“Your father fell in the night, very quietly near the stairs,” my mother said.
“I never heard a sound. I found him in the morning, just lying out there in the hallway on the floor. ‘How long have you been there?’ I asked him. ‘About an hour,’ he said. He was inching his way along, down the hallway. ‘Let me help you,’ I said. But you know how he is. He snapped at me, like he always does. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’”
This happened four years ago. But today, lying on my sticky mat in yoga class, I’m thinking about it.
“Simply open the heart,” my yoga teacher says. “Let your shoulders slide onto the floor. Let go.”
I lie on my sticky mat with my eyes closed.
“The awareness is so big,” she says and I send my consciousness searching for the seam, the edge, the cliff where the awareness ends and (this is what I’m having trouble with) something else begins.
“Simply open the heart,” my yoga teacher repeats and I start to cry. I lie on my sticky mat and let the tears slide out of the corners of my eyes and fill my ears.
How can my heart possibly open to this?
One morning, when I was sleeping in the twin bed in my sister’s old room with the door ajar, my father fell again. I heard him come into the hall. I opened my eyes. I watched as his right foot tangled up his left, tripping him. He pivoted in slow motion, his body spiraling leftward, downward. He landed almost gracefully, on his knees beside the laundry basket, the top of his head resting on a stack of my mother’s freshly folded towels.
By then, I was beside him.
“Don’t worry about it,” he shouted—almost deaf, he had trouble modulating the volume of his voice. “I can manage.”
“Let me help you, Dad.” I said it carefully, respectfully, trying not to push while, at the same time, insisting. There was a pause. I waited as he tried to get himself sorted out. Then, yielding to his situation, my father thrust an arm to the sky. I squatted beneath it and took his weight along the back of my shoulders. I pressed upward, thighs aching, back arguing against the added weight. As my knees straightened, I leveraged my father to his feet.
Then, “I’m fine,” he snapped, pushing me away. “Go back to bed.”
Stricken, as if slapped. I stood frozen in the cold dark hallway, watching my father lurch toward the bathroom.
That lurching gait had been mistaken, countless times, by unobservant strangers on sidewalks, as the stuttered pace of a man who’d had too much to drink. To the observant—or experienced— eye, it was clear that this was the distinctive step-hop-skip of a man with cerebral palsy.
We didn’t talk about my father’s disability much.
It’s funny how memory, once it gets going, skips ahead like hopscotch, picking up pebbles and shiny coins from the sidewalk.
In this one, my father is chasing my sister Beth around the house. At 8, she’s pure tomboy, out-scrambling him, skittering around the back of the sofa as he lunges for her. When he, never as sure-footed, finally gives up, she escapes, slamming to freedom through the kitchen door.
I’ve been cheering for Beth since the whole thing began. But now that it’s over, my insides twist. I’m glad he didn’t get her but I wish that he could have.
I wish he was normal.
In this one, my father is a few steps ahead of me on the sandy path to the snack bar—an overturned sailboat where my father will buy me a hot dog and a cold orange soda—at Surfside, our favorite Nantucket beach. I am 9-10-11-12. I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll ask for a frozen Snickers bar or Chocolate Fudge Cake! A Good Humor bar—vanilla ice cream with a candy bar inside.
As I’m considering my choices, two women dressed in bathing suits, sunglasses and the scent of gin walk past him and glance back, whispering, “That poor man.”
I stop cold.
“My father is not a poor man,” I shout. “He’s better than you are any day!” And of course, that’s a lie. I didn’t really shout that—though the memory is distorted by the fierce wish that I had. Instead, I stood there hurling impotent daggers of rage at the women’s backs as a single tear hit the sand with a hiss, a small wet pebble of confusion and rage.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asked when he saw me but I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. Ever! He knelt in the sand. Eye-to-eye, he scanned my tear-streaked face for clues, my body for bleeding. “What happened?” he asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. It would hurt him.
He held me for a little while. Then, he rose to his feet. “Okay,” he said, wiping sand from his hands and knees. Whatever it was seemed to be over—we could leave it there, beneath the overturned rowboat on the beach.
A few minutes later, I swallowed that secret with big salty gulps of hot dog, mustard and orange soda.
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. You can read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here.
Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.
To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here.
To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber.
This is beautiful, Amy. I truly hope all of what you're putting out in the world reaches all the hearts that need it. Bravo to you for taking the time and effort. XO
Wow Amy. This is so vivid, visceral. Your description so maps and shows powerfully, what it was like to be parented by parent(s)… who were infantilized by ignorance and insensitivity- and the total confusion of needing them to occupy their rightful place as competent adults and parents/ while witnessing them struggle and at the same time getting lashed out at or dismissed when you tried to help, respectfully. You captured it so well!