It struck me suddenly that he could possibly have ever been a child. I try to picture it: him with that requisite bowl cut all the boys had then, dressed in little red and blue striped polo shirts with alligators on the breast, little corduroy pants. I try to picture gapped smiles, tiny milk teeth with ridges grinning away for class pictures. An impossibility. Could he have existed before the body hair, before the lacing of everything said with foul language, before the cool air of masculinity? I'd like to imagine him as a bed wetter, a thumb sucker; something vaguely defiant yet soft. Something human and comforting. I wonder if he was nursed as a baby. I cannot picture a mother.
.
In the car I ask my father about music. "What did you listen to in high school?" Don MacLean's "Miss American Pie" is playing on the car radio. I'm asking out of pure interest, but also as research. I am working with limited time here, and limited resources and I've been steadily trying to map out the puzzle of my father's childhood, the fragments he allows me, and make something out of it. Think of quilting: a square at a time, pieced together at the end. He tells me that popular music was mainly only the interest of girls; boys had little use for heartthrobs and the music was geared toward them. He tells me he remembers the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and wondered vaguely what a 'beatle' was. He didn't see what the fuss was about. My father informs me that he did not care for rock n' roll, to which my eyes roll back a little in my head; I want to believe that he is cooler than he actually is proving to be. "So didn't you own one blasted record growing up?" I say, fed up by the answers he is giving me. "Of course, but I didn't listen to music with words. I didn't care about words." This answer in itself both annoys and pleases me. On one hand he's a literary moron who can't appreciate lyricism, on the other hand he was clearly the geek listening to big band records growing up, which is respectable in its own right.
This is the image I have of my father:
The year is 1962. There he is: no glasses yet, or else they were simply removed from the photos for fear of glare; hair greased and parted and cropped close on the sides. Typical of the time. Looking like a man in one of those instructional 1950's video clips on the Technical Arts, of which he was a master at 16, already knowing how to draft and letter. He went to Revere High, drove a dark blue 1961 Plymouth Valiant, which I have a picture of him standing next to on my dresser. I stare into this picture on occasion, note the leafless trees and heavy parka he's wearing, figure the month is November or else January, something dismal. He had a girlfriend, one with a blonde flip who resembles nothing of my mother and her Snow White beauty, and I try to picture drive-ins and other dating excursions they may have had and draw a blank. When I stare at this picture I wonder if he was happy. Surely he had no idea what was coming. Perhaps he was hopeful.
.
Looking at her is like looking at train wreckage: an awful thing to assimilate a face to, I know, but correct. A mangled thing you can't take your eyes off of, you want to look into it and try to picture what it may have looked like minus the destruction, imagine the machine in its correct form. Her head really does resemble a baked potato, complete with pockish marks and hollowed-out parts; positive and negative space in screwy places, a mishmash of matter and void. Someone said once that every redheaded woman on Earth is either a knockout or a sea hag. She is unfortunately the latter: hair that snarls around itself in course frizz, the skin on the face with the tactility of sandpaper, as if freckles were three-dimensional and rough to the touch. And the teeth- the TEETH! Yellow and jagged like a hamster's. And what makes this so horrible, why I am bothering to take in every defective detail of her looks right now, is because she is talking about her husband, a man in the picture. And its this picture of her with a man now taken off the resale market and placed in her own domestic domain that haunts me. Its the thought of happiness, this picture of perhaps wedded bliss, and its a lonely thought. Because here I am, Unwedded. Unblissed.
These things are unrelated.
