From a Place like Every Song Bruce Springsteen Ever Wrote Rolled into One
Ihardly ever picked up the phone when it rang at Wonderland, but that day I did—adopting the words Prudence used when she answered a call. On the other end of the line, a familiar gravelly voice.
“‘Emerson residence?’ What kind of crap are they teaching you there?”
It was my father calling. From New Jersey. If he wasn’t drunk yet, he was headed that way.
“I have a job, if you remember,” I told him. “Things around here are different from back home.”
“You can say that again,” he said. “So how’s it going in the lap of luxury? The country club life agreeing with you?”
“I’m having a great time,” I told him. Given what he’d just said, I wasn’t about to mention I’d started playing tennis. Or all the rest of what was going on.
“My man Howie really knows how to show a person a good time,” my father said. “Excuse me. Forrest.” His voice had that edge to it that made it clear to me he was on his third glass of vodka of the afternoon. Possibly the fourth.
“I’ve been swimming a lot,” I told him. Talking with my father now, I was aware that I didn’t want things to sound too great. “It’s been really hot here. The kids are kind of a pain sometimes.”
“How’s Regina doing?” he asked me.
“She’s OK. You know.” I’d learned long ago that mine were not the kind of parents you confided in.
“You making friends?” my father asked. This could have been the moment I told him about Regina calling me her one friend in the world, but I kept that to myself.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “The kids at the club are great. We hang out all the time. At the canteen.”
“I’m guessing you don’t spend much time missing your old man, huh?
” I could hear the clinking of ice cubes.
The funny thing was that when he said this, I realized how much I actually did miss my father.
In those first magical weeks at Wonderland I had loved those summer nights out on the patio—Forrest playing his ukulele and pulling quarters out of Jilly’s ear, doing his Pee-wee Herman imitation, setting pints of H?agen-Dazs on the table.
Four different flavors, five spoons. Playing old records for me (songs with lyrics, and a recognizable melody) and asking me what I thought about them.
Asking me about the books I read, and expressing his view that one day I’d be writing books myself.
All that was before he met Brenda Barnett. Forrest, as he was now, hardly ever asked me questions about anything.
Forrest was a cheater. I might still love him, but knowing what I did now, it was impossible to respect him anymore.
For all the drinking, and his relentlessly melancholy and cynical attitude toward life, my father possessed a brutal honesty I had to admire.
Unlike Forrest, he refused to say anything he didn’t mean, and he never told a lie, that I knew of.
With my father, you knew where you stood.
Even if where you stood was kind of lousy. He never tried to pull one over on you.
Maybe it was the discovery of Forrest’s faithlessness that led me to question more about life at Lake Catherine.
As much as I’d wanted to belong in the world of Wonderland, I was more a product of Hubbard than I’d realized.
I’d never be one of those girls in the matching tennis sets—skipping out to the courts while their mothers followed three feet behind, carrying their tennis bags.
Multiple racquets in case they broke a string.
Nothing unpleasant happened at Wonderland.
Only it did, of course. We just pretended otherwise.
Now here came my father, crashing into the sunlit kitchen where I had just fixed myself a milkshake. Maybe the sound of his voice reminded me who I was, still, and where I came from—a place like every song Bruce Springsteen ever wrote rolled into one.
Tomorrow—assuming I could still fit this in around my newly assigned detective duties—I’d be on my bike, riding over to the tennis court to work on my backhand with Jonathan.
But for this one moment, receiving that call, I felt a wave of something—if not love, then the deepest kind of connection anyway, the recognition of a part of myself I had worked hard to keep under wraps. Maybe the most real part of me.
“How are things back home?” I asked him. I hoped he didn’t hear my voice trembling a little.
“You know your mother,” he said. “She thinks I’m a bum.”
“You’ll finish that book, Dad,” I told him.
I didn’t actually believe this, probably, and even if he did, I didn’t believe anything was likely to change in our lives as a result, but all I wanted at the moment—all I ever wanted, with my father—was to make him happy.
If I could do that, maybe he wouldn’t need the vodka.
And if he never gave up vodka, I’d love him anyway.
“I don’t blame your mother for being fed up,” he said. “I doubt she could come up with a single good thing about me at the moment. She could’ve once, but that was a long time ago.”
My parents bore virtually no resemblance to Forrest and Regina Emerson.
But for a moment it occurred to me that the four of them—my parents, and Forrest and Regina—shared one thing: the experience of profound disappointment.
Maybe they had all been in love when they were young.
Each of them had big, hopeful dreams about the person they’d chosen to marry and make a life with. None of those dreams came true.
Maybe that’s how it was with love. For a brief moment it appeared to you like this golden and glittering thing, like a treasure box you opened, filled with jewels and spilling with possibility.
Then you took everything out, one piece at a time, and it all started to look like junk from a Goodwill store.
“It sounds like the good life is suiting you,” my father said. “Old Howie behaving himself?” On the other end of the line, I heard a wheezing sound that didn’t used to be there. I wished my father would quit the cigarettes.
“It’s fine.”
As much vodka as he’d consumed that day, maybe my dad picked up on something in my voice. “You OK, Junior?” he said. “If anything’s wrong, you need to tell me.”
And then what? What would you do about it?
“You know how it goes,” I said to him. “There’s always stuff going on.”
“Like what?”
I could have said, Like everything.
“The usual,” I told him. Why say more?