Statue of Liberty

One of my fondest memories is of the time my father took my brother and I to the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t a special occasion, not a holiday trip or anyone’s birthday, as far as I know it was just something my dad decided to do. I don’t remember when it was, but I was young, probably nine or ten, which would put it around 2009. It was warm but not stiflingly hot, and for some reason I feel like it must’ve been June. We spent the day in Manhattan, visited the butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum where the butterflies land right on you and it’s humid and the air is sugary thick with the flapping of so many small wings. We had lunch at a sci-fi-themed restaurant with a UFO elevator which delighted my brother and I, and we ate toasted cinnamon cashews in paper cones from a vendor on the street and took a red boat to Liberty Island in the afternoon just before the monument closed.

My dad had tickets; I don’t remember anyone else coming up with us. The staircase was dim and narrow and we climbed up to the crown, the highest you could go at the time, and looked out at the harbor. It was sparkling, rippling like a sheet in the summer wind, and boats left tracks in the water that faded. High-rise buildings with blue-glass windows were lit up gold with the late afternoon sun, and the people walking around below looked impossibly small, and my dad grabbed the pole in the middle of the tiny observation room and shook it and the whole thing shook, and I shriek-laughed with delight. We ate huge dollar slices of hot pizza and walked back through what felt like miles of breeze-tunnels formed by the tall buildings lining the sidewalk as the sun was going down and the air was turning blue. I fell asleep on the way home, as I am wont to do in moving cars, lulled to sleep by the low rumble of the wheels on the highway and the streetlight beams slanting in at intervals through the indigo night.

I don’t think of this memory often. It makes me uneasy now. I don’t know what to do with it, can’t quite get a handle on it, what it means in the context of the rest of my life.

See, the tough thing about this Manhattan day trip is that it contradicts with the prevailing narrative of my childhood. My parents were divorced; my brother and I saw our father every Wednesday and every other weekend. And everything we loved, everything we cared about and had fun doing was at our mother’s house. Going to our father’s felt like a strange and uncomfortable interruption of our real lives to stay in a house that wasn’t ours, at the mercy of an incomprehensible and capricious man and his wretched wife who never seemed to want us around anyway, and besides were mostly busy raising their new triplets. Our time there got worse and worse until practically the only things we did with our father were chores.

The memory of that day has since been crowded out by innumerable others. My father screaming at my brother after he found a cigarette butt at the bottom of the driveway and was convinced his twelve-year-old son was smoking. Waking us up at 6AM and forcing us to get haircuts, tears stinging my eyes as he made the stylist straighten my curly hair. Long drives without a single word. His gift to me for my fourteenth birthday, tickets to Six Flags after I had said that I hated roller coasters. Screaming at me to clean up my vomit when he forced me to eat peas. Sneaking down to my room to read during Thanksgiving dinner. A solemn conversation after I came out to him in which he told me not to tell my stepmother or anyone else in the family. The way my tears blurred the view of the street as I stared out the window just last year while he was lecturing me about the unemployability of my choice of major. The shock of learning that he’d moved without telling us, six months before, and thrown out all our things.

I don’t speak to my father anymore. I decided, finally, that him having one foot in my life was more painful than him being completely out of it, that he just constantly made me feel terrible. I had spent so long trying to reach out and keep a relationship going that finally cutting it off this year felt like a relief, a gift to myself.

My brother and I have settled on a vision of our childhood that’s wholly miserable, but we both know that wasn’t really the case. We did hate it at our dad’s house, and our stepmom was a cruel harpy, and the food was scant and terrible, and there were incomprehensible and unspoken rules that we were bound by without understanding why. But painting it as uniformly horrible is just a way to cope with the difficult fact that it wasn’t, that there were these inscrutable bright spots, like the day in Manhattan, or when our father started watching Doctor Who with us, or when he brought us to the apple orchard every year or took us deep-sea fishing. He drove forty minutes to buy me a replacement T-shirt after I got puked on by a kid at my cousin’s birthday party. How to make sense of a man who oscillated between these extremes? Who could be so cruel but also so caring? It’s more than a child’s mind can handle; I don’t even really understand it now. I wish I could say whether the good stuff or the bad stuff was the norm, which was the exception and which was the rule, but even now it’s hard to say, it all sticks in my mind so vividly, no top or bottom in sight.

I don’t know if my father stopped loving us, or maybe he just forgot how, but for one day in June he remembered, and he took us to see the Statue of Liberty. And even though it makes me sad and uncomfortable to think about in the context of everything that happened after, and even before, I’m grateful to him for that one perfect day. People are more complex than we can bear to think about. And for all the other memories he gave me, I can’t deny that he gave me that one too, that one day where I really believed that he loved us and could treat us right. But then it was easy to believe anything standing at the top of the Statue of Liberty and looking down at the New York Harbor, where the water looked like rippling silver and the people looked like ants.

My sister called at 3AM
Just last December
She told me how you’d died at last, at last
And that morning at the racetrack was one thing I remembered

I turned it over in my mind
Like a living Chinese finger trap
Seaweed and Indiana sawgrass
Pale green things, pale green things

– The Mountain Goats