DAD called our house one day not too long after having moved
out.
Standing in the recently renovated—pre-illness—kitchen, with
white cabinets and porcelain knobs, I picked up the phone when it rang. The
caller ID sat on the counter next to the phone.
“Where are you calling from?” I asked. The caller ID said
the call came from his girlfriend’s house. I was testing him.
“I’m at a friend’s house.”
“What friend?”
“Chuck’s.”
I doodled on the pink messages pad while we spoke.
“Well, the caller ID says you’re at your girlfriend’s
house.”
“Nicole, your mom has the caller ID set up so whenever I
call, it looks like I’m calling from my girlfriend’s house.”
I stood there wondering about this while we talked.
Is it possible that Linda reprogrammed the phone? How would
she have done that? I didn’t know the caller ID was programmable.
When we hung up, I called the number on the caller ID—his
girlfriend’s number—right back.
He answered.
“I thought you said you weren’t at her house.”
“I just got here.”
“What? I just spoke to you. You said you were at Chuck’s.”
“And I just drove up.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I told you your mom has the caller ID rigged.”
“Talk to you later. I love you.”
I did love him. And I wanted him to know that he could take
my love for granted. No matter his behavior I still loved him. I had almost
lost him.
But I was mad at him too: for lying to me, for lying to
Linda, for leaving us.
I stood there in the kitchen staring at the phone. I knew he
was lying and yet I wanted to believe him.
Later I asked Linda about the call.
“Can you reprogram phones to make it look like Dad was
calling from his girlfriend’s house even though he was someplace else?”
“No, Nicole.”
“I didn’t think so, but that’s what Dad told me you did.”
“He thinks people don’t see through his lies.”
“He doesn’t lie to me Mom.”
“Oh yes, he does. Remember when Dad brought you the Suburban
last year? He had his girlfriend with him then. He left her at a rest stop
while he went to exchange cars with you. He had told her he would be an hour.”
“He was with me for a few hours.”
Laughing she said, “I know. I love it.”
I was stunned. I didn’t ask Linda how she knew this story. I
wish I had. It might have answered a lot of other questions, such as how long
had she known about the affair? She still had friends at Delta, spies who
called and gave her information, and Walt had friends, too. Maybe they had told
her.
Given their previous unhappiness, their divorce shouldn’t
have surprised me, but it did. What didn’t surprise me were their vitriolic
interactions from that point forward.
The unlikely existence of their union itself had been more
interesting to contemplate than its demise.
Dad’s mother, Grammy Harkin had grown up in India and she
cooked curry as a family staple. Dad had cooked a curry for Linda and a family
legend was born. He made the curry so spicy on one date that Linda took off her
blouse at the table because she was so hot. The sexual aspect of this story was
lost on us children. We just laughed at the thought of Linda unbuttoning her
white blouse at the table and the patent absurdity of Dad cooking. We enjoyed
imagining them just meeting and having fun together, something that rarely
happened in our home. After they were married Dad had been banned from the
kitchen because he couldn’t figure out how to clean up.
Grammy Harkin didn’t have a great fondness for Linda. Dad
had been her youngest and favorite son. First, Linda hadn’t been Catholic when
they married. Second, because Grammy Harkin was born into the upper class in
England and she felt her social status to be vastly above her current
situation, Linda’s family just wasn’t in her social strata. And third, instead
of moving back to Boston, like every other person from Boston is required to do
at some point in their lives, Linda took Dad further away. All of these things,
combined with Linda’s natural abrasiveness, made things difficult between them.
When Linda asked for the curry recipe, Grammy Harkin gave
Linda some long and convoluted recipe that took hours and hours to prepare.
Linda, while an uninspired cook, eventually figured out how to make curry in under
an hour. She cooked the onions and the meat together with the curry spices and
then added tomatoes, potatoes, veggies, and water. Once the lid was on, it sat
on the stove for a few hours. If it wasn’t thick enough by dinner, she put some
cornstarch in and called it done. We always had mango and lemon chutney with
it. If Grammy Harkin was visiting dried shredded coconut also appeared on the
table. Once a year, Linda canned and one of her best efforts was homemade spicy
chutney with raisins and other fruits.
The pictures from their wedding made my parents look
glamorous. Linda wore an off-white turban, with her blond hair curled up at the
ends, just above her shoulders. Her off-white dress had a three-inch wide belt.
She was slender and the shoes were silk platforms with her red toes poking out.
She looked like a model with her false eyelashes batting. She had in fact been
a model for Delta in commercials featuring flight attendants. They were married
at Holy Name Cathedral in downtown Chicago, which had Gothic stained glass
windows and a soaring ceiling. Linda had agreed to raise her future children
Catholic in order to marry Dad there.
That Linda did this seemed odd the first time she told me
that story. But as the price for getting married in the Cathedral, it hadn’t
seemed too onerous to her. Besides, who would be checking? But Linda always
intended to honor that deal. She was like that. A done deal was a done deal.
Why did Dad want us to be raised Catholic since he didn’t believe? These
internal contradictions confounded me.
My parents were attracted to one another because they both
embraced adventure. They both liked to move. She was beautiful and
well-traveled. But why they felt the need to get married was a mystery.
Maybe she wanted security and she never divorced Dad because
he represented security.
Any talk of dying, in the abstract, over living in a coma,
is cheap, as Linda often said. But once Dad lived through the coma and learned
that Linda had contemplated taking him off of life support, his views on plug
pulling changed. Dad blamed Linda for even contemplating pulling the plug. She
blamed him for everything else.
Dad did this a lot, however. He mused over something in his
mind, rolling the issue or idea over and over. He did this contemplation
without any input from anyone else. This was his own analysis and therefore his
own conclusion which became his immutable truth. No amount of explanation or
clarification changed his mind. Linda had tried to kill him. End of story.
Once he left her they both lost the ability to behave kindly
towards one another. Their united front fell away. Dad didn’t feel that Linda
was owed anything. He had worked and therefore all of the money in his pension
belonged to him.
“When is the divorce going to be over?” I asked, crying when
Linda’s lawyer’s secretary put me through to her attorney.
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