Meeting for the First Time Every Day

First Time Writer and I wrote this rather quickly, still proud of it though.

On every drive to visit her father, Emily’s truck sputters down a woodland road and pitches on rock candy potholes, the tires diving and squawking up the edges. As Emily curses the potholes, her mother’s voice echoes in her ear, informing her that some people are no less worthy for being born with melancholic dispositions. 

She silently curses the road and the voices that intruded on what, barring the potholes, should have been a serene descent. She curses herself for being so jaded as to not be able to enjoy the pleasures of the woods silently zipping by. Maybe she’d become so easily afflicted by minor indignities that her serenity of mind had been tarnished, and she’d never be able to enjoy such a scene innocently again. She then curses the truck, heaving gallons to move inches, and her husband who insisted on it. She curses that her father’s nursing home is so farther away on the power of that same insistence. She curses all these things in one silent hiss, a single shriek of a thought, for to her they were all of a piece. 

But as she swerved inelegantly into the parking lot, she let her anger dissipate. She remembered why she came, but also remembered that, as her husband said, they were paying for it. 

On each visit, she tries to dispel her frustration with a glassy, reflective smile. The nurse at the front desk says hello, and she smiles back with a canted grin. Though she no longer seethes inside, the smile makes it seem so, and so the nurses treat her delicately, avoiding the traps she seems to lay with her gestures and over-annunciations by speaking to her curtly and politely, as one would to a hysteric child. The nurses ask for her keys, a request that confuses her even as she mechanically proffers them out of habit. With a swoop, the nurse removes the key from her hand and explains that ‘the crafty ones’ often steal keys to escape, or trade them with their adventurous peers in exchange for more illicit pleasures. Emily is no less surprised at this than the mismatch between how she presents herself and how the nurses seem to treat her. 

This is the mismatch she confronts each time she visits her father. 

When his daughter comes, the nurse will tell Emily’s father to behave, but he won’t know what that means, because for him he has done nothing wrong. He’ll protest, ask to leave, explain he doesn’t have a daughter, before the image of her provides itself to him. She’ll slip through the room mid-argument, and the nurse will blush and sigh, share a knowing look with the daughter, and usher her in before backing out of the room. Some visits, the door will open and the nurse will walk out with a distressed look on her face. “You’re father’s not feeling himself,” she’ll say, apologizing for the inconvenience. That always rankles Emily, the word inconvenience. Like her father was some machine that had to be serviced and not a man with the volition to behave himself. But she had seen the decline of mind, and the dearth of things he could do without the proper care. It was the same argument she’d unsuccessfully made to her husband before putting her father in a nursing home anyway. So on these trips she holds the lines, and apologizes to the nurse, before grabbing her keys and taking the long ride home. 

Luckily, for the majority of visits, she did get to see her father, even if only momentarily before a breakdown revealed itself. Much of him was already revealed to begin with. His limbs are weak and knotted, his skin peeled like the bark of a palm tree. He was so denuded of muscle and flesh that he came to resemble a fetus, as if age was returning him to a kinder state. 

The nurse tells Emily’s father that this is his daughter. All the father will see is a foreigner, an auburn bounce of hair and fingers shyly laced together. Emily’s eyes will roam around the room listlessly, looking for changes in the room, and the father will take this as a sign of disinterest. Eventually she’ll say hello, and the father will reach his hand out warily. They’ll shake hands and the father will ask himself how long the daughter has been here. He’ll remark to himself that she looks no older than twenty-five, which is nearly his age. He’ll maintain this illusion till he traces the bridge of overgrown cartilage on his nose, it’s strangeness startling him, and reaches up the bridge of his scalp to find his hair has turned to twine. 

Some days Emily will find the moment too much. She’ll cast a guilty look in her father’s direction, talk through the crack of the door, and follow the whispered response back down the hallway. But most visits, Emily will stay, and the door will close, and the whisper will recede. 

For Emily, to talk with her father was like witnessing a man reverse in time. By now, her father had regressed to an adolescent. He was unpragmatic, and not prone to listening, both deeply curious and deeply invested in the minor, unimportant truths his worldview seemed to offer him. Like an adolescent, any contradictory information upsets her father---his condition, his age, his maleficence towards his caretakers---, but the lack of it terrifies him. His imagination, unkempt with fragmented memories and feverish catastrophizing, will torment him if left unorganized. Explaining his condition approves his mood, but even a deliberate stream of words and tone can leave him fine one day and apoplectic the next. So Emily sticks to her father’s interests, and speaks deliberately, like a student reciting strange words for the first time. 

Her father wants to talk about television. He points to the TV cantilevered over his recliner above his head and asks if she watches.

“No not really,” she’d say.

“Nothing interesting on?” he’d ask.

“No just too hard to keep up with,”

“You ever watch Miami Vice?”

“I used to watch it with you all the time,”

“Do you remember which car they drive,” he’d ask, whether the show was Miami Vice or Knight Rider or Columbo. 

“No I don’t remember,” Emily will respond.  Conversation becomes much easier when the two realize they were never father and daughter to each other in a meaningful way. They can eschew the gentilities when it’s clear that decades of baggage have not accumulated over every minor subject. 

On most visits, it’s enough for Emily to act as a silent observer to her father’s boyhood memories, the sunlit truck rides giving way to groggy basement parties, which was around where the most pertinent memories ended. When his mood was the least sour, Emily would try to coax the lost memories out of him, to ply him with the lost knowledge of the man he used to be. On good days, he could only scarcely remember the image of a wife, shining black hair and long legs. He’d try his hardest to remember, but say it was as if there was an empty basket where the memory had been, and all that was left was the divots inside and the faint markings of feelings on the embroidery. He’d fuss and grumble and rub his head to dislodge the memory, and on good days this was when the visit would end, for he’d refuse to talk until the memory was found. 

More times than Emily would like to admit, her father would fail to understand her words, the weight of unremembered lost years bearing on him, and he would refuse to see her, would scream, and shout, and yell at daughter and unsuspecting nurses alike that he couldn’t remember them, so why should they matter to him at all. And the striking restraint of his daughter, her inability or unwillingness to humor him or her expectation that this would happen, would send her father into the deepest sadness of all. 

Emily didn’t like to admit this to her husband, because her visits incurred costs he wasn’t willing to bear. The one time she brought her husband to visit her father, her husband noted that he seemed less like a man and more like a shell with the old person seeping out in short spurts. Emily hated him for saying that, but she couldn’t help but agree. His speech grew more hoarse and distant every day, his spirit dimming like a rotting bulb. She still felt, like any child, that it was somehow all her fault. 

“But you visiting him won’t bring him back,” was the husband’s argument. “And you can’t expect that visiting him will do nothing but humor him or make him confused,”

And that was true too, though he only said it because he thought it made sense for the family to leave him alone. But she secretly wished that her only reason to see him was not to call upon her love to fix him, but merely because she loved him, and that was it. 

There were times she couldn’t stand both of them, the husband not caring, the father not remembering. She recalled her mother explaining the natural sadness of specific individuals, and wondered whether she was referring to her daughter. Whatever those voices said, she didn’t believe them. Emily didn’t believe sad was a thing you could always be. She’d seen the sadness so much herself, in the improperly high deficits of love and respect, and yet she’d soldered on, chucking the kids over her shoulders, or retreating into paper mounds. The work let the sadness simmer behind a barricade, let it throb like an abscess in the throat. You couldn’t let it crest the barrier till the moments in-between, when all you had was yourself and when the sadness could live alongside you without touching anything else. But she had no in-between. 

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On one visit, the father grunted unnaturally.. 

“What is it?” Emily asked.

The father, usually laid supine on his recliner, sat up and pressed his hands against his back to straighten to his full height. “Is it enough for me to just say, I’ll always love you?”

Emily stopped, the grief in her throat swelling. “What?” 

“Well I just figured that you’ve been coming here a lot looking for something I can’t give you. And you know I can’t, because you’ve stopped looking, even though you clearly want it. But if you’re my daughter, I can say I’ve always loved you, and maybe that could be enough?”

Emily felt caught, like her feet had turned to tar. Smiling over tears, she says, “Of course that could be enough,” and holds her father’s hand.