Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

I had made an effort to discuss the events of our past, but he regarded this as a trespass. “When did God empower you,” he asked me, “with such omniscient abilities?” His position was truth; mine was not. My letter, he wrote, “is incorrect throughout, is a fictional (‘Having no foundation in fact,’ OED ) version of reality (‘Reality: The quality of being real or having an actual existence,’ OED ).” He was defensive, which I should have anticipated: “After nine years of sixty-hour weeks of intensive research, not reading and study, but research, I know I was a terrific dad and terrific husband.”

I wrote more letters. His replies were long — seven, eight, nine pages. There were words he couldn’t get past. He became obsessed with boundaries . Boundaries were bad. “Those who set them up,” he wrote, “protect the dysfunctionality they see in themselves and seek to foist that malady on others through their boundaries.” Boundaries, he wrote, “are the antithesis of meaningful honest relations.” Boundaries have no place between a father and his children. He insisted the proper word was relation . “Relation is a mathematical notion which means one-to-one correspondence.”

Another time it was the word gag . He had used the word, saying that I was prevented from speaking honestly; I objected; he objected to my objection. “Emphasis on the word, gag , denies the act!!! The gag is the aggressive act. The word gag fits, is proportional to, the act. The gag is the loaded act; the word gag fits the denigrative power of the act. The act, not the word, is aggressive and odious. Place the focus where it belongs, properly, on the aggressive and repugnant act, and not on the word.”

Some nights, I dug into the lee of a snowdrift and hollowed a shelter for myself. Snow contains air and insulates, holding the body’s warmth so that, at a certain point, the temperature remains constant, blood and ice in equilibrium. In deep snow, I dragged supplies with a pulk I’d made from a child’s sled and plastic conduit. I was afraid of avalanches and checked a slope meter before traversing open, treeless hillsides. What I feared was suffocation, particularly the inability to make my chest expand. I really knew nothing about winter, nothing about surviving the season beyond the blunt lesson in fatality I’d learned from picking up bones. Sometimes I slept in the open mouths of mine shafts, their crumbled headframes like broken teeth, where twice I found clusters of bats, hanging by their feet, their wings folded in, like the strange fruits of darkness itself.

I wrote, asking him about our home movies. For years I’d kept alive the fantasy that he burned the movies, only because I was haunted by the image of them orphaned in a Salvation Army thrift shop, reels and reels of birthdays, Christmases, and Easters, all reduced to an ironic treasure for strangers. In the past, I had wanted to believe my father was a liar rather than a man who could destroy something so valuable to his children. The movies were old Super 8s, poorly lit and without sound, but the only place left where I could see my brother’s face.

I wrote, “You intentionally destroyed something inside your children, a place of warmth and fondness, a cherished dream, a continuity that connects us in time to our history and across space to one another.”

His response was icy: “Of what sense of warmth and fondness are you speaking? It is an interesting sentiment, laced with some romanticism, but devoid of reality.” And he wanted to know, “What did I destroy in you that was not already destroyed?”

In my father’s last letter, the grammar carries the summary tone of a narrative closing down. It is framed by the forms of family affection. He opens with “Dear Char” and parts with “Love,” followed by his signature. In between, the language suggests closure, termination. My previous letter, he says, continued an “unacceptable tenor and dead-end focus.” It smacked of “recidivism”; it followed a “desolate and vacuous path.” None of my letters “added a repairment.” “So be it,” he says.

I sometimes wonder if by “repairment” he meant “repayment,” and I always pause at the caesura created by the simple sentence, “So be it,” which Catholic kids were once taught is the meaning of “Amen.” Was this the phrase that ran through my brother’s mind as he paused between his two signatures? So be it : with these, my father’s last words, I know I will never hear from him again. But I save his letters, as I save Danny’s, as I save Mike’s, neatly bound and held between the army surplus boots that my brother died in, and which I keep, filled with rocks, on my desk.

Right inside the door of my first Fleetwood Home I was greeted by the evocative odor of American Newness, that smell everyone knows but cannot name. It was like breaking the seal on a box and getting a whiff of — of what? — of exactly what you always wanted. I know I got doped up on the smell and instantly forgot the facts of my life for the fantasy it might become. The walls in the homes I toured had the texture of those egg-shaped confections of sugar that house dioramic Easter scenes of bunnies and baby chickens. The walls didn’t look entirely dry, as though you might sink your finger in for a lick of buttercream frosting. They were immaculate and white and somehow against this backdrop even normal objects seemed like miniatures, not quite real and thus easily manageable. All the rooms were furnished by a hired decorator but felt empty. What they were missing was you and yet it was haunting to confront a face in a mirror. Suddenly you were there, arrived and occupying a place in this world premised on choice, where everything exists as potential, where the deep pile carpet on the floor is only a polite suggestion and might, in a moment’s wish, become Adobe, Cameo Blush, Cabernet, Cinnabar, Periwinkle, or Nappa [ sic ] Valley. The Formica on the counter could be traded for squares of blue tile. The fridge will find food, the quiet will find voices, the beds will bring rest and love and renewal.

To make a manufactured home, first you build a chassis with axles. After you’ve put the chassis in place you glue and staple the flooring to it with extra-big boards that cut down on the number of seams and hence reduce the likelihood of leakage. As it’s being built the house floats like a river barge on a bed of compressed air. A couple men lean into it with their shoulders and shove it from one station to the next as if it were nothing. Exterior walls go up, interior walls; men plumb the thing, run wires, install fixtures; they add windows, hang doors; a roof is lowered in place by an Erector Set crane; appliances, cabinets, fans, and carpets are readied. Out of this wizardly and truly awesome Oz the house is wheeled into the daylight and trucked away to whatever Kansas your heart desires.

I made a couple of trips to the factory and a dirt lot nearby where Fleetwood showcases their finished product, and lastly I started looking for places where I could find people living in the houses for real. Several detours off Interstate 5 showed me just how rapidly a community seeded with modular housing can grow. Everything’s so brand-new there isn’t even any sound in the air. In one such neighborhood off Gun Club Road in Woodland, Washington, I parked my truck and tried to talk to some kids coming home from school, but they were right on it with the snappy, drilled response.