Odelia Writing Extract

My father was not initiated into the church of boundaries. Lives, words, effort, assets could flow indiscriminately into one another at will and also by providence.

In those teenage years when he was no longer the father I knew but still the same face, stubble, worn suit jacket, rumpled but still recognizable shirts my mother had bought for him at Bloomingdales. He had a way of speaking that appeared as though he was speaking about himself in the plural, and that plural included me.

There was so much that, together, we deeply understood. So much that we found amusing in a slightly sad, head-shaking way. So much wry and tender tragedy that we were privy to, not both of us, exactly, but that newish entity in which I was included. I can almost remember the way his eyes looked at me, when they did. At me, through me and out to the distance beyond, all at the same time. That we understood each other as no one else ever could or would was a given that was, occasionally, explicitly stated. 

In my high school imagination, I made him into anything mysterious: a criminal; a spy (he would have appreciated that). Sometimes I let out some fragment of that unmentionable mystery to a friend. It could easily explain so many things – my own absence, my reluctance to bring friends over. A great big cover-up. Or, imagined dread covering real shame. Shame of drunkenness, absence, neglect, slurred speech, mania, craziness. Shame of being caught out. Mocked.

My daughter raises her eyebrows all the way to her hairline if I so much as ask a visiting friend of hers a question she feels is out of place, such as: what is your favourite lunch? Odd to have become myself that looming giant, the parent. That oversized enabler, maker and breaker of fragile worlds. For no apparent fault of my own, everything I do or say can be an embarrassment to either one of my older children. I would like for them to understand how good they have it. How much real and painstaking attention I pay to their individual worlds. Their classmates and the music and the TV shows they love. Their school activities and their disappointments. The expressions they use and those they find antiquated and overbearing. Still, each day I discover that simply by being who I am, something in my manner or looks or point of view simply does not go over well with them, particularly in public. There seems to be nothing for it. 

And I remember: there is a moment in childhood when you open your eyes and that superhero on which (on whom?) your life wholly depends is reduced to human proportions. When I myself reached that age, my sister was still a little girl. I believed I could improve her lot by interceding on her behalf. As a go-between to my mother, I let her in on some of the basics. I found myself explaining: Mom, when the school writes that they play softball, get her a mitt. When they send a form for the school trip, remember to actually sign it and make sure you put it in her school bag.  It was, admittedly, a very literal interpretation of repair. For myself, I felt, hope was lost. I was whatever people like me become. But not here. I won't stay.

Today, I think: where were social services? School counsellors? Why was saving face and getting by always the default plan? One school morning my mother got a phone call from the high school office informing her that I had missed more school days that year than even the New York Board of Education deemed permissible. It was not outright truancy, to be fair. I did go to school. Where else would I go? But I was not inclined to attend all my classes. Avoidance was a family lesson I had learned well. The thing was, if you skipped homeroom, you were marked as absent for that day. It was therefore possible to pick and choose the rest of the day’s schedule with impunity. Or so it had appeared. My mother was not aware of any of this, or anything else pertaining to my life outside our home. That morning, when by chance I was sitting through homeroom, she stormed into the class sharply dressed and seething with rage. 

Solidarity was not our common dream. We each stolidly pretended to do what daughters and mothers everywhere did, only we did it badly, and were lonely and frightened going through the motions.

Those were the years my father mostly didn’t live at home but also did not have any other address. I recall that when I did see him, I would scan his face to see what was going on. I knew the term manic depression included the word depression but that was rarely a state I could identify. Instead, I knew it was biologically possible to sleep for three days straight. This was not discussed. In retrospect, I realize my mother was as much of a mouse as I was. As clueless and as anxious. Other times, I sat beside him as he shifted boxes of paper from one place to another with some indecipherable intent, as he told me about his situation using metaphors that looped around to include Napoleon’s strategic genius and the paradigm shift in the discovery of the double helix. He was nearly always amused by his predicament, no matter how bad it was, as though always both writer and protagonist of some truly unusual and convoluted plot, involving no less than matters of state, breakthroughs in science and ordinary human failings.

At times it ran beyond my capacity to string together into coherence yet perhaps it was ultimately this effort, and not the albeit rigorous training required of New York’s “finest” high school that gave me the preparation I needed to truly open my mind.

Life with my father in those years was a form of teenage opportunism. If I saw him, when I saw him, I quickly scanned: What kind of shape was he in? Could I tell him my troubles? Could he help me work my way out? Could we go out to Sixth Avenue to buy me a new cassette? In my junior year, I bought myself a Walkman: private music player. I could never quite get over the dissonance: listening in my little gallery room, my head, my entire body could fill with Suzanne Vega or Prince and no one at home would know. It was like being naked in public and at the same time it was the ultimate solution to walking the streets of New York on my own.

Other times I would meet him in his corner room, eyes glazed, jaw set hard, shaking his head at the impossibility of finding just the sheaf of papers he was looking for among all the piles, some caked with very old chicken rotisserie sauce from the time my mother dumped the tray on his desk in a fit of fury. Or else he would be talking and talking away, but not quite to me. But if I saw that twinkle, that spark of interest… YES! It’s ME he is seeing. He’s here! Let’s use this now!

Often, we’d go out with my sister, a toddler already, remarkably happy, and with a mind of her own. We’d go to the playground at Washington Square Park and swing her as high as we could while swapping stories about the “bad” kids in my class, the ones whose antics reminded him of himself and made him laugh. Or we would walk over to Mercer Street, also close, to the new plaza they had laid out in cement. My father got a pair of roller skates for me and one for himself. He took to it with typical enthusiasm. I was never great but I got by thanks to my years of ice skating. But he was no good at all. He strapped thick plastic capped knee and elbow pads to protect himself, although he managed not to fall much. But his skating was jerky and it almost hurt to watch the near lurching and bow-legged bracing. Unless you were looking at his face, which was beaming with the joy and excitement of working out a new thrill.

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My father suffered from COPD, a degenerative lung condition. The last few years, he needed a constant supply of oxygen, wherever he was, which was mainly at home. Every so often, with increasing frequency, he would have real trouble breathing and would go to the hospital, often in an ambulance accompanied by Geraldine, his carer. But the first time he was intubated was about a year before he died. It was the first time his breathing was so compromised and his oxygen level so low they had to stick a tube down his throat and hook him up to a machine to do his breathing for him. He had been in the ward all night when my sister and I came to the hospital the next morning.

My father was miserable. His hands were tied to the bed so as not to pull the tube out and hurt himself. Every so often he would contort his face in what I thought was a gag response but turned out to be a hands-free attempt to yank the tube out by pulling away from it with his neck. It looked scary. Like a dog trying to get a restraining muzzle off. The doctor on duty came in to check on him and decided they’d up the oxygen dose and if he could be diligent about breathing slowly and deeply and getting enough air in him for another twenty minutes, they would take the tube out. Twenty minutes sounded to my father like a life sentence. We tried encouraging him every way we could think of. We held his hand. We told him how brave he was being. We told him the time was flying by. That he was improving. That it would be over in no time. He motioned me to go find that doctor or the nurse and beg them to take it out NOW! I stepped out of the room briefly as if looking for the doctor and came back again. That repeated a couple more times, sifting out a few more eternal seconds, until my father realized that I wasn’t wholeheartedly looking for anyone. He looked around at the three of us in despair. He rolled his eyes towards the ceiling like a seasoned soldier who realizes he’s been left in a tight spot with a few worthless recruits. Our words of encouragement and explanation made no difference to him. Time slowed down.

At some point, I caught his eye. I began to tell him stories, fragments of stories, highlights and images and snippets from his past. I reminded him of his glory days as a soldier, how the commanding officers had praised him and relied on him, how his men had adored him and followed him off airplanes and into battle. How he had been noble and brave, and also a rebel and a troublemaker. I reminded him how beautiful he had been and admired. How he had wooed and won the most desirable woman in Tel Aviv, had married her and taken her off to Paris. How he had floored the Parisians with his looks and his charm, a movie star in their midst sitting at the Café des Deux Magots and the Café de Flore and in student squats all around the Latin Quarter. How he had passed his medical exams by sheer brilliance since he had spent his student days drinking and philandering and talking about Balzac and Sartre.

I kept going for as long as I could, dredging up everything I could remember, all the boasts and the truths and the half-truths, everything that had been real and true and everything that was sourced from nostalgia, myth, self-inflation, pathos. I did not stop to feel the painful gap between what had been, its promise of what would be and the actual skidding of a life off course. I did not stop to feel the neglect, abandonment, the disappointment of the daughter. I did not stop to take the measure of my words against truth or accuracy or any other reference.

I could see his eyes widen and soften and some of the craze of needing to get rid of the tube seemed to lessen. I could see how he no longer felt at the mercy of hapless fools. I could sense him feeling cherished and I could see how that lifted him out of his turmoil. It felt a very simple privilege to be the one giving that kind of nurturing. I was just talking, I realized. Just telling stories.

I suppose I spend much of my time telling stories. Trying to find in them the meaning and coherence I need. As a teacher on meditation retreats, I offer talks that try to inspire those struggling through lonely, mute hours of silent practice. In them, I often share stories from my life. I try to single out the quotidian, the challenges of daily life. Occasionally, I still feel that old tremor of exposure, speaking honestly and personally about my life. There is a sense of nakedness, a slight fear that creeps in, doubting whether I have anything of value to share, wondering whether I am not making myself ridiculous, whether I have, in fact, understood anything of wisdom or compassion after all.

Now that my father has passed from this world, maybe I can come to terms with the story that still needs to be told. This is a book about grief and mourning. It is a book about loss, but also, a book about being my father’s daughter. It is about remembering who he was, particularly who he was for me. It is about sorting out the parts that have been lying around for years, half-buried, waiting to be discovered again.