“If it is miracles you are after, you must know how to wait.”
– Oskar, The Tin Drum

Prologue

We believed. All our lives we believed, all our separate lives.

My grandmother never did. She died old, never believing, and she was the only one of us who went to regular church, with a pocketbook to match the season, at the nine o’clock mass every Sunday. She had never been a Christian until her husband died. Then she capitulated, gracefully, ending the one battle that had lasted them all his life. It was then that she began to buy hats.

There were two of us who were his. My mother and me. My grandmother respected our feelings although she never liked my father. She made my cousin give me the cowboy suit just because I didn’t have enough myself from him. My cousin didn’t see the point. “Your dad’s an Indian giver.”

“Shht. Now do like I tell you,” my grandmother finished our fight. She could be unfair and we would obey here, because she cared for our comforts. She was good to us. We trusted her.

My mother is fifty-six years old and in a way she still believes. She would say she does not but she has saved herself for him, saved herself beyond saving, to a spoiled bitter that expects only the worst. But in her private soul she is a child holding an empty glass jar waiting for the sky to fill it, for him to return and restore us to our lives. To me, my childhood; to her, the marriage she once had and threw away and will now cherish forever as some unreachable crystal heaven. It is he, she believes, who stole her glitter and throne, her money, her wings, which after all are only petals of the years.

My grandmother was always on the other side. She used herself and whatever she had for her life. Her husband was dead and to her, so was my father. There was no Head of Household. But at the age of fifty, she learned to pay taxes and to drive. She spent. We, even in our extravagance, were always saving.

Now, I can tell in children, who has that hole that is belief and which children will be children of this world. You can see it in a class of first-graders. You can recognize in a group of eleven-year-olds, the children who lose their rings and their gloves, their keys, the same children who themselves get lost in department stores, on the way to the library or to school. They are the children who are waiting, in their hectic way, for something. You can read from the small things that collect and disappear around them, the quality not of their order or disorder, but of their aspect to it. Any stranger could have seen it in me.

It depended on how quick you had an answer. I was too quick on the top but really I was infinitely slow. Our patience was tragic. We were people who could spend our lives loving one person who never cared for us.

I grew up without a father, but those years while it was happening, I never understood that it would always be that way. We expected him to come back. Any day. And then, when he didn’t, my mother thought she would marry someone else and he would be the father. “He’ll buy you things,” she said. “You just wait and see.”

I waited. There was nothing else I could do.

My mother was a young woman then; she was waiting, also, for her life.

From place to place we moved an embroidered sampler. Row Row Row Your Boat, Gently Down the Stream, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life Is But a Dream. She always hung it in the kitchen, usually near the sink. Sometimes she looked at it and sighed.

Once she did marry someone else. But he never seemed to either of us like a father.

Absence has qualities, properties all its own, but no voice. The colors of his absence were the blue and white of a Wisconsin sky, a black like telephone poles and lines falsely on the distance, or a tossed spray of crows. The brown of a man’s old suit, bagging pants and worn leather shoes; there were traveling men, hoboes, those days, and every time we saw one across a field it was him. The yellow of a moth, the gray of sheer mountain rock in Colorado, even the dusk smell of a summer field. He was the forced empty clean of those cheap mints from taverns, green in the middle of white. That taste meant empty, like the tiled tavern my mother and I went in once during the daytime to use the phone and buy gum.

He would never know. He wasn’t watching us. Days went by and years. We understood we’d never remember all we had to tell. It was just now—the elapsing of our time and lives. Nothing much. We would have left it for an afternoon with him.

There were two times. Wisconsin time and his. Everything in the Midwest was patient and had to do with seasons. Everything seemed too easy for us there. Nothing was hard. In school, for me, everything was beside the point.

I never found the faith I wanted and all along I had it. It just wasn’t colored and fleshed the way I’d imagined. It was like the time my class was taken to hear a symphony orchestra. The children around me were playing hang-the-man, passing paper and pencil back and forth. They offered me a place in their game but I refused. I was following the program intently. It said two things and then Hansel and Gretel.

I imagined sets and capes and pink ballerinas. Choral opera vaulting into the sky.

Then the concert ended and there was an encore and people stood and left their programs on their seats. I never saw the pageant I expected.

Faith was that way. Thinner, abstract. Only music.

We wanted too much from this world.

We believed in an altogether different life than the one we had, my mother and I. We wanted brightness. We believed in heaven. We thought a man would show us there. First it was my father. We believed he would come back and make me a daughter again, make my mother a wife. My grandmother did not like him, but I prayed for her anyway. If he came, we didn’t want her to be left behind.

My mother never lost her faith in men, but after years, it became more general. She believed a man would come and be my father, some man. It didn’t have to be our original one, the one we’d prayed to first as one and only. Any man with certain assets would do. In this we disagreed, but quietly. I was becoming a fanatic.

We moved to California. I thought maybe if he saw my face on TV. That is the way I was with men. I wanted love but a high far kind that made my breath hard as if it wouldn’t last.

I was ashamed of my wishes as if there were inherent wrong in them that showed and if I told anyone they would see it was my own fault I would never be happy. I wanted too much. Foolish things. But I wanted them anyway. I couldn’t stop my longings. I could only keep them to myself. It is pathetic now to remember. They were ordinary girls toys, full of netting and spotlights, sugar and ballet. I wanted wands, wings, glittery slippers from my father. I wanted to dance while someone watched me.

“Look at me,” I dared.

“Shht,” my grandmother used to say. “Keep still.” She settled my arm against my sides. “There now, that’s better. What you got you think is so special, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I said. That was the answer to everything in childhood. “Nothing” and “I don’t know.”

My grandmother didn’t care about brightness or any of its forms. She didn’t care about fancy, shining things, she had all the money she needed. She didn’t care about intelligence or newness. My mother understood too that these qualities weren’t any closer to God. But God would always be there like stones in the road, there was all the time in the world for God, we could go back and pick God up, after we were young. But when a person bad-off slanted across the street, when my mother helped someone old, she would remember. You could see it in her eyes.

~

For years my mother and I waited together. We had been together my whole life. Other people had come into our family, but only she and I stayed. The hardest thing I ever did was leave my mother.

The spring before I first went away, to college, we drove out to get ice cream cones at night.

I told her she might still get married. “But he won’t be my father,” I said. Our time for that had passed.

My mother had tried substituting once before, in Wisconsin, with Ted Stevenson the ice-skating pro, but she thought it would be different here in California, the man would be rich, someone who could give us life.

“Well sure he will. You’ll see. Just wait and see.”

I had waited already a long time.

“I don’t need a father anymore. You don’t need a father when you’re twenty, Mom.”

“Sure you do. Just wait’ll you come home from college and want to bring the boys and your friends to a place that’ll impress them a little. That’s when you’ll really need a father. And he’ll buy you things maybe, and make a nice place for you to bring kids home to and see. Just wait. You can’t know how you’ll feel then. You’ll see.” That was her way of getting off a subject when she had to.

“I already had a father and he wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t there for me either,” she said.

“I don’t want one anymore.”

Then, later, she began to expect him too, but in a bad way, as a danger that could drive me from her.

~

My mother had always talked to me about marriage. It was her great subject because it was what she never really had. She felt she had missed the boat, so she advised me, starting when I was very young, too young to do anything about her suggestions. College, she said, college was the promising time and place. When I was a child in Wisconsin, I already knew I’d go to college. From the way she talked it was a large green summer camp where everyone wore beautiful clothes. Hundreds of good young men just walked around waiting to be picked. When I wanted things in high school, the same as what she bought for herself, she’d scream at me, you, you don’t really need the clothes now, I need them, I’m the one who has to catch a man, you won’t marry any of these boys you know now. You think it’s important because you’re in it, but it’s really not. High school doesn’t matter. Unh-uh. She was angry at me. I still had it ahead of me—college—she was way past that. When you’ll really need the clothes and the house and the car and the everything is in college, and then maybe, if I get someone now, I’ll have it all to give you.

“Marry someone in college,” she said, “that’s when you meet the really great kids. Find him there.”

But then when I was in college, she didn’t like who I found. I didn’t want to marry him anyway. I used to say that I couldn’t imagine a wedding because I had no one to walk me down the aisle. But it was worse than just my father. We were a carnival freak show, us. And I didn’t like other people’s better families adopting me either. They seemed as bad, only with money. And not mine.

I always knew I wouldn’t do it my mother’s way. That seemed like an old-fashioned wish. When I went to my first wedding I was twenty-two and I kept thinking that they were too young. Their faces looked round and liquid the same as always and they looked funny in their clothes. I was a bridesmaid in a mint green chiffon dress. All the rest of us were still just graduate students, or kids with promising stupid jobs. I didn’t envy the bride and groom at all. I thought I’d get married late. We’ll, I thought I knew exactly when. I thought twenty-seven. By then, I wanted to be rich and have the Beatles play at my wedding. That was already impossible. The Beatles had been apart for years. But I still thought about it. Poor people always want things like that.

You will, my mother whispered once. I didn’t really expect the things she promised anymore, but I didn’t disbelieve her yet either. She always told me we were royalty really. People didn’t know it, but we were. It was something we whispered about. I wasn’t supposed to tell.

I always wanted to marry an architect, even when I was a little girl. It was the first idea I had about who I wanted to marry. I thought I’d be a ballerina. And the only reason I’d thought of being a ballerina was our fifth-grade teacher was trying to teach us about money. We had to make a budget. First, he wanted us to choose a profession and ask for a particular salary. He let everyone be what they said and gave them the salary they had asked for. Mine was the most in the class. I’d asked for three hundred and fifty dollars a week.

Performers make a lot of money,” my mother had told me. “Go ahead and ask.”

“You have to ask for what you want in the world,” the teacher said. “Put a high price on yourselves and the world will probably be fool enough to pay it.” He was using me as a positive point, this teacher, to teach us all to feel entitled to more than we had. But I could tell in a way he hated me. He was like the others himself. Three hundred and fifty dollars a week was more than he or any of our parents earned in Wisconsin.

Even though I didn’t really want to be a ballerina. You would have to go somewhere like New York City to do that and I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even like practicing that much. My mother and Ted the ice-skating pro had never gotten around to putting up a barre for me in the basement. Dance was just the only thing I did then besides school. And what I was good at and cared about—marbles it used to be, and then cartwheels, a perfect, light, high cartwheel, hands sequential like the two parts of a footstep—everyone knew you couldn’t ask a weekly salary for that.

An architect was a funny thing to think of, where we lived. The houses were small tract, prefabs, most of them, with aluminum siding that, if you looked from a ways away, seemed like painted wood. People from the top part of town hired architects, but anyway most of those houses were just copies from other houses in slightly bigger, more glamorous places. The people had seen what they wanted in Minneapolis, say, or Milwaukee, and then had paid to have it built with its same columns along our smaller lake here.

I didn’t take ballet much longer after that year we made our budgets. When I was twelve, my mother and I moved to California so I could be on television. Even in California, my mother still never made three hundred and fifty dollars a week and I saw the world in a way much closer to my fifth-grade teacher’s than he could have imagined. Still, he shouldn’t have hated me. He didn’t know the half of it. My mom and I ate dinner on top of sealed-up cardboard boxes every night.

Is it fortunate or an unfortunate thing, to own a life that makes you believe in the invisible? I still don’t know. Faith can come to a person slowly, like a gradual climb up long stairs, or it can be heady and dizzying. Or it can be strong as an iron banister, never reached for or thought of at all. But the propensity for faith is inherent, like an organ or a sexual inclination. I always possessed the place for religion, but faith was unsteady in me, flitting. I didn’t always believe my father existed. The sacred had no voice for me, I was sure of it. I had been listening all my life. And whose faith was more true, those who searched for it, working and strained, or those who had never thought of it at all?

When I was eighteen I left. It is a different thing to wait with another person than it is to wait alone. But I still believed.

I believed without knowing I believed and then, the year I was twenty-eight, I stopped. When that happened I did not know if I could continue. I had lived that way, trying, for so long.

Then the world was stiller, less light. Spirit was not everywhere but a common, transient thing.

All my life I had been looking for my father. It had been my own shame. Then, the year I was twenty-eight, I found him. And everything changed.