Anyways, I had an essay due for American Studies about the table I eat at and that larger community, and I incorporated parts of my previous writing about my dad into that. I figured I'd post my rough draft here and any revisions I do I can add as time goes on. (P.S. I love feedback, if anyone reads this)
Without further ado:
I don’t eat at my house anymore. Breakfast is coffee and a scone at Stumptown, lunch is something wolfed between classes, and dinner is anyplace but home. My daddy says I live off air and good intentions. He’s wrong, of course; I eat a lot, just not the way I used to.
I remember a time when our house was filled with music. I would sit at the table, tucked into my daddy’s hearty booms of Dylan and Cash. “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” The air was always warm with the smell of a roasting chicken and boiling dumplings.
Today, this big old house is almost always empty. The rooms are caves where my mama and daddy and baby sister are hibernating bears. I am the quiet ghost, wandering the kitchen like a blind girl, fingers to the fridge and the wooden tables, bare feet numb against the icy floors. The air feels too thin to breathe, but it is somehow heavy, weighing me down all the time with the cold, cold clink of forks and spoons and the things we leave unsaid.
Our kitchen table is a wooden rectangle with carved legs in the shape of spirals. My mama sits at one end, and my daddy at the other. My sister and I have the other two sides. Dinner around this table has become an empty ritual; we push food around on our plates with slack jaws and tongues that do not taste. I don’t eat at all. The food here feels thick and it is hard to swallow. But attendance is mandatory, so I sit at the table tapping my foot until I’m allowed to leave.
No one says what she means. My parents bury their intentions in forced politeness. My sister and I sit in surly silence. None of us ever make eye contact.
“How was your day, Laura?” my daddy says.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t have to be rude.”
One by one we leave the table and retreat back to our caves. The silence makes me tired; it wears me down until I don’t have the energy to think. I creep back into the kitchen to brew some tea.
As the water in the kettle comes to a boil, it starts to rain. The fat droplets burst on the skylight above my head. The wind picks up. I hear my daddy’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
It is always raining with me and my daddy. On sunny days, I stay out as late as possible to avoid the silent dinner table. But when it rains, I stay home and my daddy quits his work to come up to the kitchen and listen to the raindrops hit the roof. And when the sky opens up, so does my daddy.
I like talking to him. The table feels smaller when it is just him and me. It might be the tea, but I feel a little warmer.
When he speaks, his voice is soft. His daddy died in the war. His mama was a beautiful war widow, just twenty years old, already alone with two babies and not even old enough to drink. My daddy never says so, but I know this is how he and my mama got close. They were just two grownup kids with no daddies, crying about submarine explosions and heart attacks on the front lawn and the way their hearts were broken before they were old enough to drive.
He had three baby sisters and two baby brothers and they grew up poor. At Christmas, all they got were plain black turtlenecks. He tells me he felt lucky, because new clothes were a luxury his beautiful mama could not afford. “You girls don’t realize how good you have it,” my daddy says. He leans back in his chair, resting his feet on the beams under the table.
His new daddy beat on him.
My daddy is quiet for a long time. I take a sip of tea.
He says he’s proud not to be the same man his new daddy was. “I promised myself I would never be that way with you or your sister,” my daddy murmurs. I hear in his voice a terror that maybe that beast was nurtured in him too, that maybe one day something in him will break and he will be the same monster his new daddy was. Maybe the world spins in a set pattern, and maybe fate knew my daddy’s life would end up the way it did before he was even born. Maybe no matter what my daddy does he will end up retracing the steps of his adoptive father.
My daddy wouldn’t talk to his new daddy for fifteen years. None of us ever spoke of him at all. As far as I knew, I had no granddaddy. Then my daddy’s mama died and my daddy boarded a plane to
Later that night I walk in on my daddy in the kitchen. He is wiping dust off the black and white photograph of his real daddy. My daddy’s daddy’s face will always be young, but the buttons on his naval uniform have dulled with time. His hat sits at a nervous angle. “Can you remember him at all?” I ask.
“Sometimes I think I can,” my daddy says. He smiles, but there is no joy in it.
We sit at our table, the four of us, one to a side. The heavy air presses us from all around, like a long, drawn out punch in the stomach. Our family is a table whose sides don’t quite fit together the way they are supposed to. We are barely held together; each side looks without with a terrible longing, wishing to be a part of something else. We pull at each other, cling to the windows and the doors trying to escape. The weight of the air beats us back together.
When my parents die, when my mama and daddy are only ghosts, when I sit up at night wiping the dust from their portraits, I’m going to feel guilty. I’m going to feel like there was something I could have done to fix the table and our family, like I should have done that thing. Like maybe it wasn’t too late.
I am going to regret not doing anything. I know that. It’s like I can see a car crash years before it happens, but I can’t stop it. I don’t know how to stop it. The world is so huge, and there are so many forks in the road. I feel lost.
This knowledge aches in my gut and my throat. It nags at me, like my broken daddy and this cold house are things I should be grateful for. I resent the silent kitchen with its silent dinner table; I resent our silent house with its silent rooms and the silent spiders that wait in the silent corners. I think our house is perpetually holding its breath, and I resent that, too. I resent my daddy for not singing anymore. But at least I have a daddy to resent. And we aren’t as broken as those families with the daddies who beat on their babies. Like how my daddy’s family was.
My daddy is alone, orphaned. His beautiful mama and both his daddies have sunken slowly into their graves. This silent house and this silent family are all he has left. Thinking they aren’t good enough just doesn’t seem right.
