say.
“But what about him, your grandfather? “
I turn in my seat to look at my father. “He made a pass at me, “
I say, and I describe the circumstances. My father betrays neither surprise nor disapproval. “Maybe it’s genetic, ” I say. “Do you think? “
He bristles, and I begin to laugh, a spasm of black humor. We eat in a coffee shop.
At the motel, a squat sprawl of units built around a dusty courtyard, we share one room in which two twin beds are pushed together and covered with the same king-sized spread. Half asleep, I let my father kiss me the way he wants to, and I kiss him Early in the quiet morning, I wake as suddenly as if I’ve been roused by a loud alarm, my heart pounding as I remember the heat of the kisses. What I feel is not so much guilt as dislocation. I look around the dim room in confusion, not knowing, for a moment, where I am. In the bed beside mine, my father sleeps, the air whistling faintly in his nose as he breathes. I shower. I sit on the floor of the bathtub and let the hot water rain on me for an hour or more. My heartbeat doesn’t slow. I watch the water curl down the drain, a yellow scum of soap at its edge. There is a white desert in the state of New Mexico. Its beauty is unsettling, endless washes of something so white it looks like snow but burns the fingers. Each night, the wind pushes and sculpts the whiteness into great dunes and drifts, so that between dusk and dawn the whole face of the earth has changed. If you were to fall asleep, you’d wake in a place you’d never seen before. We go there because my father wants to take pictures of me standing in that desert. As he sets up his camera, I kneel in the sand. Curiously, despite a strong wind, the place seems airless. I sigh and yawn as if I can’t get enough oxygen. At my knees, the ground spreads out as white as a sheet. What I want, more than anything, is to close my eyes. When the film is processed, the images are of a girl alone in a place without any horizon, earth indistinguishable from sky v, no means by which to navigate. A car is in some of the shots, my father’s long red convertible with its top down. “Terrible car for a preacher, ” he concedes, looking at the prints. “Sends all the wrong messages. ” I take the photographs from his hand. I study the girl in them carefully, her averted eyes, the way her blond hair, as long as her arms, blows across her open mouth. In such a place as this, is she free or is she lost? The photographs offer no clue. We’re taught to call the church our mother.
My father, raised by his missionary grandmother while his mother worked as a secretary, must have heard this analogy from the time he was small, when his grandmother (who stood over six feet tall and whose imposing stature settled any disputes in which her pugnacious, diminutive husband found himself) gave him to God. Since he’d been entrusted to her, she must have assumed he was hers to give, and so, before my father’s life was his own, it was returned to the church. My father’s grandmother told him that he would grow up and be a preacher. This woman’s power over my father was such that her death did not release him from her wishes.
After all, he owed her everything. But he resents his servitude, along with the castration implied by the robes he’s forced to wear (he calls them skirts), and his insurrection finds a target in mothers, in mine and in my grandmother, who took away his wife and child, in the church itself, through whose wall he once put his fist, and, of course, in his own mother, with whom he always seems to be fighting over the most trivial matters. My father and I drive many miles, even days, so that I can meet his mother, my other grandmother. She’s married to her third husband, or maybe it’s her fourth. (Again, I’m confused by the two marriages to my father’s father. ) They live outside of town, in a small tract of homes on a hill so windy that I watch as the welcome mat
“But what about him, your grandfather? “
I turn in my seat to look at my father. “He made a pass at me, “
I say, and I describe the circumstances. My father betrays neither surprise nor disapproval. “Maybe it’s genetic, ” I say. “Do you think? “
He bristles, and I begin to laugh, a spasm of black humor. We eat in a coffee shop.
At the motel, a squat sprawl of units built around a dusty courtyard, we share one room in which two twin beds are pushed together and covered with the same king-sized spread. Half asleep, I let my father kiss me the way he wants to, and I kiss him Early in the quiet morning, I wake as suddenly as if I’ve been roused by a loud alarm, my heart pounding as I remember the heat of the kisses. What I feel is not so much guilt as dislocation. I look around the dim room in confusion, not knowing, for a moment, where I am. In the bed beside mine, my father sleeps, the air whistling faintly in his nose as he breathes. I shower. I sit on the floor of the bathtub and let the hot water rain on me for an hour or more. My heartbeat doesn’t slow. I watch the water curl down the drain, a yellow scum of soap at its edge. There is a white desert in the state of New Mexico. Its beauty is unsettling, endless washes of something so white it looks like snow but burns the fingers. Each night, the wind pushes and sculpts the whiteness into great dunes and drifts, so that between dusk and dawn the whole face of the earth has changed. If you were to fall asleep, you’d wake in a place you’d never seen before. We go there because my father wants to take pictures of me standing in that desert. As he sets up his camera, I kneel in the sand. Curiously, despite a strong wind, the place seems airless. I sigh and yawn as if I can’t get enough oxygen. At my knees, the ground spreads out as white as a sheet. What I want, more than anything, is to close my eyes. When the film is processed, the images are of a girl alone in a place without any horizon, earth indistinguishable from sky v, no means by which to navigate. A car is in some of the shots, my father’s long red convertible with its top down. “Terrible car for a preacher, ” he concedes, looking at the prints. “Sends all the wrong messages. ” I take the photographs from his hand. I study the girl in them carefully, her averted eyes, the way her blond hair, as long as her arms, blows across her open mouth. In such a place as this, is she free or is she lost? The photographs offer no clue. We’re taught to call the church our mother.
My father, raised by his missionary grandmother while his mother worked as a secretary, must have heard this analogy from the time he was small, when his grandmother (who stood over six feet tall and whose imposing stature settled any disputes in which her pugnacious, diminutive husband found himself) gave him to God. Since he’d been entrusted to her, she must have assumed he was hers to give, and so, before my father’s life was his own, it was returned to the church. My father’s grandmother told him that he would grow up and be a preacher. This woman’s power over my father was such that her death did not release him from her wishes.
After all, he owed her everything. But he resents his servitude, along with the castration implied by the robes he’s forced to wear (he calls them skirts), and his insurrection finds a target in mothers, in mine and in my grandmother, who took away his wife and child, in the church itself, through whose wall he once put his fist, and, of course, in his own mother, with whom he always seems to be fighting over the most trivial matters. My father and I drive many miles, even days, so that I can meet his mother, my other grandmother. She’s married to her third husband, or maybe it’s her fourth. (Again, I’m confused by the two marriages to my father’s father. ) They live outside of town, in a small tract of homes on a hill so windy that I watch as the welcome mat
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