2002 to 2007, Colorado

By Stef Willen

Living in the same house as my mother was losing its appeal. So my dad packed his things: a bucket seat from his late-model minivan, a talking trout, several books debunking myths about Jesus, a brick from his old high-school building, toenail clippers, and six or so Garcia Vega cigars.

He sits out there with this stuff and has birthdays year after year. Sometimes he’ll call me out after Mom has gone to bed, and we’ll talk about right angles, insulation, and God. We’ll feed Jake, the family golden lab, an excessive amount of dog treats. We’ll make him do things that don’t amount to anything, like: “Sit.”

Hanging thick above our heads are cigar smoke and bare nails. And it’s always cold because the floor is comprised of concrete and sawdust. And because my dad is a cryogenics engineer.

More than two-thirds (or if you ask him, more than .666666) of his life is over, and he can’t make himself happy. The last time he did was when our family accidentally drove through the Very Large Array.

We were headed to Socorro, New Mexico, and found ourselves in a surreal pasture of gigantic satellite dishes. My dad swerved to the side of the road and got so excited that he didn’t even shut his door all the way.

He climbed on top of the RV while my mom yelled pointlessly to him that he hadn’t shut the door. It was a door that nothing would get out of and that no one could hit with their car. He stood and squinted and took photos. I can’t remember a time that wasn’t Halloween, when my brother and I were still kids, that my dad took photos.

I followed him onto the roof, and my brother followed me onto the roof, and my dad explained that we were looking at roughly 30 huge radio antennae arranged in a “Y” about 20 miles long.

Their signals eventually meet up in space, acting like one huge antenna with a diameter of about 20 miles. They all point in the same direction. And they stand on the ground looking out of place up into space, like my dad, while my mom sits inside thinking of words to explain why that door should not be open.

She doesn’t like it when my dad talks about croaking or sucking on the tail pipe. She hates to hear him eating a peach or crunching or flipping a magazine during her show. She especially hates it when he does anything that reminds her that she’s paralyzed. For example, storming out to the garage.

My mom is unaware that in the garage, my dad has made half a dozen nooses from packaging twine. She doesn’t know about his mobile of naked Barbies. It was his solution to her demand to store all my childhood things instead of putting them on a card table at the yard sale. It’s also a very dramatic reminder that my childhood is over; the best that it can do is hang somewhere in the space-time continuum.

Tonight, it hangs above my head in the form of six pairs of plastic high-heel-molded feet that dip and rise. As a kid, I came out to the garage with complicated math problems. Now I’m a big baby (nearing 30) under a mobile, and I have some complicated love problems.

This isn’t a textbook case I can flop down on my dad’s table saw. Feelings I’ve never felt before loiter around the left hemisphere of my brain, looking to hitch a ride with the appropriate train of words.

When the train finally comes along, it’s a junior train. A silly one that gives rides to kids at amusement parks. It goes: Why didn’t she love me back? Why didn’t she love me back? Why didn’t she love me back?

It is starting to be a very redundant train, so I stick one of my dad’s cigars into the tunnel it might have come out of. I take a couple puffs, hoping my complicated love problem would become like the cloud of smoke now rising in a garage. Something that just happened.

During this complicated silence, my mom buzzes the intercom, wondering, “What are you guys doing out there?”

“Jeeezus, Jan. We’re just having a chat,” my dad buzzes back. My parents got married 40 years before they bought an intercom to communicate to each other.

I imagine that this is not what they pictured on their honeymoon in Barbados, when they lay on the beach feeling very much like a yin-and-yang necklace in the sand, and their future looked out at the Caribbean, and no plane flew by with a banner that said, “Hey! Happy Couple! Forty years from today, you won’t want to plant flowers in the garden anymore, and your mothers will be dying from senility, and you’ll resent them. P.S.: Both of your children will be queer.”

Clearly, my dad is having some complicated love problems too.

He is standing at his band saw. He plugs it in, and it RAT-ATAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TATS! Sawdust scatters, and so does the dog. He is using it to cleanly cut the tip of his cigar off, to get something precisely right. He smiles to himself and then nods sharply at the absurdity of relativity of scale. I know exactly what he means.

I also know my eyes must look like desperate puddles, worse than a dog wanting a treat because a dog doesn’t promise itself over and over to count the people who love it and lose track of the ones who don’t.

“Right Dad?” I thought. My dad and I hold the record for the most not-saying-what-we-really-want-to-say-but-still-get-our-point-across conversations in the United States.

He retires to his bucket seat and says this: crosses his legs and clasps his fingers together behind his head. He sucks and puffs his cigar, hands-free. His Levi’s ride up from the leg crossing to flash his tube socks, and they don’t match.

My reply: When I’m an old lady, and I’ve filed away so many pictures of people – people I haven’t even met yet, this will be the picture I have of you.

Finally, my dad spoke. “Well, pumpkin, the real bummer is that President G.W. Bush has 1,069 days left in office. That’s almost 18 percent of my remaining life that I have to live under that imbecile’s administration. That is depressing.” He knocks the ash off of his cigar onto the floor.

“Yeah, it is.” I smirk because I guess there are bigger issues. Then I knock the ash off my cigar and think about how things somehow get sorted out in the garage. Hammers hang next to hammers, C-clamps go in the C-clamp drawer, except for the one holding my dad’s light to a two-by-four. Wood screws go in their compartment, as do wing nuts, bolts, fasteners, and washers. My complicated love problem is shelved temporarily. Or, at least, it’s broken down and sorted into something a little more manageable.

“Your girlfriend’s doing ‘X,’ and you’re reacting like ‘Y.’”

Two puffs of smoke rise, and love becomes a correlation between two people acted upon by outside forces that neither person has much control over. It’s not my fault that she didn’t love me back. It’s not my dad’s fault that he just happened to see my mom carrying groceries into her apartment in 1965 and that things didn’t pan out how either of them had planned.

Eventually, my dad pulls out a fresh pad of graphing paper and a precision ink pen, and he draws pie charts and line graphs of my time spent talking on the phone to friends and how much money I’ve wasted.

If he were to ever say, “I love you,” it would be an awkward series of dots with a line fitted through them representing the scatter plot of his affections toward me and the association of two variables: me and him.

Stef Willen lives in Los Angeles, where she is pursuing writing, photography, art, and acting. She is doing everything she can do to keep herself just below the poverty line.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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