The Jacket

For as long as I can remember, he called me “Mudpie”.  To him, it was a term of endearment.  I always thought it sounded slighting, but never let on.  After he and my mother divorced, he took me for day visits one weekend out of the month.  We went to the mall, a restaurant, or to the art museum.  In the car, he would slap my knee, squeeze and say “Whad’ya know, Mudpie?”  He seemed delighted in the smallest details of my stories.  I mean, I could tell him that I found a red rock that writes, and he would exclaim “How interesting!”  The gifts always came as soon as he started the car.  I sat poised as he would reach into the pocket of his jacket and pull out a small token of some sort.  It was always a surprise.  It may have been a die cut set of Alice in Wonderland stationary or an antique gold metal razor case with a note tucked inside.  The gifts were never predictable, but always anticipated.

He was a handsome man, always nicely dressed, and extremely well spoken.  At the restaurant, he would approach the hostess with “My friend and I would like to share some lunch”.   The hostess thought this was adorable.  She would show us to our table, smile at me profusely, and attend to our every need.  At lunch, he would ask about my school, cup his hand around his good ear, and lean in to my responses.  During awkward silences, I would catch him looking at me, staring really.  When I would ask why he does this, he would say “I just don’t get to see you very often”.

Back home, I showed my mother the gifts of the day.  She was never impressed.  She commented on the “cheapness” of them and asked if he had given me any money for school tuition.  “That’s what you really need” she would say. 

I visited him on his mother’s property for two full weeks in the summers.  I stayed in his room, and fell asleep under the coolness of his crisp cotton sheets as he read his book under the bedside lamp.  In the mornings, I crept downstairs to find my grandmother playing Solitaire at the kitchen table.  She always had the same morning greeting “Good Morning, I.  What can I get ‘cha?”  Life on the property was without restriction.  No one told me to brush my teeth, comb my hair, or even bathe if I didn’t want to.  My cousins and I took walks in the woods, played in the barn, sipped smuggled Vodka, and ate pickles right out of the jar.  We didn’t have to go in the house until well after dark. 

When the visit had ended, my father drove me the two and a half hours back home and deposited me on our front porch.  He hugged me goodbye tightly, then pushed me out in front of him; arms locked at the elbows, then hugged again and again.  As soon as I entered the house, my mother immediately went through my clothes, inspected my teeth, and directed me to the shower.  “Didn’t he make you bathe?” she would say.  “You stink and your clothes are filthy.  I guess he leaves them for me to wash!”

My mother lashed out about my father at every chance she got, throwing heaps of scorn my way.  She brought up the story about a trip in which my grandmother took the cousins to Yugoslavia.  This led into another story about my grandmother taking the cousins to King’s Island without me.  “They had the gall to wave goodbye to you out the back window of the car as they drove off!” she exclaimed.  “You’re different, Iris.  You will never be included in that family.  They don’t love you like they love the rest.  And what’s worse, your father allows it!”  Did my father allow this?  Was I treated differently?  Before I could come to a true conclusion, she interjected “And what has your grandmother ever gotten for you?”  I racked my brain for a substantial answer.  All I could come up with was a plastic charm bracelet that she brought back for all the girl cousins when she went to the grocery store.  I sat silent.  I didn’t dare utter that to my mother as a counterstatement.

I learned to ignore her harmful comments about him.  I saw my father as a constant source of support and unending encouragement.  I wouldn’t allow her to steal that from me.  Still, there were occasions in which I could not turn a blind eye to her keen observations.  One Christmas, while visiting him, my cousins and I had the task of decorating my grandmother’s tree.  We unpacked the ornaments one by one and placed them on the tree.  We began to unpack silver plated ornaments that had names on them.  I kept hanging them up; reading the names of my cousins:  “Amanda”, “Sofya”, “Liz”, “Maggie”.  I even found one for the infant cousin, “TJ”.  I searched feverishly for the ornament with my name on it.  As I sat and stared at the pile of opened boxes, I realized that I would not be finding an ornament with “Iris” on it.  Nevertheless, I asked the aunts and cousins where my ornament was.  A crowd of them had gathered, silently, staring at me blankly.  When no one answered, I got up to find my father.  They parted like the Red Sea as I brushed past them.  After I accosted him, I half expected him to slowly pull an engraved ornament out of his jacket pocket.  I really did.  But his hands were empty.  They simply reached out and grabbed mine as he responded “Hmm.  Don’t know.  Don’t know”.  Our family Christmas picture was taken a few moments after this devastating blow to my world.  I look at the picture now, and can still see the hurt in my thin, forced smile.

For as much as I did not feel included in my extended family, I oddly felt that much more the center of my father’s world.  Each year, He made the 2 ½ hour trip on a week night to every one of my Parent Teacher conferences.  He always wore a suit and tie.  He used all the manners that the other wives wished their husbands had.  He spoke softly, cordially, and made all the mothers swoon.  The following morning, my teachers and the secretary would always say “Handsome man, your father.  Such a nice man.  What a delight he was.”  I would run home to tell my mother that he had been to the conference and that everyone loved him, reciting some of their sugary comments.  She would stick her finger down her throat, roll her eyes, and feign vomiting.

As the years passed, my father delighted in the realization that I, too, enjoyed writing.  He took every opportunity to buy me a book about adverbs, synonyms, or to send me newspaper clippings of good writers.  One year, he gave me a copy of “Black’s Law Dictionary”.  The inscription read “Some fathers buy their daughters fancy and pretty things.  Forgive me for buying you this heavy, heavy book”.  I savored it.

By the time I was married and had my first child, I had dismissed all of my mother’s caustic tales about my father.  I was certain that he truly loved me and wanted the best for me.  He constantly told me of his dream that we could live closer somehow.  In 2005, my husband got two job offers.  One was in Middletown, Ohio, very close to my father and the other was in Sidney, Ohio.  The only thing he had to do was pick which company he wanted to work for. 

We met for lunch close to my father’s house, shortly after my husband’s final job interview for the company in Middletown.  I was excited about the chance to finally live close to him, to see him daily if I wanted to.  I pictured myself pulling into his driveway on Sunday afternoons asking if he wanted to go eat Indian buffet.  I was overcome with excitement.  We headed for Sidney that afternoon to have dinner with my husband’s potential manager at the other company.  My father was going to follow shortly behind with our 3 ½ year old son and stay at the hotel until we were finished.  As I strapped the baby into his car seat, I told my father about the boy’s recent interest in the sitar.  He quickly pulled out a cd of Ravi Shankar.  He popped it in the player and off they drove to the sound of the popular Hindi music.  What a match made in heaven, I thought.

Dinner with the manager was nice.  We drove around Sidney as he pointed out his boyhood home, the train trestle and the courthouse.  No Ikea’s, Indian restaurants, or family here, I thought to myself.  My husband seemed pleased.  When we got back to the hotel, we spoke at length in the parking lot about our dinner and trip around the area.  I knew that my husband was impressed with this company.  I dreaded making the decision with him and felt like I needed to call in reinforcements.  As we stood in that parking lot, you could see cornfields for what seemed to be miles.  The cars whizzed down the interstate, heading toward Dayton.  Heading anywhere but Sidney, I thought.  I asked openly, “Well Dad.  What do you think?”  I waited for those words.  The words from a father who wants to live close to his daughter.  The words that I knew would pull at my husband’s heartstrings and change his mind.  But they never came.  Instead, my father said “I think you’re going to like it here”.

Sidney turned out to be a nightmare.  My son and I never saw my husband, we lived in a small apartment that we were certain had black mold, and I had to drive an hour into the city just to find work.  One early morning in March, as I drove to work, I called my father.  I broke down in tears as I explained our unhappiness.  “All I ever wanted was to live by you.  To pull into your drive-“ I couldn’t finish the sentence I was crying so hard.  I had to pull over.  My father was speechless for a while, and then apologized prolifically for the hurt I was feeling.  He never knew what big plans I had dreamed of if we had moved closer to him.  I had never told him, because I thought he had the same plans. I wanted my father to reach into his jacket pocket, into his heart, and pull out the final gift:  the gift of knowing that I would finally, after 26 years, get to see him daily.  That gift never came.   Still, I endure.