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Father's DayAnnaLee Wilson MFAPublished online: 24 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: AnnaLee Wilson MFA (2012) Father's Day, PsychoanalyticPerspectives, 9:1, 148-156, DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2012.662144

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Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 9: 148–156Copyright © 2012 A. L. WilsonISSN: 1551-806X (print) / 2163-6958 (online)DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2012.662144

FATHER’S DAY

ANNALEE WILSON, MFA

My graphic design business was a year old in 1975 when my fatherpaid his one and only visit. Why had I chosen this day to invite himfor a lesson in preparing graphic design for printing?

This was no time to be tutoring anyone, much less my father.Revisions had been arriving all week for the reading program thatmy two business partners and I were designing, and I was taking abig risk trying to teach my father a new job. What would he thinkof my office, or the work we did, or my partners? Would he rollhis eyes at the macramé plant holders dangling in the window andthe Tampax on the toilet tank? I wanted him to be proud of me,and of my new venture. I didn’t want him to think we were justthree girls playing at being in business.

I had been shocked when, after 28 years as a dedicated mathteacher and administrator in Newark, my father retired. He was52—a damn good educator, so people said. I thought he was tooyoung to step down. When people asked why he’d stopped work-ing so early, he told them he’d had enough of the racial strife inNewark’s North Ward. There was truth in that, but I suspected thebigger reason, the one he wasn’t saying, was that he needed tostay home and nurse my mother through the later stages of mus-cular dystrophy. He seemed to step into this role without a secondthought. I felt the horror of it, yet secretly rejoiced because as longas he was doing it, I wouldn’t have to.

As nervous as I was, the idea of my father’s visit excited me.I couldn’t remember a time since early childhood that I’d had himto myself without my mother around. Like everyone who knew my

This essay is adapted from a memoir AnnaLee Wilson is writing about starting awoman-owned business in 1974. Research for her book has been completed through aNew York Public Library, Wertheim Residency award.

Address correspondence to AnnaLee Wilson, MFA, 610 West End Avenue, Ph-A,New York, NY 10024. E-mail: annaleewilson@verizon.net

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Father’s Day 149

parents, I saw them as inseparable. Except as a helper, there wasno room for anyone else in their set of two, not even my sister andme. I was surprised when my mother agreed to let him out of hersight to make the trip to New York.

My father’s devotion to my mother was complete. At the timeof their marriage, when she was still in her teens, he’d been smit-ten with her dark-eyed movie star looks, her penetrating staresepitomized by a glamour-girl photo of her on the hood of a1942 Nash. He adored her and was always by her side; from thetime of her diagnosis at age 25, she could not leave his.

When I was home on college break and my parents got readyto go out, I would watch my father dress my mother, apply hermakeup, and style her hair as if she were a doll. I marveled athis routine of lifting her out of their car and pivoting her intoher wheelchair or curving his body toward her in a restaurant sono one noticed him feeding her. In the car she forbade him tofasten her seat belt. “I’m living dangerously,” she’d say with sar-casm. But this risked my father’s safety too since he was forcedto extend his arm like a human tollgate to prevent her pitchingforward when he hit the brakes. I understood she didn’t want anymore restraints than nature had already given her, so I didn’t letmyself think about it.

My mother was his life’s work; and how she resented him forit! In the past when we were alone she would complain that hechose the lowly position of public school teacher—a woman’s pro-fession, she called it—and not medicine, or law, or insurance, likeother husbands. “The Board of Ed takes advantage of him, andhe’s got no guts to fight back. He’s a dreamer,” she would say.I didn’t defend him to her face, but it angered me to hear her saythis. My father was steadfast and earnest about his work. Peoplesaid I took after him, and I was proud of that. So when she voicedsuch things, I felt she was also speaking of me. I knew she dispar-aged his job to his face, too. Perhaps that was what gave him thenotion that in retirement the two of them would start a business.

At first my father grasped at straws. “We’re becoming Amwaydistributors,” he said after a neighborhood couple had stoppedover with a valise full of household products to give my parents thepitch. “Your mother can make phone calls. I’ll make deliveries.”When my father told me, I was disappointed in him and scornful,too. I had always counted on him to uncover truth. At 16, when my

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150 AnnaLee Wilson, MFA

history teacher assigned us to watch the movie Operation Abolition,I came home riled up about Commies in our midst. My fatheropened my eyes to the film’s distortions and manipulations. If heknew how to smell propaganda, how could he fall for an obviouspyramid scheme?

My father seemed lost without a job. I sensed his desperationto accomplish something aside from ministering to my mother’sneeds, but I didn’t want to see him this way.

“Who’s going to buy this stuff?” I said.My father scowled. I didn’t realize he’d already invested

$80 in a starter kit. Maybe my mother had been right about him.Soon he had a new plan.“Your mother and I think we should open a frame shop,” he

said. He’d just finished cutting her meat.My father’s square hand scooped up pot roast with a spoon.

He extended it to her open mouth, his pinky in a preposterouscurl.

“What do you think of my idea?” he asked as he cut up mymother’s potato.

“I’ve never seen you frame a picture.” I frowned, watching myfather feed my mother.

“Napkin,” she said, and he patted one between her partedlips.

“What could be involved? Your mother and I could learn thebusiness.”

My mother’s hands were useless. A knitting project lay aban-doned in a basket, the irregular knits and purls proof of herdeterioration. My father seemed not to notice. I pretended Ididn’t notice either. I wanted my parents independent for theirsake—no, for my sake. I had to do something.

“Come to my office,” I said to my father. “I’ll teach youpaste-ups and mechanicals. Ad agencies are looking for mechan-ical artists.” He raised his eyebrows in interest and looked at mymother. “You can easily make $10 an hour.” Two dollars more thanhe made as vice principal.

“What do you think, Beeb?” he asked my mother.“It’s an idea,” she said, compressing her lips into a thin line.As soon as I had offered to teach him, I regretted it. I’d been

so proud when I told my parents about my new business. Butwhen my father agreed to the lesson, I thought only of shabbiness.

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Our office neighborhood, to the east of Gimbels, was littered withcut-rate electronics and gadget stores. Ragtag rug merchants wereforever going-out-of-business, and Con Edison was forever diggingup our street. Most mornings we partners arrived to the detritusof hookers who serviced johns in our entrance and returned laterto use it for a toilet. We’d furnished our second floor walkup ona shoestring, with doors for desktops and sawhorses for table legs.Workstations erected from industrial shelving units were thrownup with our husbands’ help. Afterward we sloshed white paintover everything. Our studio was practical and defiant, the oppo-site of my parents’ French Provincial–inspired home. I scrubbedwindows and floors and neatened piles of design projects the daybefore my father’s visit.

Phones were already ringing the next morning when I let myfather in with his brown bag of coffee and sweet roll. “Did youfind a seat on the train?” I asked, while he squeezed the breathout of me in greeting. Everyone apologized for the lack of air-conditioning as they helped me clear a table for him. While myfather looked around, I wondered if my establishing a businessmight have disappointed him. From long hours working in hisfamily’s grocery store as a child, he had frequently cautioned,“Never go into business for yourself.”

Such worries dissolved as I fell into my new role. Head-to-head we sat while I demonstrated graphic design production tomy father. Here’s how you slide the T-square along the drawingboard. Here’s how you keep your triangle from wiggling. Here’show you shake a Rapidograph pen so ink will flow evenly alonga straightedge. After each instruction, I checked to make sure hewas following along.

I explained that the objective was to slice portions of text outof paper galleys, then follow a graphic designer’s layout to alignand glue the text onto a stiff board. I showed him examples, andhe nodded. He laughed when I used jargon like “repro” and “strip-per” and “bleed” to explain techniques and tricks I’d learned oversix years in the industry.

That day our office bustled with activity. Messengers maderound-trips, picking up finished work and delivering it to ourclient only to return with another package of corrections to bemade. In between reviewing new illustrations and supervising, Idemonstrated how tweezers and razor blades were used to nab

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a bit of copy and nudge it into position. “There’s no right orwrong,” I said to ease his mind. I didn’t tell him a mistake would becostly.

I slapped an X-Acto knife, handle first, in my father’s thickpalm and watched awkward fingers curl to accept it. The toollooked alien in his 52-year-old hands. His grip was powerless.I couldn’t tell how much he’d taken in, but I went right on givinghim the simple task of drawing four lines on a board and tapinga sheet of newsprint on to protect it. I needed him to succeed sohe would have his own endeavor. My worst fear was that he wouldlose heart and become too despondent to care for my mother.

“Holler if you need anything,” I said.After a while I checked my father’s progress. Ink had min-

gled with tufts of hair around his knuckles and smudged his work.Every line he’d drawn ended in a feathery smear. He struggledwith his tweezers; when paper bunched under his straightedge, Iheard dammits. Sadness enveloped me. I wanted to make it better.

“You’re doing great. Let’s try a hard pencil instead. Here’s atrick.” I rotated a mechanical pencil in a high-tech sharpener anddrew even lines while rolling the implement to keep its point.

As my father practiced, I proofread a stack of work due thenext day. We chitchatted about his plans to remodel my sister’sroom and the duplicate bridge group he and my mother joined.I yearned for him to say, “Come, I’ll buy you lunch,” or, “Let’sgo for a drink.” He never did. I would have taken the initiative,but as much as I wanted time alone with him, the idea frightenedme. I knew how envious my mother would be if she discoveredwe’d shared a meal when she wasn’t there. Her attitude becamepunishing whenever she was reminded of her incapacity. She hadonce been so vibrant that I could understand her resentment.Still I felt cheated. With so much to say and so little to say, itwas safer to pick up Cuban food for us to share with my part-ners at our all-purpose lunch table. At cleanup we brushed thecrumbs onto the floor to join snips of paper and erasure shavings.Afterward my father continued practicing, but without progress.He had no aptitude for the work, yet we both pretended not tonotice.

Toward the end of the day as light reddened in our designstudio, I looked over at his stilted attempts. His garbage pail over-flowed with crumpled wads of paper. I ignored his embarrassment

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while I gave him a few more pointers and packed up some sparetools so he could practice at home.

“I’ll ask your mother,” he said when we made plans for himto return. I was relieved. I doubted she’d let him. With heraide’s help, my mother had phoned several times to check onus and beckon my father back. It was getting late, but he wan-dered around to see what the others were working on. He seemedreluctant to leave.

“You’ll have to hurry to catch the 5:30 train,” I said. I held thedoor for him. Would the day never end? From their cubicles, mypartners watched me grimace in desperation.

”I need . . .” my father said as we clomped downstairs. Thedull echo of the metal flight swallowed his words, but I was alert tosomething plaintive in his voice. My father was someone who gaveto people, never asking for anything in return.

“We’ll talk when we’re downstairs,” I interrupted. Whateverhe had to say, I didn’t want to hear it.

“I need to tell you about your mother,” he said. His eyesbesieged me, but I had my own problems. Didn’t he see what ittook to run a business?

I burst out the door. “Wait until we get through this crowd,”I said, and plunged right in, hustling him up the street. I hopedhe didn’t hear the fear in my voice. Did this have something to dowith muscular dystrophy? He had never let on there was anythingwrong in our family. After so many years, why would he want tobring that up now? I knew once we were dashing through the riverof workers flowing toward Penn Station personal conversationwould be impossible.

When my mother’s disease was diagnosed, my father drew meclose, taking me with him to night school, where I watched himteach math. On Saturdays he took me to Newark’s ChancellorAvenue Library. While he browsed the stacks for something toread, I sat with other kids in the hedge garden, enthralled as thelibrarian read aloud Wanda Gag’s Nothing at All and bent backthe cover to display the drawings. Afterward he helped me borrowthe book with my metal-tabbed library card. It was summer, and Icouldn’t wait for school to start so I could learn how to read formyself.

My father had been the one to ensure my independence.My mother wanted me to stay close to home and work as a

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secretary or attend a local college. “Get a teaching certificate tofall back on after you’ve raised your family,” she said. But I wasthinking beyond family. I had a brain and I wanted to use it.

“Let her go away to school,” my father had said. I knew hewanted me to have greater opportunities than had been availableto him. Had he realized, more than I did, how much I neededto flee the steady march of my mother’s illness, the gloom ofservitude?

Once we were striding along, his unspoken words were for-gotten in the hubbub of scrambling commuters. I saw my fatherto his gate and took a crowded subway home. I stood all the way,hanging onto a strap, my body anticipating the curve of the tracksalong the route. What had been on his mind that day never cameup again. The stairway had been his last opportunity to say it.

At first I’d been relieved, but in the months that followed Iturned the incident over many times looking for ways to ease myconscience and let myself off the hook for such cruel censorship.My greatest fear was that he could no longer manage my motherby himself and he needed my help. If I allowed him to speak suchwords, I could never turn him down. I knew I had failed him. Yethow could I help him when I needed to help myself?

Maybe my father longed for someone—me—to attest to hisreal job, the servile one he’d taken on when he retired early tolook after my mother. But even with that acknowledgment wouldcome duty, and I had had enough of that before I left home. I was31 years old and at the threshold of an exciting adventure thatfew had tried, a business collaborative where all the partners weretalented women. There was my husband to think about and myapartment to attend to. These required everything in me. But mymother’s disease threatened to suck me back and swallow me up.I vowed I would never help him with her care, even though I knewI couldn’t keep that promise.

Twenty years after his visit, in 1994, my father had a psy-chiatric emergency after threatening suicide at an adult day-carecenter. I handed the project I was designing to my business partnerand raced uptown to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

I could understand why he wanted to kill himself. At 70my father had Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The program I hadenrolled him in had downgraded him to the dementia group.I was employing two home-health aides for my paralyzed yet

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Father’s Day 155

mentally astute mother, but afternoons when my addled father gothome, he was still trying to take care of her.

Sitting there forlorn in the ER, my father beamed when herecognized me. Whether it was his surprise to see me in an unfa-miliar place or his shock that his threatening words had beentaken seriously, he spoke with surprising clarity.

“Why am I here? All I said was, ‘I want to kill myself.’” In hisdeclaration there was no evidence of the aphasia that had beenplaguing him. He’s okay, I thought with relief.

We spent the day on plastic chairs—me wearing sleekBarney’s attire, my father without belt and shoelaces to keep himfrom hanging himself.

“How’s business? Tell me about your clients,” he said. Did heremember his visit to my office in 1975? Shame over my behaviorhad haunted me for years, yet I had never had the courage to apol-ogize. What was I afraid of? Maybe it hadn’t been as important tohim as I thought. As before, I put the conversation off for anotherday.

We’d been in the waiting room a while when my father said,“I have a yen for a hot dog.”

“Me too!” I was already salivating.So I left him there and went to the corner to find a Sabrett

wagon. When I returned toting two mustard and kraut specials,I found my father in the hospital corridor, confined to a gurney.His speech was garbled and he waved a portable urinal. From fee-ble gestures and shoulder shrugs, I realized he was desperate torelieve himself, but not in a public place. Over protests from themedical staff, I escorted him to the lavatory.

“He’s on suicide watch. We’ll give him Klonopin to calm him,”the doctor said some time after midnight. “Go home and rest.He’ll be fine.”

When I returned the next day he was slack-jawed, his headarched back. “Dad,” I said. He never answered. In two months hedied, leaving my bed-bound quadriplegic mother in my care.

In the ten years my mother survived him, I conferred with herphysicians, managed caregivers, and attended to her needs. In themonths before she died, we confessed many things to each other,some of them dumbfounding. Yet I never told her about the day,30 years before, when, in terror, I had refused to let my fatherspeak.

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I still cringe when I think of my actions that day. But withoutthe benefit of his words, I used my imagination. I didn’t give upmy business. I didn’t give up my marriage. I didn’t abandon himwith the responsibility of my mother. I picked up where he left off.And found a way to do it all.

Contributor

AnnaLee Wilson, MFA, has had writings published in The First Line (BlueCubicle Press, 2005), Storied Dishes (Praeger, 2010), This Is the Way We SayGoodbye (Feminist Press, 2011) and NY Underscore (L. Podolnick, Spring2012). Wilson is President of Kaeser and Wilson Design, a marketingcommunications firm in New York City. She lives in Manhattan with herhusband and daughter, and is completing a memoir about the early yearsof her business.

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