Lily King - Father of the Rain

We pick out pairs of blue, gray, and black socks. We’re going through the pants rack when my father looks over into the women’s section, says, “Duck!” and pushes me down by the shoulders into a little nook.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

“Is it Catherine?”

“Christ, no. You can’t buy muumuus in here. It’s Tits Kelly. If she sees us, we’ll never get out of here.”

The wooden floorboards creak.

“Fuck. She’s coming. Suck in your gut and don’t breathe.”

No one in town ever calls her anything else, except to her face, and I can’t even remember what that name is. She’s a terrible busy-body and, as my father has said a million times, completely humorless. The ultimate condemnation.

Brenda McPheney comes over and asks her if she’s looking for something special.

“Not really,” she says, more of a sigh than words. Brenda goes back to her sweater folding. Mrs. Kelly cuts a long, low growling fart. Dad looks at me, delighted, making an O with his mouth and squeezing my finger to help him stay quiet. I laugh in silence, my stomach knotted in pain. We are bent over and mushed together to fit in this tiny hole in the wall. I don’t know how it’s possible she doesn’t see us, but she takes her time choosing a man’s shirt. Finally, she brings her selection to Brenda at the register.

“I wonder who she’s buying that shirt for,” my father says on the way home. “Husband Number Two left her last spring. You ever hear the story of little Davy Kelly and the two C-pluses?”

I have, but he’s in such a good mood. “No.”

“No?” He’s thrilled. And he tells me about how in fourth grade little Davy Kelly brought home a report card with two C-pluses in math and social studies. Little Davy, according to his mother, never got anything but As. Then she found out that in both math and social studies, little Davy sat next to Ollie Samuels. So Mrs. Kelly marched over to the Samuelses’ at dinnertime, stood in their kitchen, and demanded that Ollie tell her what he’d been doing to distract her son during math and social studies. Ollie told her he’d stopped talking to Davy long ago, when he realized Davy was paying Lucy Lothrop ten cents for her answers in English and only gave Ollie a nickel for his.

My father laughs like it’s the first time he’s heard it himself. It seems to me a story much older than Davy Kelly, a story my father might have heard on a radio show when he was little. It’s just the kind of story he likes, about people getting their comeuppance. In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.

I figure it is time to ask about work. “What happened with Hugh, Dad?”

“Fuck him.”

“What happened?”

“That’s over with. I’ve retired.”

When we get home, there is a message on the machine in the kitchen. “Hey there, Gardiner, it’s Patrick. I’ll call another time. All right. Hope you’re well.” You can tell he was nervous. The message is breathy and full of lurches, not really Patrick’s normal phone voice, which is, at least with me, as goofy as he was as a kid. It makes me miss him. I’ll call him as soon as I get away from here.

“You should call him back.”

“I’m not calling him back and you’re not either, you hear me?”

“He adores you, Dad. You can’t just drop him.”

Watch me, his eyes say, glaring at mine.

He goes upstairs and changes into his new pants and blue socks with geese flying on them. I go to the bathroom off the den and stare for a long time at the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall, my father’s team pictures from St. Paul’s and Harvard, rows and rows, years and years, of white English-looking boys holding oars and footballs and tennis racquets. I have seen these so many times I can quickly find my father in each one, his small nervous face in the earlier ones, when he was only eleven and twelve, and then his more mature, impatient expressions later on. Clearly no one was encouraged to smile in photographs back then, so it is impossible to say if he, or anyone, was happy.

He fixes himself a drink when he comes downstairs. It isn’t yet noon. We sit by the pool. I bring out tuna fish sandwiches, and we play backgammon while we eat them. The sun beats down. The pool glimmers and beckons. I’m not sure I still own a bathing suit, and if I do it’s buried in a garbage bag somewhere in my stuffed car.

He makes trips to the poolhouse to refill his glass. I watch his bowed spine, his splayed step, the need on the way in and the fulfillment on the way out, that first sip of a fresh drink, eyelids swooning shut, lips amphibious, reaching out and around the curve of the glass, desperate to make contact with the alcohol. Sixteen more hours until I can drive away from the sight of it.

The sun sears my back.

“Aren’t you hot, Dad?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe we should move under the tree.”

“No.”

He beats me.

“Have a swim,” he says.

“Will you?”

“Nah. Not today.”

“I guess I could just jump in in my clothes.”

“Take ‘em off. No one’s looking.”

He leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes.

I jump in in my shirt and shorts. The water is colder than I ever remember it. Everything in my body withdraws, as if trying to contract to a single point. By the time I reach the shallow end I can’t feel the skin on my legs. As I get out, the water rolls off them as if over rubber.

My father is laughing. “I thought you’d at least test it with your toe!”

“What’d you do, fill it with ice cubes?”

“Haven’t turn on the heat yet.” He wipes his eyes. “You should have seen your face. Priceless.”

I flick water from my hair at him.

“Nice tits.”

“Dad.”

“Why do you wear such baggy clothes? You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, believe me.”

I can’t find my voice.

My father rolls doubles and hoots.

“I would appreciate it,” I begin, shakily, “if you would not speak of my body like that again.”

“And I would appreciate it if you would just roll the dice. I was giving you a compliment.”

Eventually he goes inside to take a nap. Fourteen more hours.

I call Jonathan from the poolhouse but only get the machine. I love the quick rumble of his voice. I feel like calling back just to hear the recording of it again. In a week we’ll live in a cottage in California together. Stop saying California like it’s so important . It is important. It is deeply important to me. What if one of us doesn’t make it out there safely? I’m bad at trusting the future. It seems suddenly improbable that both of us will make it there alive. I have an urge to get in my car and outrun fate.

I get up off the floor of the poolhouse and go back out into the heat. I cross the grass to the tennis court. I reimagine the rose garden, the scrolled bushes, the faint blue paint of the fountain’s basin, the smell of the black leaves when we cleaned it out the first nice day of spring. I see my mother in her kerchief and gardening gloves and me asking her as she sprays for aphids what a French kiss is. She wore bright cotton shifts, laughed loudly when Bob Wuzzy or Sylvie Salters was over, had so many convictions. And then in Paul she found a true partner, a fellow believer, and I would hear them on the couch late into the night talking about his cases, about the abuse of children and the rights of minorities, talking seriously, though laughter would always burst out unexpectedly. It didn’t include me, and maybe that accounted for some of my sullenness with them, but it’s still my idea of love, of harmony, that sound of them on the couch with all their beliefs and hopes and laughter.