The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,59
the Central Club on my insisting. I said, honey, I want a real bar with pool tables and cheap drinks, and your mother said yes even though she didn’t like the idea. That place was pretty bad then, worse than now if you can believe it, and pretty soon after we sat down it was a scary scene. Every guy in the place was staring at her—she was way too pretty, way too smart—and she didn’t like it. I tried to take her mind off of it, suggested we play a game of pool, but your mother … when she was mad like that, she couldn’t focus. She shot a terrible game and the whole time these assholes were starting to snicker, but your mother … she had always refused to let me treat her like a lady, do you understand? ‘None of that Southern charm shit,’ she always said, always pushed the door open for herself, rarely even let me”—he gasped here but in a different way, the kind that precedes a great opening up of the body for a sob—“never even let me coddle her. Ida, are you listening?”
(I was listening, was transfixed. I was also considering what else I had inherited from my father: that insistence that the audience look and listen. How many times had I pleaded to Jackson: Look. Listen. Are you listening? Do you understand? But not stopped to hear his reply. My father didn’t stop either.)
“And so I kept tough on her, didn’t give her any breaks. Pretty much all her balls were on the table and I had three left. She told me she was leaving and I said, hey, come on. Don’t be a poor sport. But she left, Ida, and I didn’t follow her—if I had tried to she wouldn’t have let me, do you understand? And so I stayed, had a grand old time feeling like I was, you know, ‘integrating with the locals.’ Some idiot was impressed by my being a newspaperman, the stories I told him, and he gave me, I kid you not, a hat and a steak. He was a meat delivery guy and his truck was out back, went out there and got me a steak and gave me the hat off his head. Don’t know why about the hat, still.”
My father laughed, here, and it was the closest to the hoot he once famously produced I’d heard in a couple of years, until he remembered what story he was telling, exactly.
“But Ida I stayed ’til last call. I don’t really remember the walk home, quite, but I know I had the mind to put that steak in the freezer and crawl into bed. And that’s it. I remember vaguely that I was looking forward to telling your mother about this guy, about him insisting I take his meat and the hat, that I knew she would laugh at what an asshole she’d been to leave and what an asshole I’d been to stay and get so tossed. I remember planning on a big dinner for the three of us the next night—even though your teeth weren’t ready yet, I remember thinking, yeah, baby’s first steak, and smiling at the future memory.
“Only, Ida, I didn’t hear her. I was sleeping off the cheap whiskey the steak guy bought me and I didn’t wake. The only time in her life your mother actually needed me, actually called out for me, and I didn’t hear her.”
I was touched that my father had come to me and not Julia. Touched that he saw me stable enough to take this, digest it, and still love him; touched he was still able to laugh about the hat and the steak; touched by how clearly I was a combination of the both of them; touched by being a part of a real live, honest-to-goodness family made of bloodlines and shared genetics who did not up and go whenever they felt like it except when death gave them no choice. When I went to respond, though, my father stopped me.
“Dear heart,” he gasped, “I shouldn’t … I shouldn’t have talked like that so long. Gets my blood pressure high and my heart sad. Tired, now. I’ve got to get off the phone, okay?”
He sounded panicked. I wanted to tell him I loved him and ask where Julia was, whether he was all right, but he was already gone. I almost called back several times that night, but part of the deal