“Are you all packed?” my father asked.
So he thought I was coming on this imaginary trip. “All packed and ready to go.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said, his voice thick, the way it got after he’d had the second of his two pre-dinner martinis. “I hope you’ll have fun in college. Blow off some steam! Put down the paints and go to some parties! Meet some nice boys! College isn’t just for book learning, you know.”
So he thought he was taking me to college. At a red light, I took a deep breath, remembering that trip, how we’d stopped for milkshakes and he’d given me a pained and heartbreakingly sweet speech about how college boys would want certain things, and how, at parties, I shouldn’t ever put my drink down lest some knave try to “slip me a mickey,” and how I should be careful about what I wore. “I know that’s not a very modern thing to say,” my dad had told me, and I’d been so embarrassed when he used the phrase “it’s just their nature” that I’d spent the next ten minutes hiding in the bathroom.
I stepped on the gas and tried not to think about what it would be like when the time came to drive him to an assisted-living facility, or a nursing home, or whatever he’d end up requiring. No milkshakes; no speeches about how he should avoid the divorcées with hungry eyes; no joking or resigned tenderness about how this was just what happened: little birds left the nest. It was all wrong, I thought, remembering how impressive my dad had looked offering my new roommate his hand, and how he’d helped me make my bed. I cleared my throat so he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was crying. “I’m just grabbing some coffee, and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Sounds good, princess.” He sounded jovial, hearty, so completely himself. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he’d just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We’d have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.
“Why don’t you watch CNBC?” I said, forcing cheeriness into my voice. “Check your stocks. Let Mom take a shower. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” His love of CNBC was one of the things he’d retained, even as he slipped further and further down the rabbit hole. In my parents’ house, the television in the den was always on, at a volume just slightly less than deafening, tuned to the financial news so my dad could keep an eye on his portfolio, which was, in fact, being managed by his former protégé, a man named Don Ettlinger, who worked in Center City and who remembered me from when I was a girl.
“Okay, then. I’ll see you when I see you.” There was a thumping sound as he set the phone down—sometimes he’d get confused, then angry, when he went to hang up the phone and discovered that cell phones had no cradles, just chargers. I clenched my hands on the steering wheel. When I was fourteen, after my complexion had calmed down and the rest of my features had caught up with my nose, a boy asked me out to a movie. His mother drove us there. We spent the next two hours palm to sticky palm, eyes on the screen, each, undoubtedly, waiting for the other to make a move. My father picked us up and drove us home. In the kitchen, where my mother had left a plate of cookies, he’d looked sternly down at all five feet three inches of Marc Schwartzbaum. “You two are behaving yourself, correct?” he asked, in a voice that seemed deeper than usual, and Marc, gulping, had bobbed a nervous nod.
“Excellent,” Dad said. “Because I’ll be watching.” With that, according to the plan I’d begged my parents to approve, Marc and I went down to our finished basement, where there was a wide-screen TV, a Ping-Pong table, and an air hockey game where the puck glowed in the dark, requiring that the lights be turned off. I’d flicked the switches and plugged in the machine, and after a few minutes, Marc and I had retired to the couch for what I even then recognized was inept and unsatisfying fumbling when, suddenly, my father’s voice came booming out of the ceiling, sounding, for all the world, like God. “I’LL BE WATCHING,” he intoned. Marc, shrieking like a girl, sprang into the air, hit his back on the arm of the couch, and tumbled to the floor in a groaning, tumescent heap. I started laughing, and every time I came close to collecting myself to the point where I’d be able to comfort my paramour, I’d hear my dad’s voice again, coming through the house-wide speaker system he’d installed last year so my mother could hear James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkle wherever she went. “I’LL BE WATCHING.” Marc had never asked me out again. I didn’t mind. It had been worth it.