Sounds Like

Sounds Like

by Ann Voorhees Baker

Photo by Simon Berger, Unsplash

I was about to leave for home after visiting my father, and at the last minute, on the sly, I made a sandwich for him, according to his unwavering requirements—natural peanut butter, whole wheat bread, no butter, no jam. I wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it on a plate on the counter, and I knew that he’d find it in an hour when he went into the kitchen for lunch. Surprise.
        He called me a couple nights later, at 3 a.m., reminding me that I would need to send my business expenses to my CPA—something he knew damn well I already knew. Geez, I’d been working as a consultant for what, twenty years? But, of course, he had to have a ruse for calling; he could never just say “I called to say hello” or “I miss you.”
        “I found the sandwich,” he said, “but next time, make it some real food, would ya? A man could starve.”
        “Next time, it’ll be liverwurst and limburger cheese,” I said.
        That cracked him up.
         This didn’t really happen—not the visit, not the call. I dreamed it. My father’s been dead for 17 years.
        Who knew our Emotion-Charades would continue, without benefit of corporeal existence, in the indefinable ether of our dreams?

                                                                

Once when I was five, I climbed onto my father’s lap when he was in his armchair after dinner grading law exams, a Dutch Masters cigar held like a cigarette between his second and third fingers, a cloud of smoke around his head.
        He pushed me off, slowly, with his elbow, not actually looking at me. He went on working, his red pencil scratching on the pages of a little blue book. I stood for a moment, gazing at his legs, my hand holding onto the arm of the chair. Then I walked away.
        And when I was seven, I started building a car from the old lumber pile by the side of the house, my own invention that would (somehow) be powered by a series of wound-up rubber bands. He said, “You gonna have that thing up and running by this weekend?” He looked at me with a weird half-smile, so we both knew it was a joke.
        Then right before fifth grade, when I came home from my first-ever visit to a hairdresser: “What happened, got your hair caught in a lawnmower?” He gave me an innocent stare.
        In my senior year when it was announced that I was valedictorian of my high school, he raised his eyebrows in comic anguish and said, “Does that mean we’re going to have to listen to you make a speech?”

                                                                

I can read between those lines now. But I couldn’t then. Growing up with my father was like playing a never-ending game of Emotion-Charades. “First word.” “Sounds like.” “Rhymes with.” Expecting me, I guess, to know. But these were clues, see, and nobody ever told me the rules.
Did my father ever say:
        “Straight A’s again! I’m proud of you.” 
        Too saccharine.
        “You look so pretty.” 
        Uh, no.
        “You ran really fast!”
        “I liked your story.”
        “What happened at school today?”
        “I love you.”
        No.
        No.
        No.
        And most especially no.

                                                                

In the summers when I was little, every morning my best friend, Marcia, and I watched reruns of “Father Knows Best.” I loved Father, aka Robert Young. I loved how he would come home at the same time every day smiling and he’d call out “Kitten!” when he laid eyes on his daughter, and he’d grab her up and hug her, laughing because he was so happy to see her. I was never called Kitten or any other term of endearment. My father and mother called me AB, the initials of my first and middle names.
        The Robert Young father came to Kitten’s room when she was having a hard time, and he’d sit down on her bed and ask her what was wrong and listen to what she had to say.
        He told Kitten she looked pretty. He said to her, “I love you.”
        The thing is, I now know Robert Young was an alcoholic in real life. But he played his part so well. I wanted to be loved like “Father Knows Best” loved his daughter.
        Marcia and I watched the show every morning in the summertime, and I sat there, doe-eyed, feeling sorry for myself, while the Southern California sun glared outside.

                                                                

My sister and I were required to bring our schoolwork home every day and place it on the credenza next to my father’s armchair. I would place my assignments, test papers, book reports, essays, math sheets, poems, and report cards face-up. Pile A. And not just Pile A, understand, but literally, a pile of “A’s.”
        The next morning, every morning, all of the papers would be face-down next to where they had started. Pile B.
        It was only decades later that it finally occurred to me: my father read every word we wrote and looked at every test we took and equation we solved, night after night, week after week, month after month. Without fail. No question.
        But he never said a word.
        And instead of having a clue that in his silent examination of all my work was some kind of interest—a fatherly regard—all I felt was violated by the dictate to submit my papers to his review and, in his silence, I felt a daily failure. I didn’t know there could be parents who didn’t pay any attention whatsoever to anything their kids ever did, attaboys therefore being ipso facto out of the question. I just knew I wasn’t getting any.

                                                                

For vacations when I was in elementary school, we didn’t go to a theme park where we could ride roller coasters and eat cotton candy, or go to a lake where we could swim or canoe. We camped in the desert—a landscape I hated, with its jumping cholla, extraterrestrial insects, and the infinite dry expanse of land, flat and hot like an oven—Borrego Springs, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, for God’s sake. And he would, without fail, on a night when we could see Orion, the Big and Little Dippers, and a billion more stars scattered like crystals over an indigo-black bowl, make a pronouncement: he would be arising before sunrise the next morning for a hike up the nearest low mountain, from whose top he would watch the sunrise.
        My mother and my sister always declined his non-invitation invitation, but I took his announcement as an assignment and said I’d go. The next morning, he would wake me in the dark and I would pull up from sleep in an agony of regret, drag my clothes on, mope my way to the outhouse, hang my head as I held my flashlight on the rocky, dusty trail, and follow him upward. When we were high enough, we sat down on broken rocks, said nothing, and peeled an orange to share. By then the dark was giving way to the barest light, and the craggy outlines of the mountain range became visible on the far side of the godforsaken landscape. Soon the barest breath of violet started to glow behind the points of the range. As the violet grew richer and wider and turned to purple and orange, I was filled with an eerie sensation: a surreal awareness that it was not the sun that was rising, but the planet that was rolling over, and we were riding on its surface and receiving the light as it spread across the earth.
        But without a pat on the shoulder, a short hug, a word—something to embrace the moment, together—it became my own, alone. Only now do I look back and see that my father was sharing something more than a TV-dad hug with me, and it was bigger and more meaningful than anything between us or anyone ever would be.

                                                                

When I was in middle school, my parents bought a cabin in Idyllwild up in the San Jacinto mountains. Before one of our trips, my dad, as though he were reminding me of something that had been agreed to earlier, discussed the details of the one-day round-trip hike that he and I would make to the top of the mountain one day that week.
        That day we got up before dawn, drove to the trailhead, and began what would be six plodding hours from a starting altitude of 5,000 feet up to the peak at nearly 11,000, where, he had promised, we would enjoy chocolate milkshakes at Peaks Restaurant, then ride the aerial tramway down to Palm Springs and back. Then, refreshed, we’d make the hike back down the mountainside.
        The day was sunny and hot, the trail dusty. We walked in a slow, methodical cadence; a determined exercise in perseverance. The only cool stretch was Saddle Junction, a fern-filled valley three miles up, where we stopped to fill our tin canteens in the clear creek—the only time in my life that I’ve drunk water directly from Mother Earth. We walked under the shade of massive trees for just a short time before emerging again into the sun-blasted heat. Onward we walked, slow and zombie-like, up the dry crooked trail. We stopped to rest every so often, ate cheese and sausage while we silently took in the far expanse of mountain peaks across limitless dusky air.
        Finally in the early afternoon, soaked with sweat, dry-mouthed, salivating for a tall glass of ice water and our milkshakes, we stepped into the Peaks Restaurant clearing.
        And discovered that it was closed. For no reason. And so was the tram.
        As we sat under a tree and ate crackers and our remaining slices of cheddar, drank our thin warm water and ate warm apples, the sky darkened and a chaotic pileup of storm clouds rolled into the sky from nowhere. And then a bolt of lightning cracked in the distance, and a deep, chest-rumbling thunder rolled through the mountains all around us.
        My father did not say, “We’re going to be fine, don’t worry.” He only said, “Looks like it’s time to hike back down.” We packed up our food, pulled out our ponchos, put on our packs, and started back down the trail.
        I learned in the next hours that down is harder than up.
        The rain didn’t let up. The lightning never stopped. The thunder crashed around and through us. We didn’t look around—only down at the trail as it first spotted with fat raindrops, then turned solid dark, then began to run with trickles of water, then streams, then outright sheets sliding down and sideways and every way, sand and pebbles moving with it. We walked for four hours straight. Our boots and socks were soaked through. In the last hour, our legs shuddered and jerked with each step.
        We did not panic, we did not fall, we were not struck by lightning, and we were not killed. And we exchanged no words during the entire descent.
        That fall, at a dinner party at our house, my dad’s law partner and wife and a few other couples sitting around the table, one of the men asked me about our hiking trip. I said, sardonically, “Never trust my father if he promises you a milkshake.”
        That cracked him up.

                                                                

On into my high school years, we continued with Piles A and B on the credenza, the years of no hugs or praise or I love you’s.
         I picked up my first real clue in our game of Emotion-Charades my senior year when I was dating a guy my mother and father hated, and I made the Unforgivable Mistake. I don’t remember how I told my mother or where I was standing, or if maybe I was sitting, and I don’t remember if The Boyfriend was with me or not. How can your brain erase such a searing moment?
        I do remember when I told my dad. My mother said I had to; she wasn’t going to do it.
        My mother sat in the corner armchair and my dad sat in the other corner armchair next to his credenza. Pile A was on the credenza. My dad had his legs stretched out on his big footstool, his elbow on the armrest, hand in the air with a cigar between his index and third fingers, and my mother said, “AB has something to tell you.”
        My dad put the cigar to his mouth and breathed in almost luxuriously and looked out the window at the immense expanse—the city lights, the mountains, the ocean in the curve of the shore all the way up to Malibu—and he squinted in the swirling smoke as he regarded the distance, like you do when something bad is coming, and you’re a man.
        I said it, but I don’t remember how I said it. How can I not remember that detail?
        She started crying.
        He said nothing.
        Then she said across the room to me, “I thought you were a nice girl.”
        Then into the silence, my dad said, “Well, these things do happen.” Still looking out the window.
        The way he raised the cigar back to his lips, turned his head a hair more toward the outside, it was like he was the Living Abraham Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland—an emotionless machine.
        But:
        Well, these things do happen.
        A clue. Like maybe he was pulling on his ear.
        And maybe I was starting to guess, “Sounds like.”

                                                                

After the short hospital stay that Shall Never Ever Be Mentioned Again, I got birth control pills, and they made me see a therapist, who assured me, super earnest, that he was my therapist, for me, not my parents. That everything we said was CONFIDENTIAL. Not only because it was his oath as a doctor, but also because it was right and moral.
        He even said negative things about my parents to build my trust. Didn’t I think my father was cold?
        He gave me a Personality Test. Do you feel you are equal to others? Do you feel that other people like you, or not? Do you feel that you are wanted or that people would rather not include you in their group? Would you rather sit alone than approach a group of people you don’t know?
        He went through the results with me. All I remember is Paranoid Tendencies.
        Later that spring, I sent a short story to Ladies Home Journal. I told no one about it.
        An editor from the Journal sent me a personal letter rejecting my story but giving me a detailed critique, and asking me to send more of my work.
        My mother opened it. She included the letter in the pile of mail that she placed every day on my father’s credenza (next to Pile A).
        I was furious. Another silent examination of my work; and this time without my knowledge.
        “It was a mistake,” my father said, defending my mother.
        “Why do you care so much anyway?” my mother added. “You’re always accusing us of trying to invade your privacy.”
        “That’s paranoid,” I said.
        “No,” said my father, then, pointed, “You’re paranoid.”
        After that, I refused to see my therapist ever again.
        Weeks later my father commented, seemingly apropos of nothing, that I should send another story. That getting a letter from an editor asking for more of my work meant something.
        I didn’t want to talk about it; I ignored his advice. I didn’t want to see my mother’s patronizing disdain—me and my pathetic belief in my own greatness—and the weird smile from my father with a joke, like, “So you’re going to be a famous author, huh?”

                                                                

You know the aggravated moan you make when you try to start the car and the battery’s dead? That’s the sound my mother made in my senior year of college when I told her I was applying to law school. Then she sighed and said, “Don’t you think you’re shooting over your head?”
        Two weeks before I headed off for my first year, my father announced that he and I were going to dinner at the French restaurant down the hill. There was no warm invitation like, “Let me take you to dinner before you leave for law school.” Like all of his non-invitation invitations, it felt almost like a punishment.
        At the table, he produced a deck of worn 5-by-7 index cards wrapped in two rubber bands: his notes from his years teaching contract law at UCLA during the early days of his law practice. With no prelude, he removed the bands, held up the first card, and began lecturing. As we ate our soup, the escargot I said I’d like to try and that he ordered without comment, our main course, our salad, our desserts, he proceeded methodically through the deck, scanning the faded hand-penned notes, intoning the principles and the logic of the Law of Contracts, start to finish.
        Totally devoid of emotion or even normal social segues, but another clue.
        I aced Contracts my first year, easy peasy.

                                                                

By the time I was an adult with daughters of my own and visiting my parents every year for Christmas, my dad and I had worked out a pretty good game of Emotion-Charades. One year, I sewed my dad a red flannel jacket for his gift. The next morning, and every first morning of our Christmas visits after that, he’d come into the kitchen where my daughters and I sat eating breakfast, and he’d be all askew, one shoulder up, the other arm down, the cuff of one sleeve pulled way over his fingertips. “I appreciate you making this for me,” he’d say. “But next time measure first, will you?”
        It cracked my daughters up. Every Christmas.

                                                                

When my husband of 15 years took a week’s vacation in the woods with his new female associate, 13 years my junior, I let everything go to hell: the advertising invoices for the magazine I was publishing, the household bills, shopping, schedules. I insisted on marriage counseling, and it fell apart.
        I made plans to move with my daughters to a rental house, but the money situation was dire. In desperation, I called my parents. My mother wailed, “How could you do that! You don’t fall behind on your bills; you don’t fail to pay your taxes!” And then my father, who never got on the phone with me, suddenly was on the line.
        He didn’t ask what happened. He said, “How bad is it?” and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was half in the conversation and half in his calculations; surely, he had a pencil and yellow pad in front of him. When I told him what I owed, what rent was going to be on the rental house I’d found to move into, that my husband was refusing to give me any money for myself and our daughters because, he said, if I hadn’t decided to move out, I wouldn’t need any money, my father sighed. And then he said, “Well, this is bad. But I’ve seen worse.” And then he figured out how much money they could send to me—an advance on my eventual inheritance—and he sent it.

                                                                

Our last game was six years later, after my move back to Southern California and my marriage to my second husband. My dad came to visit, driving alone across the desert from Phoenix, a crazy feat for this 85-year-old man who was shrunken by severe osteoporosis and who ambulated by plodding along unsteadily with a cane: thump (of cane), shush (of foot), thump, shush. A month before the visit, he’d amazed me by saying yes when I suggested that he stay in our guest bedroom instead of a motel. He never stayed in other people’s homes, family or not, but he agreed without hesitation; he liked my new husband that much.
        On the third day of his visit, he set out solo for the bakery while I stayed home to work.
        When he exited the bakery, a white sack with bear claws for both of us in one hand and his cane in the other, the door hit him, and he fell.
        I got there while the paramedics were crouched over him. A red dinner plate of blood was spreading under his head, a flesh-colored foam collar was wrapped around his neck, and my father was saying to the air, unable to turn his head, “You can’t put me on my back, I can’t lie flat.” I translated the obvious to the techs: my dad’s upper back was like the top half of a question mark.
        In the emergency room, my father lay stiffly curled on a bed, propped with various pillows, staring at the ceiling. As the tissue-paper skin on his skull oozed blood, I pressed gauze against it, and we waited—five minutes, ten, 20. He started to whisper a mantra, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He had sworn plenty throughout my life, but not that word.
        Mostly we waited in silence.
        At one point, he pursed his lips, turned his eyes sideways at me. “Did the bear claws survive?”
        I thought of the smashed-flat sack that had been lying on the asphalt next to him.
        I leaned over his face, looked at him gravely. “I’m sorry,” I said. “They didn’t make it.”
        They screwed a halo into his head to hold his broken neck in place, sent him to intensive care, and then over the days and the weeks that followed they transferred him to a hospital room, to a nursing I-shouldn’t-even-dignify-it-with-the-word home, to the hospital again, to the rehab wing of Dignity Health Care down by the harbor.
        And now, here he was, wasted, with a little fringe of fuzz around his bald head, his wizened chest adorned with a flimsy powder-blue patterned gown, unable to turn his head, making mildly resigned, droll commentary when a nurse left the room after asking questions about his pain level and his bowel movements: “The height of irony,” he said. “There is no such thing as dignity when one is in the hospital.”
        Every day I came in the late afternoon after work. He told me stories I’d heard a hundred times before …
        … about the camping trip in the San Jacinto Mountains when he and his friends, all middle-aged professionals and not exactly mountain men, strung their packs high between the trees the first night and congratulated themselves on their wilderness-savvy ways, and then in the wee hours a bear came and tore the packs down and ate all their food …
        … about my grandfather, back in his early law practice during the Great Depression, sometimes getting paid in chickens by clients who didn’t have the money …
        … of the time my dad drove his Model A from Wisconsin to a military base in Texas at the end of the war in the dead of winter. On a lone deserted road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, he saw a car in the distance approaching. As it came closer, it started to wobble, then fishtail, and then, horribly, to spin slowly. But right before the car reached my dad’s, it straightened itself out in its own lane, facing the same way he was facing, sliding backwards, and the two cars passed noiselessly, my father rolling forward, the other car sliding backward. At the moment they were abreast, he and the other driver looked over and regarded one another, two men side by side, gripping their steering wheels, passing in the night. Afterward, my father saw in his rearview mirror the other car fishtail again, then spin again, then straighten and—again in its own lane, but then facing in the correct direction—it proceeded on, neat as that.
        When my dad told these stories, they were always the same: same sequence of events, same actions, same observations. It occurs to me now how odd that is. Most people tell their oft-repeated stories a little differently each time, embellishing here, exaggerating there. But my father, he told them like they happened—no frills, no inventions, no lies, small or otherwise.

                                                                

A week in at the rehab hospital, I pointed out that his and my mother’s wedding anniversary was coming up. Fifty-two years. Fifty-two. I said, we’ve got to get roses.
        Every year for over half a century, my dad had given my mom a yellow rose for every year they’d been married. One, two, three, four, ten, twenty, thirty… Every year the bouquet grew more massive and my mother, ever the practical woman whose romantic equipment was just as broken as my dad’s affection machine, would, with more than a tinge of annoyance, sigh at the expense. He knew this. But every year he did it again, a count of one bigger than the last. Intrepid. The man of Never-A-Question.
        He said, “I can’t get roses.” From inside his metal halo, he looked at me blankly, like a turtle.
        “Of course not. I’ll get them.”
        “No. I’m not going to do the roses this year.”
        “It’s your anniversary.”
        “No roses.”
        We both knew how sad the giving would be—all of us in a little hospital visiting room, my now-husband, not my dad, coming around the corner bearing the huge bouquet. Setting the vase down not on the coffee table in my parents’ sunny living room, but rather on the fake-wood conference table in the blank, green, windowless space, my dad folded up in a wheelchair in his flimsy cotton gown—a skeleton with dark circles under his sunken eyes and a black ring of hardware holding his skull immobile.
        “You’ve given her roses every year for 50 years,” I said.
        He was silent. He did not change his facial expression.
        “Fifty-two,” he said. “Yellow.”
        I didn’t change my facial expression. I didn’t go “Ohhhh!” or clap or rush to hug him, or even smile. Perhaps I might have slightly nodded. Done.
        And we were both satisfied.
        He might as well have tugged on his ear.
        I definitely would have said, “Sounds like.”

                                                                

Six weeks later the hospice nurses removed the steel halo screwed into his skull and, mercifully, laid his head on the pillow. My sister and mother stood on the left side of the bed, I on the right. His eyes were open but did not see; he was drugged to block the tidal wave of pain from the resuscitation the paramedics had performed on him two nights earlier when he had quietly died but the night nurse we had hired to watch over him had roused herself from her nap, noticed, and sounded the alarm.
        Ever the practical lawyer, my father had a DNR in place, but it had no effect. Why? Because we had not exercised it. Because we had been still holding onto hope. And this is the critical weakness of an end-of-life legal document: the need for your loved ones to invoke it—to give up hope, leave it up to the body and the spirit, not the doctors—to state that a pounding on the chest, a bruising of the tissues, a breaking of the frail sternum and ribs, a shoving of a tracheal tube down the throat would be worse than death. They must say to the doctors, we are calling it now; this is In Effect. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of paper.
        My dad’s careful planning was for naught. And there I’d been, his daughter the lawyer, holding the document in my possession and not realizing that now was the time.
        They’d kept him in a coma for two days and then decided to slowly bring him to consciousness and remove the intubation tube. I came into the hospital that morning and found three doctors standing at his bed. My sister stood by and my mother sat on a chair near his shoulder, her head resting on her arms draped over the bedrail. My father, in only a flimsy gown, not even a blanket, not even a sheet, was seizing. Not like an epileptic seizure—like a whole-body contraction of pain. His eyes were open, his mouth was wide open, but he made no sound. He seized, lay back, then seized, lay back, seized. There was a nurse coming.
        “What’s happening?” I demanded. “What’s happening? And why doesn’t he have a blanket?!”
        The doctors were discussing among themselves above my father’s head, as if he weren’t even there.
        “Why doesn’t he have a blanket?!” I said to them.
        One of them glanced at me. “We’re deciding the proper course to take.”
        I said, “He’s in pain! He’s cold! He needs a blanket!”
        The group took a few steps away. I looked down at my father. My sister was now at his other side, clutching his hand. My father’s mouth was unnaturally wide, his tongue grotesquely swollen. He was trying to speak but couldn’t. I took his other hand.
        “Can you hear us?” I asked. “Squeeze my hand if you can.”
        He squeezed.
        “Are you in pain?”
        He crushed my hand and would not stop.
        He was trying to mouth something again. I leaned down.
        “Help me,” he whispered.
        “I will,” I said. “I will get help for you.” Like to a dying comrade in the foxhole.
        A female doctor appeared—a beautiful, soft-spoken Indian woman. She’d met with us the night before. She had a melodic voice. She looked directly at me. I went to her.
        “He needs pain medication. He needs it now,” I said.
        “We can give him something,” she said. Then she put her hand on my arm and looked directly into my eyes. “But you have to know, if we do, it will put him back into a coma. And in the condition he’s in, he will not survive.”
        I looked at my sister, my mother, each of us staring into the others’ eyes.
        “Give him the pain medication,” I said.
        The doctor leaned toward me. “You are doing the right thing.”

                                                                

It was so quiet in the hospice room. We were apart from the real world. My father lay on his back, earphones on his head that we’d placed there so he could hear recordings of his old choral group, Los Cancioneros.
        I thought of the Christmas decades ago when I was a young lawyer living in New York City and his group performed at Carnegie Hall. It was snowing as I turned down 57th Street and spied the huge marquee, its lights bright behind the swirling flakes. In the theater I sat in an upper row, miles from the stage, but I spotted my father’s gleaming bald head among the group the minute he walked onstage.
         His breath was slow. Who knows if he was hearing the music, if he too was remembering that night.
        We removed the headphones.
        My sister held his hand. She leaned over him. “I love you; we love you,” she said.
        I took his other hand. But I didn’t say, “I love you.” I said, “We know what to do. We can take care of ourselves. You taught us everything we need. And we’ll take care of Mom. We’ll all be fine. You really don’t need to worry.”
        A cloud slowly seeped into the brown iris of his right eye.
        “We love you,” my sister said.
        “You don’t have to worry about us, we’ll be all right,” I said.
        My mother took his hand from my sister, held it to her face.
        Then the left eye. And that was all.
        Did he hear me? Did I say the right thing? Did he think of me pulling my ear this time? Did he think, “Sounds like?”
        I’ll never know. But I was speaking his language. That’s the best that I could do.