Impatience - Archived LJ Post from 2008

it's still just warm enough in the early evening for there to be mosquitos determined to feast on my sweetness. I've been thinking a lot about my dad today. When E.T. came out in the summer of 1982 I was eight years old. There had been lines curving around the run-down little movie theater near us for days. This was a first-run theater, an enormous treat, something as impossible and unlikely as a second Christmas. Usually we went to the second-run, 99-cent cinema, eating cold popcorn made in the air popper at home. My mom produced it from her purse after the theater went dark, packaged in old bread bags that were heavily creased from reuse. I held my breath during those rare drives to the movies, praying in my head to a god I had not been raised to believe in. Asking him for favors in stages from the backseat - "Please let us get over the bridge without turning back." And when we passed that, "Please let us get through three stoplights." Then "Please let us get to the parking lot." If we made it there, I knew that further prayer was futile. What I wanted was too big to be granted, it was like wishing to be an adult in my own house, wishing to be allowed to cut my hair short, wishing to be invisible, unsusceptible, unremarkable. I wanted to be able to see the movie was because I wanted to go to school on Monday morning and finally be able to say "Oh I've seen that" when the other kids mentioned the latest release. I believed that if I shared that with them, it would no longer matter that my clothes were outdated mismatches from the second hand store, that I brought the same thing for lunch every day - wheat bread with peanut butter, that in the carpool line, our car was the rust-colored Gremlin backfiring black smoke among a line of shiny Cherokees and BMWs. This fantasy was the selfish purpose of my prayers. It should have been my father, I should have prayed for him to be sane, peaceful, untormented by his fears. I should have prayed for my mom to have comfort, security, a removal of the disappointments that caused her to fly into rages fueled by despair and incomprehension. It's said that god listens to the prayers of little children, and I sometimes wonder if I missed my chance to fix them all. We sat in the parking lot, the car making ticking noises from under the hood. My legs were slippery with sweat against the torn vinyl seat. I chewed my nails, quietly, afraid movement or noise would remind god that I was still getting something from him he hadn't meant to leave behind and he would snap any remaining thread of influence. That it would dart away like a stray cat with a backwards, accusatory glance. The keyring, still in the ignition, swung slowly against the dashboard. I counted how many times as it slowed and stopped. I turned my neck to see the line at the ticket window growing. We were half an hour early, but it was still in danger of selling out. "Mom?" I whispered. "Mom, the line." My mom stayed silent, sitting in the seat by my father, I thought she was trying to hold onto the threads of her prayers, maybe. My father cleared his throat. He placed his hand on the door handle, and it creaked open. My brother and I got out of the car with my mom, my desire to race to join the line before it was sold out made me feel quick with breathlessness and hollow-boned, like a bird. My father followed us, as we reached the halfway point to the theater, he stopped. My mom turned back toward him "Nonononono" I remember praying, my brother took a few steps further away from us until he looked like he was no longer one of us, like he'd finally managed to belong to somebody else. "We have to leave. They followed us here," my father said, and he started to walk back to the car. I was young. But I knew that there was no "they." I didn't understand why my father didn't, too. It seemed like he was stubborn, or maybe more like he spoke a foreign language. Something that sounded a lot like English, but wasn't, so when his words met everyone else's in the air they just slid across each other and then slipped apart like the smoothest of metals. I did always look around, though, wanting to be wrong, wanting to see a car parked in a far corner of the lot with a couple of men sitting in the front, chain-smoking and wearing sunglasses. But I was never wrong. When I looked back at our car, my dad was already in it, curled behind the steering wheel, waiting for.... something. I don't know what. I've imagined that he has been waiting like that all these years for someone to understand, to agree with him, to point and whisper "I see them too, there they are," but that seems so painfully lonely to me that I can't let myself think about it for longer than it took to write it down. I guess because of this, I can be very sweet when people can't tell me what they need, for whatever reason. I am willing to guess. I am willing to try. I am willing to hear confused, contradictory, harsh, double-meaninged words. I try to figure out how to comfort, how to soothe. And then I don't. I start to slowly turn in place like a music box ballerina, thinking "Dammit, you CAN say what you need. I know people who can't and you're not one of them. So if you choose not to, I can't do anything for you." Eventually, my mom took my brother and me to see E.T. Weeks after it opened, when all the status and cool had worn off it. I was still enchanted. And now I own it. But I have never watched it. I touch the box sometimes just to feel that immense flush of hope and disappointment that comes with the memory. It's almost tactile. It's almost feels like a piece of rope in my hand. Scratchy. But strong enough to be some sort of comfort. I call my dad and he clears his throat before saying "Hello?" The same way he used to clear it before he tried to force himself out of the car. "Are you still living in Baltimore?" He always asks. "Yes, Dad, I will never move without telling you. Is my phone number on the fridge where I taped it? Because you can call me any time you want to." "Oh yes," he always says, though I know when I get there it will be gone, the fridge pulled out into the middle of the battered kitchen. They hide behind it otherwise, he says. "People have been telling me your brother moved to town, but I haven't seen him yet" he'll say. And I will tell him, again, that my brother still lives in Richmond, that these people must be mistaken, that an awful lot of people look alike in the world. Knowing that nobody who is real told him that. Nobody talks to him. He is utterly alone, and I am unable to produce the stamina required to physically visit him for more than a few hours at a time every few months or so. "I know you think I'm crazy," he will sometimes say, breaking my heart because I wish for him to lose that odd piece of occasional lucidity, because it scares me to think about how much that must hurt. "Oh, no, Dad. People live in all kinds of different ways and think all kinds of different things, and they are all okay with me. You're a good guy. Have you been working in the yard today?" I find it odd that I don't have more rage about the things in my life that should have brought it - a crazy ex filing false assault charges against me, being beat up, mocked, ostracized, lied to, heart broken. All of these things just sort of seem like part of everyone's life, it's all just pain and it's messy and hurtful and organic and blends in with everything else and lays out your path and that's just all it is. I don't feel more or less deserving of hurt than anyone else, I just know it will come sometimes and that's okay. But I wonder with some anger about why my mom chose to adopt my brother and I. She knew by then, at least when I became available, that my father was mentally disengaged. I want to ask her sometimes - "Really? Really, Mom? You thought that would be a great idea why?" But I think I know. In the same way a lonely widower will start feeding a stray cat, the way an ostracized child will whisper to an imaginary friend. We need comfort. We need someone to rely on us. We want to feel like we're normal. We want something to interact with or look at so we don't have to look at the hard edges of our own lives. I don't resent her for it, and I'm not angry at her, but when I think about it all, how bad it ended up getting and how bad it is now and when I think about my lonely dad who I cannot save, I see myself in my head. I am standing in the woods, I am a little kid again, and I am screaming with such force that it blows the trees around me into dust, blows everything into whiteness, and all I can feel is the force of it streaming past me and I am smiling with some kind of frightening pride to hold such a terrible power in my small body. And young me looks at adult me, and when I see her I am amazed at my own power to hold that power in check.