So Long So Little

by Brooke Lummis

My dad would throw me up into the air whenever I asked. He called it quacking, I didn’t know why then, and I don’t know why now. He would launch me up and send me flying, squealing, and then he would catch me in his hands, those strong hands that could fit all the way around my waist. I was so little then, light enough to be tossed in the air, and he was always there to catch me. He was tall, but sometimes he would put me on his shoulders and I would be even taller. I would reach up to run my hands on the paneled ceiling of the school hallways, wondering if anyone else had ever been that high up. 

When my dad and I were young, we lived for Sunday mornings. We slept until we didn’t want to anymore. Then, we made waffles. The low sun came in through the kitchen windows, and squares of light landed all around us. I was still small. I had to step up on a stool just to wash my hands or measure ingredients. I shuffled around the kitchen with my wooden stool, ready to help. My dad always beat the egg whites by hand in a copper bowl, making music with the whisk until the egg whites somehow transformed into something beautiful and fluffy. 

“See? Stiff peaks,” he said, tilting the bowl down so that I could see. “Do you think you have the recipe memorized now?” I nodded confidently. “Alright! Pop quiz. How much flour?” 

“One cup,” I said. 

“Sugar?” 

“Two tablespoons.” 

“Baking powder?” 

“A teaspoon and a half.” 

He raised his eyebrows and smiled at me. “You’re a great sous-chef.” 

“You’re a great head chef. We should get cool hats.” 

My dad was always incredibly selective with his kitchen gear. Our waffle iron was vintage, from the 1950s, because it had small squares like my dad liked. He taught me to turn up my nose at the large squares of Belgian waffles, an inherited opinion that I still can’t get rid of. He would ladle the batter onto his precious iron, and I would close it and watch the batter ooze out of the sides. The iron had a red light that would turn green when the waffle was ready, and we would both sit at the island and stare at the light in hungry anticipation of our breakfast, silent as we smelled it cooking. This is how we began our weeks: well-rested, sunlit, together. Hungry, and then blissfully full. 

My parents shared custody of the dog after the divorce–my dad took her on weekdays from nine to five, and my mom kept her on nights and weekends. Chula lived a life of luxury. She split her time between the man who fed her scrambled eggs and napped on the floor beside her, and the woman who cooked her turkey and draped blankets over her crate. 

One summer evening, I was standing in my mom’s stairwell when my dad dropped Chula off. I was hidden behind a wall, but I heard his key turning, the door opening, and Chula’s excited claws finding traction on the wood floor. 

“Have a good night, Chula,” my dad said softly from the other side of the doorway, the side he stayed on now. I smiled, still halfway down the stairs, deciding to stay hidden so that he wouldn’t be embarrassed. “I love you,” he said, as the sound of her claws trotted toward the kitchen. I heard the door close, the sounds from outside stop, the metal of the lock falling back into place. 

I sat at the bottom of the stairs for a while and stared at my hands. I couldn’t remember the last time he told me that he loved me, unless I told him first. 

I went into the kitchen to pet Chula, to throw the stuffed raccoon toy for my dad’s favorite daughter. 

“Am I going to light the house on fire?” I held the blowtorch out at arm’s length. 

“I hope not,” he said. “Just aim it at the meringue. You’ll be fine.” I backed up and squeezed the trigger, watching the flame birth a blackness across the surface of the meringues. I looked at my dad, wide-eyed. He smiled and grabbed two desserts to take to the table.

“Thanks for cooking with me tonight,” he said, after all of the dinner party guests had left. 

“Yeah, happy to help.” He looked at me from the other side of the kitchen counter and moved his mouth like he was searching for the right words. His hands were covered in soapy dishwater, and he wiped his mouth with his forearm. 

“It’s not just helpful,” he said, slowly. “It’s fun.” His eyes were big, vulnerable. His huge granite island still divided us, kept us on our separate sides of the kitchen. His shoulders relaxed, and he went back to work on the dishes. 

Monday night meant dinner at Dad’s. The lobby of his new apartment smelled like Play-Doh and had free hot chocolate, which I got every time just because I could. There were pieces of our old home transplanted into his new place: the leather chairs from the living room now in his bedroom, the painting of a desert from the hallway now in my bathroom. All the familiar things in all these foreign places. 

Half of his dining room table was covered with stacks of mail, bills and magazines that were still sent to my mom’s address and then shuttled here with Chula. There was scuba gear lying limp in his bathtub, because for no apparent reason he was getting recertified, and for no apparent reason, he had bought instead of rented. The fridge was always full, even though he was cooking for one most nights of the week. Rearranging the food to put in leftovers was a doomed game of Jenga. 

Some nights, he would cut up a pound of strawberries and toss them in sugar, and we would watch a movie and eat them all. That night, he got drunk off of martinis and red wine instead, and dinner was mostly silent. I pushed back my chair with an aggression that he didn’t notice. I cleared our plates and started to wash dishes. 

He watched me with a sedated smile, like he was sleeping and having a good dream. I splashed myself with soapy water in the sink, then swore quietly as if it wasn’t my fault. When I was done, he was still staring at me, so I looked for something else to clean. I started arranging his spices in alphabetical order and ignored him. 

“I love you so much,” he said out of nowhere, his voice heavy with alcohol, his teeth purple. I looked at him and clenched my hand around the paprika like I was ready to throw it. He stared at me, and I wished more than anything that he would just look away, give me space to be unwatched. His eyes were bright, unseeing, happier than they were when he was sober. Almost blissful. 

I put the paprika in its place next to the rosemary. “Yeah, Dad, I love you, too.” 

On a different Monday, a better Monday, my dad bought a miniature Christmas tree. It sat in its pot on top of the dining table as the centerpiece. We improvised the ornaments, attaching decorations to the tiny branches with mini binder clips. I helped him make a star out of cardboard, adding some sparkle by wrapping it in aluminum foil. He deliberately smoothed out the foil wrinkles with the backs of his fingernails, obsessing over the perfection of this tiny object in the grand mess of his apartment. We clapped when it was fully decorated. It was a masterpiece: a two-foot-tall tree with an asymmetrical tinfoil star and dangling binder clips. 

That was one of the nights when he cut up strawberries. His spoon made a swooping circle in the metal bowl. I watched him and remembered making waffles in a different kitchen at a different time, the sound of his spoon just as musical now as the sound of his whisk was then. 

My high school classmate killed himself while I was traveling in New Zealand, and I cried on a four-hour bus tour. My mom asked me what was wrong, but I refused to tell her. I knew she’d cry harder than I did, that she would talk about Peter’s mom, that she would picture it being me, and I wasn’t ready. 

In the hotel room, my mom went to a happy hour that she had no interest in so that I could be alone. I called my dad. It was afternoon in New Zealand, nighttime the day before in Houston, and his voice was either sleepy or tipsy. I told him what happened. He sighed. I relaxed a little into the hotel pillows as he apologized, said how young we were, told me he knew how it felt, meant it. Static from the other side of the world. 

“How did you get better?” I asked when I got my voice back. We had never talked about this before. I only knew by piecing together comments from my mom and reading labels on his prescription bottles. In a sick way, this felt like an opportunity.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out. “I didn’t, really.” I pressed a hand over my mouth and tilted my phone so that the microphone wouldn’t catch my breath. “But I saw how many people were hurt after Mr. Hartman died. I could never do that to you.” He was so far away, and I wished I could see his eyes, but even if we were in the same place, I didn’t know if I would have been able to look at him. Mr. Hartman, the man who, when I was eight, turned his car on and sat in his garage until he died. My dad’s best friend. 

“Yeah,” I said, because I felt like I had to say something. “Thank you,” as if that were enough to make up for him living for others, for us, for me. “I love you,” I said. 

“I love you, too.” 

The first time I saw my dad cry was in my peripheral vision, in a movie theater, in the pink light of Bohemian Rhapsody. Everything smelled like popcorn. At first I thought he couldn’t be crying, there was no way he was crying, but then he raised an enormous hand to his cheek and discreetly wiped away another tear. In the decades before this father-daughter movie date, his son dealt drugs, his kids left home, his business failed, his marriage failed. His father died–heart failure. His best friend died–suicide. Another friend died in front of him–stroke. He dressed in black again. He went to therapy and came out with a prescription. Twenty-one years of marriage, and my mother never saw him cry. No one saw him cry. His eyes were always clear blue and somewhere else, beautiful and unreadable and dry. And a movie about Freddie Mercury finally broke him. 

I watched the movie more closely, trying to find the trigger, trying to make this make sense. The theater lights came on, and we could see the popcorn confetti on the ground. My dad was as composed as ever. 

As he pulled out of the theater parking garage, he said, “Wow. That was a really good movie.” I agreed quietly, hoping that if I left enough silence open for him, he’d say something revealing. When I was about to give up and change the subject, he said, “It seems like he only felt alive when he was performing. All he had were those moments on stage. Like he lived so long for so little.” I tried to process this and hoped that he would go on, but he didn’t. The sun set over Houston’s chunky skyline in the side mirror. My dad’s eyes flitted between the rearview and the windshield, watching traffic, making sure he got me home safely. 

A few stoplights into the car ride, he said: “You seem down. I worry about you.” I felt a shift in my chest, heat in my face. I hadn’t prepared for this. 

“I have been down a lot… lately,” I said, the words feeling inadequate, small in my mouth. I looked over at him and saw his face fall into a sadness I had never seen before on him. 

“I get down, too,” he said, his eyes looking straight at the road, my eyes on him. He parked in the driveway and hovered his hand over the car keys, waiting to turn them, as if this conversation needed the engine to run. 

He looked over at me. I saw how similar we looked, as if from a distance, as if from the perspective of a stranger. He looked at me like he was in pain. I have his eyebrows, bold and dark, his nose, sharp and long, his eyes, blue and clear. I wondered if he saw too much of himself when he looked at me. “Just don’t let it consume you,” he said.

Published February 16th, 2020