Then Again - Diane Keaton [70]
11
AFTERMATH
Two Letters
Dear Dad,
It’s the first day of 1991. I think you would have been happy to see your girls today. The sun shone through a dense marine layer at 10. Robin went to the store towing Riley and little Jack, now a toddler. Dorrie, Mom, and I went to look at an open house on Ocean Drive. Can you believe they were asking 2.5 million dollars for a 2,000 square foot box with a marginal view? You would have been proud of Mom. She nearly gagged.
Back at Cove St., Dorrie put on Willie Nelson. I opened a bottle of wine, and we all sat down to one of Mom’s delicious tuna casseroles. The kids ate candy for dessert, your favorite, See’s chocolate turtles.
It was unseasonably hot, so Robin, Dorrie, and I swam over to Big Corona, where we caught waves with people who don’t own homes on the beach. Thank you for our little box with a view, Dad. When Mom and the kids joined us we built sand castles. Riley taught me how to make them correctly. She’ll end up in management. She’s your kind of girl. Little Jack bent over a collection of buckets on the shoreline, examining sand crabs.
I think you would have gotten a big kick out of your three daughters eyeing all the hunks. Dorrie joked about my type. I want to reiterate: I don’t have a type, Dad. I know you think all women love bums, but you’re wrong. It’s complex. Al and I broke up a couple of months after you died. It’s been sad, but educational. I wonder if I’ll ever find a better way to love a man, the “correct” way. I wish you and I had been closer. I wish I’d been a Daddy’s girl. Your girl. I wish I had figured out a way to love you with a little less effort.
In any event it was a good day, this first day of 1991. We were happy at the beach. It was just us, your five girls, and a little boy named after you. Jack. Love, Diane
Dear Jack,
I want to talk to you about some things I regret I’ve learned too late. I know you wouldn’t want me to live with regrets. And I’m trying not to, but I look at couples bickering about some small matter and I want to say, “Don’t take your living time fighting & fussing over nothing. Be happy. You have one another.”
I still feel your presence. When that feeling comes I look up to the sky (as if that’s where you are), and I think if I feel you so intensely you must have a sense of me also. If that’s true you know that I am feeling old. I hate to confront the fact that I’m slipping in my mental capacities too. It bothers me. I still have the red heart you gave me last Valentine’s Day full of See’s chocolates. Or was that the year before? Oh, God, Jack, you see what I mean. It’s all slipping away.
I would like to request a favor from you. Please be with me, for I am very much in need of you. Force your way through to me, will you? Please. I am lonely. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to tell you how much I loved you when you were sitting across from me on the bar stool, drink in hand, music playing, dinner cooking, all things working. Maybe you know all the answers now that you’ve gone to the other side. All I know is I held you in my arms as you lay dying. I want to go that way too. But who will hold me, Jack? Who will hold me now that you’ve gone?
I love you.
Your Dorothy
The Price of Pretty, March 1991
It’s funny how the rain came so suddenly. A mud slide crushed the yellow crocuses in my backyard. Even at dinner with Dana Delany and Lydia Woodward, two fantastic single gals, my mind was never far from the avalanche. Dana ordered a glass of cabernet. She wanted to know if I was dating. I mentioned a guy in Newport Beach. “Did he do you?” Dana asked. “No,” I said. “No, he did not do me.” I hadn’t been done.
What I wanted to say was, my lungs were filled with a residue of dust from the past. Why did I have to be intrigued by the Goth with bloody cuts decorating his tattooed neck outside Musso and Frank