cruising
by Melissa Rosato
My father cruised through my childhood like scenery: Ever present, but silent and overlooked. Mom fought the cable company, called the plumber, advised her children on scraped knees and school yard brawls; and later, dating and academics. She was fierce, trying to be both mother and father, all wrapped into one. It was clear she had given up on dad. He had implied tasks, like trash detail and driving. Otherwise, he was a silent presence at dinner, a shadow in the mornings, shaving in his small mirror, looking lost in the pastel pink bathroom with embroidery-edged hand towels; and, ridiculous on the flowery bedspread and lace-edged pillows on his own bed.
But one day, inexplicably, he woke up. We were on a family trip to Virginia Beach, and dad was driving, of course. Mom had told him where we were going and he was silently obeying, whistling that same tune over and over, while we ignored him. We were deep in one of our conversations, full of private jokes and personal references that dad wasn’t privy to. Mom was twisted around in the passenger seat, her seatbelt sliding off her right shoulder, laughing at something my sister had said.
Dad burst out of his lane with a swift turn of the wheel and pulled up in front of a little bungalow by the roadside. He started beeping the horn, frantically, waving like a maniac to three people lined up in folding chairs on their lawn, like three crayons in a box of eight. The only man, a big gentleman with a large paunch, was clutching a plastic cup—one of those thin clear plastic jobs— in his meaty hand. The woman sitting next to him had squeezed wide thighs into a lawn chair that would take some finesse to unstick from her rear end when the time came. To her right, a more wrinkled, shrunken version of herself sat bent.
Does dad know these people? I thought. How? We were hundreds of miles from home. Dad kept honking the horn in that excited way people did when they recognized someone on the street. I could tell the people were confused, too, but dad managed to get a half-hearted wave from the big guy, who squinted worriedly, before dad sped away, whistling like a madman and looking satisfied. Mom quizzed him like it was the Inquisition, but dad gave cryptic answers. Mom fumed at her sudden loss of control, resettling herself in her bucket seat, and plucking at her pants furiously for imagined lint.
Suddenly, my parents were strangers. My father, perhaps he started life merely hesitant, a bit unsure, before becoming this henpecked version of himself. As his daughter, of course, I resented him. But a stranger garners sympathy. Mom was always moving, talking, doing— sure – and in her motherly busyness I merely reacted. As mother and daughter, we were clearly defined. But, in her brief silence now in the car, I sensed every doubt she had ever had— the seconds before she opened her eyes in bed each morning— a time when some people meditated, practicing the art of just being; and others, who had not yet reached a state of just being, yearned.
About the Author: Melissa Rosato is a family physician, writer, bicyclist, Philadelphia enthusiast, and mother, in no particular order and hopefully with some flair. She has published creative non-fiction essays about doctoring and breaking up in Intima and Barnstorm. She also writes fiction and poetry, sings and dances, always with aplomb and sometimes flair.