My father puts the sharpest point on paradox. He’s masculine to the degree of being weird, but he loves to dance. I remember more than one woman from his legendary list of girlfriends whispering into my twelve-year old ear, “Your dad is the best dancer.” When I’d tell him that later, he’d pat my thigh with his hairy knuckled hand and say, “Too bad for her, you’re my favorite partner.” No matter how many women he dated, or how much I hated them, I clung to the knowledge that he liked me best, and that I held the most important opinion. I can guarantee that he never read a parenting book or a word of self-help in his life, and that this tiny (to him) reassurance came easily and naturally.
He is a cop, but he has a softer side. He admires Martha Stewart and once made a lampshade out of a white pickle bucket. He just pried the handle off and drilled a hole in the bottom, then inverted it onto the lamp and topped it with a lovely finial. He made his own coffee table, and can sew a few things from dish towels. He irons the crispest cotton shirt. He is fastidious about his clothing and hygiene. His getting-ready-to-leave-the-house ritual regularly spans over two hours.
Every Friday night, he took out his shoe-shine kit, a small metal bin with an inclined top (to set his boot on) that he made himself. Inside, there was Kiwi polish; black and brown paste. A small wooden brush with a round head and soft bristles caked with polish and a rectangular buffing brush with bristles so soft you could barely feel them on the back of your hand. After showering and shaving and combing and hair-spraying (that’s right, I said hair-spraying) and carefully tucking his white Hanes T-shirt into methodically pressed Wranglers, but before buckling his belt, he’d sit in his favorite chair and smear polish onto his boots with the little round brush, working it in ever-increasing circles across the tops.
He had a lot of boots: ostrich, lizard, calf, elk, snake. He would work for several minutes on the right and then the left, and then get up to go look at himself in the mirror, a break to let the polish cure. He’d return then, in his sock-feet, to inspect the right one. Each time, he would explain to me that one could tell when it was done by noting that the thin coat of polish had turned dull. He’d take out the buffing brush (what were those bristles? Boar? They were so soft and tapered at the permanently dyed black ends) and flick it across the top and the instep, never forgetting the heel, until the boots shone like a worn-smooth saddle. Every Friday.
The sharp petrol and charcoal scent of Kiwi boot polish is the singular olfactory sensation I associate with him, unless you count gasoline. When my parents divorced, he had to take up cooking for my sister and me half of the time; a great stretch for a man who eats only so he won’t faint. He particularly liked to cook outside, because he is somewhat uncomfortable indoors. I remember him kneeling beside his black Silverado, sucking on a stiff yellowed plastic tube run straight down into the gas tank, drawing the gasoline closer and closer, until it zipped round the curve and blasted across his tongue. He’d quickly stick his thumb in his mouth and cover the hole until he could drain the petrol into a mayonnaise jar, then pour it over the bag of Kingston briquettes in the grill and light a match, spitting gasoline the whole time. The result of this process was an inferno rivaled only by solar flares. Until I was twenty years old, I thought hot dogs tasted like gasoline, and was startled to eat a frankfurter which had been steamed.
He’s a clever practical joker; he has enticed me to eat an acorn by claiming it would be delicious (it is, I assure you, more like taking the morning-after swig of cheap Canadian whiskey only to realize that someone has put their cigarette out in the glass). He has tricked my children into eating bitter pears. He once spent an entire afternoon constructing a fishing line-and-pulley system to drop a rubber tarantula onto my mother’s shoulder while she was visiting friends (did I mention they’re not married anymore?) He loved to set up his jokes in the most elaborate fashion, but now I can see that the part he enjoyed most was the retelling of the story: “You should have seen your mother’s face when she realized that girl wasn’t really my pregnant twenty-year old girlfriend…”
These activities balance his more stern side. He’s law-and-order; he won’t wear a black cowboy hat and always chooses gray felt because black is “for outlaws.” His favorite television includes “The Lone Ranger” which he takes very seriously. He never tolerated lying or deceit, and told me once he would shoot anyone who hurt me. Of course, he would shoot them in the legs and then put them in jail, because the good guys don’t kill anyone unless they absolutely have to. He loves guns, and prizes them as only a lawman can. Once, he was practicing his quick-draw from a new holster, admiring himself in the mirror, when he drew and fired through several walls of our trailer; the bullet lodged in a dresser, an incident which is not yet forgotten by my mother.
He taught me to shoot his .45 when I could barely lift it, mostly because he thought the kick from the .357 might be too much. He kept his personal revolver locked and unloaded in a bank deposit bag in his desk drawer, and his service handgun, a .45 or a 9mm Glock, loaded under the seat of the car when he wasn’t at work. He showed us hollow-point bullets and Kevlar vests and night-vision scopes. He had a collection of items purely for conversation: brass knuckles, a small steel knife with a boot clip, a shotgun he never touched unless it was to pawn until payday.
As an adult, on a visit to Oklahoma, I wanted to go to lunch with some friends, but had not rented a car. I asked if I could borrow his new shiny truck, and he, the most gracious person in the Universe, said sure, but he had a caveat; he explained that the truck’s tool box was “full of weapons,” and that I should be careful to lock it up when not attended. I agreed that that was reasonable and started for the driveway. He walked me to the car, and as I was unlocking the door, I thought of the transmission and said, “Is it automatic?”
He looked at me with incredulous gravity, and said, “Yeah, you just pull the trigger.”
Dear ex-girlfriends (and by “ex-girlfriends” I mean former lovers, boyfriends, friends with benefits, micro love affairs that turned out to be bad ideas, straight girls who just wanted to see what it was like, and Neko Case in the event that I ever get that chance),
I should have written this letter before, perhaps; I’ve thought about it for a while now. I’d like to go on record regarding lessons I’ve learned, even those that came at the end, the sharp gusts of November that arrive to make way for wet Midwestern snow. But also for the breezier ones, the subtle teachings that slipped across my soul and crept into my daily life while I was distracted by your voice or your scent or your earrings. The knowledge I have gained from you far surpasses that from any other source, even Wikipedia.
I know the difference now between want and need, between help and emotional imprisonment, and between risotto and paella. I know that coffee should be dark and bitter and that everything that is worth doing should be done well. I know how to kayak, read poetry aloud, re-wire a lamp, order wine, play ping-pong, and recognize zone defense. I am familiar with T.S. Eliot, bell hooks, MFK Fisher, Allen Ginsburg and Toni Morrison. I have listened to Nanci Griffith and Miles Davis and Erykah Badu. I learned to sleep late on Sunday, to wake at four am to comfort a baby, to drive a standard transmission, shoot pool, and to make a stunning martini. I am nearly conversant in jazz, theater, film, basketball, tennis, real estate, Spanish cuisine, Dutch contributions to society, Italian motorcycles, and French cheeses. You reinforced for me honesty and hard work and integrity. You illuminated racism and gender identity and alienation and abuse and religion and a thousand other things I couldn’t have really understood otherwise.
My relationships with you made me stronger, funnier, braver and better in bed. My life is richer because I had club sandwiches with your mother that afternoon, and because I watched you care for her when she was dying. The memory of the night that we spent on Main Lawn is tangled like seaweed among my neurons, and I think of the evening at the shimmering rooftop pool in New Orleans as the moment I was born again, even though we can never return to that hotel. I don’t remember how we ended up on the floor of the Belltower, or how long it took to drive out of the snowstorm in Texas, but I remember your hair; curly, coarse, thin, ebony, beech, cherry—then your hands; slender, thick, brown, pale, confident, tentative. I would still recognize your disguised limp, your hysterectomy scar, your impossibly thin wrists, your fissured thumbnail, and the smooth nubs where they cut off the extra fingers. The recollection of the sound of your silver rings clinking against my windowsill makes me dizzy even now.
Oh, sure; I learned not to accept marriage proposals at the peaks of roller coasters (also not to accept them at all). I learned not to put too many fava beans in the pressure cooker at one time. I learned to never let a ferret into my sleeping bag again. I learned that not everyone believes that Blue is Joni Mitchell’s greatest album. I learned to send flowers the next day and to always keep the videotape.
But most importantly, I know that love has vastly more to do with forgiveness than with possession, and that wanting what we cannot have is the most toxic dream that exists. I realize that transparency and truth, although they pave the path of most resistance, are the only conditions of consequence, and for that alone, I would do it all again. Thanks.
Love, Lainie