My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ pressed solid against the pane wet with cold. I touched my fingertips to the glass and bore my eyes steady into the front end of the car. I would not let it fall.

      “Jesus,” Mom hissed, “He can’t even do that right.”

      I stared harder, willing the car to stay.

      On my father rocked.

      And it was only me that stood between them.

      That’s where my father remains forever etched in my being: just out of reach, on the other side of the glass. From that day forward, carved in my heart was a hole which no other love but his could fill. With a fragile liability that led him out to the drive to wedge himself under the car and a three-year-old omnipotent enough to feel she alone could save him, we were crippled from the start. But this was the template from which my love was stamped and I could no sooner change it than a duckling could undo its imprinting at birth.

      Like the Quakers, the Gregory family lineage had always managed to linger slightly on the brink of extinction. My mother’s dad put a gun in his mouth when she was still a girl, my dad’s mother died young of a stroke, his own father only hovered above death, living in a perpetual alcoholic stupor behind cases of Bud Light stacked to the ceiling to keep out the light of day. And, with the eventual death of the last withered-up great-grandparent, the first portrait of our remaining family clan is snapped.

      It is a blustery, winter afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, on a piss-grey day, lined up next to a cement wall cascading the carcass of a bush that used to be alive in the months of green.

      There is something to be said for the fashion of the Seventies; something haunting, almost surreal in what people actually wore out into the world. In this photo, it’s all of us and we amount to only five—six if you count the dog my grandmother’s holding.

      There’s Lee, my mother’s mentally slow brother, standing on the one end, pelvis tilted forward, shoulders slack, arms stiff at his sides. Grandma Madge, my mother’s mother, is next to him, oozing eternal Christian goodness out her every pore. She has a pulsating cluster of fabric orchids fingering out over her lapel and there is something almost sinister to them, like an accessory The Joker might wear. Mom is next to Grandma Madge in a long blond and black peppered wig that kind of makes her look like an early cone head, from where the seam sewn at the top points into a little ^ that runs down her scalp. She wears a purple mini with one panty-hosed knee cocked like a model’s.

      Then there’s Dad on the end. Standing cockeyed, throwing the camera his pissed-off, I-could-just-kill-you glare, having hoisted me up to his chest with one mighty palm and pointing his leg out away from the rest of us, like he was about to get off the exit ramp of this family any minute now. His clip-on tie hangs limp and is tucked into a wrinkled suit coat with a buckling waist button, too small to span his protruding belly, even though his pant legs hang ghostly empty.

      As Dad points away from the other three, looking disgusted, Lee, on the other end, bears down into the heels of his shoes, looking constipated. I sit on the shelf of my father’s arm and beam brightness in my funeral dress, lacy bonnet and white ribbed leggings. And it is after this funeral that we do what most thinning, dysfunctional families do: move cross country to be closer to one another.

      I have no other photo of my father and me until the age of nine and by then my brother Danny will have joined us, amping our total extended family count up to six. But until then, there are seven delicious years of just me and my dad.

      It is 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am four years old. I have a Fisher-Price Castle and Weebles “wobble but they don’t fall down”. The plastic horses are thick and smooth and their legs move at the joints, and the castle has a dungeon where the innocent await rescue. They just don’t make toys like that anymore.

      On the first day after our arrival, my father and I are dropped off in a public park while our mother drives around to scout for a place to live. Six years his senior, her 31 to his green 25 entitled her to make every choice that affected us, from where we lived to when we moved. Dad lounged in the lush grass, not a care in the world and peeled off a mound of marshmallow snowball from its wrapper to hand over to me. It was the most delicious thing I had eaten in all of my four years and we lazed in the grass, licking coconut marshmallow off our fingers; every moment stolen with my father one of pure contentment knowing he was safe with me.

      In our rented crackerjack house, my days are spent parked in front of the television set in a sunken den of the Seventies, covered in wall-to-wall wine-coloured shag. Dad looks for work and Mom slumps at the dinette in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and pushing the cuticles back on her nails.

      “Look, Julie, you’re father’s an ass, alright?” she’d startle when I’d catch her talking to herself. “So what if he does find work?” She blew smoke over my head from one of the emergency fags she kept stashed in the silverware drawer, “He couldn’t keep a job if his ass was on fire.”

      It was a bad disposition and sheer idiocy, Mom insisted, that caused Dad to get fired. And the more he shied from her verbal assaults, the more I spread my wings to shelter him. If I could temper his mood and happiness, it seemed a small price to pay to have my father by my side. The details were never quite clear but, if there is one thing I can attest to with consistency about my father, it is that whatever misfortune happened along the way, it was never, ever his fault. Bound to see him through his own eyes, it would take me twenty odd years to trace the wreckage back to its source.

      My father has the deepest dimples: craters carved into the sides of his face that when activated, all joy sprang forth and radiated outward. My father might not smile for the camera, but he lights up when he sees me. He bounds through the door at the end of the day and scoops me up and I wrap my arms around his neck, squeezing tight. He flips me upside down and swings me by my ankles, my long blond hair tumbling down. He draws my back to his chest with one arm, with me still upside down and pretends to stumble like a blind man into the living room, jutting his other hand out to feel the way. I giggle wildly as he steadies a faux fall down to the carpet, digging his fingers into my armpits until I laugh so hard I nearly wet my pants.

      “Ah, baby, I love you.”

      “I love you too, Daddy,” I say breathless.

      He kisses my forehead. I fold his arms around me and brush the soft warm of his palms down over my eyes. I love these moments with my father more than anything.

      “Sit on my feet so I can do my sit-ups, baby.”

      My father calls me baby, a dizzying siren song to my ears. He lay down on his back, bends his knees. I plunk upon my father’s toes, leveraging my hands on his ankles. He curls into a sit-up and raises his feet too, lifting me like a see-saw.

      “Daddddddd!” I cling to his shins for balance while he tries to buck me off.

      “C’mon Baby,” he says, as he shakes me from his legs like a lemon from the tree, “You got to hold daddy’s feet down!”

      I am all gums and teeth with laughter. I bear my weight on the tops of his feet, he crosses his arms on his chest and groans his first sit-up. One, two, three…four…fivvvve…sixsss…he falls back to the floor, winded.

      “Six is enough for today, baby.” He wheezes and curses under his breath, “Fuckin’ Agent Orange.”

      My mother slices through the corner of the living room, carrying stacks of sorted laundry. My father lies on the carpet, clutching his chest—still burning from a faraway place called ‘Nam.

      “Dan, would СКАЧАТЬ