You belong to the mystery

10

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

September 1, 1992

Dear Charlie,

Today something strange happened. But the event is already ensconced in the foggy fortress of my brain.

When I got home from school mom asked me to go for a walk with her. We never go for walks together. She joined the jogging movement in the 80’s so I occasionally run alongside her while she pounds marital stress out through her feet. But a leisurely, springtime jaunt? I was suspicious.

She began by saying, “This is dad’s idea, not mine.”

We set out onto State Park Road under overcast skies. The lake flies were beginning their autumn hatch so the air hummed with a green, high-pitched stench. Mom had one of her marriage and family counselor hats on—her statements felt rehearsed and a bit too conclusive. She’s very convincing in this state and I find it easy to not question what I hear. Why would I? Her presentation is complete, as if the gods have already brought everything to trial and she is simply reporting the golden truth. She means well and her intentions are to protect me. Mom has a fierce and generous love and wants only the best for me. But sometimes through her clear, resonant note of truth, I can hear another note. It’s faint and usually fades quickly. I heard it today. For a fraction of a second, I felt like I was remembering a sequence of notes from a dream and if I could just hold on a bit longer, I’d recall the entire song.

Mom turned to me and stated plainly, “There is a chance that dad isn’t your biological father,” — I HEAR THE NOTE! —“but isn’t it more interesting to know now that you belong to the mystery?” — AND NOW IT’S GONE.

I don’t know about you but when I receive emotionally loaded news in the same breath of someone’s opinion, I take refuge in certainty. If the opinion is plausible, if I respect the person, it’s so much easier to adopt their belief in the moment and sort out my feelings later. Mom’s conviction was clear and sunny and a lot more preferable to the hairline fracture forming inside, threatening to crack open and obliterate me.

Yes mom, the mystery. That sounds good.

Later in life mom and I will debate my response. She remembers that it was me who concluded “So this must mean I belong to the mystery.” I don’t remember this at all, but I also don’t remember some significant chunks from childhood, especially some of the more emotionally loaded ones. The delete button in my brain was already well-worn by the time I received this news. I do leave room for the possibility that mom is right, that I did say something about belonging to the mystery. But if I did, I did it for her. The invisible tentacles of my mind had already had seventeen years of practice reaching into the dark boxes of other people’s heads and figuring out how they wanted me to respond. It’s much safer to fit myself into another person’s truth than tug on the thread of my own — because if I did, my story might unravel. My sense of being an outsider would no longer be a sense, it would be a truth. Did I know deep in my bones that I was “different”, that I wasn’t a Warner? Did I push that intuition away by denying myself a voice, afraid that if I spoke up, the dissonance would be alarmingly clear? I want nothing more than to fit in with my family, especially to be accepted by mom and dad. And not because I feel like they’re the “cool crowd” and I admire all their qualities, rather I’m terrified of my own truth and the consequences of it surfacing.

Sometimes—especially in nature— it feels simple. I belong to my family, the trees, the night sky and yes, the mystery.

My teenage brain receives the paternity uncertainty as odd and dismisses it. The details are hazy other than that it doesn’t seem to matter much. I don’t recall bringing it up with dad at a later date. I never share the story with friends at school. Mom presents the paternity question as a low possibility. She even says that if I were Charlie’s daughter I would’ve been a premie and I was a healthy weight at birth. Dad and I have a strong bond. All my life she has told me that I have his lower lip. His legs. His affinity for math and science. Dad’s parents wonder where I get my nose and they trace it back to a paternal great aunt. Mom doesn’t remember this other man’s full name, just Charlie. “His last name is maybe Bower, Bowerman, Brewer” she says. DNA tests aren’t easily accessible, nor the “Information Superhighway,” so our limited evidence points toward the only dad I know. I’ll take it.

That winter I enroll in a senior year “blow off” class called Interpersonal. I first heard about this class as a sophomore and imagined all the seniors — finally carefree and wise — sitting in a circle and sharing feelings with each other for a grade. The teacher, Mrs. Haack, is also an English teacher but her attentiveness to students’ personal lives flourishes in Interpersonal. We journal. We write letters to other students. We contemplate and challenge our belief systems, choices and dreams. She takes us out of the senior year grind of college applications and connects us to ourselves and each other.

Before winter break Mrs. Haack instructs our parents to write a letter to their almost-graduate about something otherwise difficult to bring up in conversation. She then collects the letters, promising to mail them to us, unopened, one year later. Dad takes on this assignment with his usual unconventional and demonstrative love. Along with his letter to me, he makes a mix tape with his favorite dance music. Lately he’s been trying to combat depression with morning movement sessions in the basement before heading to the hospital. He stops his Zoloft prescription because “it takes away my dreams.” I hear the tunes pulsing through the kitchen floor as I eat breakfast—slightly embarrassed and disturbed but also relieved it’s in the privacy of the basement. I’ve grown to fiercely love dad. Maybe I don’t like all of his weirdness but the affection is real and deep. None of my friends ever have to know that while their dads wake up with coffee, mine greets the day shaking his pelvis to the hypnotic drumming of Gabriel Roth.

Dad’s temporary depression antidotes — Zoloft, early morning pelvic gyrations, and escaping on his Harley Davidson. 

The spring before graduation I get a job. Most evenings and weekends are spent at the ballet studio but Friday’s are often free and I want to start saving money. I also love the sitcom Cheers so in my waitressing fantasy, I am Kirstie Ally bonding with servers, Shelley Long having light-hearted chats with customers. The Gibson Grill is a small, contemporary bar and restaurant on Appleton’s main street, College Avenue. It’s near the Paper Valley Hotel so it attracts business travelers working in the lucrative Fox Valley paper industry. I say contemporary because that’s how I saw it then. Steely gray wallpaper. Red sconces hanging over the bar. In hindsight, it was more an Art Deco spin on Red Robin.

My high school friend Gina is already a server at “The Gibson” so she volunteers to train me. Very quickly I learn the physics of multiple wine glasses on a tray and their relationship to gravity. Red wine spills all over my first customer’s white pant suit and kills my Cheers fantasy immediately. I am mortified. I have my first Friday night shift later that week and I practice the delicate balance of wrist, glass and tray dutifully every night after ballet. All the years of perfecting balance with my legs, feet and ankles, I never thought I’d struggle so much with my other set of limbs. I am not a natural and I start to wonder if I should take a summer job leading backpacking trips instead of serving booze.

Thursday after school dad picks me up in his new Volvo. He kept his old vanity plate so the familiar word YANG slowly approaches the curb. Just a week earlier we road-tripped to Milwaukee  to hunt for a prom dress—more an excuse for a dad-daughter day than a love for shopping (or prom)—but I like that he’s game for the adventure. Post-Cinnabon sugar high and mall frenzy, he felt sleepy so I hopped behind the wheel and drove us home. He was fast asleep as I navigated through the small farming towns in central Wisconsin; seas of wheat and corn interrupted by the occasional one-church, one-bar township. Occasionally I glanced at dad. His head leaned awkwardly against the window, his jaw slack. Sleep and death wear the same face.

Now he sits in the driver seat and I can’t shake that image of him from a week ago. As I buckle my seatbelt, I notice he’s quieter than usual and doesn’t hit the gas right away. With the car idling, I look at him. He’s wearing a pale pink, button down shirt. His hair is pulled into a low, tight pony-tail. He smells good. He always smells good. Rubbing alcohol, ylang ylang and something earthy that is uniquely his own. His face is tired as he reaches his right hand to his chest and says “My heart hurts today.”

I don’t know what this means. But it makes mine ache as well. Tangling up my feelings with dad’s emotional state is second nature. He always carries a heaviness but today it unsettles me. I don’t reply in words. I reply with empathic angst buried in the chambers of my own heart.

That Friday I go to my first, official waitressing job. What I don’t know is it’s also my last.

I return home at 1am for an hour of sleep before mom, dad and I are scheduled to drive to the Milwaukee airport. It’s spring break and our flight to Mexico is at 6am. Eric is in his second year at University of Colorado Boulder so he will fly separately and meet us there. No pant suits are stained with wine my first night of waitressing so I fall asleep feeling a small sense of accomplishment and bigger sense of anticipation for warm sun and turquoise blue water.

NEXT CHAPTER

Sleeping faces — four hours of ballet class and rehearsal on Saturdays often landed me in the warm embrace of afternoon naps and dad.