Asymptotes

I made the announcement at dinner. “Dad is coming to visit next week.”

“Did somebody die?” Mom asked, not sounding particularly bothered by the thought.

“Sheila…” Thomas began. I could tell from his face, even as he pursed his lips and blew on his soup, that he too was trying to puzzle out why Randy Johnson was coming back to Louisiana in late March and not following his normal schedule of between-semesters visits. The two men could be cordial, had even shared a table for my sake (Christmas Eves and birthdays back when those mattered to me), but it was as clear as a cup of water that the two men I considered my fathers held no warm feelings for one another. Dad thought Thomas was as dull as a board and felt suspicious at his lack of relations (“I don’t trust people who don’t have people”), while Thomas, whose idea of fun was a presidential biography, was too polite to explain the dimensions of his distaste for Randy.

“I guess he wrote a new book,” I said.

“About time,” Mom muttered. Dad’s first novel had appeared almost two decades earlier. It was a critical success—the New York Times had called it a “disturbing, vivid, and ultimately compassionate bildungsroman exploring the decrepit state of white Southern masculinity”—and it had been longlisted for a big prize, though it was unclear if it’d been much of a sales success. Likely not, as he never paid a penny of child support. (Mom didn’t complain, but once she’d reached the bottom of a bottle of merlot, she might get to grousing about insurance premiums.) He did get a job out of it, teaching at a university, and had moved to Michigan before I turned two.

“Wonder if he’s still writing about your mother,” my stepdad said as he searched his bowl for a shrimp.

Mom’s eyes shot a mean glare across the table. “You told me you never read it.” I had never read the book, either, or not finished it, at least. The first time I’d tried to crack Parade Ground, I’d quit after a chapter, equal parts disturbed by the violence and confused by the thicket of prose. I’d stowed the book in the bottom of my sweater drawer, and the next time I looked for it, several years later, the book was missing. I suppose I could’ve kept hunting, gotten a library copy, scoured used bookstores (it was long out of print), but I hadn’t. Sometimes the fruit falls close to the tree, but sometimes a bird eats the fruit and shits it out on the other side of town. This was the case with me and the literary impulse. Mom said I was mildly dyslexic, which was probably true, but I also knew that if I wanted to like books, I still could’ve, transposition or not.

But Parade Ground was about Mom? My interest was piqued, and it made me wish that old copy hadn’t disappeared. Had that poor young woman from the first chapter been an early version of my mother? The person scowling and stern at the head of the table held no resemblance to that vulnerable girl in the frat house basement, except for maybe that they both enjoyed their cups. (In that regard, I had landed right at the roots of the family tree.) And more, if that woman was Mom, had those wicked young men described in the opening scene been Dad and his friends? My blood turned to ice.

“There are other ways of knowing, dear.” Thomas scooped up a shrimp and blew away the heat. After he’d swallowed, he turned to me. “Next week, you said?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Sorry to miss him,” he said without conviction. “Offshore.” After a decade at the refinery in Geismar—a long commute, but one that brought him home each night—Thomas was back to helicoptering to a rig halfway to Havana, overseeing the implementation of some complicated new environmental security protocol. His company didn’t have anything to do with the big spill, but since it’d happened, everyone’d had to put safety latches on their safety latches.

Across the table Mom had gone quiet, spoon on the table, hands in her lap. The wine in her glass was gone, save for a drop running down the side. (She tried to drink less when Thomas was around, but in that moment, one thing was more important than the other.) “But Sara,” he continued, looking from her back to me, “I know it’ll be nice for you to see your dad.”

 

The truth of it was that Dad hadn’t even told me he was coming. The night before, I’d been in my room with my math textbook and the watery dregs of a to-go daiquiri (small, because it was a school night) when I’d seen on Facebook that several friends were going to an Event Near Me. I never followed those suggestions, wary of cookies and clickbait, but I’d also never seen such a cluster of Dad’s people outside of their Independence Day barbecue.

A book launch at Joe’s Coffee for a novel called Elegy for the Brokenhearted. There was a thumbnail of the book cover, a picture of Dad in pancake makeup and a stiff-seeming suit. He looked old. The event description was one sentence: Randy Johnson returns to his hometown to launch his long-anticipated second novel, which revisits questions of masculinity and responsibility in our contemporary culture. Responsibility? One thing that’d stuck with me about that first chapter was the lack of responsibility. Those guys passing around that girl, half-comatose with booze, had acted jocular, crass, like she was nothing more than some woozy doll. I’d been grossed out by the scene, but also by how I’d felt reading it: sinister and sexy, before I could put a steady finger on those feelings. Before I’d experienced them for myself. Then, when I found myself drunk and sixteen and in the middle of a leering circle of frat brothers, and it seemed like my life was following a script Dad had dreamed up two decades prior, I was too upset to admire his accuracy. Certainly not his prescience.

It took an hour of distracted problem sets to screw up the courage to call, and when I did, the phone rang and rang. I’d been to Michigan twice, and seen his life there: the small, crowded apartment tucked above a storefront travel agency, stacks of books and student papers on every surface. Nothing bad happened during these visits, but they weren’t fun either, Dad short-fused and fidgety in an unfamiliar way. By contrast, when he came to see me in Louisiana, there was always gumbo on somebody’s stove, and Dad was gregarious, happy to be around his people. I got the twinned heat of Dad’s attention and the reflected radiance of the gathered crowd. Spoiled, Mom once called how he and his family treated me, and Thomas told her to hush.

I left a voicemail. He texted back, almost immediately. “Yes. Nu project. Ben meaning 2 call, srsly. Sry. Can’t wait to C U!!!” I stared at the screen, sounding out his message. He may have been a lauded novelist and tenured professor, but my father texted like a twelve-year-old girl. “Cool. LMK your schedule,” I replied, careful to use your correctly. He replied with a thumbs-up.

 

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