the people who live here :: rebecca rotert

Mom is doing makeup for the opera and dad tags along. Beverly Sills has been brought in for the role of Lucia de Lamermoor and she has packed the house. Mom draws wrinkles on a large tenor while the great opera singer is called to the stage. The page is growing urgent. It’s clear Miss Sills will miss her entrance if she doesn’t show up soon. Mom stops working and listens, wondering what’s become of her. A crewmember blows by and says they found her in the green room, apparently smitten to the point of distraction by a big strapping cowboy, my father, who she’d stumbled upon backstage. Bill Rotert, mom would scold, later, on their drive home.

He continued to go to the opera with her even after she stopped doing makeup. For the next thirty years he went, even though he dreaded it – the horrible seats, the story he couldn’t understand, the required suit and tie – and he never let on. Except to us kids. When they would cheerfully announce that they were headed to the opera, he would make a face like he was about to undergo a spinal tap procedure. But to her, he remained willing, enthusiastic even. It was one of the things I loved most about their love, the emotional concessions they made. I will not only go to the opera with you, but I will be happy about it, so that your joy can flow uninterrupted.

Tonight, mom’s going to the opera with an old friend, a fellow singer and widow, and I stay home with dad. We don’t leave him alone anymore. Without mom he’s terrified, and my presence helps take the edge off, though it doesn’t do much.

Mom around here somewhere? He asks. I tell him she’s at the opera. He looks at the window then back at me. Is mom around?

It’s a beautiful evening and I ask him to walk outside. We look at the yellow rose bush, the bleeding hearts and the rhododendron. His face lights up, his mouth opens a little in amazement. Look at that, he says over and over. Isn’t that real pretty? He slowly bends over the irises, as uncertain as if he were on a cliff, leaning out to retrieve a balloon. Did you see this one here? He asks.

When he was well, and we would show him something interesting or beautiful his famous question was always, What does it do? And we would say, Oh dad, it doesn’t DO anything! It’s just beautiful.

Now he is as intoxicated by this old garden as one who has never seen a flower in his life. He doesn’t lock up in the face of beauty. He doesn’t repeat, get stuck in a loop; there’s no terror, anxiety, confusion. He doesn’t ask where he is. Sometimes I think, if I could always have beauty on hand for him, he might be okay.

On some level, I understand getting stuck. Lately I’ve been unable to sleep. I’m sober but I don’t feel like being sober anymore, doing the work of it. Nor do I feel like doing the work of being an addict. I circle around this neural cage for hours.

I realize I can’t know what his brain feels like but I keep trying to understand how it operates. I’ve seen the images – the frazzled neurons, the moth-eaten hemispheres – and I can’t imagine trying to think, remember and react in this decimated geography. My thoughts travel along the same known roads hour after hour, while his must be a disorienting game of leapfrog.

Beauty pulls him into a brand new place, one that does not require memory. This might be at the heart of beauty: it doesn’t require you to remember; it doesn’t even require you to be you.

We come to the end of the garden and I decide that we should move to the front yard. There is more to see. I can hold him here longer, give him a break from his sticky, tangled mind.

We walk around the house to the front and I show him the peonies – pink and white, obscenely luscious. He looks at them and nods. He looks out at the street, at the cars speeding by. He looks over at the neighbor’s house, at a car full of young men in the driveway, with their windows down, the bass so loud it rattles our screen door. I show him the hydrangea. He nods without looking at it. I’m losing him to the tangles, I can tell. Let’s sit down, I say. He does, tentatively, still the reluctant good sport. He and mom have sat on this porch for thirty-two years but without her, every move he makes, even this, appears foreign and halting. The chair is uncomfortable to him; he sits awkwardly on the edge. He looks at the men in the driveway next door, he looks at the traffic moving too fast. He is at the opera and he doesn’t understand the story.

I point to the huge American Chestnut in our front yard and tell him there used to be a swing on that horizontal branch, that it had been my favorite place, that he had hung it there. He looks up at the branch. I expect, he says, as though it sounds like a reasonable, fatherly thing to do.

These days he tests his memory more against probability than the actual contents of his mind. The question is no longer whether he remembers, but whether something seems plausible.

Have you been inside? He asks.

I look at him and try to think fast. There are answers that comfort and answers that increase his confusion. I’m aware I’m taking too much time. Yes, I say.

Have they kept the place up? He asks, interested.

Yes. It’s great, I tell him. Lots of room. Woodwork. I suddenly run out of things to say.

You know anything about the people who live here?

My routine strategy is to go along with whatever narrative he’s stumbled upon but there comes a point when that tactic can create a new knot of confusion.

You live here. With mom.

He looks at me like I haven’t yet answered the question.

You’ve been here, let’s see, thirty- two years. The tone I have chosen is: Isn’t that an interesting fact! I’m careful to siphon out any bit of surprise, anything that smacks of you-should-know-this. I know he absorbs tone if not information. Tone is everything. So, even though it feels like my heart is shaking, it’s important to sound cheerful and certain. My father’s entire sense of safety, in this moment, rests on my ability to absorb my sadness, my surprise, and sound like everything is fine. As the Buddhists say, in all manner of all things, all is well.

Have you been inside? He asks again.

When he was well, his brain ticked along incessantly, always hooked into a problem, real or invented. On holidays, when even dad was required to go to church, he would sit there and count things – rafters, fixtures, tiles, pews, statues, people – and on the walk home give a full accounting. Mother would listen to him, smile, and then raise her eyebrows at us kids, as if to say, well isn’t that impressive.

I don’t recognize his mind now. I don’t know where it goes, how it works—and don’t know why I want to figure it out. So that I can find a way for him to feel safe, I think, discover a magic phrase that transports him, provides a sense of peace. It’s what I want for him. It’s what I want for me. I want to avoid the hot spots in my own head that fill me with terror and move quickly to the places where I can feel peace and relief, like drinking used to do. What’s more, I want to believe that peace is at the heart of our true natures, dad’s and mine, that we somehow deserve it.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to go home. It’s his greatest desire, day after day: to go home. It’s not a comfort that he is home. He can’t trust this because what he sees around him no longer corresponds to his memories. Home is familiarity, certainty, a fixed point, where, in the brutal tide of entropy, nothing changes. Without memory, there is no home. I think of the times I’ve felt like I was home even though the physical location was foreign to me and I extract that home, then, is certainty of the self, a knowledge that wherever you are, you are home, because the self is the only constant.

At the end of my drinking, I longed for home and felt it nowhere because I had no home inside myself. My mind, the vehicle of myself, was a runaway train. The only certainty I had then was that I could not stop drinking when I started, and once it began all my boundaries dissolved. I could dance, sing, have sex. And I could count on the holes in my memory the next day. I lay in bed, aching and parched, with the terrible awareness that whole hours had slid into these black holes like a stream of rainwater into the gutter. And all the answers I wanted went the way of the hours. Where did I leave my car? What happened last night?

The cat greets us at the door. Hey kitty, dad says, and I feel a small flood of relief. I find a nature program on television and we sit down to watch. I need a break. From him, from how I feel, from trying. The low-grade guilt that always accompanies these feelings wanders in, predictably. But he loves the vibrant green leaf filling the screen and he loves the little green worm that the leaf has trapped with its invisible, sticky hairs.

We’ve watched programs like this together for as long as I can remember, which I love, but that feeling is mixed with terror. For every gazelle leaping expertly across a plain, there’s a weak one getting picked off by a lion.

Now we are watching a giant slow-moving water buffalo surrounded by Komodo dragons. They are circling in. It’s hard to tell if the water buffalo is clueless, paralyzed or indifferent to what he’s got coming. The four dragons wait, watch, advance with slow fluid precision.

I start to feel anxious, upset. I don’t want to see this. I look at dad. He is leaning forward in his seat, smiling slightly. When I was young this made me so mad. I’d sit there in a stew of terror and sadness for the animal, and feel angry that my dad seemed to enjoy it. He, of course, would see my little storm brewing and say, It’s just nature, Bec. Nature’s a bitch. This was his version of comfort and I didn’t bite. That frustrated him. I know he believed that if I could master my emotional responses, I could do anything. Instead I showed great promise for being overly sensitive, prone to weeping, too attuned to injustice. Nothing like him, in other words. Just as the water buffalo is about to get the business, as dad would say, he turns to me, perhaps to deliver the ‘Nature is a Bitch’ lesson again. Instead he says, You know anything about the people who live here?

I don’t, I tell him. I used to.

This essay was originally published in The New York Times as The Mysteries of My Father's Mind