We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Read online

  Finally, I whispered, “I’m turning eighteen tomorrow.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Happy birthday.”

  —

  This is a tiny little love story.

  My mom had three little girls, born when she was sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-one. She raised them on her own and was often seen around town with the three of them trailing behind her, all ribbons and bows and shiny patent leather. She was an emergency-room nurse who mostly worked nights so that she could be home with her children during the day. SB drove a bus for the now-defunct Evanston Bus Company. My striking mother (six feet tall with hair, lips, and talon-length nails all a shocking red) would line up her three little girls a few afternoons a week and wait at the corner of Main and Elmwood for the bus to take them downtown. And WOW-O-WOW MY PARENTS MET ON A BUS, but here’s the thing: every day the four of them, pretty as a picture, would get on my dad’s bus, and every day he would cover the coin slot and refuse to let my mother pay. Fuck, I don’t know what’s sexy anymore. But it’s probably a sign that I am a grown-up for real that the idea of someone saving my weekly bus money is, like, totally hot. THAT IS ROMANCE.

  So this cat-and-mouse game continued for a while (my dad covering up the fare box, my mom smiling coyly while taking her seat and never speaking to him), then it took a turn toward next level when my mom decided to repay this charming bus driver’s kindness with an invitation to dinner. When I heard this story as a kid, the thought of inviting some strange dude over to my house to eat dinner with my kids made me go, “Gross, weird,” but it was the 1960s and my mom had three little girls, and driving a bus for a failing suburban bus company was as good a job as any.

  They dated for eleven years before getting legally married, which, for those of you who don’t know any black people, is just the way we do things. I guess it takes a while to know what you really want. Carol, the youngest of my sisters, was fifteen by the time I came along to usurp the affections of the only father she’d known, and she expressed her displeasure by immediately trying to suffocate me in my crib. My mom and sisters had been living on the second floor of a duplex where my skinny, mean grandmother fried sardines downstairs while SB lived in a shag-carpeted bachelor pad across town. As a wedding present, my dad conned the bank out of a loan to buy them a large Victorian in a decent black neighborhood not far from where two of my sisters were finishing high school.

  There is nothing better than being the product of a late-in-life pregnancy, at least until the shriveling invalids pushing their walkers around your tenth birthday party begin their rapid decline before you even get hair on your privates. But before that? IT’S ALL GRAVY. Before their eventual divorce I was spoiled and coddled and feted and fed Frosted Flakes in front of the television like King Shit of Fuck Mountain. My sisters had grown up sharing clothes and crammed into one tiny bedroom while my mom slept on the pullout couch; I, on the other hand, had a room to myself just off the dining room, with a desk and a television and a little rug for our collie, Trudy, to sleep on. I had every doll imaginable, every Cabbage Patch and Monchhichi and Strawberry Shortcake doll; a toy box stuffed full of Lite-Brites and Hungry Hungry Hippos and Connect Fours; a little record player on which I listened to “Here Come the Smurfs” ad nauseam. I was their opportunity to Do Things Right This Time. There were no missed parent-teacher conferences, no preschool talent shows left unrecorded.

  The thing about fucking dirtbags is that no matter how much cologne you splash on them, they’re always going to be fucking dirtbags. My father, ever the entrepreneur, decided that it wasn’t enough to work all day and pay for this prize of a house. He decided to build rooms (read: erect shoddily constructed clapboard cubicles) in the basement of our house (read: where his three nubile stepdaughters and tiny infant baby lived) and rent them out to his friends (read: winos). So yes, I had the limited-edition Strawberry Shortcake doll whose shiny plastic skin actually smelled like actual strawberries (TECHNOLOGY HOORAY), but I also watched my dad hit a dude in his head with a hammer on our front porch in an argument over a dice game. It was like a seedy men’s hotel, except (1) illegal, and (2) IN THE BASEMENT OF OUR HOUSE. Some dude died down there! It never struck me as strange because that is how my life had always been: school bus pulling up to take me to day care at the YWCA while some junkie was passed out asleep on our front lawn. Normal: sitting on my dad’s lap while he cut up my dinner and spoon-fed it to me despite the fact that I was old enough to use words like “tolerate.” Also normal: accompanying my father to throw a wrench through the windshield of his mortal enemy’s car in the middle of the afternoon.

  —

  Two days after I turned eighteen there was a card in the mail from my mother. It was a generic birthday card, one I’m sure the nursing home had boxes of tucked away for residents to use. The lettering on the outside of the envelope had been carefully printed, nothing like my mom’s usual artsy loops and curls. The inside read, in the same steady hand, “Dear Samantha. I am very proud of you for being at college. It was so nice to see you at Christmas. I can’t wait to see you again. Love, Mom.” In the bottom right corner there was a series of unintelligible dots and squiggles. A piece of paper had fluttered to the ground when I opened the card, and I picked it up. It was a note from my mom’s hospice nurse, apologizing for the formality and explaining that her condition had deteriorated to the point that she could no longer use a pen without help. “Grace is a real nice lady. She is having a lot of trouble speaking lately. I tried to figure out what she wanted me to say as best I could. I hope you have a good birthday.” This is a luxury, you know, being spared the day-to-day deterioration of someone you love. I really wish I could’ve hugged that nurse.

  —

  My aunt called. My father had had two heart attacks and a stroke. Or two strokes and a heart attack. Fuck, these are the kinds of details that blur. I can tell you with near certainty that I was wearing an oatmeal-colored knit turtleneck sweater, but not the ratio of heart attacks to strokes my dad had at the end of his life. He’d been living in a halfway house in Memphis since the failed attempt to reconstruct our ailing family. After we put my mother back into the nursing home, I spent my junior year of high school tiptoeing around his rules and his rage, with mostly successful results. He slapped me a few times, and, once, he punched me in the eye. We ate a lot of navy beans on hot-water cornbread and vegetable soup made with V8 juice and frozen vegetables because, besides hard-boiled eggs, those were the only things I could cook at the time. It was okay. Somehow I managed to get a really high score on the ACT.

  His heart had always been bad. Multiple heart attacks and surgeries, that kind of thing. I remember coming home from school one day that winter to find a note that he was going into the hospital, written in his shaky, girlish hand. He said that he hadn’t been feeling well and that Dr. Weiss wanted to admit him for observation. I immediately kicked off my snowy boots in the middle of the living room (not allowed), grabbed a bottle of Baileys from where he’d hidden it (under the sink), and cuddled on the couch under a blanket in front of the television (definitely not allowed). I called myself in sick the next few days, leaving the house only to walk to the corner store for cans of soup and to play the lottery numbers my dad would leave on the answering machine every afternoon with the money he’d hidden for such emergencies in a shoe box in his closet. I shoveled the sidewalks so no one would suspect anything, but other than that, I watched My So-Called Life repeats and slept the dreamless sleep of the relieved. When SB finally came home, he did so with a long scar snaking across his chest.

  “It’s called a defibrillator,” he said, tapping the tender flesh over his heart as I tried not to vomit. “It sends a little electrical shock through my heart whenever it stops beating.” He explained the differences between the exciting new technological advancement that had been installed in his shiny new Frankenchest and the average, run-of-the-mill pacemaker inserted into other septuagenarians (“You see, the pacemaker regulates the heart constantly but this guy o
nly gives me a little shock when I need it and that’s pretty cool, right?”) while proudly brandishing a card that he had to carry with him to keep him out of jail in case he set off a metal detector at court or in an airport. He looked gaunt and skinny, even though he’d been gone only a little over a week and had been on solid food for at least five days. My glasses were still taped across the bridge from when he’d broken them with his fist months before, the bones beneath them, though healed, still slightly shifted off track. I remember thinking how big he’d seemed that day as I stood bleeding uncontrollably into the kitchen sink from my broken nose, my vision blurred. This dude here looked like a guy I could take in a fight. He commented on how clean the house looked, but my stomach churned as he surveyed the room, hoping he wouldn’t notice the dust on the piano that I hadn’t practiced on even once while he’d been in the hospital.

  I have never owned a microwave. I have lived on my own since I was eighteen years old, and every time I’ve eaten a Lean Cuisine in my pajamas at eight thirty on a Friday night, I have waited forty-five goddamn minutes for that motherfucker to cook in the oven before doing so. Sam Irby had a thing about microwave ovens. “Those silly machines destroy all the nutrients in your food,” he would grunt, shuffling away from the freezer case where I stared longingly at all of the Hot Pockets and Pizza Rolls. “Just get a pack of hot dogs and meet me in the car.” My dad resented that no one had ever taught me how to do “women’s work”; he was disgusted that I had spent fifteen years on his earth without learning how to buff a linoleum floor to a mirror shine or make a proper casserole. It was beneath him to fold his own boxers.

  I didn’t know shit about keeping a house. I didn’t know that mini blinds need to be dusted and rugs dragged out in the yard and beaten clean. No one ever taught me how to defrost a freezer or scrub a dirty oven without setting my hair on fire. My dad wanted a perfect 1950s TV housewife, while all I wanted was a perfect 1980s TV dad. Steven Keaton never punched his kids over a frying pan, and Phillip Drummond never kicked a hole through Arnold’s bedroom door because his pants hadn’t been perfectly pleated. But I’m a quick study. You have to pile all of the dirty dinner dishes atop my snoring body only one motherfucking time for me to understand never to go to bed without cleaning the kitchen first, no matter how tired I am.

  Dan Conner was the kind of dad who might let you get away with nuking a can of Beefaroni and serving it to him for dinner, but Samuel Bishop Irby wouldn’t stand for any of that. Especially not with his new mechanical heart. The night he came home, he peered at me over his reading glasses with the ICD user manual balanced on his lap. “No magnets, and no microwaves, EVER,” he said authoritatively, tapping the page. “My heart could explode.”

  —

  The afternoon of the detective’s call, Cara and I had been studying for a biology test. I had a huge crush on our professor, this swaggering Brit who would roar up to the science building on his Harley-Davidson and never took off his leather vest, not once the entire semester, while teaching us about eukaryotes and recombinant DNA. It was a lecture course that took place in this massive auditorium, which meant that we spent most of our afternoons fighting sleep in the nosebleeds while trying to discern scientific terms through a thick English accent. I was listening to Ani DiFranco (of course) on my headphones because Cara didn’t like to study with noise, but I couldn’t stay the hell awake unless I paired bio vocabulary with lyrics from “Hour Follows Hour.” Cara’s notes were better than mine, but I was better at drawing and labeling, so we often studied this way, back-to-back at our opposite desks, trading sheets of graph paper every few minutes. Cara tapped me gently on the shoulder and pointed toward the phone. I snatched my headphones off and ran to pick it up. It was Dr. Weiss.

  Ira Weiss is an angel. I’m sure there are times he doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste or leaves only an inch of orange juice in the carton, but as far as real-life patron saints are concerned, that kind, soft-spoken gentleman was my father’s. Dr. Weiss had been SB’s cardiologist since the first of many heart attacks, in 1984. And my father, ravenous consumer of potted meat and salt pork, dormant volcanic mountain bubbling with an undercurrent of molten rage, enthusiastic guzzler of the corner store’s finest four-dollar champagnes, kept that dude in practice. You know what that asshole was doing when he lectured me about how my desire to enjoy a bag of microwaved popcorn was going to cause his heart to burst forth from his chest? EATING A POLISH SAUSAGE WHILE HIGH ON COCAINE. 147 arterial blockages (give or take) and my dude would still be like, “WHAT IS THIS? LETTUCE?” if I deigned to serve a salad alongside our grilled Spam in Tampico punch reduction or whatever slave food we used to eat every night.

  —

  Dr. Weiss is an orthodox Jew who keeps kosher and rides a bicycle everywhere he goes, and no matter how many times my father jumped gleefully from the wagon into a waist-deep river of cheap brandy and two-dollar steaks, Dr. Weiss would take him back, crack open his ribs, and scrape some more corrosion off the rotting meatfist in the center of his chest. The last time I had seen my father was the final day of my junior year of high school, when he moved me into the spare bedroom in the back of my sister Jane’s apartment. “Who’s gonna fold your sheets?” I called after him as he hobbled down the stairs. “Who’s gonna fry your smelts?!” He waved at me over his shoulder without looking back and disappeared. A few weeks later at church, I saw his old boss, the man who owned both the house we rented and the limousine SB leased to drive for work. I had never liked James; he laughed too loud and talked too much and dropped by our house unannounced too often. I do not like conspicuous men. And there he was, praising the Lord at the top of his lungs, shaking hands with people as they entered the vestibule. A sickening, oily smile spread across his face as he intercepted me. “Your father stole a lot of money from me before he left town, darling,” he growled through a phony smile. “A lot of money,” he reiterated, squeezing my shoulder as if a twenty-dollar bill was going to shoot out of it. Bile rose in my throat as I pulled away and slunk to a pew in the back of the church. I remembered running across a large plastic bottle, the kind used in an office water cooler, in the basement of the house one afternoon. It was filled with change, mostly quarters and dimes, and sometimes while cowering in the closet as Tropical Storm Samuel roared outside my bedroom, I daydreamed about rolling that thing to the bank and trading that laundry fortune for a train ticket to freedom. Of course he took it, I thought. I imagined him in the rickety Cadillac he’d bought before he left, bouncing down the highway back to Tennessee in a car filled with nickels.

  —

  Dr. Weiss informed me that after SB had suffered two heart attacks and a stroke (or two strokes and a heart attack), he had spent his own money to send for my father so he could be under his local care. He told me that things weren’t looking good, that my father (born in 1933 in Tunica, Mississippi) had survived poverty in the South and war in Korea and alcoholism in suburbia, yet refused to give his body a break for even a minute. He was drinking again and fighting again and not taking his prescribed medications again. I listened to the doctor, his voice soothing and calm, waiting anxiously for him to tell me what was going to happen next. And then my father was on the line, cheerful and gruff. He told me that he was feeling great, that Dr. Weiss had taken him on a skateboard tour of the morgue, and that everything inside was painted in psychedelic colors—it didn’t look anything like the cold, refrigerated vaults you see on television! Samantha, I am having so much fun! I didn’t cry, even though I felt like I should. “My father has gone crazy,” I mouthed across the room to Cara as I waited for the doctor to get back on the line. “You rode a skateboard through a room full of dead bodies?” I asked skeptically when Dr. Weiss finally returned to the phone. “Of course we didn’t. I’m afraid your father hasn’t recovered this time as well as we’d hoped he would.”

  The evening of my birthday, I had gone down to dinner with some guy friends from my floor at five, but they both had girlfriends so the
re was no watching Braveheart on a continuous loop the way we usually spent our Saturday nights. Cara had gone home for the weekend. I had a stack of Jane magazines and a handful of birthday cards that needed responses, but then my sisters called, two of them on one line, and I braced myself for an explosion of off-key birthday singing. “SB is dead,” Janie said. “They found him in someone’s yard earlier today. I’m so sorry, pumpkin.”

  Here are the things that I know:

  1. My father was placed in a nursing home a couple of days after I spoke to him. Coincidentally, his nursing home was down the street from the one my mother was in.

  2. On February 12, 1998, he decided to go for a walk. Without a coat or socks, and several days after surviving some ratio of heart attacks to strokes that I am still not clear on because sometimes the details just get away from you.

  3. SB visited my mom and swindled $10 from her roommate. He’d always had a way with the ladies. Even half-dead, he was totally charming.

  4. He was missing for two days.

  5. They found him three miles from the nursing home. Cause of death: hypothermia.

  —

  Dr. Weiss was on my father’s emergency call list. He rode his bicycle through the streets of Chicago and Evanston all day and all night for two days, calling my father’s name to no avail. No one comes to a junkie wino’s funeral. Cara came, and I was so humiliated that we couldn’t even have it in a church. Men like my father aren’t eulogized by the well-respected ministers in their communities, and now she would know that about me when I’d tried so hard to construct this new self away from home. No one sent flowers. No one stood up to say a few kind words. There were drunks and hobos crowded around the entrance of the funeral home, a cloud of E&J brandy hanging over them as they tipped concealed pints of liquor out onto the sidewalk for their fallen brother. Dr. Weiss shyly introduced himself and I felt another pang of embarrassment knife through my chest. Seeing him in that tiny red room in his bulky safety helmet, imagining him awkwardly questioning the dirtbags who hung out in the parking lots my father frequented and knocking on the doors of houses of ill repute, looking for this dude who kept letting him down again and again so that he could save his life one more time, made my chest constrict with longing. He said a few kind words about his old friend, and then, in a lilting and beautiful tenor, he sang the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew over my father’s lifeless body. The room fell silent. I hadn’t cried before then. I was too tired, too angry, too overwhelmed by what it meant now to have a Dead Parent, like the exotic new character introduced midseason on a TV show. Dr. Weiss was singing with his eyes closed, and I felt my eyes flood with tears. For myself, for my mother, for Dr. Weiss. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t stopped crying since.