The Words for Love & Panties

By the time I was on the plane, I knew my daughter was using her mom’s last name. She’s fifteen now. To go four years without seeing your child becomes complicated only when calculating how many days that is. What complicates it further is calculating how many days that is. Once you get the days, you get the hours. Once you get the hours, you can divide it by the number of hours it takes to get from Germany to New York, California, or wherever they are. After that, you realize how many trips you could have taken. My daughter has a sister now. She’ll be two years old at Christmas. Or around Christmas. I’m not entirely sure. 

I know my ex-wife did not like me very much. She loved me enough to have a child with me, but she was not the type of person I would approach in times of pain or sadness or a dying father. My dad wasn’t born in Germany, but he met my mother on a trip his father dragged him on. My grandpa flew planes for England. The Royal Air Force, I think they called it. That British man was nearly killed by a Nazi, of course. A Nazi he would, decades later, seek to reconcile with. My grandfather was never a physical person, so I’m told. He thought every issue on the planet, since the dawn of time, could be solved with language. If there was no language, there was nothing to be mad about. I never had the energy to argue with him about this. He’d also probably win. 

Despite Pop’s preference to battle orator to orator, he had a lot of Nazi blood on his hands. Or petrol. Or whatever goes into German bombers. Both? Either way, the old Spitfire pilot met a lovely Irish girl after the war and, despite raising my father, must have felt incomplete. Incomplete enough, that is, to meet the one man who shot him down and forced him to float in the ocean for two days. Pop dragged his Irish wife and my father to Deutschland in an attempt to break bread. During this time, his annoying son would sneak away and look for the teenage boy’s universal keyhole. A keyhole I did not find particularly “universal,” but that’s not important right now. While my grandparents held hands in a hotel room, my father ran about the streets of a quiet town. He was unaware of the confession Pop would make to my grandmother. Not that he was scared, but that he was dying. In some respects, Pop was there to tell the Nazi he finally got him. Pop traded drifting in an ocean to hopping from milestone to milestone of my dad’s life. 

My dad would continue this tradition, by the way, of concealing major medical information until the last possible minute. His methods of secrecy got my wife out the door and me into a plane. In any case, my father met my mother at some bar. He probably hit on her with some line about how he didn’t know German. Luckily, my mother knew English–at least conversationally. I only found this out recently, but my mother had spent a year of her college life in Canada, repeatedly sneaking drives into Buffalo, which she confused for New York City. She was quite happy when I announced my move to New York when I married my wife. Now, my temporarily-Candaian mother was old and sleeping alone. 

About a decade before the Berlin Wall fell, my mother flirted with my father in a pub in Germany, and they talked. She abandoned her friends and gave the tour of the town and the forest to some Englishman she had never met. She would reminisce about “New York” and be technically correct, planting as many seeds as possible for their eventual honeymoon being in the actual New York City and that eventual honeymoon being eventually permanent. I don’t have any sort of accent. When I was a child, the German, English, and New York would fluctuate in some of the most peculiar sentences to ever spill out of one’s mouth. When I stayed in the city for college, my parents found it the perfect time to move back to the town where they danced, laughed, and flirted, speaking some English and some German, respectively. I stayed in New York, losing my accent, until my father called with the news of his impending death in fluent English. 

My only options were to confide in the sleeping ears of my daughter or finally tell Howard. He was a lawyer, largely dealing with Wills. His only personal experience with death was his great uncle, as most of the deaths in his family occurred before he was born. Still, Howard knew how to talk to the grieving. He knew how to talk to me. He knew how to not talk to me. He knew how to feel. He had a thick Upper West Side accent. How nasally. 

I wonder if the stool I’m sitting in right now was the one my mother’s skirt turned on to face my English Irish father. Or, knowing what she left out of the stories of her youth, she was probably in dark, ripped jeans. My dad dressed like a Boarding Schoolboy. He, indeed, went to boarding school. My father would not find out about my grandfather’s illness until they landed back in Glasgow, but he made sure to tell my mother the story of why he was in Germany with clear words and doodles on napkins. 

The following morning (I have no clue what my parents did, hopefully nothing too soon. But if so, good for them), Pop and my grandma were served tea by the sister and widow of the Nazi who had sent bullets or whatever they were into the wing of my grandpa. My grandfather had been too late to forgive the Kraut bastard. The German had been gone too early to forgive him. 

Still, the ladies shared their stories. All three of them. The Nazi as a boy. My grandpa as a father. Pop did not speak at all, apparently. For someone who spent the first half of the forties surrounded by jets, wind, and bullets, Pop had excellent hearing. Hearing he used wisely. By the end of hours of stories that were never relayed to me, my grandpa hugged the widow and the sister, nodding to but not saluting a photo of the Nazi on the wall. My father would arrive just in time to say goodbye to the women and tell his parents of the girl he just met. He would crack his neck every forty minutes while writing letters, hunched over an English-to-German dictionary, making sure “liébe” meant “love” for some and “höschen” meant “panties” for others. And now that boy is dead, and I drink in the bar he met my mother in, trying to imagine what my daughter looks like as she becomes a teenager. 

She had fuzzy hair when I left. Her ears were small, and they never heard my secrets. She knows, she has to. I’m sure her mother told her. I’d like to think that what happened between me and Howard was told to the little baby calmly with a hand on her shoulder and a soft look into her eyes. Knowing my ex, it was probably screamed as an argument when my baby girl, now a teenager, would make the case that she’d “rather be living with Daddy.” I don’t think my daughter has any memories of my parents. I think she’ll eventually forgive me. At some point or another, probably after I die in Germany, Ireland, England, or anywhere on the planet, my baby girl will accept me for who I was. Genetics and psychology were never areas in which I was the smartest. Nor were foreign languages, but here I am. Either way, I had to have passed down a secret-keeping gene. My daughter was always so quiet that everything was practically a secret. My ex insisted she got her silence from me. She’ll understand why I left. I hope she’ll understand why I left her and her mother alone in New York. They’re fine. 

My mother was getting sick. She no longer had the energy to wake up early and care for a British-Irish boy she watched die. She no longer had to care for me, either. Such is the point, I believe. I’m glad my girls out West didn’t crumble. That was never a possibility. The baby is quiet, but she knows how to stand her ground. She’s fine. My ex will surely meet someone. She should. We loved each other but never really spoke. We knew what each other wanted, but seldom how we felt. We either didn’t speak or yelled, struggling to understand despite both being perfectly fluent in English. It’s the only language I know. Ever since my father died, I’ve been dreaming in German. I have no idea what is being said or if it correlates with the random images of a marble lakehouse getting washed away by a storm. It probably wasn’t even in German, just vague, angry tones under the thunder. 

It happened a few days after he died. Officially died, that is. It took Dad a long, long time to float away. His life could be measured in translated letters and morphine drops. I hope where he’s going will be languageless. Or maybe he relished in how “difficult” it was to communicate with my mother, a spry young bilingual woman who certainly knew enough English (and French) to live in Montreal. I think Dad was trying to impress her with his notes in German. When he died, I was sleeping. I returned to the house I grew up in and cracked an egg with two yolks. I still cracked a second for the sake of routine. I ate all animal for a week. On my fourth nauseous night, I fell asleep, waking up in a lake house with marble tables, lamps, walls, floors, and doors. It was like what we all think Ancient Greece was like. Of course, they painted their friezes. Maybe I’ll die in Greece. In the dream, water and German from the sky rained down on the house, shattering the glass. All the utensils and cups were gold. A child I couldn’t recognize as mine or even a real person slept on the stove. I held her as the house went underwater, unsure whether to let her drown with me or bash her head in with a rock to ease her suffering, as she was afraid of water. I couldn’t remember who feared water. Maybe that’s why I want to live in Greece. 

In the dream, she didn’t feel like a child. I know how it feels to hold a child during every day of their growth, but her hand felt adult. I was an adult as I crashed through the house. Her hands felt adult. I think a little girl somewhere at some time was having a dream where she was drowning in a storm, and some evil man was pulling her under. I hope that in her dream, she escaped, woke up, and continued her life. I always put too much value in dreams, but they often seem to be telling. The decision to confide in Howard and express my pain and peace without words came to me in a dream. A night I needed to stay in New York alone. My ex took my daughter upstate to see her cousin, an event I would regretfully attend the following day. My baby and I sat in the corner of a lukewarm pool, watching as loud bickering became loud fighting.

Before the pool, I tried to sleep in a noisy city. I had opened the windows. It was a hot June. There was no breath to focus on. With a wife or a baby girl breathing directly into your ear, the chaotic sounds of angry cars quickly drown out. That night, I didn’t sleep. Even as a baby, I could always tell when my daughter stopped faking being asleep. If she was awake, all of her breaths were even. When the baby was dreaming, some would be sharp, and some she would hold for five, ten, or an alarming number of seconds. She slept in our bed for probably a year too long, but the biggest hit to her psyche was probably my grand escape to Eastern Europe. 

I’ve wanted to visit her. One year, I went to New York only to discover they had moved.  Los Angeles, according to some neighbors. I didn’t visit Howard on that trip. With my mom’s illness, I’ve been stuck. Something cute, spry, and German hit my ear. I turned. 

“Sorry?”

“Oh, good, you speak English.” Smiling at me was a young lady with short hair that looked as if a child were given a brown crayon and told to draw gusts of wind. She wore a green denim jacket, black roses and thorns curling around her arms.

“Yeah. Can I help you?”

“I vas vondering if you vere saving zhese seats for anyone?” She seemed to be fighting her German accent. Born here but needed to run. 

“All yours.”

“Danke. My friends are coming soon.” She jumped up on the stool, no older than twenty-three and a half. She tucked her hair behind her ear. There were some scars that led to hourglass earrings. She played with them, and they actually flipped around. The sand was fake, though. She had deep brown eyes that were almost yellow in the light. My niece had a German father. Her Italian hair tried its best to restrain her sky-blue eyes to little avail. 

“If I may, your English is great. Do you go to school in the States?”

“Hm? Oh, yes, I did. Yes. Very fun. New Orleans.”

“How was that?”

“Fun. Loud.” She laughed, perhaps a tad uncomfortably. She got a drink, and I finished mine. I would have paid for hers, but the last thing I wanted to give her was the wrong idea. 

We ended up talking about her school, New Orleans, New York, and how both accents (similar accents, no less) had crept into both of our mouths for a word here and there. In fact, for me, it was usually the words “here” and “there” that got the Brooklyn twang–so to speak. She talked about her friends, and I talked about my parents. We were merely passing the time. 

“But yeah,” she continued, drinking. “I got pretty good at doing zhe…I don’t even know vhat to say…zhe Party Girl voice.” She took a gulp, scrunched her eyes, rubbed her mascara, and opened to look at me. She smirked and became someone else. “Yah! So…like…that was literally so much fun that other night. Yah! We should totally–totally–do it again. For sure!”

It was horrifying. 

“That was horrifying.”

“Sorry. It vas weird. My friends and I took zhis trip to Nashville. A whole month in zhe vintertime. I practiced in zhe car and did that voice–like–literally the whole time. I told zhe boys my name vas…I don’t know, somesing else. I…I don’t know vhy I’m telling you zhis, but I started to buy drinks for girls. I ended up…you know. Blah, blah, blah, Nashville is fun and so great and zhen…it’s graduation. Zhe night before, I called my friend vith a fake number and…and I played little games and pretended to be someone she hooked up vith or something. Really dumb. And then–like–after talking all like this all night, I told her my real name, pretended I was in Nashville…and voke up vith her. All of zis is to say that she’s who I’m saving zhe seat for. Zhe rest of zhose bitches can stand for all I care.” She giggled, getting another drink and, perhaps, prepping another story. She was the most talkative person I’d ever met in my life. 

“Don’t worry, I was just heading out. It was nice talking to you. I hope you all have an excellent night. You deserve it.” I almost said love you. 

We didn’t touch. After only nods, my neck was craned down, and I counted out the money. A wave of young women fell into the bar. The German beamed and swiveled around on the barstool. I only then noticed her legs. She wore dark, ripped leggings under a denim skirt. She spread them slightly to hug the girl who was once her friend, and I thought about the infinite number of people my mom could have been in Buffalo.