Memoir

Redwoods Drive

by Ayshea Wild

So, let’s say our relationship began when I was four years old. We met when I was four, but I don’t remember meeting you for another ten years. When I was fourteen, I let myself into the house after school one day and there you were, in profile, sat in the corner of the sofa closest to the door. The light from the window behind you threw your profile into contrast, and you were wearing a dark suit with gold cuff-links that cast you as an authority figure. But I could sense your discomfort, sat there staring into space and waiting for my mother to return home from work. You were propped up by your stiff suit and I felt sorry for you, brought you some of my nature magazines to read with the pictures of foxes and butterflies and willows.

Then, after that, I would come home from school and there would be either you, sat in the corner of the sofa doing nothing, or my father, reclined on the other sofa with his back to me sleeping. I preferred returning to an empty house. To eat salt and vinegar chipsticks in peace.

When I was fourteen, by some strange coincidence, you lived three doors down from my best friend. So did your wife. But you kindly extended an open invitation for me to visit you any time and meet Minka. We had, by now, discovered that we were both fond of cats. My best friend and I, perhaps unexpectedly, took you up on your offer. She was also fourteen and liked cats, especially soft, long-haired, ring-tailed felines with exotic names. My friend was concerned at the way you bowled your supine pedigree cat along the polished hardwood floor, because Minka’s ears would flatten as she sped by. But it was just as you had said. Minka came right back for more.

I wonder now what that must have been like for you, for me, in all my oblivious schoolgirl reality, to walk into your home without my mother and meet your wife, who peeped at me from within her own home, like a cat flicking her tail, childless and depressed.

When you were fourteen you had already left school. You worked in a linen mill. In Belfast. Breathing lint and hearing the clamour of the machines.

Now you are seventy-four. I approach you as you sit on the much larger couch. It is the same couch you collapsed on last week, the couch from which you were loaded onto the stretcher by the ambulance crew. And you tell me the whole story in great detail: how you were drenched in sweat; how the EMT had to cut your clothing away from your torso; about your fear and your pain and how caring the hospital staff were. How the nurse had to go home to feed her cat and how you told her you had always been a cat lover, and how she said that she had read your chart and from what she could tell you are a cat, judging by all the lives you have had.

I don’t know much about the other lives you have had. Here are two things I do not know about you: Vietnam. And South Korea.

Because that time when I pulled my son’s smoldering mattress out of his room and dragged it down the stairs and out into the driveway, where it burst into flames upon receiving a fresh supply of oxygen, I asked you if you had ever had tunnel vision. And you said, “I don’t talk about it.”

Although when asked by the air ambulance crew if you had ever travelled by helicopter before, you told them you had logged more hours in a copter then they had.

I’ve seen a photograph of you, sepia-toned, unrecognizable to me, rail-thin and stooping, standing by a vehicle in South Korea. I’ve never known you to stoop. You are much shorter than you would like to be, you wear cowboy boots, and you always pull yourself up to your full height. And you had a dog in South Korea—a little Chihuahua-like creature you kept in your jacket.

What were the conditions that allowed you to keep a pet dog next to your heart while on duty in a war zone? This question is unaskable.

You once leaned against the kitchen counter next to two empty wine bottles and sketched a portrait of your former self. Which I remember vividly and you do not. Which was, that when you were on the road, a global travelling salesman, you played the field, and you told the women they didn’t need to worry because you couldn’t have children. So there have been moments of self-revelation.

When my first child was an infant, and I was home with him, you offered to help. But the baby was colicky and it took perseverance to soothe him. We stopped at the post office and I ran in but there was a line. When I finally returned to the car, you were sat in the front passenger seat with your profile towards me, with the doors and windows closed, and the baby had been hollering the entire time. But you didn’t know how to get out and pick him up.

But you did know how to fix the wiring in my dining room when I wanted to replace the fixtures and it was all knob and tube. And you knew how to take the entire toilet out when my toddler stuck a plastic cup down it that wouldn’t budge, and you had to reinstall the whole unit and fix it with a fresh wax seal.

And you know a thing or two about this American life. When I became an immigrant like you, and roamed the grocery store aisles that first week without finding a thing to eat, and came back with a Hershey bar, you said, “you’re not going to like that.” And I knew with a heartsickness that you would turn out to be right, and I was irritated in my late-teenage way that you were undoubtedly already right about something I didn’t really know you were right about yet, and I let the bar sit for a day or two, and, when I tried it, it tasted like chalky soap.

You were my American cultural informant, as well as an Irish émigré. You tried to prepare me for America, by bringing pancake mix and bacon and sausages and eggs and maple syrup and strawberries and canned whipped cream on weekends, which you understood as a surefire way to win over teenagers. And I couldn’t take my eyes off your plate, because you were eating sausages and syrup. Together on the same plate with the same fork. On the same plate as the strawberries and whipped cream. And I just stared and stared and stared.

Perhaps the way the barful of black Americans stared at you in Chicago in 1960, when you walked in with your black friend, because you were frustrated and perplexed that you couldn’t go out for a drink together and you finally asked him to take you to his local. And he explained you away by introducing you as Irish. And after that they just called you Irish and bought you drink after drink.

It’s hard to say what shaped hole your passing will leave in my life. But, you had the immigrant experience first and you understood it. You drew me into your life via my mother, and you wanted to be a parent to me. And, to all the nurses, you refer to me as your daughter, never step-daughter. I don’t know how you feel about me always calling you by your first name, Dad or Father being dirty words in my former experience of male parental figures. It is another unaskable question.

I do know that we are connected by your intimate connection to my mother, but also that, now I am closer to the age she was when the two of you first lived together, we are connected by the ways in which I am like her. You recognize many of the behaviours of hers that I have unconsciously adopted, and I can throw you a look you can immediately interpret, having been on the receiving end of it before from her. Through her and her propensities, you know me by extension, perhaps in some ways better than I know myself. And the ways in which I am different you simply observe, accepting what you know and understand of me, and letting rest what you do not.

©Ayshea Wild 2017

Meadow Walk

by Ayshea Wild

At sixteen, I was required to attend the annual school-leaving ceremony, even though I was staying on for Sixth Form. The ceremony involved sitting still in a chair for a while, instead of on the floor as usual, and then trooping up some steps and across the stage in single-file, pausing to shake the Headmistress’s hand and receive a piece of paper, and continuing along the stage, down the steps and crossing back in front of the stage to return to our seats. We were not required to wear school uniform for the event, and it felt incongruous to be free of this constraint but to still have to line up. And, when I randomly passed the Head of Sixth Form on the staircase, on my way to the bathroom, she gave me both her attention and a sharp look, and expressed her dismay that I was not wearing a collar. No-one had implied anything about tops with collars. It was so obvious a rule as to be unspoken. But, it was too late now, we were lining up, and there were other missing collars. I had been taken shopping by my mother, to an unfamiliar store where the clothes were overpriced considering that girls my age were still growing. And I picked out a black, Indian, embroidered top with no collar, and a pair of russet culottes, to further distinguish myself from all the uniformed schoolgirls in the audience I was officially leaving behind. Culottes were unequivocally banned.

So I stood in line in my new, dismaying outfit, feeling disconnected to the supposed-achievement of school-leaving. The ceremony seemed purposeless, and my peers and I would be back the next day anyway. But the transition would be marked, and parents and siblings were invited to watch the trooping ritual.

To be clear, it was all about me and the sensation of my new clothes on my skin and the awkwardness of standing waiting. And my best friend was in line too, further back because her surname began with “W”, and her close-knit family were in the audience, filling their place within the school community. Including her mother, who could make elegant swans out of choux pastry, and who forbid us to go knocking on neighbors’ doors after we visited you and your cat. And although it was all about me, my mother had asked if it would be alright if you came to the ceremony, as a formal invitation had arrived in the post, and I had shrugged and said if you had nothing better to do. And after the trooping we were sent to join our family members and you were standing there, as awkward as me, in your dark coat with the gold cuff-links that I would later learn is called a sports jacket. And your cowboy boots. Next to my mother. And apparently this was somewhat scandalous, because my best friend’s mother’s mouth was a slackened “O” and her eyes were wide. Because no-one knew my parents were even separated, their still-togetherness an illusion it must have taken some work to maintain. And because you were the American neighbor with a swimming pool in the back garden, a pedigree cat, and a stay-at-home wife.

©Ayshea Wild 2017

Thirty-Third Avenue

by Ayshea Wild

In 2005 you became Pappy. It was not a name I had ever used before, not anything I would have come up with. But I quickly discovered it is the word my close friend’s children use to refer to their French father; a bona fides family-member name. We all adopted your new title, which was coined and disseminated with a little help from Nanna. And it suited you both.

In those early weeks, when you were becoming Pappy and I was learning about new motherhood, you often came to visit while Nanna was at work. I dutifully placed the baby in your arms and the two of you would look at each other. Until one of you became uncomfortable and the baby was passed back to me, and then my unscented, all-natural, breast-fed, recently-changed baby would reek of Paco Rabanne, which I hadn’t even realized you were wearing. And so it became a ritual that after each visit my little pomander would go straight in the bath tub.

Today, your nurses dislike the Paco Rabanne. One of them refused to treat you, after you had applied it in an effort to feel more like yourself again, after the trauma of a sudden turn for the worse and hospitalization. But it is part of your identity, and it tickles the nose, and it just is.

On longer visits you bonded with my dog, whose status in life had diminished with the arrival of the newborn. Under the guise of being helpful, you led her willingly out the back door and “around the block.” After all, I might start breast-feeding at any unpredictable moment. So, there was no hurry. Nanna’s eyes were locked with the baby’s; she was telling him all over again how much he had grown and how much he looked like his daddy. I was folding rounds and rounds of laundry. And the dog was parked at the bicycle rack outside the local café, watching you through the ground-to-roof glass windows. And you would come out and meet the children who were petting the friendly Labrador, who was in sleek, tip-top condition on account of her organic, free-range, dog-food-only diet, and the regular, health-promoting walks to the park. And the children would watch with glee as you told her to sit and then dropped one of your two ice-cream cones on the ground in front of her. And it wasn’t even ice-cream, this being Portland, Oregon, but gelato. Toasted coconut. Her favorite and yours.

And over in the corner was my vegan neighbor, a new parent himself, who, unbeknownst to his vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free wife, was scooping down his daily serving of vegan, gluten-free sorbetto. The two of you swallowing there in parallel, coping with the brand-new demands of modern family life.

©Ayshea Wild 2017