My father and I sat across the table from each other and said nothing, like strangers at a train station. I looked at his eighty-year-old hands, ropy with thick blue veins and corroded with deep lines. His fingernails were thick and clean and longer than mine. I felt nothing—not sympathy for an old, tired man, not remorse for all he had never been. I was no longer a daughter-abyss needing to be filled. We sat in silence and he looked into the distance blankly. I knew I was supposed to say something, but I had nothing left to say. My father just stared out toward my garden with unfocused eyes. When I tried to make small talk, he responded with words like “oh,” words like air, words like emptiness. The cicada had flown, and the empty hard shell I had tried so hard to penetrate as a child was all that remained of my father.
My father peed on the toilet seat and I sat in it. My children asked why Grandpa got mashed potatoes all over the table when he ate. He tried to assemble a simple wooden toy with my seven-year-old and glued everything together backward. My father, formerly an airplane pilot, boat captain, and pediatrician, could no longer distinguish between his left and right hands, could not translate a map, could not follow a conversation to completion.
He asked to have a “heart-to-heart” with me before he left. I tried my best to avoid it. There was nothing he could say that would mean anything to me, and I hoped he didn’t expect validation of his parenting or proclamations of my love and appreciation. I just didn’t have it in me to pretend any longer. He stood up from the table where we all sat and asked to speak with me, and I could not come up with any more reasons not to. My father and I sat upstairs on my balcony, away from his wife and my family.
I could still see a tinge of brown in my father’s gray hair. His face was foreign to me. He had shaved off his beard when I was twenty, and had looked like a stranger ever since. Even though I had known him clean-shaven for more years than bearded, I always saw him through the eyes of a child, and his face was no longer the face of my childhood. I wondered if his front tooth had always been longer than its mate. I noted how the extra weight he put on over the years filled in his wrinkles. He stared directly into my face, as he always had. I did not see him blink once. I could not sustain that level of eye contact, and looked at his hands instead.
My father told me about his dementia, his Parkinson’s disease, and his relationship with his wife. He was sorry that he was moving closer to his stepchildren than to me or my brother. He was afraid I felt spurned. He told me that he knew he couldn’t function like he used to, couldn’t carry on conversations or walk with his old, easy gait. His cicada words bounced off my daughter shell. I just wanted him to go home. I stared at his folded hands and made reassuring, meaningless noises, as was expected of a good daughter. But I was no longer a good daughter.
My father’s hands curled loosely on his lap, so I could not see his talon-like nails. The metacarpals rose in sharp ridges above the wrinkled red skin. His veins were bluer than his eyes. The skin on the backs of his hands was made of some material different from mine, something thinner and less opaque, like the skin of lips, that would chap and tear easily. The eighty years of his life didn’t show in his face, but were betrayed by those red, fragile hands. My body remembered his hands teaching me to tie off the boat at the dock, to sew a patch on my jacket. My hands balled up so I would not reach out to stroke his fragile skin. I made an excuse to check on the children, and he followed me mutely down the stairs.
another fourth of july
On July third, they closed the street in front of Irondequoit Town Hall, set up a stage for a live band, and had the annual street dance. Girl’s hair was dyed black, curled in an ’80s pouf on top, and reached just barely to her shoulders if she pulled it straight with her fingers. She wished it were long—she wanted hair down to her knees, longer than her miniskirts, but she dyed it so often it was perpetually fried. She wore her Metallica half-shirt and a pair of denim short-shorts that were, to be honest, shorter than she intended when she bought them. You could just barely see the curve of her bottom from behind. She took a round black button from a band called Metal Church and attached it to the front side of her shorts, just below the left pocket, to draw the eye. She wore one lace fingerless glove on her left hand. Before the street dance, Girl applied black eyeliner on the inside rim of her eyes and pale pink lipstick, made paler by first applying a light concealer to hide her natural lip color. She was hot. Sexxy, with two Xs. She didn’t look fourteen years old, that was for sure. She and Brother smoked as they walked the mile to the town hall.
