BOUNDARIES: A Louisiana Love Story (Post 19)

Chapter 8: Philip (continued)

Look, your house has left you desolate.

Matthew 23:28

My father cries like men cry, with red swollen eyes and few tears. We sit across from each other on my parent’s queen sized bed. It floats on dull, yellowish carpet. Tiny dark spots in the corners of the room prove that it has taken on a life; mildew growing beneath the tightly woven threads have finally reached the surface.
     “Your mother’s leavin’ me.”
     The announcement hits me as if the house is imploding. The truth strikes unexpectedly, but the debris that falls in heaps around me has always been there, waiting to collapse. I feel nothing. “What’s gonna happen to us?” I ask.
     “Your mother’s movin’ to an apartment, and your brother’s stayin’ at school for the summer.” His large frame looks out of place. It seems like he might fall off the edge of the sagging bed and disappear. He shifts and I feel the bed’s weak springs sway. “I think she wants you to go with her.”
     I always go with her. “What if I don’t want to?”
     His wide hand reaches out to cup my chin. “You know you can stay here.” I feel his callous palm against my skin. Feeling the hard dots that run along the bottom of his fingers, I can imagine being a snowflake after all. I can see opening myself, flat and beautiful, and falling, flip-flopping through the winter wind, knowing that when the time comes, I’ll land softly on something strong. “You’re gonna be all right,” he says. “Growin’ up is hard but you’ll make it. You’re strong.”
     I nod in agreement as I try to recall what he’d done to generate such thick calluses. “I thought I was grown already.”
     “It takes longer than you think,” he says. “Trust me.”
     I realize then that I don’t know my father at all. Not really.
     “Are you goin’ to Dr. Broussard’s today?” he asks.
     “I don’t want to.”
     “You’ve only been goin’ for a few weeks. You’ve got to give it more time.”
     “He makes me nervous,” I say.
     “Sometimes the thangs we don’t wanna do—the thangs that make us nervous—are what we need.” He speaks slowly as if listening to his own words.
     “Like you and mom divorcin’?”
     “Maybe.”
     “Maybe you’ll be happier,” I say.
     “You’re mom will be, I guess. I wish I could make her happy,” he says, shaking his head. “It may not seem like it to you but I tried. I could never compete with what she loves the most.”
     Simon Taylor’s face rises out of the rubble surrounding us. “God?”
     “When your mother and I first got married thangs were different,” he says. “She says she never loved me, but she did. We were like any young couple in love. We were livin’ in the dorm for married students in Ruston. She spent hours fixin’ up our apartment. We laid in bed, talkin’ about our life together and what it would be like.” I recognize the expression on his face—the one people get when they’re reliving their best moments. “We were happy and then one weekend she went home to visit your grandparents. She had some kind of vision in her parents’ livin’ room and got baptized in the Holy Spirit. She came back a different person, one who didn’t love me anymore.”
     “Dad, don’t say that. I’m sure she loved you.”
     “No, it’s true. Everythang changed. She didn’t like our friends anymore. She dropped out of art school. I tried to talk her out of it. I told her God gave her a gift but she wouldn’t listen. I thought she needed it, but she thought God was all she needed.” He stands up and the bed seems to relax as if taking a breath it’s been holding for too long. “How could I compete with God?” he asks. “Is that how it’s supposed to be?”
     I know it’s not supposed to be that way.
     He paces back and forth across the dull carpet. His head hangs as he stares down at the carpet and I wonder if he realizes how bad it’s become. Then it strikes me that he’s been sad all along. He clung to that big comfortable chair in front of the TV because it was his lifeboat; perhaps drifting toward a distant light I never noticed.
     “But what about all those years ... when I was little?” I ask. “She was so unhappy. If all she needed was God, why wasn’t she happy?”
     “Your Mom’s always had a lot of serious problems. Listen to me,” he says, reaching down to rub my shoulder, “I’m not perfect either. I never wanted us to have the kind of family we had. At some point I just gave up. That’s when all the fightin’ stopped.”
     “No matter what, I’m glad the fightin’ stopped.”
     “Me, too.”
     He’s a good man with good intentions. He sits in the murky shadows but on clear days, I see him. I want him to reach his light just as I want to reach mine, but it doesn’t seem fair that our family should be ripped apart in the process. My only comfort is the hope that he’ll catapult toward that enigmatic light shining from the television.
     I lower my head, but my father’s calloused hand reaches out again and pulls it up, forcing me to see his tears. They are no longer the kind that men cry; they are like mine. Staring into his eyes, I realize the inevitable has finally arrived. I also know that I’d prepared myself for her departure for so long that I don’t care anymore. It’s as if she already left—long ago when I’d screamed, beating on the bathroom door, and when I’d packed my tiny Going to Grandma’s suitcase time after time. She swore all the way there that we were never going back.
     Surely she left long before the time I was twelve when she and I shared a small apartment for several months. Each night I snuggled against her warm skin as she spoke in hushed tones of her undying love for Simon Taylor. Although I couldn’t see them, I knew her eyes gleamed as she whispered God’s plan into my adolescent ears—the one that ensured the convenient disappearance of Simon Taylor’s wife and the death of my father. Surely, she left my father long ago when she left me.
     “I love you, Daddy.”
     I’m leaving, too—but not with her.

Dr. Broussard smiles. “Why did you lie to the preacher? It was nice of him to visit you in the hospital.” He sits across from me in a black swivel chair. I think that he should have a brown leather chair with a high back and wings on the sides. He’s tall and narrow and would fit nicely into a chair like that. When I don’t answer, he leans toward me, his smile growing as he comes nearer. His thin elbows dig into his bony knees. “Do you know why you lied?”
     “I knew I’d be okay and I didn’t wanna talk about it.” I don’t want to talk to him anymore either. It’s my fourth weekly visit and I still feel ridiculous. After all, he’s paid to act like he cares.
     “You didn’t feel comfortable discussin’ your attempt?”
     “It’s personal, not really somethin’ I wanna announce to everyone.” I wonder what I was actually attempting. Whatever it was, I realize it failed.
     “Does anyone know?”
     If I hold my head a little to the left, I can see my reflection in one of the windows covering the front wall of his office. I guess that the openness helps his patients open up; it reminds me of the ICU. So I hold my head in every possible position except the one that forces me to see my reflection. I hate how I look. “Some people from school know I was in the hospital, but I didn’t tell them the truth either. I gave ‘em the food poisonin’ story.”
     “And did they believe you?”
     I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I say, frowning. “I told my Mom I didn’t wanna talk to that preacher.”
     The telephone rings.
     “Sorry,” he says as he hurries to the front room where the secretary is normally sitting. When I arrived, he explained that she’s out for the day. He’s expecting an important patient-related call and will have to answer all calls during our session. It isn’t his normal practice. This is the third call since I’ve arrived. I wonder if he would leave one of his other patients to answer my call. His office smells like fresh carpet. Everything is new. I feel like I shouldn’t touch anything. I don’t feel like I’m really here.
     When he returns to assume his smiling-leaning-forward position, I don’t give him time to ask a question. “I think I wanna let my hair grow.” I can’t bear his previous line of questioning and want to move on.
     Like a good psychologist, he understands. “Do you think that will make you feel better?”
     “I need a change.”
     “Why do you want to change yourself?”
     “My hair’s too short.” I feel stupid.
     “Peyton, how did you feel when you left the hospital?”
     “Purged,” I say, smirking.
     “I guess so!” He laughs, but I don’t. He knows I can’t give a real answer, but I don’t blame him for trying. It’s his job. In the last few weeks, as he struggled to expose me, I’d reached down like a person caught naked and pulled back up the onion peels Matt had ripped from me. They came up haphazardly because the proper layers can’t be duplicated. But I don’t care; my only priority is to hide. Nevertheless, I’m beginning to hate those stinking layers. I wish they could fall at my feet so I can kick them away. But instead I fight to block the sequence of life—the peeling, the rotting, fertilizing, and new growth—that metamorphosis that happens to us if we’re lucky.
     “How old are you, exactly?”
     “I’ll be nineteen in a couple of months.” I try not to bite my fingernails. It’s excruciating.
     “And you’ve been involved with Matt for a year?”
     “Almost.”
     “Why do you love him so much?”
     I force myself to look at my distorted reflection in the window. It’s getting so hard not to look. “He had an appendicitis attack when I was at his house one night.” The doctor studies my face. “That’s what it was because a few days later Peter had to take him to the hospital in the middle of the night. They had to remove it.” His head shakes, almost impatiently. “But anyway, I could hear him vomiting and goin’ to the bathroom, but it didn’t change anythang.” My voice falls to a whisper.
     “What didn’t change anythang?”
     “What I heard.” My face warms. “I still loved him. If it had been any other guy, it would have changed my mind.”
     “It would have turned you off.”
     “I loved Matt even more.”
     His head continues to shake up and down as if attached to his body by a spring.
     “I wanted to take care of him.”
     “And did you?”
     “When he came out of the bathroom he asked me to get a damp rag for his forehead. It seems dumb, but gettin’ that rag and foldin’ it and puttin’ it on his head made me feel so good.” I lean toward him thinking that maybe, just maybe, he understands.
     “That’s not dumb, Peyton.” He hands me a tissue. “You’re obviously a very caring person.”
     I ignore what I think is a typical response. “I wanted to do somethin’ for him ... that he needed ... and wanted.” I stare defiantly at my reflection in the window hoping to see something other than the stuff I hated moments earlier. “I wanted him to know that I love him. I would have done anythang for him.” The music teacher in my head cheers because I’m singing with my gut; my voice cracks. “I would have climbed to the top of a mountain in my bare feet for that damp rag.”
     “You were very loving toward him that night, but that doesn’t answer the question.” His smile is so constant that I can almost see his lips drying. His torso moves slowly, like Gumby, until he’s sitting in a perfectly upright position. “Why do you love him so much?”
     I snatch the pillow from the end of the couch and hug it. He’s torturing me. He speaks in riddles he hopes I won’t recognize, but will solve nonetheless. We aren’t really friends at all. When my hour is over he’ll go home to his wife and kids, and I’ll walk out the door with still only myself to talk to. “I don’t know. I just do. Some thangs cain’t be explained.”
     “Everythang can be explained. You just have to know how.” I stare at him and decide that I’m not coming back. “How do you feel about your parents’ divorce?”
     “I think they’ll be happier,” I say, feeling sad. “To tell the truth, it doesn’t bother me at all. It’s perfect timing.” He looks puzzled, but quickly regains his composure. “My mom wants me to live with her, but I’m ready to live on my own. I got a job.”
     “Do you like your mother?”
     “We have fun together but sometimes she drives me crazy.” I roll my eyes.
     “How so?”
     I gather my thoughts and give what I think is an acceptable answer. “She has a distinct vision of how life should be, and it doesn’t always match mine.”
     “Is yours distinct?”

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Chapter 9 coming this week. 

To find out what BOUNDARIES is about and start reading at the beginning. go here.

BOUNDARIES is Penelope Przekop's first novel. It's a work of fiction based on true events. Since writing BOUNDARIES, she has completed two other novels. ABERRATIONS was published by Greenleaf Book Group in 2008. CENTERPIECES is currently being considered by several publishers. Penelope is working on her fourth novel, DUST.