The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [92]
The next day my stepmother did not know where Dad had gone. After my friends left, I walked to my mom’s house. In the afternoon I called Pat, who tried not to sound worried and said it wasn’t my fault. Late that night she called to tell me he had come home. I stayed with my mom for a couple of weeks and played my music so loud my ears wouldn’t stop ringing.
The summer I turned nineteen, my dad drove from Vermont to Washington, D.C., to pick me up from a friend’s townhouse where I’d been staying for two months. It hadn’t been a particularly hard summer for either my dad or me: I had been working at a day-care center and swimming; my dad had been gardening and teaching yoga; we had both been smoking a lot of pot. But we hadn’t kept in touch, and in the car there was a blunt sadness between us, because of nothing, which made me think it was because of everything.
We made a deal for the drive back to Vermont: music by song, not album. The passenger was responsible for switching CDs between every song. We went through Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan, Belle and Sebastian, PJ Harvey, Van Morrison. The tension lifted, and we rolled the windows down and gulped summer air and sang our way through Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey. We spoke only when we stopped for meals, and then only to tell jokes. We stayed to the right so others could pass.
My dad drove about ten hours that first day we were together in France. At ten o’clock we found a motel in a small town. Every house was locked and shuttered. We ate in the motel’s restaurant, and when the waitress took our order, I pretended I didn’t know French and let my dad do the talking. That night I couldn’t sleep and lay awake with my head shoved under the pillow and my heart pounding. My dad woke up once; he must have thought I was sleeping, because I heard him sighing and making soft crying noises, a cross between a little boy’s whimper and an old man’s weeping. Then he went to the bathroom.
After he came back to bed, I told him, “Dad, I can’t sleep.”
He was quiet for a while before he said, “It just hit me, the pain you’re going through.”
Depression is rarely described as “pain.” It’s most often considered a series of losses—of appetite, of enjoyment, of motivation—while the acute hurt that replaces what’s lost goes unspoken. My father’s instinctive choice of words was the reason I needed him, and no one else, with me in France.
Dad and I talked through the night, lying on our backs in our parallel twin beds. I remember few of the actual words we spoke, but I recall their cadence—short, quiet sentences with long pauses between—because it suited my mood so well. I could be myself with him, never having to fake sanity or explain how I felt.
When the first light of dawn came through the curtains, Dad reached over and turned off the alarm clock. I said I thought maybe I could sleep for a while. He started to tell me about a new folk CD he’d brought to play for me. “It’s full of suffering, but it’s not hopeless,” he said. “When I heard it, I thought, This is for Hannah.”
After we checked out of the motel at noon, we bought a pipe at a tobacconist’s and smoked pot in the rental car, bickering about whether to listen to jazz or rock. I guess he’d forgotten about the new folk CD he wanted me to hear. Once, after he’d passed me the pipe, I waited for a few seconds before I took a hit, and he said, “Don’t waste it, babe, don’t waste it,” snapping his fingers lightly. That babe struck me as glaringly unparental, far from the father I wanted at that time. I did not need a friend, a flawed equal searching like me for a way out, but someone older and stronger to help me make sense of things. I looked out at the French countryside while profundities shot from my father’s mouth: all his ideas on how to live a good life (if only he could make himself follow them) and theories on everything from coffee to the war. I decided then that, no matter how much I wanted to, I would never smoke pot with him again.