled black blood.
He was good at
She sells sea shells down by the seashore.
But
Seashell city
tripped him up.
Seashell city. Seashell city. Seashell city.

There’s this:

My father and I were watching a video called, I think,
Cops: Too Hot for TV.
There was a sting operation involving undercover police disguised as Arab sheiks busting a prostitution ring. When I said surely members of law enforcement have better things to do than hassle those poor women, my father said he disagreed. Those poor women are criminals, he said. So I said prostitution should be legal.

I don’t know why I said that. I don’t even know if I believe it. I was twenty-five years old, old enough to have and assert a controversial opinion, but I suspect there was nothing grand or lofty about what I was saying. I think I was just trying to shock my father, get a reaction out of the old man, who said he was disappointed in me, he thought he had raised me better than that. He looked sad. He said do you have no morals? What happened to your morals? I wanted to raise you better than that.

And there’s this:

One year my father made me watch the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I was fascinated by every detail. I remember how in the final hours, his hair black as shoe polish, slick with pomade, dapper tuxedoed Jerry loosened his bow tie, tugged open his collar, and made a case for the kids, his kids, those poor sad tragic hopeless crippled kids. Jerry sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
You’ll never walk, period
flashed through my mind, and as if to punish my wicked thoughts, my father pledged my allowance to the handicapped children on my behalf. He asked if I understood how lucky I was that I could talk and walk and sit up straight. I imagined how awful it would be to be handicapped in a wheelchair or on crutches, and I felt happy that I wasn’t. Then I felt guilty about my happiness, guilty about my good fortune, my healthy body, my strong mind. Then I felt resentful about how it wasn’t my fault that I possessed good fortune, healthy body, strong mind, and who were Jerry’s Kids to get my allowance? Then I felt ashamed of my selfishness. I broke open my piggy bank and threw some Susan B. Anthony silver dollars at the problem. I became a Democrat because of my father, who keeps how he votes to himself.

And finally, there’s this:

My father is the smartest man I know. He remembers things he learned in fifth, sixth, seventh grade, things like how many feet are in a mile and how many cups are in a gallon and what’s the state capital of North Dakota. He wanted me to know things, too: how to work out math problems in my head and why I should pay attention to interest rates, what my constitutional rights include and why I need to pay off my credit cards in full every month. He told me to trust no one, that the United States government wants me to be ignorant and stay ignorant, and that the media are trying to keep me that way, and so is corporate America, and so is the pope. He told me if I ever wanted to make some real money, I should major in business, not English. He believed college wasn’t really even necessary, and he said if I went into business, then I needed to learn to play golf because the big business deals are made on the golf course. Shortly before I moved to Syracuse, New York, my father told me that someday the entire state of New York will be underwater. He told me gas prices will drop in the weeks before an election. He told me to always carry enough money to make a phone call or pay a cab for a ride home. He told me to always carry some form of ID in my pocket so they can identify my body if I’m ever in a disfiguring accident. He told me no one is more important than my family.

 

 

 

 

 

What happens is sometimes a girl will go with this one, and he isn’t right for her, so she’ll go with that one, and she doesn’t like him, either. The girl isn’t a pig, she just doesn’t know what she wants. Or maybe she is a pig, but she’s young and reckless and doesn’t care. She likes romance, she wants adventure. She sees that one over there, and he doesn’t look so bad. In fact, he looks to her like he’s pretty good, and she thinks what the hell, why not.

So I went with that one. But my father didn’t like him, didn’t approve of him, and for a long time, my father didn’t speak to me. Not even on Father’s Day when I showed up with a wrapped gift box containing a leather wallet. Not even when I said Happy Father’s Day, Dad. It took me getting knocked up before my father grudgingly spoke to me again.

I named my son for him. My son’s middle name is my father’s first name. I think my father appreciated the gesture, but then I don’t know for sure. He’s never said.

A friend of mine once told me to give it up, he was sick of hearing me go on about it. “Your old man is never going to love you the way you think he should,” my friend said. “He’s never going to ask the questions you want him to ask. The best thing you can do is learn to father yourself.”