The Farmer in the Dell

The first and only time I recall my father and I being really alone, we spent a day at my grandmother's house when no one else was home. I remember breathing in and out, the safety he moved into every room. We were together then, like a father and a daughter, it was not a dream, I'm sure of that. My mother had been admitted again. He took me to Fairyland in Oakland and bought me a giant yellow plastic key that swung from a blue string around my neck, made the larger-than-life fairytale scenes come true. A six-foot giant baby in a cradle swayed in the tree tops and Little Bo Peep swiveled sadly searching.

He took me to a liquor store across the street and let me buy a grocery bag full of chocolate and cream-filled delight. We didn't go home, though it was the same distance as my grandmother's house. We set up camp, a TV on my grandma's livingroom floor, though the TV in the back room was bigger, and color. I rested my face in the deep umber shag and watched 'Via Allegre' that afternoon. My dad made me grilled cheese and promised we would learn to tie flies together. I knew what contentment was. Kinship ruled, I was in a foreign land. It would be the only day of it's kind. Later we were divided by the law of gender, mother taking daughter, father taking son. Planets misaligning, stars colliding.

That night we went back to our empty home. I slept in my parents bed, my dad on the couch. In the morning I woke on my mother's side, to sledgehammers, dust, the soft smell of sheetrock melting away. When I walked out into the hallway it had disappeared. Our house sat on a Eucalyptus encrusted hill, and my father had made passage to the basement once only accesible from the outside. I looked down a full floor into the damp concrete and heard him say, "Stairs. Your mom wants a staircase to get down there. Soon, anyway."

My father clasps his worn hands today, he knows what work is. Cuts and scars, scars on scars. He jumps ahead, to the side, and tells me Agent Orange is like olive oil, slick and soft with staying power. He remembers someone asking, and being told it was safe. Back then he might've laughed at the prospect of a dying embryo, a shaking hand. He was in it just to get home, he repeats this to me, again.

Eventually my mother would come home again too. Years later she would sit me on our front doorstep, with a giant bulging belly and breathlessly tell me I would have a baby to play with soon. She was full, and showed me down to a place I knew was made of solitude. She did not do this out of malice, but fear and ignorance. Eventually that baby would come to pass and those stairs would lead to my bedroom. Long and narrow, no rail to guide you, designer wallpaper my mother smoothed by hand, matching cornflower blue curtains. I was the envy of all my friends with that big room in tow. No one ever knew I hung up paint-stained sheets for years, desperately trying to build a space of my own, as my father remodeled the upstairs, one room at a time.