trash bag brie, heartsickness, & my big sister

the recipe

Serves: 4-6 women who “ate before they came, thanks”

Pair with: Apothic White Wine Blend 2/$12 at the gas station

Misremembered stories

Misplaced affection

Ingredients

Brie

Jam, fruit preserves, or jelly from 2 years ago from the back of your fridge

Pecans or walnuts or a fake nut allergy

Canned crescent rolls

The Quick and the Dirty

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Roll out the crescent roll dough.

Place Brie on top of dough, in center.

Top Brie with jam or preserves, then chopped nuts. 

Fold over the crescent dough so that everything is wrapped, as if in a trash bag.

Bake until crescent roll browns.

the essay

“My favorite thing about this recipe is that it’s pretending to be something it’s not—it seems fancy, but it’s just easy,” I say, in my fake-nice voice, jotting it down for the receptionist and knowing, even as I tout its simplicity, that I’ve—not even once—made correctly. “I used to eat with my sister,” I add without thinking.

“I didn’t know you had a sister!”

“Oh.” I pause. “Yeah.” I smile, emanating a polite but firm end to this casual conversation. I had unsuccessfully made this several times during our “sister dates,” where we drank shitty white wine and ate snacks before going to the movies if we were sober enough.

Barbie always played, in the background, Investigation Discovery, a channel that fed her interest in horror with a thrilling real life aspect due to its twenty-four hour programming geared toward the lowest common denominator among white women. For the first several years that these shows became popular, they didn’t bother me. I found them tacky but very interesting. As my career pushed me toward public defense, I began to loathe them. To me, they represented the brokenness inherent to our justice system and the casual but vicious vindictiveness of our intellectually deficient media. They serialized tragedy and glossed over important legal safeguards. For my sister, they fueled her thirst for vigilante, shortsighted, and necessarily hollow justice. They reinforced her ideas about what kind of people deserved justice and what kind of trash deserved a violent, underfunded, Dickensian-turned-Dante prison system. These shows ultimately inspired her to give up her accounting major and switch to the seemingly grade-less major that is criminal justice (and, then, to eventually pursue but abandon a Masters in criminal justice administration).

When I still lived in our home town, I saw my half-sister Barbara Anne Pettyman almost every day. I babysat her four children at least twice a week, came over with snacks after work on other days, and met up with her and the kids at the beach, Frank E. Fromage, or softball games in between. 

When I left for law school, I sought her out several times each visit home.  I missed her.  But, also, in a fit of rage, my mom had cancelled the Internet at our house.  Barbie let me use hers to submit final assignments and take online exams while she and the kids were at work and school. The first few times, she sat with me on the sofa, excitedly asking me lots of questions about law school, which I hated much to her profound disappointment.

“I’m so jealous,” she said wistfully. “I always wanted to be a lawyer.” It was the first time I’d heard her voice this desire, but I didn’t comment since, generally, the Pettymans leave a lot of true statements unsaid. I shrugged uncomfortably instead, feeling once again guilty for having something she didn’t.

As time passed, Barbie became less enthusiastic to see me. The last couple of times that I visited home, she had been asleep on the sofa—getting up only for a moment to give me a hug hello and goodbye.  It’s such an odd thing, remembering those moments.  I can still feel the ghost of her hug if I try: small frame, bony shoulders that ever so briefly and lightly met mine and then disappear into the ether.

I am still adjusting to life without Barbie. When I first started this draft, it was only—only—a few months out from the end, after several years of what I later determined to have been simply circumstantial closeness. In truth, we had so little in common that we seemed to be mirror images of one another—pure opposites perpetually rooted together. We have different mothers but share—disproportionately—the same father. She is nearly twelve years older than me.  As a kid, I used to think she was the most beautiful, and therefore admirable, girl. I idolized her. She loved dolphins and wanted to be a teacher. Her favorite color was purple. So, naturally, I loved dolphins, wanted to be a teacher, and tried to garden emotions for the color purple.

I eagerly awaited her every-other-weekend visits to our father. I believed somehow that exposure to her would make me more like her. Although I was too young to articulate this at the time, I studied Barbie and emulated my findings once she left. 

My time with her was, therefore, all the more important because she was a study in what I should be. So, naturally, I was crushed when she would inevitably leave to go on dates with her boyfriend of the moment on Friday nights. 

Once, she’d said, “I’ll be back soon!” 

She had meant to console me, but I had instead taken her at her word—a mistake I would make again and again as I grew older, forever unable to glean the true meaning of politely consoling statements. That day, I took a stool from the kitchen and plunked it down on the cement patio staircase in front of our house. I would wait for her.

After an hour or so, my mother crept up behind me, leaning into the screen door. “I don’t think she’s coming back right away, honey,” she said quietly.

“No, she said she would be right back.”

I wanted to be like Barbie in a way that was unlike anything else. I yearned to be like her. Barbie represented to me what a flawless, pretty girl I should be but, ultimately, could never actually become. She was to me, then, what Gillian Flynn would later articulate a Cool Girl is to modern women. Barbie could eat disgusting foods—full-calorie beer, greasy pizza loaded with various spiced and decaying meats, nachos with extra-extra cheese, popcorn with extra-extra butter, one-hundred pickled jalapenos—and never get fat. In complete truth, I once witnessed my sister melt a bowl of margarine in the microwave and proceed to dip individual popcorn kernels into it and eat them. She remained, however, underweight for her entire life. When I spent more time with her as an adult, I noticed that she simply only made loud exclamations about the things she ate, but she never finished a whole meal and stuck to a strict policy of never eating before noon. 

She was diminutive without being overtly feminine whereas I preferred all things hyper-feminine, as if to compensate for my appearance—chronically dirty Keds, black over-stretched stretch pants, and un-ironic XL-sized Tweety Bird t-shirts. Someone could glance at my wispy sister with her effortless fanned bangs and know she was femme. But, that person would then look at me, a pudgy but tall kid with enormous glasses dressed in a men’s Wolfman costume and exclaim to my mother, “Oh, how cute. How old is your son?”

Even Barbie’s name was decidedly female, whereas I was consistently marked male on my standardized tests due to my technically-unisex-but-leaning-male name. My name, which my mother had always loved, was a burden leading to misgendering mistake after mistake after mistake, ad nauseam. It was yet another challenge I had to confront in order to prove I belonged in the realm of Female. 

I was constantly accused of being a “Tomboy” because I loved violent and crude films but, in true whiplash fashion, I was then immediately rejected as one because my hypochondria, social anxiety, and philosophical nature even then made things like, “playing outside,” both a fretful and confusing experience. 

“What am I supposed to do?” I’d ask myself. I would attempt to climb a tree, but I was afraid of heights and the bark scratched at my soft palms so I would just stand in the base of a slim tree in my front yard, a perilously high fourteen inches from the ground, staring at the neighborhood from behind a paltry smattering of leaves until I’d notice a bee and then run inside to watch scary movies (the ghost kinds, not the torture porn kinds).

I was generally aware that I had personality traits that didn’t fall into either rigid realm of acceptable 90s female child stereotype.  These were not traits possessed by actual “tomboys,” like my across-the-street neighbor who was obsessed with sports and didn’t think about bacterial infections every time she scratched her knee on a broken fence post she hopped.  But I clearly wasn’t an actual “girly girl,” either.  It seemed I had the worst traits of both—I wasn’t pretty but I loved the color pink and floral prints; I wasn’t brave but I loved spooky supernatural and monster movies; I was smart but somehow not the right kind of smart.  I was somewhere in-between, and I could sense that was wrong and unlikeable—primarily from the merciless teasing I experienced during my short stint at a public elementary school and my father’s frustrating inability to figure me out when he was forced to spend time with me or had to purchase me a birthday present. Learning how to pre-empt the teasing about my appearance or to reassure my father that I really did like the demolition derby and only cried because the pink car was destroyed and not because I fervently believed the whole stadium was going to catch fire and kill us all as in a scene from the not-yet-made cinematic masterpiece, Final Destination.

To put it frankly: I was insecure from an early age—which was just another difference between Barbie and me. Perhaps, it was that security that made Barbie proudly willing to act like one of the guys, if only in such stereotypically pleasing ways to men. No one would misgender her because she followed the Bears or because she loved beef sandwiches or because she vociferously hated pink. Once I became thin, I would spend my preteen years also trying to do these things—to not be a regular girl but cool girl. Thankfully, by the time I became a teenager, however, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl would reign—a significantly more attainable ideal for me, a legally blind, sci-fi addicted weirdo, who, by then, had learned how to passably do hair and make-up. But before then, I was just a chubby kid, following my pretty sister Barbara around, in a Walmart, in the upper Midwest in the very late 90s. 

“You can get one thing, if you want,” she shrugged, wholly apathetic.

Given such an important mission, I knew I had to choose carefully. I looked at the varied M&M candy dispensers longingly, not because I liked M&Ms (Barbara Walters had told me that the food coloring is a carcinogen) but because the brown lady M&M cartoon character, who wore glasses and emasculated all the other M&Ms, had just been introduced; and, I felt like I could be her. (The absurdity is not lost on me, as I—an adult human woman—write this, that I once looked up to a cartoon piece of candy as a female role model.) Obviously, the sexy green M&M would remain perpetually beyond me—even at seven, I knew this to be true. But smart, sassy brown M&M—who was also probably a little earthy since the brown M&Ms likely had less artificial food coloring—was definitely in my wheelhouse of Women I Could Become One Day. She was a palatable candidate I could easily toss my childhood obesity behind.

My sister read my face. “That’s fine, as long as you don’t get the dumb girl one,” she rolled her eyes, purposefully mischaracterizing the brown M&M in a flawlessly executed woman-on-woman takedown.

Of course, she must have known that was the one that I had wanted. I had grown up wearing only mismatched shades of varying degrees of pink until the first grade. My bedroom—my lair, my safe space—was pink. My bedspread was pink until my mom surprised me with purple Goosebumps-printed sheets, and now it was pink and purple. When our father had purchased us large 14” by 22” pictures to hang on our bedroom walls, Barbie had picked out a cold and violent orca slicing through freezing water and glimmering light while I had selected a pastel unicorn nursing a litter of fuzzy orange kittens under a leafy but flowering tree that I imagined also probably housed elves. (It remains an unhealed loss from which I will never recover that this item is one of the many things lost in my parents’ divorce.) Of course, I wanted the dumb girl M&M.

I looked at the M&M dispensers, and I swallowed. I selected the angry-looking orange one, who clearly suffered from an unfettered aggression problem and was the cartoon, candied version of Sam Kinison.

“Whew, that one is way cooler,” she said approvingly.

***

When my parents and I moved to the southern gulf coast, Barbie became meaner somehow—perhaps because she had felt abandoned since my parents decided to move approximately five minutes after my then-twenty-year-old half-sister gave birth to her first baby. 

When Barbie started having kids, this endeared her even more to our anti-choice, baby-loving father. It was just another thing they had in common. Pete Pettyman, our dad, had impregnated Barbie’s mother when he was seventeen and Barbie’s mom only sixteen. Barbie, named after a Beach Boys’ song, was the pivotal turning point in his young teenage life. Were it not for this crying bundle of blankets, our father would have continued to steal cars and hang around with “gangs” in the south side of a major metropolitan city in the upper Midwest. Instead, he claimed he straightened out and earned his GED, worked two jobs, and saved enough for a down payment on a house before he turned twenty. And, now, the roughness of life was a secret bond that Barbie shared with our father—one I could not know, being that, at ten, my life was provided for me by our father’s hardworking attitude (and definitely not by my mother’s rather large share of my grandparents’ trust). 

Instead of remaining distantly fond of me, Barbie soured toward me. When she and her ever-growing brood visited, she teased me incessantly. “Sleeping again? Is that all you do?” She huffed as I retreated to my bedroom after school for my ritual weekday nap that I took instead of eating.

“Pretty much,” our father would chime in.

If Barbie had to borrow my clothes, she swam in them. “These are huge!” She giggled, of my size-four American Eagle jeans, which gapped at least three inches from her emaciated abdomen. To this day, Barbie remains several inches taller than me and perpetually thinner, like chewed-up and stretched-out bubble gum. 

And, then, “Are all your clothes from American Eagle and Abercrombie? You are so spoiled,” she would say while shaking her head. 

I didn’t correct her that they were almost exclusively from the crumpled sale table in the back or confide in her how embarrassing it was to shop with my mother or my grandmother at these cool stores, where my family gaped at the price of shrunken, wrinkled t-shirts and jeans with holes in them, “Holy cow, Penn, $25 for a shirt? With holes in it?”

“Hey, nerd,” my sister would say when she sat next to me on the sofa as I read. “Don’t you have any friends or do you just hang out here all the time and watch TV?”

Books are, in fact, not TV, but I never defended myself.  I wish I had considered doing so as not worth the effort; but, in truth, I always felt a bit kicked in the gut when Barbie teased me.  I was used to my dad doing it, but the combination of the two of them feeding off one another to get under my skin and then laughing together when I finally would leave the room was too much of a betrayal for me to make a witty comeback.

Years later, I would find myself harping on my niblings in this same way at family gatherings. “You are so spoiled,” I would tell my third nibling with disgust in my voice when they would get a dozen or so presents on Christmas, jealous that my parents had given up gifting me presents once I turned eighteen in exchange for doubling the gifts my young niblings received.

 But, after I exited my early twenties, I stopped this teasing when I noticed my third nibling getting upset. Now that my brain was fully developed, I explicitly remembered hating my sister for making me feel guilty and anxious for things over which I had no control—namely, my parents inconsistent spoiling of their different children.  And, how much betrayal I felt when she publicly attacked me.

“They are such a drama queen,” my sister muttered about my third nibling when the little child started to pout.

“Or, they weirdly don’t like getting bullied by their family?” I suggested finally, having officially felt ashamed of myself for teasing Three.

“They’re like their auntie,” our father chimed in. “Over-sensitive.”

My dad and sister laughed, and when I didn’t, our father facetiously wrapped his arm around me uncomfortably and said in a familiar singsong and utterly hollow voice, “What’s the matter with my poor baby?”

Once again, my dad and sister were a team to which I inherently couldn’t belong. I had finally realized it wasn’t that I wasn’t trying hard enough to belong; it was that I never could.

In an effort to contextualize this bizarre kinship Barbie and our dad had, I once gave away a copy of the book, Mystic River, to someone I thought could get it. When I gave that person this book, I’d shrugged, “This is basically my father’s relationship with my sister, except she’s not dead.” 

I wanted to impart upon that person how this all-encompassing relationship—from which I had been pointedly excluded for my entire life—had so fundamentally altered me, an over-excited understudy always hanging in the wings, silently mouthing the lines, ready to enter should I be called. Like all gifts I give, I had attached to this book a secret meaning, a clandestine task, for the recipient. Read this and feel as I felt, an outsider in my own family.  Of course, I was ultimately disappointed by the recipient, who turned out not to be an empath.

Since you, Reader, may similarly not be gifted with such abilities, I will explain.

Mystic River is a male-dominated mystery with the only worthy female character being young, white-ish, and dead. (She was, admittedly, half-Latinx but only in a sexualized way, completely alienated from her culture on account of her mother’s also being dead—the fate of all good and worthy women.) After the protagonist gets out of prison, he is a single dad. He quickly marries a white lady, and they have two more daughters, who are mentioned less than a cumulative 5 sentences in 500-plus pages, which largely concentrate on the privilege they received from having intact parents and wealth. It is the older daughter who holds a borderline obsessive place in the protagonist’s heart. She is perfect; she is his saving grace. She had it tough, like he did.

That was our story, too, except I had no other younger whole-sibling with whom I could share the void. My sister Barbie was perfection to my father. And, we were—are—nothing alike. Physically, she is narrow where I am wide; tall where I am an inch out of petites; thick light-haired where I am fine and black; devoid of fat where I am soft and thick; clear-skinned where I am pitted and scarred. She has my dad’s bad teeth and tan skin whereas I never needed braces and a scare with skin cancer in my early twenties left me pale and cautious. Emotionally, she is quiet where I am outspoken. She is unfathomably passive where I am condescendingly assertive. She is passive-aggressive where I am intimidating and rude, which is to say “direct but female.” Our similarities begin and end with the likeness of our signatures and a single freckle on the inside of our pinky fingers—hers darkened from the sun on her right, mine faded from sheltered summers on my left. 

When Barbie first got pregnant, she moved into a crummy apartment with her then-boyfriend. My parents furnished this place with rooms of furniture from our old house, including the white canopy bed that my father had built for me, with a heart carved into the headboard, which went to my oldest nibling until my sister threw it away when she moved in with us several years later.  Every year after that, we made the twenty-six-hour-long road trips to see her and the growing brood. 

The smell of old milk, spit-up, diaper paraphernalia, and cat stuck to all the fabrics in the place. Every surface was sticky. A fine layer of crushed Cheerios lined the carpet, and a candy coating hugged the sofa cushions. Getting used to the smell took a beat, but my father—who once bemoaned the smell of one slightly mildewed board game buried under ten boxes I moved from my northeast apartment for weeks—never complained.

My mother politely blamed her disgust on her cat allergy. “Ugh,” my mother would cough, holding her throat afterward. “The cat was really getting to me.” Then, my father would roll his eyes; even though, several years before, my half-brother Petey had tested whether my mother’s cat allergy existed by smuggling a cat home to secretly live in his bedroom closet, which resulted in my mother’s having numerous, seemingly inexplicable asthma attacks until the cat wandered into the kitchen.  I never got to meet the cat, which remains one of my greatest disappointments.

Anyway, I knew my father missed my sister and her children terribly, but obviously not because he said these things. He smoked more cigarettes when we left their place, or when he spoke to her on the phone outside our house in the driveway, or when he drove her and the kids back to the airport after their twice-a-year visits. I think he ached for them to move to our new hometown, where he believed they would have a better chance—away from Barbie’s unemployed, substance-addicted boyfriend and her allegedly cold, unhelpful mother.

According to the heated gossip exchanged between my father and sister, Barbie’s mother refused to babysit more than one child at a time. That seemed a bit unsupportive to me, but she did eventually buy Barbie a house, so, who can ever know the truth? Her mother’s worst transgression, however, was that she offered to pay for an abortion when Barbie, a twenty-five-year-old waitress at steakhouse not known for steak but its onion appetizer, became pregnant with her third child. 

During this time, Barbie supplemented her wages with help from our father and her mother as well as WIC, a federal supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. She claimed that she was unable to receive welfare benefits for vague reasons that she did not elaborate upon but might have had something to do with not filling out an application. 

“Of course,” our father had shaken his head while smoking a cigarette with my sister, also a smoker, yet another commonality. “Because you’re white.” He rolled his eyes before continuing on the tirade. 

Barbie’s enthusiasm for our father’s casual racism was just one more trait I couldn’t match. She could drop racial epithets with him in a way that horrified me, a product of the multicultural programming embraced by Nickelodeon and the WB. Also, being perhaps the only success story from the fear-based, facts-optional program, D.A.R.E., I refused to remain in the same room with my father and Barbie as they smoked without making a loud to-do about breathing through my coat sleeves, which my father screamed at me for doing. 

“Oh, come on,” he would groan, visibly offended by my not wanting to catch early death from his cigarettes, which I creatively referred to as “cancer sticks”—which, as you can imagine, he enjoyed.

A year later, when I picked up my first emergency asthma inhaler, I smartly reminded him of these several instances of being forcibly subjected to his cigarette smoke while my lungs were still developing.  This resulted in his glowering at me from across the kitchen island, my standing there like a deer assessing the threat, his making a quick if half-hearted lunge (ha ha, because of the heart disease I’m about to tell you about), and my darting to my bedroom where I locked the door.

In my teens, I transgressed yet again when I didn’t share the same high blood pressure and cholesterol problems that plague my father, Barbie, and Petey. In their mid-twenties, they had both returned from doctors’ appointments with results that verified my father’s paternity. Their cholesterol was frighteningly high despite their youth. And, even though she was chronically underweight, Barbie was taking Lipitor before she turned thirty-two.

Before I had my blood work done in my teens, my father had been pushing my mom to take me to the doctor. It was after his first heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass. “We should know if she is like me,” he whispered anxiously.

However, my blood tests came back that I am, actually, like my mom. I have low blood pressure that belies my high anxiety. My cholesterol is also low. When I’d asked if my vegetarianism had anything to do with that, the doctor shrugged. “Maybe so, but not to significantly alter it if it was astronomically high to begin with.” It was settled, then, even my blood was significantly different than my father’s, than Barbie’s.

And, so, my genetics were just another chasm between the real Pettymans and me, letting me know that in yet another way I am an outsider. I will likely not share the same fate of endless cardiology appointments, expensive prescriptions, and the surgical cracking of breastbone, even though I was the only child to bear witness to them for my dad.

Barbie hadn’t been there for my father’s annual heart attacks until he had already had at least four. The fascinating thing about heart disease is how normal a person appears right before they drop dead. There are times of short breath and perhaps too much sweat, but overall the person seems okay, especially if sweatiness and shortness of breath can be attributable to normal things, like yard work in swampy southern heat. But, then, all of a sudden, the person isn’t.

***

In October of my final year of law school, I returned home for a week. Over the summer, my father had told us—Barbie and me—that he would be undergoing another open-heart surgery. I was fairly surprised that he consented to this because, after his first open-heart surgery, he said he would never do one again. “I’d rather just go,” he had said with finality. 

And, even later, when we discussed my Aunt Cleo’s recent open-heart surgery and her younger son’s recent heart attack, I could hear him shudder over the phone. Cleo, his eldest sister, had undergone the surgery during the spring of my second year of law school when she was in her late sixties. Her oldest son Hank had died of a massive heart attack on Christmas day when I was a senior in high school, and her younger son Harry had a heart attack shortly before my dad’s second open-heart surgery. 

“He really needs to start taking care of himself,” my dad had said of Harry. “He has those young kids at home.” My cousin had two kids, a twelve-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl. I had met them several times as children, but I had most enjoyed meeting their slightly fermented personalities as pre-teen and teen. The boy, Harry, Jr., was a knowledgeable hypochondriac who refused to eat anything except mashed potatoes, a strong choice that I thoroughly respected. The girl, Jessabel, was a brilliant teen, already taking AP classes, obsessed with the CW’s Supernatural, and very proud of her fanfic inspired comics last Thanksgiving.  When she told me she had dressed up as Castiel at c, I was smitten and, to this day, a piece of my heart belongs to her.

I had paused. “You know, Jessabel is older than I was when you had your first heart attack,” I reminded him.

“No!” He was surprised, but then thought about it and conceded.  “Oh, I guess you’re right.”

My dad’s first heart attack was followed almost immediately by emergency open-heart surgery. That evening, we had gone out to dinner at a restaurant, where he had ordered chicken alfredo. I had sides, a plain baked potato and a salad. In the morning, I woke up and no one was home. My parents did not regularly carry cellphones at that time. There was no note. After a while, my mother came back and said my father had a heart attack in the middle of the night. 

“What does that mean?” I had asked. “Is he alive?”

My father had been only forty-one. When they first arrived in the ER, no one had thought my father was actually having a heart attack. But his cardiologist would eventually say that it was a miracle that he had come in with his chest pains since he likely would have then suffered a fatal massive heart attack, which can be preceded by smaller heart attacks that go ignored by young sufferers.

Within days, he was in surgery. He was transferred from the local hospital to the better one forty-five minutes north of where we lived. There, he underwent a quadruple bypass. My mother and I spent a couple of weeks there. I read Grapes of Wrath in the waiting room, and still, when I see the title, I smell rubbing alcohol and urine. This time period would influence my college essay, entitled, Spending My Weekends at ICU Beach.

After the surgery, my terrifying and indomitable father became weak. He couldn’t cough without tears welling up in his eyes. He had to hug a tackily decorated heart-shaped pillow from the ICU whenever he did so. He was pale and disoriented. He had trouble dressing himself and accidentally flashed me once or twice while doing so but was too disoriented to be embarrassed. It was shocking for me, at thirteen, to see because I had always known my mother was the weak parent. She had two near-death scares while I was growing up, so I always imagined she would die first. I had prepared myself for it by recording her voice in a Yak-bak, forever telling me, “I love you, goodnight, honey-bunny.” My father, at six-foot-two and two-hundred-something pounds with a stare that could turn grown men into Jello, seemed too formidable for something as trifling as death.

The bright side of my father’s poor health was the softening of his temper. While he didn’t become nicer—in fact, he became crueler in many ways—he did become significantly less physically violent. The broken objects, like phones ripped off the wall or tables overturned, around the house during arguments disappeared, leaving me to sometimes wonder if I hadn’t imagined such things. Now, my father just gave smoldering looks and disparaging remarks—generously. 

“Better mean dad than dead dad,” I had told my mother once, as she complained about his behavior after picking me up from school.

“I guess you’re right,” she clucked. 

Dealing with his sour temper, without the overly generous asks of forgiveness that had been prompted by his violent outbursts when I was younger, was draining. My mom and I were totally alienated from the rest of the family, most of whom remained up north. It was just us, in a cold house with my incessantly irritated father.

He was perpetually disappointed with us, spending almost all of his time at work or in the barn. And even though he and I had essentially no relationship, then, I constantly feared his death. Leaving for college filled me with guilt. And, annually, the call would come that another heart attack had happened in my absence. When I was a sophomore, the call came from Barbie.

“It’s so scary,” she said, as if from a distance. “It was so sudden. We were just hanging out yesterday and drinking beers, and now today he’s in the hospital and he looks . . .” She broke off. I could tell she was crying. “I never thought his health was this serious,” she admitted.

This open-heart surgery in 2014 was different. There was enough time to plan for it. But, it was also riskier. My father knew he had to have it or he would die. But now he was older. At fifty-five, his recovery would be slower and harder than it was before. Worse, he knew what to expect—and what to fear. 

Without notifying my mom, he designated me as executor of his will and the primary beneficiary of his life insurance. “I know you’re the youngest but Barbara . . . can be Barbie, and I know, all things aside, you’ll be fair,” he said, using the kinder voice that I had gotten used to in the last couple of years. The statement felt like such a gift; I didn’t mind that it was another uncomfortable secret wedged between my mom and me.

He even asked me not to tell my mom about the surgery.

“I barely talk to her,” I rolled my eyes, thinking how suddenly and completely their roles in my life had reversed during my first few weeks of law school.

“Yeah, well, she’s your mother,” he lectured, as if he believed that meant something.

I planned to go home for a few days prior to the surgery, the day of the surgery, and a couple of days afterward. My Aunt Cleo and Uncle Min, a white man named after my grandmother’s favorite Korean butcher, would fly there a couple of days after the surgery. When I told my Aunt that I was going home, she initially acted as though my going was a danger to my completing school. “You’re so close to finishing law school. You should stay.”

“But he’s my father,” I couldn’t believe I’d had to say. I couldn’t believe I would have to put up a fight to justify my going home, which I did to my aunt, my father, and my sister. Normal people take time off for things like this, I had thought. Why would they think I wouldn’t go back to school?

Finally, my aunt had said irritably, “Well, I wish I’d have known you were driving. I would have saved my money on my flight.” 

But the mere thought of driving with my chain-smoking aunt in my tiny Ford Fiesta gave me a migraine. I was glad her travel plans had already been made.

“You know, he’ll most need help after the surgery,” she told me, as if unaware of the fact that I had lived with my father during his last open-heart surgery.

I merely nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to state the obvious: he very likely wouldn’t survive this surgery. I was going home to spend a couple of days with my dad before he dies.

When I got there, we spent the days before the surgery together. We made meals that we couldn’t really eat. Each day passed uncomfortably quickly, the sun rising too rapidly each morning and plummeting into darkness too fast each night in an act of cold betrayal. I didn’t see anyone else while I was home; I dedicated my time entirely to our father and guiltily skirted around any questioning from my mom, who did eventually learn about the surgery. 

Barbie was supposed to take our father to the hospital on the morning of his surgery; but then, since I was at the house anyway, we all agreed it was best for me to do this. Barbie promised us both that she would be there, too.

I took him in for pre-op at four-thirty in the morning. Neither of us had really slept. I was allowed to walk with him to the suite where he would be until he was ready to be wheeled in. I politely looked away as he got undressed and sat for the check-in. I collected his clothes and shoes and carried his overnight bag, all of it feeling heavier than it was.  The room felt cold and vast and sharp.

Then, Barbie texted me that she was running late. 

I responded with, “No worries,” even though I was irritated.

If I thought too much about the actions we were performing—clumsily folding clothes and initialing consent forms—tears pricked my eyes. So, I tried not to think. I tried to just breathe. The nurses were cordial and warm as they took his blood pressure and temperature, which made everything worse and better at the same time. Everyone knew my dad, who used to work in the hospital before he went on disability. They kept patting his arm and telling him he’d be waking up uncomfortably before he knew it. 

It was a special kind of hell to watch my dad, who had put fear in me regularly as I grew up, look ashen with fear.  It was a special kind of hell to have gotten only a couple of okay years with him after a lifetime of tension and disdain.  I was saying I would see him soon, but I was also saying goodbye.  What a special kind of hell to do those two things at once.

Barbie texted again, this time to inform me that she was taking the kids to school as they were getting ready to wheel my dad into the operating room. 

I responded with, “Okay,” even though nothing was okay.

I kissed my dad on the cheek, right before a tear rolled down. 

For a while, I waited in a surgery waiting room. There was only one other person there. A television played quietly in the corner of the carpeted room. I pulled out my laptop and worked on a paper as I sat there, alone, for the next couple of hours. Around six-thirty, my sister texted again, “Getting Starbucks, what do you want?”

“Soy latte, grande, pls.”

“K.” 

Ten minutes later, “Where are you guys??”

“Just me, in the waiting room on the fourth floor by elevator B.”

Ten minutes after that, she rushed into the room, out of breath. “He’s gone already?”

I cringed at the words, accepting the latte from my sister. “Yeah, he was first in line so they had him back by 5 AM.”

“Oh,” she sat down, dejected. “I thought they wouldn’t get to him until like 7.”

I didn’t say anything for a while but eventually responded with, “Yeah,” because actually saying nothing seemed too cruel.

We sat together for the rest of the morning in that waiting room. She worked on an assignment for her ill-fated master’s program while I worked on my paper. Every once in a while, a nurse came out to give us an update. Eventually, in the afternoon, we were allowed to move to the ICU waiting room where two other families sat. One of us would lose a family member that day. 

We took cushioned chairs next to the window. It was there that my dad’s cardiologist came out to tell us that our father’s heart had stopped during the surgery, that he had lost a lot of blood, and that he was continuing to lose blood. The point of this surgery had been for the cardiologist to burn off as much dead tissue from the heart and arteries to encourage regrowth. But the premise behind that concept was that there would be enough living tissue to sustain new growth, and unfortunately the cardiologist hadn’t encountered as much of that as he had hoped.

“I just can’t make any promises right now,” he said. “It doesn’t look good. There just isn’t hardly any tissue left alive,” he shook his head, “I don’t know how he breathes, honestly. Even if he survives, he will be in near-constant pain.”

My sister and I sat there, cold. “Okay.”

“The next hour or so is critical, and I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said honestly.

We thanked him and returned to our shared silence. I pinched myself in order keep myself from crying while my sister sat beside me, crying freely.

***

Our father is a mean bastard, who will never die; so, he obviously survived. I had to leave home before he would be allowed to leave the hospital, but I was able to stay long enough until he stepped down from the ICU to a regular room. I spent long days at the hospital, where I could easily work on my paper as he slept.

On the last full day that I had been home, I left the hospital to take a nap at the house. My sister, who couldn’t take any more full days off of work, had promised to call me that evening. We talked about seeing Gone Girl, which had just come out. I had read it over the summer and fallen in love. I told my sister that she would love it, and I was under the impression that we would see it together.

When I got home to take my nap, my sister texted, “Leaving work now.” I told her I would call her after a short nap. In my room, I slept fitfully for about forty-five minutes and, then, hurriedly put myself back together and called her from my car. I was headed to her apartment.

“Oh, I thought you would still be sleeping,” she said.

“I told you I was only going to take a short nap and then call you?” I said as if it were a question. I was irritated because I was still tired, and I didn’t understand why she had not seemingly understood what I had told her earlier.

“I know, but you seemed really tired.” She paused. “I’m not at home.”

“Oh, well, are you going to be home soon? It doesn’t matter. I can go to Wynn Dixie and pick up brie.”

“I’m at the movies with Sue-Ellen. We’re going to see Gone Girl.”

“Oh.” 

There was a long pause, during which I suddenly realized I was driving aimlessly and had to head back to the empty house alone.

“Are you mad?” She asked obtusely. “You’re mad. I won’t see it.”

“No,” I lied. “I’m not mad.” And, seemingly out of nowhere, I just started to cry.

“You are. I won’t see it.”

“No, go ahead.” I said, calmly keeping control of my voice while the tears exploded over my cheeks.

“I’m sorry, I feel like shit.” She said quickly.

“Don’t,” I lied again.  “It’s fine.”

“Okay. I’m really sorry.”

“Okay,” I said, hanging up.

Instead of going home, I drove to the hospital and burst into more tears when my dad asked where Barbie was. 

The next day, before leaving for school, I went to the hospital to say goodbye. My sister was already there, and she started to cry while I kissed our father on the cheek. I knew she felt horrible, but I hated her for crying as though I had done something to her when she had hurt me. I refused to acknowledge her at all, kissed my dad on the cheek, and drove the twenty-two hours back to school.