Sarah Rose Etter

THE FATHERS

The day our fathers died was a day of ritual.

Our fathers were one father in replica: men in faded polo shirts and khaki shorts, worn-out boat shoes, silvered hair, blue eyes, tan legs, fatherly bellies which bulged a little more each year until they extended to prod at store counters and steering wheels.

Our fathers moved as a unit. When our fathers were convened in one place for a funeral or a town hall or a BBQ, you could almost imagine the specific factory which had churned them out. Time had made them replicas, worn away their differences, as it does with fossils and our bodies. Our fathers resembled one another so closely, our eyes would blur and often we might hug the wrong one.

“I’m not yours,” they would whisper, and then we would hug another father to see if he was the correct one before the burial or the local updates or the serving of the meats, searching with each hug for a certain variation to their universal father scent which would be specific to our home, our dogs, our mothers, etc.

Our mothers were a different story, of course.

*

Our fathers had done terrible things, and also wonderful things. Our fathers had robbed banks, fallen in love with alcohol, taken pale blue apartments across town in order to escape our mothers, taken mistresses, sailed the wildest oceans, built shacks, ridden horses and motorcycles, written love letters and signed divorce papers, owned and lost businesses, read books, watched television, taught us lessons, screamed at us, taken us on vacations, showered us with gifts on our birthdays.

Our fathers, too, had their own sordid pasts and youths, times when they were secretive the way we now were, guarding their decisions and choices, making them in the privacy of young adulthood. Our fathers fell in love with our mothers and created us, then they lifted us into the air so we could kick our legs, then they took us to ballet class and to college and on road trips and to the beach and even once to France.

In France with our fathers, we stood before Notre Dame, and our fathers were quite old by then, and they thought they’d never see it, but they laid eyes upon it and their eyes glistened with tears and they said, “Isn’t this something?” and they lit a candle inside and prayed. With our fathers, we took an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where we watched the sun sink into the horizon, and we had tears in our eyes then because the moment was so beautiful, and we turned our faces to hide the tears from our fathers, who might have teased us for crying, but who also might have been crying at this, the most beautiful sunset they had yet seen.

*

The town we grew up in, all us girls, had cliffs, some called them bluffs. The jagged edges cut down to the water. There was no way to get down to swim, but there was much standing and staring at the water, many families lounging in the thick grass, kites being flown, dogs frolicking, etc.

If we moved away to new cities with their sharp skylines and yellow cabs, we called our fathers regularly. The phone calls were similar in that they had almost a script to them:

“Hi Daddio.”

“Hello, my daughter!”

“How are you?”

“Are you crying?”

“A little.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I hate it here. I hate everything about it. I miss you.”

“Come home.”

“No.”

“Breaks my heart when you call me like this.”

“I have to try to make it work out here.”

“How’s that boy you were dating?”

“He’s a monster. I think he’s in love with someone else by now.”

“Well fuck him, he’s a fucking fuck. And fuck her too. How’s work?”

“It’s awful, I hate them all.”

“They’re fucking fuckers too.”

“How are you and Mom?”

“She’s annoying as hell, but we’re good. She’s upstairs with the dogs.”

“How’s work?”

“It’s pretty good. My back has been acting up, so I’m trying to rest it.”

“I miss you.”

“Come home.”

“No.”

“Well, I’ve gotta get going. I’ve gotta let the dogs out.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

When those of us who moved away were homesick, we would think most of our days at the cliffs with our fathers. On those days we remembered, our fathers would drive us in their cars, in the intimacy of their cars, their cars which were full of their favorite father music, empty cans of soda, occasionally a napkin, and also full of the daily scents of our fathers.

“Do you know this song?” our fathers would ask, and we would shake our heads no. “It’s the best goddamn song. I love it.”

During the drive, the song would repeat itself, a created déjà vu, and the sun would cut through the windows, and we would feel in our hearts the fullness of our love for our fathers, and we would try to preserve the memory, attempt to crystallize the moment as if in amber, threaten ourselves internally with the idea that this might be the last time we saw our fathers, though most often it would not be until it was.

*

Our fathers drank coffee in the morning, and their breath smelled right after. Our fathers worked. They worked all over town in various capacities: lifting heavy rocks from the earth, stocking shelves, delivering meals, sitting at desks where they wrote and then filed very long reports or legal documents. Then our fathers would drive their cars home and eat their evening meals with our mothers, the dogs at their feet.

Evenings, our fathers slept like large mountains beneath their blankets, a size which was always larger than ours, no matter how much we had grown, as if our fathers were linked directly to our growing. When our fathers slept, we sat in the glow of the television which still flickered, the glow which was blue, and watched their chests for signs of moving, proof of breath.

Always, we knew, a day would come when their chests would not move, when their bodies would be fed back into the earth, when we would turn to grasp their hands and there would only be the thin air.

*

What, then, were our mothers like? Our mothers varied but were consistent: They were neurotic and picky, short and a bit plump, their faces sagging with wrinkles they tried to push up with lotions and serums and small twigs, their skins hanging over the tiny branches which were almost invisible beneath the weight of the burden.

Our mothers wore out-of-date tops and slacks, canvas tennis shoes, strange bracelets with trinkets which chimed whenever they gestured, which was frequently.

Our mothers also complained about our fathers in a chorus: He doesn’t do anything but watch television. I want to go on an adventure, and instead we watch the same television program night after night. He doesn’t talk enough. He talks too much. He won’t give me affection.

Our mothers were, perhaps, miserable. We were unsure. They seemed never to know their own internal workings. Our mothers were unmonitored volcanoes with mysterious pathways beneath their surface, full of chambers and conduits through which magma and lava would flow and then erratically erupt, demolishing everything around them, only ash clouds in the aftermath.

We were terrified we were also volcanoes, and that with some time we might erupt similarly. At present we were working on discovering ourselves, our truest selves, we were on a quest to find our own inner light and beauty and shine it back out into the world. We were determined not to have children and then resent them, determined not to erupt, but to ooze our lava slowly, lovingly, as with an ache, a bittersweet release that made our mothers look lunatic with their wild explosions.

This is why, then, we practiced very safe sex. This is why, then, also, we preferred our fathers.

*

Our fathers did have their rituals. Their shaving, their grocery store trips, their favorite television shows, their evening walks with the dogs or our mothers, our mothers who were still erupting from the little holes at the top of their heads, their own lava streaming down their faces, carving paths through their wrinkles.

Our fathers’ most important ritual was, though, of course, the ritual of ice cream at the cliffs.

Our fathers admired every sunset, their hearts soft at the streaking pastels, particularly the yellows which bled into electric oranges and then shifted into wild pinks.

Our fathers, in their love of sweets, preferred to eat ice cream as the sun sank its body into the horizon, and preferred to take the best bit of rocky road or mint chocolate chip as the sunset hit its climax, as the sky shone full of color, as the sun tucked itself down into the opposite hemisphere.

Our mothers would enjoy this ritual, too, but would sigh a bit at being taken from their motherly activities to travel across town to the cliffs, and would also watch our fathers’ bellies as they ate their ice creams, though our mothers ate their ice creams and we, too, also, ate our ice creams.

But the ritual did have a payoff. When the sun went neon red before sinking into the horizon, our fathers would nod, eyes glistening in appreciation, and say, “Isn’t this fucking beautiful? Life is good. Life is very good.”

And we would nod, all of us, the whole town, even the mothers, because our fathers’ word was good and also the law of the land.

*

We should have known something was different in the morning on the day our fathers died.

Our mothers were quite tender and teary-eyed over breakfast, holding our fathers’ hands tenderly in their own hands, cradling them as if they were precious objects which belonged in museums far away from our town. All day, we sat together and talked and laughed. There was no television, and there were no telephones or errands.

At one point, our fathers reached across the table to grasp our hands and look deep into our eyes and say, “I love you, you know.”

And we nodded and smiled because we thought it was a game, and we said back in a bright voice: “I love you too, Daddio!”

As the afternoon crept on, our mothers’ eyes seemed damp and we chose to overlook that detail, chose instead to focus on the niceness of walking the dogs together, of the way our fathers would sometimes pause to stare at our faces, as if trying to capture us, in such a way that we felt favored and adored, and we reflected that light back.

*

In the evening, we obtained our ice creams in the preferred flavors, and our mouths were parted over the cool dairy treats. We sat between our mothers and our fathers, all of us, the whole town on the cliffs with the dogs.

There was a strange bittersweet peace over the scene, as if our fathers knew something we did not. We can see it now, in retrospect. At the time, we believed our fathers were simply thinking fatherly thoughts or examining their own ancient knowledge and philosophies about work, love, life, and death, philosophies which they had expanded upon to us at length, philosophies which we had absorbed as if sponges, philosophies we later regurgitated to our friends as if they were ours and ours alone, as if our knowledge extended beyond our young bodies and into a time beyond us.

Our eyes were on the horizon, and the sunset was particularly brilliant: An onslaught of air pollution had caused streaks across the sky and a low-hanging bright red brilliance.

Our fathers were impressed, and nodded as they ate their ice creams.

“Isn’t this fucking beautiful? Life was good. Life was very good.”

We only realized it later, the past tense. Were their eyes damp? They were. Were their chests thumping? They must have been, hearts wild with knowing that the edge of life was so close.

Finally, explosively, the neon red sun sank fat into the line of the horizon, and our fathers, without word or warning, stood and moved to the edge of the cliff.

All of their bodies moved together as if in a mirror: Hundreds of old men in their polo shirts and khaki shorts and worn-out boat shoes staring out into the dusky sea, which crashed rough against the rocks with its dark turquoise violence.

Our fathers did look back once, to mutter or shout their love. Some of their throats were choked with what they were about to do, others bellowed as if they were stranded in deserts. Our confusion warped our faces. We looked at our mothers, who remained stoic, nodding, eyes leaking slow, tender tears, as if they had known all along.

Then, in small groups, our fathers hurled their bodies off of the cliff, those hundreds of them, in a stampede, airborne at first, but then crashing across the horizon to their deaths in the ocean, which foamed and roared around them, and masked the sound of their bodies hitting stinging sea or jagged black rock.

Hearts in our throats, we moved to stop them—we thought we might be able to save the closest fathers. But our mothers, still stoic, wrapped their arms around our torsos, rocked their forearms against the rage in our ribs, which flowered up out of our throats into violent screams that shook the air.

Our fathers kept jumping, one after the other, until there were none left.

Our throats were raw from grief, our skin saturated with the salt of our tears, our faces bloated with our own bellowing, the realization of our loss expanding from the pit of our stomachs out into our limbs.

We looked around at our fatherless world and wailed again, wild as animals, turning feral against our mothers, whose cheeks we ripped at with our nails, our blows landing at their weak old ribs with thuds.

“It was their time,” our mothers hushed back against our violence. “This is how it works. We’ll go next, and then one day, it will be your turn.”

We thought of our lives without our fathers. Already, we were frantic that we were beginning to forget their faces, their mannerisms, the way they gave their advice, the way their clothes smelled in the morning after sleep but before coffee, their favorite songs, the way they hugged us, their laughter, their anger, their tenderness, the way their voices bent over the phone lines as if to hug us when we wept from the other cities.

A part of ourselves had been amputated and taken away, as if an organ we were unaware of had been ripped from our bodies. Grief ripped open a hole in our worlds. A tremendous gash filled with our endless pain became the entire universe.

Some of us stood still as glass, in shock beside our mourning mothers. Some of us fell to our knees and sobbed, blurry-eyed and dumb with grief, screaming into the sky about our bleak futures.

Others of us stumbled to the cliff’s edge to look down, to see our fathers’ bodies collecting on the rocks, and then wailed. Fewer of us took our own flight, propelling our bodies off of the earth and into the air, briefly free and flying before plummeting to join our fathers in the sea.

SARAH ROSE ETTER is the author of the novel The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio), winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, The Cut,Guernica, Gulf Coast, and VICE. She lives in Austin, Texas.