GAINING GROUND, by Robin Black
My dad died on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh. But it isn’t truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.
It was about a month ago, and you’d think I’d have figured out by now which way to put it. Harris says the whole worry is stupid, the whole question of how to put it, because it makes it sound like I’m debating some point of causality, as if the two events were in some way related. Linked. Which they were not. The water ran electric because the house was not properly grounded. Because my electrician is an asshole. And always has been. And ought to be shot. Or at the very least not be an electrician anymore. My father died because he walked in front of a train. On purpose. Like in a movie. Like Anna Karenina. Because he was a whack job. Mentally ill. And always had been. No connection. Unless you think having a lousy electrician you don’t fire, and a lousy father who offs himself is some kind of connection, which even I do not think. So in the end it’s just timing. And timing is nothing, meaningless, a slim quality to build any conclusion around.
That’s Harris’ point, anyway. That timing isn’t everything, like people say it is. It’s bull. And that’s Harris pretty much all around. Harris is a piece of work. Forty-seven years old, pretty fat now, he’s got these lingering tufts of leftover hair sprouting all over him, any which way. He’s got skin like badly mashed potatoes. He’s got eyes like he knows perfectly well he’s wrong. About everything. All the time. And couldn’t care less. He works in quality control at the local paper plant. Which is a joke, since neither quality nor control, nor any imaginable combination of the two that does not involve adding the words “lack of” or “out of” can be applied to him. And he is just who you would expect to take you on, on something like this. Just exactly who you would expect to pull the plug on trying to find meaning in anything. While he leans into my fridge, scrounging, foraging, investigating, making himself at home, taking it upon himself to debunk phenomena like coincidence. Like timing.
I used to be married to Harris. I know him well. Last year, just about halfway through realizing he had turned into a walking, talking laundry list of human decline, I threw him out. Harris. His cigarettes. His underpants. His poking through my food. His need to talk me out of things. Out he went. Still he comes back around to see our daughter Allison, who is four now. Or at least that’s why he says he comes back. That is why Harris claims he is still always around. The fact is, though, that there is only so left he’ll ever agree to be. Only so thrown out. Only so gone he ever gets.
“Don’t you believe in anything?” I asked him, right while he walked suitcase number one out my front door.
“Nope,” he answered me, standing there under a street light, his luggage kind of tilting him with its weight. “Nope.” He shook his head. “Not a goddamned thing.” And Harris, he just walked away, as they say, into the night.
He was the one I called. When it happened. My father. The water. All of that. About which fact I have nothing to say. Except that old habits die hard. And that if I could remember which part I told him first, I might have some idea about this whole how to put it question. Either I told him my father was dead, and then that I had been bathing Allison when the bathwater shocked us both. Or I put it the other way around. I know that Allison was screaming bloody murder, dancing this awful naked wet jitterbug of fear around my bedroom. Wouldn’t even let me towel her off, because she didn’t want to be touched. By anything. Ever. Ever again. And I had this phone in my hand. This phone that had rung just as I was reaching for it, so I just answered it and said hello. And then a man had asked me, some man on the phone asked me if I was my father’s daughter, because if I was, there had been an accident. It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.
“But I was just going to call you,” I said. Then I heard what was being told to me, and I asked, “What kind of accident?” And then I took that in. The train, the dead, the my-father-is-over part. And then I called Harris. And told him something. I’m still just not sure exactly what. But I know I told him to come. I know I did that. So this one’s on me, I guess. I invited him this time.
Having a parent die who is crazy is different from having a parent die who isn’t crazy. I know because I have had both kinds, and they have both died. My mother was just so normal you couldn’t even be in the room with her and Dad both without losing all belief in God. In anything. In anything that made sense. Of anything. It just all seemed too impossible. Which, if you ask me, is why I married the king of nothingness in the first place. Why Harris’ essentially unpleasant view of the world as a random and pointless sphere held some appeal. I mean, she was nice, my Mom. She was pleasant. She was a Mom. Picture a Mom. Go ahead. You get the idea. Picture her cooking meals, coming to assemblies, chatting on the phone with her other mom friends. Walking the dog. Making your teacher smile at pick-up at the end of the day. Making your teacher like you more. Nice. Normal. Smart enough. Pretty enough. Blonde. A real Mom.
Now you explain my father to me. What he was doing in that house with her. When he was there. Or in those wedding pictures. Or on my birth certificate. You go ahead and make some sense of that, because I have pretty much given up. My earliest memory of my father was of visiting him in a linoleum room, little windows, bars on them, long tables, scattered with art supplies. Construction paper. Clay. Pipe cleaners. Glue. Sequins. I must’ve been about Allison’s age. Four, maybe three. I know I’d met him before that visit, because it wasn’t like we were introduced or anything. That’s just the first image I have of him. In the Art Room. At the Place. He had made a picture for Mom. A collage she admired like it was mine. Which it easily could have been. Red paper, shiny foil shit glued on it. It ended up on our fridge. And there was a woman there on a sofa who stared at me the whole time. That’s all.
That’s the whole thing. My first memory of my father. Except he isn’t even in it. Not if you look carefully. He isn’t there.
When I met Harris, in a bar about ten years ago, I was just twenties, young twenties, and he was the first person who ever said to me “So what?” when I told him about my Dad. I was going on and on about how bad it’s been, about this horror and that, how many times he was in the bin, how long he stayed, which birthdays Dad missed, and what graduations he ruined. And Harris, he just hoists a beer and shrugs: “So what?” I guess that was love. Not his saying it. Me hearing it. “So what?” I heard freedom in that. Like a great big chalkboard eraser getting rid of all that shit. So what. That won me over. Until I got sick of it. Then really sick of it. And then threw him out.
I mean, it’s hard to build a whole life around someone saying “So what.” Frankly, I think nine years was a pretty damned good stretch.
So I called Harris that night, and I called my same asshole electrician too. But the difference was that when I heard the electrician answer the phone, I just hung up. Then I pulled out the yellow pages and went for the biggest, glossiest most expensive ad I could find. The kind of ad that has about sixteen phone numbers listed according to time of day. Emergency and all. And that was the one I called. Because this was an emergency. I mean for God’s sake if electric water isn’t an emergency what is? For one thing, not my father at that point. That much I had taken in. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help him. Which was actually not news, there had never been anything much I could do for him. But it was official now, in some way it had never been before.
“It won’t kill you,” the guy said who answered the phone, and right away I liked that I had never heard his voice before. I kind of trusted that quality in him. “You’re not in any danger. The house isn’t going to burn down. And you aren’t going to be electrocuted if you need coffee or something. Water. Maybe wear rubber gloves. Wear rubber shoes. Sneakers, maybe. I’ll come in the morning. By eight. I’ll be there at eight.”
“That’s good,” I said, hearing Harris let himself in downstairs. “That’s great.”
The whole father-daughter thing with Allison and Harris gets me down sometimes. Sometimes it’s like I should have done better by her, gotten her a better Dad. And sometimes it’s just facing that there’s Harris in her, Harris genes, Harris thoughts, Harris God-knows-what that’s hard for me. Like her being upset when he moved out. Like her being so happy these days when he comes around to see her. Like him being able to reassure her that night, when everything I did just made her scream and dance around. It’s like I spilled something on her. Harris juice. It’s like she’s stained. Like there’s something that connects them, wherever I send him to live. And maybe that reminds me I’m stained too.
“You gotta go anywhere?” he asked when I came downstairs, those great big hopeless eyes of his staring right at me. And there she was wrapped in a towel now, a towel Harris found who knows where, happy, happy, happy sitting on his lap. “You gotta deal with anything?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“Morgue. Hospital.” I said. “Morgue, I guess. In the hospital. I don’t know.”
“They need you to identify him?”
“No one said. I have a number to call.”
“You should call it then.”
Allison had her head turned away from me, buried into Harris’ big chest. Her hair was starting to dry, springing into its little curls. My curls. Her father. Harris. It’s all just unbelievable sometimes.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go call now.”
My mother died just right. Which is to say, it was horrible. She got a terrible disease, had a series of unspeakable treatments, fought like hell and lost. It took about a year, and it was just the worst thing ever. It was so miserable that it worked. It counted. It hurt like Hell. Like death is supposed to do. My mother died and everything was sad. Ba-buh, ba-buh, ba-buh, ba-buh, ba-buh. Perfect. Her name was Alice, and I had Allison the next year.
This wasn’t like that.
The man on the phone said that yeah, I was supposed to come identify my father, and I was supposed to tell them a funeral home to call too. To take him away after I give the OK. While he talked, I flipped from E for electrician to F in the yellow pages. I went for the biggest ad again, and gave him the number.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know those guys. They’re good.”
“Good,” I said. “See you soon.”
And then he said what I suppose I should be glad he said. He warned me about what I was going to see. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”
“Huh. Yeah.” I kind of let that point in. That aspect of this night. “Yeah, I guess he would be,” I think I said. And that was pretty much that.
One view is that Harris is too rational for me while my father was just the opposite. Completely irrational. The kind of guy who notices one day that the newspaper on the porch is lying at a funny angle, and then it’s just counting backwards from ten before he’s back in the Place, doing Art. Just a matter of days before my own little masterpieces are crowded out by his creativity on the fridge. That’s the view that says Harris was a reaction against my Dad, but kind of an overreaction. And that’s the view I take when I think that there has to be someone out there for me. A man. That Harris is too this, and my father too the other. And that what I need is a middle man. Not a pathological debunker. And not a lunatic. Just someone who thinks, well, yeah, maybe things mean something but maybe they don’t mean much more than that. And maybe sometimes nothing means much of anything at all. But maybe it does.
I want a man who thinks the way I do. It scans. It’s short. But it does scan. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh.
I’m not going to talk about what I saw at the morgue. Not now. Not ever. But it was him. He’s right there this time. And trust me, there were no art supplies. No glitter, no glue. Just my father. In this memory, he is there. They gave me his watch, his wallet and the Medic Alert bracelet he had on, with my name and number engraved on it. A Timex, seven dollars and my own I. D.
Harris had Allison all tucked in and dreaming away when I got home. He asked me if I wanted him to stay. I didn’t, but I thanked him though. Because he had helped. And because he didn’t ask me any other questions before he left. Part of me was thanking him for that. For just not going into it. Not being all that interested in the whole thing. His strongest, maybe his only, attribute. So what? His great attraction. At times like this, I still get the appeal. He grabbed an apple out of the bowl on my counter, and let himself out, with the fattest part of the fruit headed toward his enormous mouth.
Marriage is a funny thing. Even when it’s over. Maybe especially then.
In the morning, when Allison woke up, she came in to find me in my bed, just like every day, and climbed under the covers beside me. I wrapped my arm around her, at first just out of habit, but then I started kind of feeling her, feeling for the shock that had rippled through her the night before. I stroked her, I squeezed her, checking for some change in her skin, in her flesh, in her bones. Something left in her of the way that she had jumped and screamed. Something left of the current that had flashed through her. But nothing seemed different. Nothing at all. I tucked her little shoulders under my arm, and let her head relax onto my chest. She had screamed to me “It stings, it stings,” and I had snapped at her to stop complaining. “Oh quiet!” I’d said. “Stop being such a baby!” Yeah. Mother of the year. That’s me. And then bzzzzzz, right through my own arm.
That morning I had her skip brushing her teeth. And I told her not to the flush the toilet. Or wash her hands.
I thought I should call her doctor. I hadn’t thought of that last night. I had no idea if there was anything to worry about. Anything long-term. If getting shocked that way leaves a mark, does damage, hurts your heart, your brain. Makes you crazy. Makes you nuts.
I didn’t say anything to Allison about my Dad. The train. The whole dead thing. She’d never met him. I never talked about him to her. I never saw any reason to. The pediatrician told me not to worry. There wouldn’t be any long-term effects.
And from that point on, it’s pretty much all about dirt.
“The thing is,” my new electrician said, “you have the pole where it should be, stuck in the ground. And it seems to be in pretty deep. But it’s useless, because it doesn’t attach to anything. You got to have every wire in the house leading to this ground, every bit. And you’ve got nothing. No connection at all. Who did your electric work?”
I shrugged. “Some asshole,” I said. “Can you fix it?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’ll run you, but there’s really no choice. It’s either that or frying chicken in the bathtub from now on.”
The woman at the cemetery said the plot beside my mother was all in order and ready for use. “Just tell us the day, any day this week. We’ll arrange it with the funeral home. We want this to be easy for you. We just need about two days warning to prepare the ground.”
“Let’s do it in two days then,” I said. “If that’s what it takes.”
I didn’t ask anyone from the Place to come. They were just going to go on about how this really wasn’t their fault, and how sorry they were. How they just can’t understand how this could have happened. And I didn’t feel like hearing that from them. Didn’t feel like pretending that they had given a shit one way or another about some crazy old guy. Maybe they had. I just didn’t care. I asked Harris to be there, of course, because at least with him I know where I stand. At least I know he just thinks it’s all a great big meaningless mess. That nothing means anything. That none of this connects. Not in any significant way, anyway. It’s all just timing, and timing is crap. That’s Harris. That’s Harris’ big point, and now that I haven’t got to be married to him, I am the first to admit I need that perspective sometimes.
I need that perspective sometimes.
Ba-buh ba-ba-buh ba-ba-buh.
Yeah. Like that. Not all the time. Just like that. Just to keep me grounded.
Ha, ha.
The box went in the way it was supposed to do, right next to Mom. There’s a blank space on her stone where they’ll carve his name and dates in along with hers. I’ll have to call someone to get that done. Back to the yellow pages I guess. And I already know, even now, that every time I see that stone and those names linked together like that I will lose all belief in God, just one more time. In anything. In anything that makes any sense. Of anything.
I just don’t understand it. I never have. But this is pretty much the way they were supposed to end up, I guess.
While the diggers started filling in the dirt, Harris offered to go pick Allison up at school for me. Said he’d kind of enjoy the chance since he wasn’t at work anyway. But I said no, that I wanted to see her too. But he could tag along if he wanted. We could go together. Give her a treat. Take her out for ice cream or something. He is her father after all. And she really does seem to like him. Strange as that may be. She even looks like him a bit. I do see that. Even though sometimes that’s hard for me.
And I’ll tell you something else that’s hard for me, and that is that maybe Harris is right. About just this one thing. Just this one time. It costs me to say that, but maybe he is right about the root of this problem. Right, that I just can’t believe these two events were unrelated. Just can’t accept that it wasn’t my father in that electric water, not him streaming through my daughter, not him burning down into me as he walked out onto those tracks and waited there to get killed. Not him hurting us, his flesh and blood, even as his life just blew away.
I just don’t believe it.
Because I see my father. I do see him there. I see him standing outside of that tunnel, in the dark. And I see myself at that moment dipping my beautiful naked child into her bath. I know exactly where they found him. I know the path he walked from the Place. And I know the ripples of water around her small body as she plays. I know the slight gray tinge of daily dirt that falls around her, and rings that bathtub. And I know how he got out. Which nurse had her back turned. Which orderly thought he knew that my father was tucked into bed. And I know the smell of my daughter’s shampoo. The way her ears emerge as her hair rises into lather. I know what my father was wearing, his gray wool pants I mail ordered him last month, a white T-shirt bought by my mother God knows when, no shoes. The last time I saw him, he’d lost so much weight. His food was all poisoned he believed. I know that. The air was growing harder for him to breathe. The air that Allison breathes. I know that he couldn’t breathe her air anymore. I know he was diminishing. I know that she is growing. The nurses were pouring toxins into his room with their words. I know the songs I sing to her as she bathes. The songs she begs me for. He wouldn’t let anyone speak around him. He had forbidden even me to speak. Every word was deadly. Every breath was painful for him.
There once was a man with a daughter,
Whose electricity ran in her water.
When his body was found,
Her house had lost ground,
But what was the lesson it taught her?
And that is why Harris is right about me. Why Harris, who is always wrong, is right about me.
Because I just think there has to be some connection. I just think there has to be.
And Harris. I mean just look at him. Examine him some time. Look at Harris. Look into his eyes.
He just doesn’t care.
“So what?” I can still hear him say like when we first met. “So what?”
I just think there’s an answer to that. Even if I haven’t found it yet. I just think there has to be. And when I do find it, when I know what that answer is to his “So what?,” Harris no doubt will be somewhere close at hand. Most likely with his face stuck in my fridge. And the first thing I’ll do, just as soon as I understand all this myself, is pull him the hell out of there and explain to him how everything connects.
And then it’ll be Harris in for the surprise of his sad life. Then for once it’ll be Harris getting shocked. Instead of me.
Robin Black has reviewed books for ELLE magazine and for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Gaining Ground” is her first published story in a national literary magazine.