enabled him to change the oil in his car, to steam the wallpaper off the rooms in our old wreck of a house, to disassemble the place’s old windows and replace the chains and counterweights. Now, as I attempted to imitate him—and other father figures—I wondered whether Deedie could tell how little I understood the role I was trying to play.
I mowed our not insignificant lawn with a John Deere tractor. I sat on that thing for hours, moving around and around in a counterclockwise circle, my ears thrumming with the noise, my brain gently vibrating in my skull. I tried stripping the wallpaper in one of the rooms, but because our walls were cheap drywall rather than the plaster that had been the foundation of my family’s house, the wallpaper just tore off some of the drywall beneath it as it peeled, leaving a surface that, despite my best attempts at spackling and sanding, never really appeared smooth. Other manly jobs fell to me as well—the changing of lightbulbs; the shoveling of snow; the putting up and taking down of screens. I didn’t object to these tasks falling to me, since I knew that someone had to do them and that that someone might as well be me. But I feared that my fundamental uncertainty about my identity, which even now I tried to keep hidden from everyone and my own self not least, bled over into even these small mundane chores. And because of this, so many tasks I attempted to perform ended in monumental, almost operatic failure. I purchased a snowblower at Sears, for instance, and when I got it home, I saw a tiny pin fall out of the thing, a pin I learned later would render the entire thing nonfunctional. And so, when I brought the whole contraption back to Sears the next day, and they loaded a completely new one into the back of my SUV, I figured I’d solved this problem. Until I hit the gas, and the snowblower rolled backward in the storage area of the car and crashed through the rear window of the car.
Or: We had our septic system in the house replaced at great cost and inconvenience one summer. Except that in digging up the yard, the septic tank people somehow managed to sever the electric line that ran toward the well, thus cutting off the water supply. And also somehow sever a pipe in the perimeter drain that thus made our basement flood with knee-deep water after every rain, water that then seeped into all of our files and precious keepsakes, including Deedie’s mother’s watercolors, which had been stored in the basement as well.
Like Hermey the Elf in the stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who is unable to make a simple Christmas toy without disaster, I kept thinking of a mantra that explained why everything I touched so often turned to shit. Just not happy in my work, I guess.
But then I would remember the moments I’d seen through my own father’s veneer. There was the time, for instance, when he’d propped a ladder against a tree limb, climbed to the topmost rung, and cut through the limb with a hand saw, only to have the ladder crash to the earth as the limb it had rested against fell to the ground. It was like the kind of accident that would befall a man in a cartoon—although the arm that my father broke as a result was real enough. Then there was the time he was mowing our lawn in Newtown Square and he ran over a yellow jackets’ nest with the lawn mower. He’d wound up in the hospital after that disaster, all puffed up like a Thanksgiving parade balloon and bearing a newfound vulnerability to bee stings that he would suffer from the rest of his life. Clearly there were moments when my father couldn’t quite pull off the man business either.
It made me wonder how many men—and women—in this world don’t have a clue what they’re doing, are only going through the motions of what is expected of them because they don’t see that they have any choice. Oh, I’m sure there are men who really feel like men, and women who really feel like women, in this world. But I begin to wonder whether they are, in fact, an eccentric minority, like some marginal cult that exists on the fringes of town. How it is that the rest of us have become convinced that,