Fiction: The Particulars

By Rita Plush
arttimesjournal October 25, 2020

A short, muscular, tightly packed bundle of energy and optimism, a talker (and interrupter) working into his 80s, my father was a good provider (the term back in the 40’s for a man who earned a nice living); he was a faithful husband. Yet along with his sunny outlook and dedication to upper middleclass Jewish values, came a temper and nastiness that flared with the quickness of a struck match. I was afraid of him throughout my childhood. Not that he ever raised a hand to me; he didn’t have to. He shot me a look; a Glock couldn’t have been more deadly: I quaked in my saddle shoes. When I got older I asserted myself; I opened a mouth. As an adult, I avoided him whenever I could.

My mother? My mother was the modifier and moderator, the explainer of his moods and outbursts, my very own Culligan woman, rinsing away his hard crust buildup to soften the family dynamic.

Then she died. My go-between was gone. I was 58. My father was 82.

Months after the funeral we chose her tombstone, pink granite (I thought gray too somber, my father agreed). At the monument showroom we took the floral image from one offering (a swag of flowers cut across the stone), font from another, wording and layout from still another. We were working together, attuned, there was ease between us. Maybe he felt it too. “We did a good job,” he said, after he placed the order. Sad? Ironic? My mother had to be in her grave, it had to be her tombstone that gave me those craved-for moments of closeness with my father?

It made me wonder all the more—if we could be in sync then; could we have other of those moments? Could we actually get along?

It was not a time consuming thought because a change had come over my father. Not that he went from shooting from the lip to doubting himself, but he toned down his talk and opinions. Maybe he sensed that without my mother to run interference for us, he and I were on our own. He even asked about my life and how certain of my friends were. I didn’t even know he remembered who my friends were. There was a poignancy about it that touched me, this getting away from himself, his I, I, I-ness, a want on his part to connect with me. He’d sought me at other times, I began to recall.

See him in our Brooklyn walkup. It’s after his dinner. He sets up a bridge table in a corner of the living room. I’m in third grade. I have an aversion to arithmetic. Borrowing and carrying, how to take a larger numeral from a smaller one and pay it back is my nemesis. For hours I struggle over the homework problems. If I get the difference right I mess up on the proof. I fake a yawn. Plead exhaustion. Beg for release. Not a chance. Not until I complete one example on my own (he’d been showing me where I erred). Finally, finally, when 347 minus 239 equal 108, my father frees me from the prison of minuends and subtrahends and says he’s proud of me. I’m proud of me too.

I’m 11 when he teaches me how to ride a bike. A banged-up old thing he found in someone’s trash.

“Get on,” he says after he dusted it off, hosed it down, and oiled the chain.

“What if I fall?”

“You’ll get up.”

He holds the seat, runs alongside me as I pedal and try to find purchase. He lets go, I kiss concrete.

“Try again,” he says.

Knees skinned and bleeding, I spend the better part of the day at it, jerking the handlebars this way and that, till I manage to steady the front wheel and stay my course.

“This is junk,” I say, cocky now that I can ride. I nudge the tire with the toe of my shoe. “It doesn’t even have hand brakes. When can I have a new one?” I gripe.

“You’re lucky you have a bicycle. Children in Europe don’t have food to eat.”

The children in Europe again.

A few Saturdays later, the newspaper is on the kitchen table folded into a narrow column. He’d been going over the For Sale items in the classifieds (new is not in his vocabulary). Always on the lookout for a good buy of one kind or another, an ad is circled in red pencil. “There’s something in the car,” he says. “I need a little help getting it out.”

It’s a Schwinn, used, but I don’t care. It is red and white with gleaming spokes and a front light that works. And it has hand brakes.

He’d sought me out and taught me. Now you know what I know. What is in my brain is in your brain. How much more connected can two people get? But more than the particulars of finding the difference between two numbers and how to stick to the seat of a two-wheeler, I realize now that from those lessons I learned his ethic of doing. Of doing and doing and keeping at a thing till you get it right. My drive comes from him. He gave what he could when he could, what his nature and make-up allowed.

When you think about it, that’s all a father can do.

End