1913issue6online

78 Resolution in Bearing “Last night at dinner, Sarah asked me if I was close to my father,” my dad says. I am in Tucson, in a house that smells faintly of sewage, surrounded by pomegranate trees with rust colored fruit and hundred degree heat. Monsoon season has started and the afternoon sky is dark gray with clouds. My father is in our Los Angeles apartment, surrounded by my mother’s orchids, snaking succulents, jade plants and rosemary. This is the first day my phone has worked since I returned home from Portugal, and he is catching me up on what I’ve missed, namely a dinner party with old friends. “I told her that when I was little, my father would smell me. I did the same thing with you.” When my dad starts to talk about his father I feel heavy and a little spun. So I sit on the couch with the phone on my belly in speaker mode, as though we are in the room together. “When you were a baby you had a fragrance that I grew accustomed to. I could find you in the dark.” I think of the Polaroid photographs of my father, muscular and shirtless with unkempt hair and a wild beard, holding a premature, jaundiced infant in the palm of his hand. I try, too, to imagine my grandfather in a similar pose, holding my dad, though the effort to conjure my own father as an infant pushes me too far. Infancy and death are, perhaps, too similar, and I don’t like imagining him so vulnerable. “If I carry it a step further,” he continues, “I could find you beyond the grave.” I know that death is on my father’s mind. It always is. He is a hypochondriac, so I’ve learned to brush off his morbid moments. But it’s harder to feel at a remove when I see how the notion of his own death slaps him in the face every time an old friend dies. I encourage him to do yoga in the hopes that some teacher will coach him to keep his mind on the present, instead of lurking in the halls of an imagined afterlife. The apartment was spare when I was born, with a brown carpet instead of the gray it is now. There was no bookcase with a thousand books, no stereo, no red velvet couch cover or African masks, no embroidered pillowcases from Pretoria, no glass table, no stack of art books, not much furniture at all. I imagine him navigating the space of our apartment in 1981 in the dark, where there was so much less chance of stubbing your toe,

1913issue6online

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