My father spent the last year of his life discontinent. He’d always had trouble with prefixes. The day after he died, I entered my parents’ house—the house I grew up in—to the smell of piss, the humid night air thick with it. “It’s the mattress,” my mother explained, and I said, well, then the mattress had to go. 

I tried to haul it out right then, just dropped my bag and went down the hallway to their bedroom. I started with the soda bottles. There were five of them, scattered beneath their bed, three with urine still sloshing around inside from when my father had relieved himself during the night. I used a broom to maneuver them out while my mother watched, lying on the floor on the far side of the bed, peering at me across its underbelly and demanding that I call them pop bottles. She was sure that I was saying soda to bother her because she said there was no way a person could grow up saying pop and then find herself one day just thinking soda. 

As I knelt beside their bed, I felt something hard beneath my right knee. “Why are there cough drops all over the carpet?” I asked, using the plural, for I could see then that the floor was dotted with them, half-sucked and smooth like sea glass washed up in the dingy blue shag of my parents’ bedroom.

“Your father coughs a lot at night. He sucks on them until he’s just about to doze off, and then he’d spit them on the floor,” my mother explained, her sentence beginning in the present tense but ending in the past, because that’s the way death worked, the fact of it lost for whole seconds, whole sentences. “I used to pick them up in the morning, but he’d get after me for wasting perfectly good cough drops.” 

“Bettina’s not here yet?” I asked. My sister lived just an hour away, so I was annoyed that she had not arrived, but I was also admitting defeat: the mattress was too much for me to handle alone.

“You know she has a family,” my mother said, by way of excusing her absence. 

Rachel and I had been together eight years. We had a house, jobs, two cats, and a dog, so I thought of myself as having a family, also. 

“You know what I mean, Sybil,” my mother replied. I did know. She meant that I didn’t have children, but mainly she meant that two women together was not a family. 

“Well, if she’s not here in the morning, I’ll call a neighbor to help,” I said, but my mother did not like this plan. She felt a mattress soaked with urine was a family affair. 

My father was dead, I said, so what did it matter, and she said, “Why can’t you say ‘passed away’ like everyone else?” This was a good question. 

From where she lay on the floor on the far side of the bed, she announced that she was putting me in my old bedroom. “So you’ll be comfortable,” she added, and I did not say that I had never been comfortable in this room and could not imagine I’d start being comfortable in this room now, nor did I remind her that Rachel would be arriving the next day, which meant that I would not really be in my old room long enough to get comfortable because Rachel and I always slept in the basement, in the rec room that my father had built years ago with teenagers in mind. My parents did not approve of us sharing a bed, and the rec room was a compromise: it allowed us to sleep together, a technical win for us, but together on separate sofas, unlike my sister and her husband, Carl, who slept upstairs in her old room, in a double bed that my parents had purchased for this very purpose.

“Why are you lying on the floor?” I asked, bending low to peer beneath the bed at her.

“You’re getting rid of my bed,” she said, and then she pulled herself slowly up, using the mattress as support, and I picked up my bag from where I’d dropped it and went down the hallway to the room my mother somehow imagined I would be comfortable in, this room that I had spent my childhood in: with walls that my father had painted pink as a surprise, the orange shag carpet, the framed print of a child kneeling to pray. 

Years ago, soon after I brought Rachel here to my parents’ house for the first time, I’d returned for a solo visit having to do with one of many health scares related to my father. Though my parents had just met Rachel, they did not engage in even the basic courtesy of inquiring how she was. Then, on my second night here, my mother came into my room, this room, to announce that she—and not just she but everyone she knew—was ashamed of it. She was carrying Bibles, a stack of three, as though they did not all say the same thing.

“It?” I said. “What, exactly, is it?” 

“You know what it is.” This was what an education had done to me, she said. I couldn’t just talk about stuff like normal people. 

“Well, then I guess I’m not normal,” I said, “because I want you to say what this it is that you and every single person you know is so ashamed of.” I was speaking to her from the bed I had occupied as a child, before I went away and became the kind of person who thought of her life as something more than it. 

“If you can’t say what you mean,” I said, “then we’re not going to talk about it.” 

My mother had left, but not before turning to set the Bibles, stacked atop one another, on my dresser, where they have remained these seven years; on the nightstand, a fourth had been added—just in case.

Now, beneath the praying child, there was something new, pointing upward: a row of hunting rifles, six in total, butts nestled in the orange shag rug. 

I went into the kitchen, where my mother was doing something with cottage cheese.

“Why are Dad’s guns in my room?” I asked. 

“They were in the entryway, but you know how your sister gets about the kids.” 

“You mean how she gets about not wanting them to blow their heads off?” I said. 

—

Earlier that evening, after a day spent flying backwards from Albuquerque to Los Angeles in order to get a flight to Minnesota, I had stopped to pick up my rental car at the airport, and the young man at the counter asked whether I was here on vacation. He was making small talk, but also, he didn’t think I was from here, for reasons having to do with the way that I speak, the Minnesota accent that I no longer have. I had not made a point to lose it, not that I could recall, though Rachel says that by the time we met, it was already gone. Sometimes, my mother says she can’t understand me anymore. “It’s your brogue,” she says, as if I have suddenly become Scottish. 

“Actually, my father just died,” I told the young man, which surely struck him as further proof that I was not from here, because if you were from here, you knew not to say such things to strangers. Quickly, he handed me the keys, and I got into the rental car and drove two hours up the interstate, exiting onto the highway that led through my hometown. All around me was darkness, but I knew what was out there: lakes and fields, cows and barns and silos, the occasional house. Three miles out of town, I turned onto a gravel road and then, half a mile later, into the driveway, at the top of which I shut off the engine and rested my head on the steering wheel, the way one does at the end of a long trip, especially when there’s more to come. 

I lifted my head, and there was my mother, staring in at me like all the gas station attendants of my youth. I rolled down the window. “Fill ’er up,” I said, but she didn’t get the joke, or maybe she did get it but didn’t get why I was making a joke at a time like this, with my father so recently dead. 

Passed away.

“Oh, you’re awake,” she said. “I thought you were planning to sleep out here.”

My mother often said things like this, things along the lines of suggesting that I might be planning to sleep in a rental car in the driveway. My father and I had been alike in the way that such things irritated us. “Why would I sleep in the car?” 

“I thought you might be tired from the drive,” she said.

“I am tired,” I said, and then I tried to play the game where I kept my mouth shut, just once—the game I always lost. “But why would I sleep in the car?” 

“Shirley’s been at it again,” my mother said.

Shirley Koerber lived on the lot behind my parents, her sole companions a band of dogs at which she yelled for various infractions. She was a stout woman with legs that bowed severely, as though she were straddling an invisible barrel as she walked, and she possessed a deep hatred of small animals—squirrels, chipmunks, birds—all of which the dogs chased with limited success and at which she shot with far greater. As a child, I’d awakened often to the sound of her gun, rising to watch from my window as the dogs circled the felled animal, howling, while Shirley rode her imaginary barrel toward them. Once when I was hanging laundry on the backyard line, a bullet whizzed past my head and I ran inside, leaving the basket of wet clothes behind. When my mother came home and asked about the abandoned clothes, I explained that Shirley had been shooting again, and my mother nodded as if I’d said it had started to rain, my options akin to opening an umbrella or going inside, for there was no option that involved making the rain stop. 

“This is crazy,” Rachel said the first time she visited my parents’ house, a visit that I kicked off with a tour of the bullet holes speckling the back wall. “Why didn’t your parents do something?”

Rachel grew up in the suburbs of New York, in an intellectual Jewish family with parents who were refugees from war and violence. Until she met me, Rachel had not known people who discussed guns in a personal way, as objects they owned and fired.

“What could they have done?” I asked, trying to see the bullet holes through her eyes. Until I met Rachel, I had not known people who had never held a gun.

“What could they have done?” Rachel repeated, sounding incredulous. “They could have called the police.” 

“And what could the police have done?” I said, equally incredulous. “Take the gun?” 

“Yes,” Rachel said. “They could have taken the gun.”

—

I made a list once—pre-Rachel—a list of the things that I considered non-negotiable in a partner. It was a short list, reasonable in its expectations. I met Rachel just two months later, at a lesbian potluck of all things. Not long after we moved in together, I read an article in the New York Times—back when we used to have it delivered instead of reading it on the computer—about professional matchmakers, all of whom said that the key to successful matchmaking was to pair up people with the same pasts, people who recognized themselves in their potential mate’s childhood and family and beliefs: Italian Catholic from Long Island with Italian Catholic from Long Island. People want familiarity in a mate, want to recognize themselves, their youth, in the other person. That’s what all the matchmakers said. It’s not that I didn’t believe this. I did—maybe especially of the sorts who would consult a matchmaker—but I also believed that matching a person with someone who resembled a cousin more than a lover suggested a lack of imagination. Until then, I’d assumed, naïvely I suppose, that most couples were like us, drawn to each other precisely because we were so unfamiliar. 

At night, when we lay in bed, Rachel told me stories about her family’s arrival in this country, and I listened. Her father and grandparents had fled Russia because they were Mensheviks, one of her stories began; she dropped in Menshevik as though the word were common knowledge. This was right after we had sex the first time, so I did not say, “What is a Menshevik?” though later I realized that nobody knew what Mensheviks were, that Mensheviks were not common knowledge, except in the very specific world of Russian Jews in exile. 

Her grandparents had first gone to France, where they continued to be Mensheviks, and then came to this country, where they kept on gathering with other Mensheviks. Even after her grandparents were dead and her father had his own family—Rachel, her mother, and sister—the tradition continued. One of the other Menshevik offspring had a house on the Hudson River where all of them would meet on weekends in the summer to eat and drink vodka and discuss Russia, its past, its future. Once, Stalin’s daughter was there, Rachel told me. This was after a different night of sex. She wasn’t Jewish, of course, Stalin’s daughter, but she was Russian and in exile. Imagine growing up with parents who knew Stalin’s daughter. I couldn’t imagine it, not at first, but I wanted to, just as she could not imagine parents who rose at dawn, who did not smoke or drink, who did not speak of ideas or question God, his existence or his decisions.

My great-great grandparents left Sweden in 1867 after the crops had failed yet again, failed because so much rain fell that year that the potatoes rotted in the ground. They left with eight children and arrived in Minnesota a year and half later with five, two of whom eventually continued on to Washington, where they became fishermen, while the other three settled in Minnesota and resumed farming, the two factions forming—or so I like to imagine—a poetic yin-yang of land and sea. According to my father, the Minnesota side never forgave the Washington brothers for choosing water, not after all the misery that water had brought to their family: first, the absence of it, droughts that stole the crops year after year, and then the abundance of it taking their crops yet again, and finally the water that surrounded them during those agonizing weeks at sea as they crouched, vomiting, between decks, and watched three children die. 

By the time that I was born in this same small town in Minnesota, my father had long ago given up farming to run a hardware store that he purchased in the late forties, soon after he came home from the war. He had enlisted right out of high school, but when the war ended, he had gone no farther away than Florida, where he was being trained as an airplane mechanic. Something about the experience unsettled him greatly, put him off the world. He came home to this town and never left again. He spoke of this as the best decision he ever made. I suppose that there is a sanity in this, in claiming to want what one has, and yet, perhaps because my father and I were alike in all of the most problematic ways—stubborn yet shy, prone to solitude, sarcastic at moments when it did not behoove us to be so, overly fond of the subterfuge of words—I thought that I understood things about him that others might not: that is, I believed that he was not beyond regret, regret for a life that he—to be fair—never alluded to but that I sometimes imagined for him, college in place of family, in place of us. 

For starters, he took no pleasure in family time. Every evening of my childhood, he went back to his hardware store, where he watched television and tended to the books, and though I was relieved at his chronic disinterest in us—for the house took on a different shape when he and his anger were part of it—I wondered at his decision to become a father in the first place, especially as he had waited forty years to begin. Occasionally, well-intentioned people—people who are parents—ask why I do not have children, referring to the fact that I am “good” with children, that I like them. “No,” I tell these people. “I like some children.” You see, I am selfish, but just unselfish enough to accept that I would not be a good parent. I never wanted to be a parent. In this way, I suspect, my father and I were also alike.

Thus, when he ridiculed me for going far away from this town and the world of hardware and childbearing, I could not help but see his ridicule as an expression of his own remorse. I imagined that my father would someday speak to me with an openness that belied the daily narrative of this place. He never did, so what remains is the narrative, a fairly standard one for those who grew up how and where I did, about hard work and toeing the line. Still, I do not think it possible to tell the story of my father’s death without first telling the story of how we came to be in this country, this place, the place my father ran back to, the place I ran away from . . .

To read the rest of “Just Another Family,” order your copy of NER 44.3.

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