The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [92]
“I was an architect? No. No, I don’t think so. Was I?”
Or I’d say, do you remember the time when … and I’d try to choose something happy. Like the time he took my mother and me to Trinidad, where his greatest architectural achievement had happened. Steel drum music. A tortoise we saw lay eggs on the white sand beaches. Or living at Stinson Beach. Fruit trees in our yard. The ocean on the breeze. Or my sister singing in The Singing Angels Choir. Or classical music. Or baseball. To all of these he’d smile, sometimes he’d laugh, shake his head yes, maybe a glimpse of something. Mostly he’d stay quiet and look out the window of the car. Once he looked over at me driving and said, “Marilou?” His sister’s name.
“No Daddy,” I’d say, “I’m Lidia.”
“I know that,” he’d say, and laugh.
Among the meager boxes of things he’d brought with him - old photographs and miscellaneous “papers” and a drawing pad and a very fine assortment of pencils and pens - was my first published book. I found it in his room one day. I picked it up and said, “Huh. What are you doing with this thing?” The cover was worn.
“Oh, I’ve read that book many times.”
“Really. Do you know who wrote it?”
“You,” he said, looking up at me with transparent blue eyes, twinning mine.
“Yeah, daddy. Me. Have you read all the stories?”
“I think so. I can’t remember.”
“That’s OK. It doesn’t matter.”
“There’s one about swimming.”
I looked at him hard. Sometimes - I couldn’t help it - I wondered if the other guy was in there somewhere. Some people will know what I mean. There were moments when he looked more knowing than he should. In those moments I almost … I almost wanted him back. My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. My father was an artist. My father loved art, and nature, and the life of the mind. He gave me those things.
He was talking about the story “The Chronology of Water” I’d written. In it, there is a father who abuses his children and then loses his memory. A father whose daughter pulls him out of the sea. A swimmer’s story.
“I like it. It’s a very good story.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing not to say more.
“Not very flattering of me though.”
I smiled and looked down and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fair enough. You know, I won a prize for that story. I got to go to New York.”
“Isn’t that something,” he said, and whistled, and looked out at the trees.
That’s the only thing we ever said to each other about anything that had happened.
A father. A daughter.
Recollected.
I have an image of him from that time. He appears in a film short Andy made based on the same short story. My father agreed to let us film him for it. In the segment in which he appears, the film is black and white. You cannot tell from looking at him that he has lost his wits or memory. You cannot tell from looking at the square jaw and broad shoulders and intense stare that he abused his wife and daughters. You cannot tell he was an award winning architect, and before that, he had the tender hands of an artist. You cannot tell he is anything but a man who looks intense on film.
I’m in the film too. In the segment in which I appear, the film is black and white. I am walking out into the ocean of the Oregon Coast. In November. I walk in waist high, and then I dive into the oncoming waves, and I swim. How I swim.
My father died less than two years after my mother. His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that’s not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet.
I drove my father’s ashes up to Seattle pretty immediately because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them in my house, or my garden, or any waterway near me or my son.
My sister and I dumped them in the river