By the end of 1973—the year my parents split up—my main emotion was relief. Seventeen, I’d long given up the fantasy of the perfect home life. Their marriage, in fact, was a wreck, and at least for the moment beyond working out. Though they rarely fought, the tension between them was making everyone skittish.
Thanksgiving was near, and my father and I had still not discussed his problems with my mom. In addition, I had still never seen him cry about the prospect of losing my mother. Like so many American men of his generation, my father believed if a man was to call himself a man, he must wear a kind of armor, male and indestructible, that concealed his fears and deepest feelings from his family. Particularly to John Wayne, showing fear and pain was for women and children.
With time and circumstance people can change, even patriarchal fathers born in 1907. And something changed that winter between my father and me. One night after an awful fight with my mother, he entered my bedroom and sat on my sister’s bed. Marisa was not around, or he never would have come in there. As my father sat down I could see tears inching down his stubbled face. When first he saw me looking he turned away. Then with the side of one thick finger, my father wiped his cheeks, turning his wet and unashamed eyes back to me.
“Honey,” he said, “your mother and I are having some serious problems. I love her so much, I love you, I love our family, but I have to work—you know I have to—to support us, and I know it’s hard on your mother. She doesn’t understand . . .”
His upper body rocking, his words spilling out between too many extra breaths, my father stopped speaking and started to cry. Once his tears unloosed, they came and they came. Tears. No sobbing or other sounds. Only tears. With no consideration of my actions, no thought of our future or past, I crossed to Marisa’s bed and I held him. He made no effort to stop me and we sat on my sister’s bed for several trembling moments, nothing withheld, my father and I as one, frozen in the sorrow and the still. I was seventeen. My father was sixty-six. We had crawled to this naked communion, this beautiful frightening point of no return, and why it had taken so long never entered my mind. Pulling him close, I knew we would never again be quite the same two people.
Now everything’s out in the open. Our lives are more honest now. I silently told myself that through the winter and spring, and at first our new arrangement suited me. After my mother moved out that December—by mutual accord, while my father was out of town—she and my dad were more friendly than when they had shared a home. Custody wasn’t an issue since neither sought a divorce. They lived five miles apart, no distance at all in Southern California, my dad in the house at Bayshores, my mom at our Big Canyon condo. I kept clothes and belongings with both and made sure my shuttles between them were even. But I selfishly preferred to stay with my mom. She was more lenient, and I was seventeen.
For me it was all fairly convenient and far less stressful, but as time passed, I started seeing that “honest lives” can hurt too. My parent’s civil smiles when the family was all together would vanish the moment the other one left. I know they tried not to, but their bitterness often seeped out. My mother complained that he was irritable and stubborn about working and that she could not spend entire summers up in Alaska on our boat. Whenever I’d visit my dad he always spoke of other things first, then brought the conversation to her. “A woman should stay with her husband. Your mother gets mad because I have to work. Where the hell does she think we get our money?”
I hurt for them both and tried staying neutral, gently taking the side of whomever I was with. But I found myself feeling more pain for my father. My mother opened a restaurant, the Fernleaf Cafe, and was busy with that, while my dad was growing older, more tired, still working as hard but not nearly as often. I’d never seen him so torn up, nor so lonely. I was used to him needing our feeding; he always needed that. But I wasn’t prepared to see his self-pity. If I missed a few days of visits, he charged that I didn’t love him. “I know you don’t love me, Aissa. If you loved me you’d spend more time here.”
As it did the night he cried in my arms, seeing my father like this filled me with more emotions than I was equipped to sort out. My mother was gone, he needed me now, and I wanted it. Still, I felt so awkward. My father talked about he and my mom, my turn came to speak, and all I could muster was something like “Dad, I know she still loves you,” or, “Dad, you should really try talking things out.” His disappointed eyes told me he wanted more, and sometimes that angered me. After all those years of treating me like his baby girl—smile sweetly and don’t have any opinions—he wanted to snap his fingers and have me turn into a woman.
Several months after my mother moved out, the more upset I saw her becoming, the more certain I felt she and my father would reunite. I think she realized her work, her new friends, her religion, her tennis, all gave her something worthwhile, but also that she still deeply loved her husband. One day she wrote him a long letter, and shortly after that they met at the Fernleaf Cafe. My mom never showed the letter to me and I never felt I should ask, but I was sure she’d return home and say she was moving back in. Instead she came back to the condo crying.
Without telling my mother, I jumped in my car and sped to the house on Bayshores, having no idea what I might say. My father sat outside on a lounge chair, an umbrella giving him shade. Sitting erect, he still looked sad, but no longer self-pitying. When I asked what happened, he spoke as he sometimes did about giving people chances.
“You give someone a chance,” he said, “and then you give them a second chance. But after two chances that’s it. After that you start to lose your dignity, and that’s where you have to draw the line.”
I didn’t know what he meant, didn’t know what had transpired the past days, weeks, months, years, between him and my mother. But I understood my father’s tone and the language of his body. I felt my own muscles go flaccid, and suddenly feeling sleepy I went inside to lie down. For now, the marriage was through.