My mother’s death had been the inverse of my father’s: quick, shocking, unbearable. She’d gone into the hospital suffering sudden, debilitating chest pain and died a day later, after twelve hours on the operating table. The postmortem diagnosis blamed a defective heart valve that had gotten infected, flooding her bloodstream with toxic microorganisms. My father spent the rest of his life suing the hospital and various members of its staff for malpractice. He became a self-taught medical expert, obsessed with figuring out what had gone wrong in surgery, sure that this could have, should have, been averted, and it had made him as crazy as any single-minded crusader.
I was seventeen when she died, a junior in high school, already a troublemaker—chain-smoking, breaking curfew, drinking until I puked. Mom’s death turned me into a sort of runaway, hopping between overnights with friends, piling up unexplained absences, infuriating my father. I could no longer stand to be in this house, which was, back then, so clearly hers. Not only had she been home more than the rest of us—she worked part-time as a lab technician in the same hospital where she died—but she kept our family in equilibrium, mediating arguments, offering compromises. I’d been identified as the problem child a decade earlier, a smarty-pants always talking back, and at the same time a confrontation avoider, a late sleeper, a dawdler. My mother had patience for my restlessness. One day you’ll outgrow this, she’d say, her English so perfect it revealed no trace of her German upbringing. My father was the pessimist. A wiseass never wins. We were two stubborn red-haired males, always at odds—though before my mother died we at least had someone to run interference for us.
This was the most I’d thought about her in years.
This sewing room was now a guest room, big enough for only an end table, a twin bed and an enormous wicker planter sporting a dusty bouquet of fake peacock feathers. The wallpaper had a leafy green, vaguely jungly pattern; the bedspread, in contrast, was midnight blue and swirled with stars and galaxies—the same one beneath which I’d agitated as a teenager. The mattress might have been my teenage mattress, too. It was so broken-in I couldn’t get comfortable.
Nearly thirty hours had passed since Deirdre’s call cut off my last deep sleep, but I was wide awake. Is there anything more enervating, short of chronic physical pain, than not being able to sleep when you’re clearly exhausted? I tried reading the book I’d packed and watched pages turn while words went unabsorbed. I opened up the notebook I carry around as a journal, wrote down some thoughts about brick storefronts, dirty mattresses and the dystopia of Big Savers, but then gave up when I tried to put into words what I might be feeling about the reason I had come here. It was too soon; I was too freshly in it. I tried jacking off but couldn’t shake the vehemently nonsexual cloak of death hovering in the air, not to mention the image of my grandmother in the next room. The muffled bass tone of her TV rumbled through the wall.
Finally, I got up and phoned Woody at work.
“I’m missing you, Wormy,” I told him. “This is pretty hard.”
“Must be hard for you there. Is everyone really sad?”
“Not so much sad as—I don’t know—tense. Nana’s avoiding me. Deirdre’s bossing me around.”
“What about you, Germy?” (That’s right, Wormy and Germy, the private us.)
“Painfully tired. I can’t sleep, I’m so traumatized by the sound of Deirdre’s cracking whip. You’d be proud of me, though. I haven’t started any fights.”
I told him I wished he was here with me. This was sidestepping the truth: I hadn’t invited him to come along. There was no way to pull him from his fifty-hour-a-week dot-com job, went the official reasoning for his absence, but the fact was, I just couldn’t cope with a boyfriend in the midst of the family reunion. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me: While my father was alive, my boyfriends weren’t welcome.
On my last trip back, a couple months after AJ was born, I’d been hopeful. AJ’s birth was a big deal, something to pull us, once and for all, out of the gloom of Mom’s death. Change was in the air, and spirits were high. Dad organized a big summer party, inviting friends from all corners of the past along with the whole extended family. Deirdre and Andy had married quickly, and quietly, after she got pregnant, but they’d been dating for years, and everyone was ready to celebrate. This would be the wedding reception my father had been deprived of.
The sun blazed strong that day, the humid air thick with barbecue smoke, cut grass and honeysuckle, the yard trampled with the carefree steps of guests getting drunk. Deirdre wore the tired-but-smiling face of the new mother; Andy was fast growing into the part of proud papa, boasting that AJ’s big hands were a sign he would play for the New York Mets some day. Dad had lorded over the grill all afternoon, a whiz with spatula and tongs, his voice booming greetings across the yard, his new apron announcing him as the WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA.
That night, I cornered him in his bedroom for a talk that I’d nervously rehearsed ahead of time. I told him that I had wanted to bring David—the guy I was seeing back then—to the picnic, but that I hadn’t because I didn’t think Dad would approve. My father, without hesitation, said, “You were correct.” The conviction of his voice, its done-deal tone, squeezed the air out of me. “I thought you’d changed,” I said, and he replied, “As always, I prefer that you keep your private life private.” To which I said, “Then I prefer to not come home anymore.”
That’s the headline-news version. The actual conversation was lengthy and insulting and loud. I called him a bigot in a dozen different ways. He took great issue with my timing: I was stealing Deirdre’s spotlight; I was ruining a joyful occasion. “You’re looking for attention,” he told me in his calm, clenched voice. “You’ve always craved attention.” I tried to notch it down, to take the anger out of my voice, to sound as rational as he did, but I wasn’t able: It hurt. It hurt because we’d been through this before, when I was a teenager and he’d first discovered my sexuality; after I got out of college, finally able to admit to myself what I was; when I decided to move to San Francisco, hoping he’d understand; and then long-distance, over the phone, in smaller doses. I’d been “coming out” to him for most of my adult life.
That night I told him he wouldn’t hear from me until he’d changed his mind. What I actually said was “Until you stop being so fucking closed minded.”
All this came roaring back to me after I got off the phone with Woody. I was sitting in a nook in the upstairs hallway, in an armchair next to a small wooden table—the “telephone table” we called it, a name that had always sounded sophisticated to me, something out of a Rosalind Russell movie. I glanced toward my father’s bedroom. An eerie, vertical slice of darkness floated between the half-open door and the frame, beyond which I could see our penultimate argument in pantomime: me, pacing uneasily, wearing shorts made from cut-off Army fatigues, a sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with a random high-school sports logo (WOLVERINE WRESTLING), silver rings on my fingers, silver hoops in my ears, a fresh tattoo inked around my bicep, the whole look an ironic pastiche of the very masculinity that he embodied. I must have appeared so adolescent to him. Clownish. Gay. Sitting tensed on the bed, he was intimidating and solid: freshly showered, his clean white T-shirt snug across his barrel chest, his freckled and furry arms, his clenched fists. I saw each contour so clearly. He was dead, but his presence was stronger than it had been for years.
I walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open, flicked on the light. Medical supplies—pill bottles and swabs and a thermometer—cluttered the dresser. The bed frame, devoid of its mattress, sat empty in the center of the room, a fuzzy coating of dust on the brown rug beneath. In a span of five years, my father had been transformed from that imperturbable figure arguing rationally from the foot of his bed to an emaciated shell withering away under the covers. Perhaps he was already heading into dementia the night we’d fought—plaque forming along his nerves, the viral conspiracy to bring down his brain fomenting deep within.
A couple of months after that, he called me in San Francisco to chat. Literally, just to chat. For small talk. When I brought up the subject, he seemed perplexed, as if things between us hadn’t gotten so heated. “I consider that