We moved into the front apartment, formerly inhabited by an old alcoholic woodcutter named Floyd, who died in his bed shortly after we arrived. It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn’t been drained for six months. Mother made batik curtains for the windows, and lined the musty drawers with butcher paper. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheese cloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough planed from trees that must have been five hundred years old.
I was given Floyd’s bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a couch by day. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street or straddling their bikes on the corner. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, my mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a moment. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Mel’s welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.
The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn’t dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene-two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day’s end.
Late in the summer of 1971, when I was nearly five, my father was released from prison. Friends of his were living on a commune in Oregon, and they had invited him to come and sort himself out.
He came west, as soon as he was free, and gathered me from Mother’s place.
It must have been a shock to see him again, for I have no memory of our first hours together. I know we took a Greyhound bus up to Eugene, and a friend from the commune picked us up and drove us out to the property- acres of dry grass and scrub oak. There, my memories become clearer. The commune members were roughing it-no running water, no electricity, just a few ramshackle houses at the end of a long dirt road.
My father’s attempt to unwind in the woods was a disaster. The sudden move from a cell to the wilderness seemed to leave him nervous and unsettled. The first day he tried to play the hip nudist and got a terrible sunburn. Then he drank some ‘fresh’ spring water and spent three days heaving in the outhouse. I stayed indoors with him while he recovered, making him tell me stories. ‘Me and nature never got along,’ he said.
But as the days drifted on, we settled into the place. My father taught me to use a BB gun in the field beside the commune’s main house. Arms around me from behind, he cheered when we shot the faded beer cans off the stump. ‘Sock it to me,’ he would say, holding out his enormous, olive-colored palm. We ate homemade bread and black beans which the women in the main house prepared, swam naked in the creek flowing through the property. One wall of the room we shared was given to me as painting space. I spent the afternoons scribbling figures on the white paint as high as I could reach, faces with huge, lidded eyes and no mouths, rapt but mute.
One day we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the midday heat. Cinder block and knotty pine bookshelves lined the walls. Up near the ceiling, a long sagging board supported Lenin’s collected works. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap to the drain. A propane stove sat on the drainboard, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.
My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame and stretched like a cat. He was there in body-a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners-but in another way he was fitfully absent. At five, I was having trouble pinpointing this. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop’s dust, not pent up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn’t know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, watched him closely. He moved through the doorway-for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man-then passed out of view.
Thirsty, I decided to make a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hand spread open in the air above him, and didn’t answer at first.
‘Do you want some tea?’
He raised his head and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. ‘No thanks, honey.’
I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea, and chatted with him a while before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.
From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream all the air in the room was gone, there was only fierce vapor. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation like a child’s drawing of a house. The dry, summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.
When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. ‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘You’re doing really good.’ My father stroked my hair. And though I wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.
That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.
My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy arm chair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last rinse of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.
Angela Lam
Sometimes in your life someone gives you permission to be exactly who you are. For me, that person was Nina.
Let me explain: I grew up listening to the Eagles, Air Supply and ABBA and watching The Monkees and
Outside of my family, my father said, there was no one you could trust. The world was a dangerous place, my
