The stories in this volume compose FAB = -FBA, SUM FLUX V.2.3. See more stories, and check out the authors featured in this edition here.
It’s time to move my parents out of their apartment. They’re moving in with my brother. Dad is waiting for a bed in a memory care unit and will move again soon. It isn’t an ideal situation. Moving an 87-year-old Alzheimer’s patient twice within a few weeks seems reckless to me, but what choice do we have? They can’t take care of themselves anymore.
I am tasked with spending a week readying them for their move. My only constraints are airline schedules and emotional stamina. I left this town decades ago and returned when my inner child tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that my parents did good things on my behalf from time to time. They did their best. That’s all anyone can reasonably ask. Now it’s my turn.
This apartment isn’t home to me, I never slept in it. Been gone so long, I hardly know my own parents these days.
But I know they’ve lied to me for years. Easy enough to do on the telephone. They were fine, they said.
I conspired with them, accepting their words at face value. Lies by omission and a dearth of follow-up questions kept me away.
And now, here I am, regarding the hall closet. It’s one of the last things I need to tackle before the movers come tomorrow. The bi-fold doors creak on their rails when I pull them open. Shelves sag from the weight of bottles: red, white and sparkling wines together with gin, vodka , slivovitz, and single malt scotch. Dad has always been a single malt guy, and thinks blended whiskey is for the unserious. The hard stuff is mostly gone, except the vodka. He bought more Smirnoff recently by the looks of it. The wine bottles are full. Probably because they stopped entertaining a long time ago.
I kneel on the carpet to get the lowest items. I pull out boxes that once housed premium bottles of scotch but now contain junk: matchbook covers, old business cards, rubber bands, pornographic pens from an auto glass supplier. The pens have images of women in swimsuits on them. You turn them upside down and the women’s bathers disappear. How old could those be?
Dust makes my hands itchy.
Is that a VHS tape back there? I pull it out. It isn’t nearly as dusty as the wine bottles. Two strapping men on the cover thrust torpedo-sized hard-ons towards me. Underneath the tape is an erotic novel about two men. Under that a DVD.
Nestled in tissue paper is a small phallic-shaped object made from silicone. I unwrap it to get a better look and nearly drop it to the floor.
I saw a similar thing once back in the 80s when I was stoned on a Saturday night in Toronto, out with a group from my dormitory. Laughing at the leather-clad mannequins in a sex shop’s window, we entered and received a kind of education.
How did a butt plug find its way to my father’s liquor closet? Could it be his? How long has it been there? Fingers shaking, I open a box that once housed a bottle of Macallan and dump the junk inside into the larger box I’d brought for the recycling. Into the Macallan box goes the butt plug along with the naked lady pens. The whole thing drops into the bigger box of garbage with a thud.
I lift my head, listening for a moment. Did Dad hear the noise? Did it wake my mother? The last thing I want is for either of them to notice that I’ve discovered these things in the box.
I can hear my father singing to himself in the bathroom, the electric shaver humming along. Sinatra. He gets most of the words right.
Through nights that never end
The summer wind
A song of love. A song of loss. A song of longing.
Who lives in his heart? Who’s lost to him? For whom does he long?
I can hardly breathe.
My mind tumbles backward into childhood, gathering up memories and experiences that could fit a narrative of closeted homosexuality.
His inability to hold a job for more than a year or two at a time. The resulting absences. The in-between times that lasted months and sometimes years between his taking up a new position far away and selling our houses, and buying the next ones. Reuniting.
What an ideal way to create space between a dutiful life and a desired one; to create circumstances to cure longing, at least temporarily, with little risk of anyone finding out.
Does my mother know? Could she be as naive as me? Or did they make a sort of pact to protect each other? If she knows, she missed her calling. She could win an Academy Award with her talent.
I wipe a hand across my forehead. Sweat smudges the dust that settled on the skin covering my knuckles and veins, the hand of a middle-aged woman at loose ends, unsettled, fidgety.
These things I’ve placed in the box, the tape, DVD, books, sex toy—what do they mean to him? To them? To our family?
***
I meet my brother for dinner in a chain restaurant known for its chicken wings, a place where diners throw peanut shells on the floor, and the house wine comes in a box. I order the chardonnay.
I tell him what I found in the closet. What did he make of it?
“It’s possible. It kinda makes sense now that I think about it.”
My brother is twelve years older than me. We had two separate childhoods.
“It could have something to do with some of the shit that went down in Hungary around the time you were born.” He chucks a peanut shell on the floor.
“What are you talking about?”
“The car disappeared for one thing. He bought a brand new Opel in Vienna before we crossed the border into Hungary in the summer of ’67. Nobody in Mátraballa had a new car, let alone one manufactured in the West. A year later the car was gone. He wouldn’t tell me or Mom what happened to it. It was just gone.” He gestures with his pudgy hands. “Poof! Never saw it again.”
Holding his gaze, I find I’m jealous of his blue eyes. One in four chance to get those, yet he never considered himself lucky.
He sips his beer and I my wine. We’re thinking. He’s remembering back to the summer when he was eleven years old, ripped from a normal suburban middle-class existence in Toronto and taken to our father’s childhood village in Hungary, a place where not everyone had indoor plumbing or telephones or TVs, but every household had chickens and vegetable gardens and stills for making slivovitz. The very Catholic aunts were there—really our great-aunts—who according to Dad doted on him when he was a child. If Dad thought of any place as home it was the village, where he’d been an altar boy.
I remember nothing from those years. Too young. Maybe too traumatized. I don’t know. Dissociation can be a superpower according to my therapist.
“What do you think might have happened to the car?” I ask.
“He could have sold it for cash. He was probably running low by then. Or maybe he was blackmailed into giving it away.”
“Blackmailed?”
“He’d disappear from the village for weeks, even months at a time. Everyone, including the aunts, figured he was into some black market shit”.
Brother twists his wedding ring from his second marriage, the wedding he didn’t invite me or our parents to.
“He cheated on Mom. First she was pregnant with you. Then she was flat on her back with some kind of arthritic flare-up. The doctor gave her B12 shots and I don’t know what else.”
“Why did she need B12?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot.
“We had hardly any meat. When there was meat, Pop ate most of it. She’d let me take the rest.”
“Do you know who he slept with?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if the rumors about a woman were a lie. Maybe he was in Budapest and thought he could get away with some homo shit.”
"And that’s why the car disappeared?”
“Could be. Hungary has always been homophobic. The stuff Orban’s doing now is nothing new.”
“Uncle John told me once when I was living with him and Aunt Marlene that a couple of strange guys by the name of Nágy showed up at Grandma’s house back in ’74 or ’75 looking for Pop. Do you remember anything about that?”
“Yeah, I was there. They said they were brothers. Maybe they weren’t brothers at all. Maybe they were a couple, a pair of gays Pop helped to escape?
“It would be just like him to tell them to look him up if they ever made it to Canada.” I pick up my wine glass and notice it’s almost empty. The waitress catches my eye, and I signal for a refill.
Brother gulps his Sleeman’s IPA. Perhaps for the courage to continue. He seems to be on a roll, so I keep quiet.
“I found something in his wallet I never told you about. Last year after he lost his license and stole Mom’s car keys for that little joy ride he took to Ayr.”
“Yeah, I remember. The cops found him crashed into a creek. The car was totaled.”
“I had to go to the hospital and get him home. Anyway, I went through the stuff they found on him. He had two pictures in his wallet. One was of a young guy I’ve never seen before. Name of Paul on the back.”
“Who was in the other one?”
“It was you. When you were little in Hungary. You had that fuck off-and-die expression that still terrifies people sometimes.”
Brother finishes his beer.
“I should get home.”
“Wait a minute, we haven’t eaten anything yet. I’m starving.”
“Sorry, I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He leaves me there, among the peanut shells, dreading the following day when the movers come. I leave cash for our drinks on the table and head for the parking lot.
***
I go back to the Air B&B I’m staying at.
My phone rings. It’s Mom.
“He tossed the laundry down the garbage chute. Can you come and help me get it back?”
I get dressed and climb into my rented Toyota.
Ten minutes later, I’m pressing the buzzer in the lobby of their building.
Mom comes downstairs in her slippers, her white hair with black streaks twisted onto those pink foam curlers that nobody uses anymore. Together we get the night super’s key to the garbage room.
Man, it reeks of spoiled vegetables and bleach in there.
Luckily very little went down the chute after Pop sent their clothes into the bin at the bottom of it.
“Why did he do this?”
“He thinks it’s a laundry chute like in the old house.”
Of course.
We carry everything out to the laundry room. Mom stuffs quarters into the machine.
The smell of Bounce burns my nostrils. It’s better than the garbage room, though. The dryer spins round and round.
***
When the dryer finishes we fold their clothes and carry them up to their apartment.
Dad is standing in the kitchen in nothing but his underwear and glasses. Grapes and cheese are out on the counter. He’s tilted to one side from scoliosis I didn’t know he had until I arrived earlier in the week. My once strong father is now a frail eighty-seven-year-old whose body can no longer hide skeletal imperfections.
“That you, Mary? We need to get the peaches off the trees tomorrow.”
He thinks my mother is his cousin Mary. Her family owned a small farm outside of town at one time. When he was a teenager he’d earn some cash helping to harvest the crops, mostly stone fruit, root vegetables, and a few hundred pounds of strawberries every June.
He turns to me. “Danica?”
“Sure.” I say this without missing a beat. I have no idea who Danica is or was.
“When did you get into town? Aren’t you supposed to be in Montreal?”
“Special days off. Thought I’d visit you.”
All the while I’m standing there holding his freshly washed clothes. He seems oblivious to his near-nakedness. He slices cheese and eats it.“Where’s Paul? Is he coming? To play cards?”
“Who’s Paul?”
“My friend. He was always a good buddy in the orchards. We’d have pissing contests out in the back forty. We’d skinny dip in the pond, too. Every day all summer we were together. By ourselves, mostly.”
I put the clean clothes down on the couch.
“What else did you do?”
Dad tilts his head. “It’s not for you to know. You’re too young.”
“I’m going back to my place, now. Maybe I’ll find Paul on the way.”
***
I get back to my rental. It’s almost midnight. I FaceTime my husband who’s three hours behind on the West Coast.
“Do teen boys engage in a bit of homoerotic play as a normal thing?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
"Did something happen?”
“I think my father may be gay.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Everything. It all makes sense. He’s coming out of the closet now. Sort of, I guess. He’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He talks about some guy named Paul. I wonder if that’s whose picture he’s carrying around in his wallet?”
“Again, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Go back to the beginning.”
I told him about the stuff I found. My conversation with my brother. The laundry. Mary, Danica, and Paul.
Husband says, “Do you really want to know about Paul?"
Do I? I ask myself silently. “It explains everything. It explains my life. Everything that happened was because he was closeted.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s the only explanation for all the secrecy. They’ve never told me what went on in Hungary when I was little. They’re happy that I don’t remember any of it. But my brother does. That’s why we hardly hear from him, let alone see him. I think that’s why he’s on anti-depressants.”
“It’s a theory at best.”
“Why did I move to the other side of the planet after my life imploded? And stay for six years? Why did I agree to marry you, knowing that I’d never live near my parents again?”
Husband reaches down to pat our dog. He waits for me to go on.
“The heart knows things the mind hides from is all I’m saying. Maybe the disease stops the mind from hiding.”
“You must be tired. See you in a couple of days.” He blows me a goodnight kiss.
“Maybe the real pain of Alzheimer’s is what’s revealed to the rest of us. Dad’s a pretty happy fellow. Yet, even now he stops short of telling me the whole truth. He’s just lucid enough to restrain himself from sharing the facts of his life with his child. The disease can’t erase the shame, not completely anyway.”
***
I am at the airport. The plane leaves in half an hour to take me home to husband and dog. I plan to sleep the whole way home.
I’m ashamed at how I browbeat my mother yesterday into letting one of the movers pack up the bedroom she shared with Pop. She cried. I told her the guy didn’t care about any of it, so why should she care about what he saw?
She made it hard to be gentle with her. The yelling. The tears. The doubling over as though she might toss her cookies. She didn’t want to move any more than Dad did. That’s why she covered for him as his disease progressed. She feared for her own future.
I spent the night at an airport hotel. Relieved and sad and wishing I dared to do something, what that might be I hadn’t a clue. The one thing that might make both parents happy is also the one thing I can’t and won’t do, which is stay.
Early boarding begins.
My phone lights up. My brother calling.
“Yeah? Everything okay?”
“Pop won’t settle. He says we’re holding him against his will. He wants to go home.”
“I was afraid something like this would happen.”
“He’s beating the shit out of the coffee table with a soapstone sculpture.”
“The glass table?”
“Yeah.”
“Call 911.”
“You think I should?”
"Is he a danger to himself and others?”
“Maybe.”
“Call. They’ll hospitalize him for the night.”
“He’s hitting my wife now. Calling her names.”
“Tell him Paul is coming. See if that calms him. Go! Call 911!”
He hangs up.
What to do now? Do I get on the plane or do I drive out to my brother’s? It’ll take over two hours to rent a car and drive to his place, where I’d have to sleep on the couch; and, I’m pretty sure his cat would try to sleep on my head, maybe even attempt to smother me. What help can I offer? If the situation were reversed, what would my brother do?
I get on the plane.
***
A month later, I go back again.
Pop is dead. Stroke.
He didn’t understand why he was in the nursing home. He’d yell at the staff in Hungarian. Get physical. They dosed him with antipsychotics to protect themselves. Hence the stroke—apparently a known side effect of antipsychotics in older people with high blood pressure.
There is no funeral. On one of those June days that begs for a trip to the beach at Lake Erie, the week after Father’s Day, my family gathers at the graveside.
I tell Mary that Pop thought of her often, which both surprises and delights her.
We each struggle to say nice, acceptable things, and then toss flowers on top of the stone marker. Drama is for others a few rows away, mourning their own loss, another husband and father gone. A woman keening as the clergyman recites the rituals of death, returning to the earth a body, a holy vessel. My father didn’t believe in the holy part, having tossed Catholicism to the curb long ago.
I want to acknowledge the sacred in this moment but don’t have the means, and even if I did my relatives wouldn’t be receptive. Brokenness leads to broken rituals. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
The whole thing fails to satisfy me. I’d rather be with the keening widow over yonder. The show she puts on may or may not be honest but it’s true. She feels something and isn’t afraid to show it. I want to whisper against my father’s headstone that I’d love him no matter what. It would be okay to tell me his longings, wishes and truths.
It might have been the thing that brought our family closer.
Like my mother, I keep my thoughts to myself.
***
A week later, my husband and I walk the dog along the west side of our hill. We stop to take in the view of Puget Sound, and Bainbridge Island in the distance, sunlight sparkling against the water.
If my father’s interior life had been less burdened by shame while he was fully alive, perhaps he and Paul could share this view with us, and maybe even my mother. Then again, had this been the case, he may not have married my mother, and I never would have been born.
The past beats like drumsticks against my heart, tapping to the rhythm of the sea. There can be no present without it.
Note from the Author:
This is a compressed account of real events to the best of my recollection. Quotation marks in speech are used for reading clarity. The words in everyone’s mouths are mine not theirs. Names have been omitted or changed to protect the innocent.
Cover Image by Jon T
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A poignant reminder that authenticity is the root of contentment. Also, my dad had those "stripper" pens too. Forgot about them until I read this. Thanks for sharing.
I was riveted from beginning to end! Thank you for sharing secrets. Those true stories make life most interesting and colorful!