Opening
After my dad falls down the hill and into the road at sunset and is nearly hit by a speeding car, it takes him fifteen minutes to limp back up to the house. I hear him call my name from the kitchen in a strange, fierce tone I have never heard before. I drop the sweater I am packing away into a box and fly down the stairs. There he is at his usual spot at the table, slumped over the antique Windsor chair. The blood is already rising to the surface: knees, hands, an elbow, a shoulder. The open gashes are somehow less fearsome than the hard, purpling contusions—like sudden stones lodged in the flesh. I was mowing the steep part of the hill, he says. Shame comes off him like smoke. I thought I could do it just this once, so you could finish loading your car. His usual ruddy skin is gray and moist and trembling. I get the antiseptic, the bandages, an ice pack. I muffle my fear.
I clean his cuts, hoping they will bind, but I am eyeing the slow march of blood under the skin, the dark stain rippling outward from the blows that didn’t break the surface. He reminds our family daily how he will have to take blood thinners for the rest of his life, ever since the gnarled veins in his shins yielded life-threatening clots that refuse to dissolve. It has been nearly thirty years since he was attacked and wrestled to the ground by a resident of the group home where he worked. In the wake of the subsequent hernia and botched abdominal surgery that sickled a swath of nerves and ignited a ceaseless fire of pain, he has become more and more afraid.
After the accident he could not trust his once-lithe body, branded as it now was with the curse of chronic pain and disability; every twinge plainly an omen of the next catastrophe that would strip away even more of his power. And the maladies did pile up swiftly over the years: deep-vein thrombosis, basal cell carcinoma, spinal degeneration, atrial flutter. I do not know whether he sensed the potential ruin that lay within him, or if his deepest fears sought and found him. Most afternoons he shuffles back and forth by the phone, old moccasin slippers scraping kitchen tile, loath to miss the call with his latest test results from the phlebologist or physiatrist. Over dinner he recounts the day’s symptom fluctuations to anyone who will listen, like a meteorologist tracking storm systems.
He looks tiny now, swallowed up by his chair. I never knew an old man could look so much like a little boy.I drape the ice pack over his shoulder and at once I am three-years-old again, climbing into his lap on a blazing summer day. Then, as now, he reeked of gasoline, shorn grass, and billowed dust, his white Hanes undershirt wet through, sinewed legs streaming sweat. The old green landline, in shades of split pea, jangled above our heads, but we ignored it; we were cracking the top off the icy glass bottle of dry black cherry soda in front of us. The bitter hiss of lavender bubbles on my tongue was novel and grown-up. I hogged it and felt important and he let me: my only real memory of him whole.
I see the rest of our history unfurling before us, too, back from when the scent of vitality still hung about him. The time in kindergarten I wore my expensive new patent leather shoes to church in February and tried to scale a snowbank on our way inside. His orders against this were explicit, but I smirked and danced on top of the pile anyway, yelling I just wanna and Don’t bother spanking me Daddy, it won’t work, while scuffing them badly. The time he sold my beloved cat at our family yard sale because she scratched and meowed at sills all night, then told me she had run away. The time I threw an orange at him after high school softball practice because he wouldn’t let me go out with friends again and it hit him hard in the jaw, so he picked up an apple and hurled it back at me, catching me in the belly. Neither of us really knew what to do with the other: our myriad conflicts were reckless, absolute.
I still haven’t forgiven him for the time he said You’re not my daughter anymore after I voted for Obama. And I wonder if he remembers when I dubbed him The Oppressor after I read bell hooks in college and decided to educate him about his white male privilege. Or the worst of all of these, the day I said I don’t believe in Jesus anymore, not like you do, and he told me he’d failed in his life’s purpose as a father. I wonder if he carries these moments inside of him, as I do, like aching, thickened nodes the body just won’t absorb. A daughter bent toward questioning, born to a father who craves order, safety, and control. Sometimes it feels as if I was formed in opposition to him, like the negative space around the edges of a painting. Or perhaps the truth of us is more akin to a pair of hands: just alike but fundamentally different, our mirror images incapable of being superimposed.
Our story hangs stilled in time as I finish laying down the bandages. The bruises have stopped their insidious creep across the liver-spotted limbs. My dad and I have the same dark curls and hazel eyes, eyes that moisten and latch onto each other as he says, Thank God you were here and rests his clammy, quavering palm on my arm. Something like love begets itself in the space between our gaze. Tomorrow I am moving back to the city, but tonight we will live inside this opening.
Sarah Grimes (@_SarahEGrimes) is a creative nonfiction writer residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An alum of the Grub Street Essay Incubator program, her work has appeared in Chautauqua, the Eastern Iowa Review, Subtle Fiction, and Elephant Journal.