Lily King: Father of the Rain

Late that night, Garvey, Heidi, and I go for a walk all the way to the main road where the sky opens up and there are so many stars it’s hard to find the dippers or Cassiopeia. They seem to all be receding even as I watch them, but everything feels far away this summer; everything feels like it’s backing away from me. Heidi explains to me that most of the stars we’re seeing don’t exist anymore. They’ve died. But because they’re so far away and their light takes so long to get to us, we can still see them, even though they’re not there anymore.

“Aren’t there any new ones?” I ask.

“Yes, but we can’t see them yet.”

I crane my head up and stare at the dead stars. I don’t like that we’re seeing light from things that don’t actually exist. I feel how flimsy a life is, how flimsy the universe is. I’m just going to die and not even leave a spit of light behind. I jerk my head down to the earth but it doesn’t help. There are no streetlights. I can’t seem to take a deep breath. My hands and then arms begin to tingle, like they have fallen asleep, like they can’t get enough blood. In a split second, for no good reason, my heart starts racing, faster than it ever does in the post office, so fast it seems like there’s nothing for it to do but explode. I’m dying. I feel suddenly sure of this. I keep walking but I feel like crouching, curling up in a small ball and begging someone to make the feeling pass. My brother and Heidi walk ahead and it seems like they are about to step off a huge cliff and I know that I’m dying but I can’t call to them. My voice is gone. I’m disappearing. They turn back down the point road. I urge my legs to follow them.

“No they’re not,” I hear my brother say.

“Yes they are.”

My brother laughs and for a second he sounds just like my father. He taps her head. “What do you have in there, marshmallow fluff?”

“It’s true. My dad and I used to take walks at night, and he taught me about the stars.”

“The french fry maker is a closet astronomer?”

She punches him. Hard. He laughs, then punches her back just as hard.

I can’t get enough air. I can’t get my heart to slow down. I can’t even feel any space between the beats.

“Screw you,” Heidi says, and takes off running.

“Garvey,” I begin, wanting to tell him that I need to go to the hospital.

“She’s not mad,” he says. “She likes to play a little rough sometimes.”

The sound of his talking to me is soothing. “She’s nice,” I say. My voice is strange, like from a tin can. But I hope he’ll keep talking and he does. He tells me that she has this birthmark on her hip that drives him wild and that she kisses like a catfish in heat.

When we get back to the house she isn’t there. Garvey calls for her and she answers from far away. We find her sitting on the grass outside Cousin Jeremy’s house.

“All the driveways look the same,” she says.

My brother leans down and she pulls him to her and I don’t stay for the rest. I decide I’m not going to die and go back to my grandparents’ house.

Every Friday morning, my mother drives down to Boston to see her lawyer. She stays in the city for dinner, and I fall asleep on the couch waiting up for her. She brings back a present each time: a jump rope, a deck of magic cards, a Watergate coloring book about people called the Plumbers and a hippie talking to a faceless man named Deep Throat in a parking garage. The rest of the days she stays on the point with me. She says I can take sailing lessons, but I don’t want to. I like being with her. We listen to the music I brought — Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, The Carpenters — in our room. We ride bikes to the ice cream shop on the main road. I teach her how to play Spit but she never beats me. She never leaves to go to a luncheon or set up a fundraiser or attend a rally. When she has to fill a prescription, buy a present, or get her hair done, I go with her, like I used to go everywhere with my father. She tells me stories about her relatives, about her childhood, about books she’s read and plays she’s seen. She has all sorts of stories she’s never told me before.

One day in my grandfather’s rowboat she points to a red boathouse across the lake. “That’s where I met your father,” she says.

“Where?”

“That’s a tennis club in there. Your father was playing in a tournament. I saw him on the court and I walked slowly past the fence. He was warming up, practicing his serves. And when he went to pick up the balls, he asked me if I wanted to have an iced tea with him afterwards.”

Was it really like that then? Did you just get picked like a flower by some guy? “And you said yes?”

“No. I said I had a hair appointment. So he asked me to the movies, which was much better than an iced tea.”

“Did you like him?”

“I did. Of course I did.” She stops rowing. I think she’s looking right at me but it’s hard to tell with her sunglasses. Her bottom lip scrunches into her top one, like she’s only just realizing my full connection to the story. “He was very attractive, very funny. I can’t remember the movie we saw, but in the middle of it a couple got into twin beds and your father leaned over and said, ‘When we get married, we’re going to have a double bed.’ I was so charmed by that.” She shakes her head. “All it really takes is a few words here and there. You can hang on to a few words for a long time. Fill in the rest with the fluff of your imagination.”

She starts rowing again.

“But when did he ask you to marry him?”

“At the end of the summer. I don’t know why it happened so fast but it did back then. We were all in such a hurry. And your father was an only child. He’d just graduated from Harvard and I think he was scared of being alone.”

When Nixon resigns in August, we have to watch it up in our bedroom, on the little TV we brought from the kitchen on Myrtle Street, because my grandfather wants nothing to do with it.

“Good evening,” Nixon says. He’s wearing a black suit and black tie. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation.”

My mother usually berates Nixon whenever he appears on TV, but tonight she’s silent. She listens intently on her bed, chewing her lip. Nixon holds his stack of papers, reading from the top one then setting it gently to the side and starting at the top of the next. His hands don’t seem to be shaking. His words wash over me: political base, national security, American interests. It sounds like any other speech. He glances up only briefly to the camera, except at one point when he lowers his papers and without reading says, “I have never been a quitter.”

After a long time his voice starts to slow down and I know he’s getting to the end.

“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer. May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.” And then he gathers his pages and they shut the cameras off.

“Goodbye to your sweet ass!” my mother hollers, then falls back on her pillows, exhausted, satisfied.

At the end of August we leave Lake Chigham. It’s like our arrival played backwards, with Nonnie giving us kisses in the doorway and then Grindy pulling me and my mother into a hug in the grass beside our stuffed car. But we don’t drive directly to Ashing. We go to Boston, where we meet Garvey at Park Street and I get out of the car and my mother drives away. She’ll pick me up at Garvey’s in three days. We go down a grimy set of steps below the street and take the T to Somerville.