Erasure

“Have you gone to college?” I asked.

The girl laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” I said. “I think you’re really smart. You should at least try.”

“I didn’t even finish high school.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I scratched my head and looked at the other faces in the room. I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.

For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.”

I went to what had been my father’s study, and perhaps still was his study, but now it was where I worked. I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine. [...] I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?”

“I want you to meet him.” And suddenly Bill’s voice was different, but it was more than just the sound of a man in love. His pronunciation changed. It was not quite that he developed a stereotypical lisp, but it was close.

“Why are you talking like that?”

His voice went back to normal. “Like what?”

The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.

My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different.

I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take.

Enemies always understand each other better than friends.