His door was different. The rest of the doors in our modest home were hollow white composite, but my father’s door was deeply stained solid knotty pine. I spent a good amount of my early childhood on the floor outside that door, wondering when he was ever going to let me in.
It wasn’t my father’s bedroom door; he and my mother shared a bedroom upstairs. This was his study. That intriguing title (What was he studying?), the anomalous door, the strange staircase within, the amount of time he spent alone in there working on his book— it all helped to mystify that room for me as a young girl.
Some days I’d sit outside the door and play with Dad’s old matchbox cars on the hardwood floor. Other times I’d look through my picture books. Quite often, I’d just plant myself, Indian-style, with my back against the adjacent wall, staring at the closed door, finding figures in the patterns and shapes of the wood grain. Some faces I’d create in my mind were welcoming and others unnerving, much like the man who toiled inside.
In reality, my father’s study was not much more than a repurposed hallway. When the house was originally built, this passage brought you to a staircase, which led to the second floor. The owners before us decided to instead build stairs at the front of the house. They boarded up the ceiling between the two floors in the back hallway, but for some reason left the old staircase. What most people would consider a peculiar eyesore, Dad saw as an opportunity. He walled in the hallway to nowhere and put up a door, thus creating his study. The stairs themselves became a sort of built-in bookcase for his many volumes.
So many books.
My father was a high school English teacher during the school year and a frustrated writer in the summer. Those hot months of my sixth year, flipping through my many stories of Christopher Robin and Pooh, provide my first solid memories.
Occasionally, I would knock and ask if I could come in.
“But Anne,” he would say, “I’m writing; you know that. Besides, there’s no room for you to sit.”
“I’ll be quiet. Daddy, I promise. I’ll just read,” I’d assure him. “And I can sit on the red chair.”
He’d open the door wide enough for me to see that the leather high-back chair was already occupied by a few stacks of books. I’d look back at him as if to say, You could move the books, couldn’t you? Aren’t I more important? He never had to answer because I never actually asked.
I had my own little library as well. The books came mostly from my father, of course. For each noteworthy event, such as birthdays and holidays, there would be a book. My mother would buy me a separate gift, either a toy or some clothes, but with Dad it was always a book, and I did not mind in the least. And these books were never merely random selections or current popular titles. He would find the perfectly matched book for every occasion. So for my first dance recital I would get Angelina Ballerina; for my pre-K graduation it was Oh, the Places You’ll Go.
But my favorite part about each gift was not the book itself. What meant the most to me were the inscriptions. Rather than spending money on a separate card that would just get lost or discarded, my father would elucidate on the inside cover of each book, instead. For instance, for my birthday that fifth year, Dad gave me A Light in the Attic. On the inside cover he wrote: “My Dearest Anne, may this book shed light in the attic of your mind, where words and stories always shine as bright as your smile. Love, Daddy.” These notes were the only evidence of my father revealing anything resembling a sentimental emotion. I think that’s what made me want to please him more.
While Mom wasn’t home much because of her night shift at the county hospital, the time she did spend with us was always brimming with bubbly love. Hugs, baked treats, and words of encouragement were just normal parts of her routine. Perhaps it was her natural warm Columbian culture, or maybe she was just making up for missed time. Either way, her love for me was never in question, and therefore easy to take for granted. Those inscriptions from my father, on the other hand, I so cherished because they were scarce intimations from a closed off man.
It’s not to say Dad was completely absent. He did his duties after school as the lone present parent. Dinners were prepared (I remember lots of stews and other pressure-cooked concoctions), baths were drawn (no bubbles in fear of urinary tract infections), one cookie with milk for desert, and then there was bedtime.
He would actually sit next to me in my bed to read me my nightly story. I could always smell the Palmolive on his hands from doing the dishes. I would graze my cheek against his as I settled myself into the pillows, just so I could feel the tiny stubbles that had poked through since his morning shave.
As he read, my father would slightly alter his intonations to adjust for the changing characters. Nothing overly theatrical, but compared to his normal steady temperament, it was a riot for me to hear. I never laughed or let on how amusing I found his voices, in fear that he might get embarrassed and stop. And when reading, Dad would always follow along with his pointer-finger, not because he needed help keeping place, rather he was hoping that it would help me make out the words.
By the time I was five-and-a-half, I could tell my father what was going to happen before he read it aloud. Assuming that I just had remembered the story from the last time we’d read it, he would test me with a new book. Dad would start the sentence and I’d finish, getting a few words wrong but understanding the gist of the story. His little girl was learning to read and he was pleased as punch—one of his favorite expressions. Once I witnessed his pride in my achievement, it became my only goal to inspire it further. So for Christmas that year, I went for the zenith.
There had been this boxed set of leather-bound literary classics for young people at our local bookstore. Simplified editions of Black Beauty, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the like. For years, each time we perused the shop, Daddy would saunter past that box, running his thumb along the edge like most fathers would a Corvette, and he’d say, “One day, Anne, one day this will be yours.” So in my letter to Santa, I wrote one lone item. My mom protested, explaining to me that I needed include more ideas, that maybe Santa’s elves couldn’t make all those books in time. Daddy just folded up the New York Times and sipped his tea with a grin. I was asking for real books. Not picture books, but time-honored masterpieces, even if they were watered down for kids.
Sure enough the set of books awaited me under the tree, wrapped in rigid brown paper and adorned with a red velvet bow. There were twelve hardcover books in all. The first one I dove into was Anne of Green Gables, because of the protagonist’s name, of course. That night my feet barely hit the steps on my way up for my bedtime story with Daddy.
It did not go as expected.
I probably didn’t realize it all that night, but it slowly became evident to me that it wasn’t my reading that had improved; it was my analysis of the pictures. Apparently I had become so proficient at deciphering the illustrator’s interpretations, coupled with a growing identification of the recycled plot points of children’s book, that I could pretty much guess what was going to happen next in the story with relative accuracy.
Those nights with my father and Anne were torturous. Without the pictures, not only was I unable to read as well as I had done previously, but I was just not enamored with the process of reading in general. This confused my father and it frightened me. How could I tell him, this lover of literature, that it wasn’t the words I craved but actually the pictures? It was our only time together, and if we lost that special nighttime ritual, I was convinced I’d be cast aside like toy car with a missing wheel.
I started to make excuses at night. I was tired. My belly was hurting. My eyes were hurting. Anne and her eleven bound friends lay unopened. I finally spilled the beans when Dad set up an appointment with the optometrist.
“I like pictures!” I yelled on the way home from church one Sunday. This is something I could never have done without Mom present for protection. “Those books have no pictures.”
“But that was the point, Anne,” he said, bewildered, looking back at me in the rearview mirror. “That’s why you asked for those books in the first place.”
“I don’t like it,” I said, looking out the window at the people spilling out of the bakery, wishing I were online for a cookie instead of in that car.
“You don’t like what?”
“Reading!” I said after swallowing hard. “It’s boring.” By the time I finally lifted my gaze from the window, my father’s eyes were directed forward on the road. That was the end of the conversation and he never looked back again. He never saw the tiny rivulets streaming down my face.
Dad still tucked me in at night, but there where no more stories. The boxed set of children’s classics was gone. Occasionally he would offer to read some of my old picture books, but I was too ashamed and certain he was only half-heartedly going through the motions. He’d reach over so quickly to turn off the lamp on my bedside table, that I’d hardly get a chance to catch a whiff of the dish soap. I certainly never got to bristle his stubble.
I was lost. Some days I was despondent and then others I’d be defiant.
One day I started to make a ruckus outside my father’s door while he was writing. I smashed the die-cast metal cars together, enacting a grand pile-up of catastrophic proportions. He came out from his hallowed chamber, yelling, “Those are my childhood possessions! Have some respect for other people’s property.”
“You gave them to me!” I quipped back, even without Mommy around for back up. “Doesn’t that make them my property?” Dad just puffed and slammed his door on me. I knew he wasn’t upset about the cars. I had distracted him from his precious book, and I’m not sure I didn’t mean to.
Then came my sixth birthday. The occasion brought a little joy back into the house, but that evening after cake came a small Band-Aid in the healing of wounds. Mommy had given me this beautiful grey and black plaid dress, along with a doll clothed in the exact same outfit. She knew someone from the hospital who was also a seamstress on the side, and Mommy had always wanted a doll with coordinating ensembles when she was little.
I had seen Dad’s card taped to a present, but I put it off out of fear, I guess. This would be the first gift since my whole reading meltdown and for once, I wasn’t sure what to expect. After opening the presents from my extended family, his was the only one remaining. It was a heavy, huge book entitled: A Big Book for Little Eyes: Children’s Illustrations. There were 240 pages of classic and noteworthy illustrations from children’s books around the world. I flipped through the pages. The book hardly contained any words.
I turned back to the inside cover for Daddy’s inscription. It read “Happy Birthday. Love, Daddy.” Not much, but I looked at it as a start. At least it still said “Love.”
My fits outside his door ceased. I began copying illustrations from my book onto some manila construction paper I’d smuggled home from school. I started out with crayons but they were too cumbersome and indiscriminate, so I moved onto markers and then finally pencils.
“Did you trace that?” my father asked me one day when he emerged from his study for a snack.
“Nope,” I said, holding the book up to him for comparison.
Dad smiled. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Really?” My face almost couldn’t fit my smile.
Days passed and my drawing continued to evolve. My nighttime ritual with Daddy began to include a lot more scrubbing at the sink, in an effort to rid my hands of the black ink stains from my pens.
Before I knew it, it was Christmastime again. One Sunday afternoon Mom and I were in the kitchen dropping red and green sprinkles on our sugar cookies. She was begging me to write my letter to Santa, but my heart just wasn’t in it, after the fiasco from last year. “What six-year-old says, Fiasco?’” my mother said, shaking her head. She stuck her finger in the white icing and smudged some on my nose. I scooped up some cookie dough and chased her around the table. The kitchen was quickly filled with laughter.
A series of crashes came from the study. I held my breath as my father flung his door open and burst through the kitchen, a stack of white paper in his hand. “I give up!” Dad screamed as stormed into the living room and kicked over the metal screen in front of the fireplace. Before I knew it, his papers fed the hungry flames and he was through the front door and out into the snowy night. My mother wiped the icing from my nose as the Partridge family sang, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” on the stereo.
After dinner that night, my father’s door was still open, and when I peeked inside, I saw all the books that belonged on the staircase/bookshelf scattered about the floor. Without the company of the books, it truly looked disconcerting, this stairway to nowhere.
My mother was busy with the dishes, so I picked up the paper and pens off my normal spot on the floor and brought them into the study. I started to draw a picture of the family decorating the Christmas tree; Mom was putting on the tinsel while I sat nestled on Dad’s shoulders, trying to place the star. I must have fallen asleep at his desk before I finished, because I woke up slightly when he finally came home and carried me up to my room. As he tucked me into bed that night, instead of Palmolive, I remember another strong odor coming from his breath. Something sweet and pungent.
I whispered to him with closed eyes, “I’m sorry if I ruined your book, the way I’m always distracting you all the time.”
“No, Anne, no,” he whispered back, kissing me on the forehead. His collar smelled of smoke.
On Christmas morning, there were no books waiting for me under the tree. Not a single book. Most kids across America were scouting out toys, dolls, and games to tear into, but I was eager to find a book, hoping that my connection with my father was still intact, even if just hanging by a thread. It was the end of an era.
But it was also the start of a new one.
That was the year Dad gave me my first art set. Sketch pads. Pastels. Watercolors. Charcoal pencils.
“Santa told me you’ve been bad this year,” he said that morning through a smile. “Said I should give you coal for Christmas. Well, I figured those pencils might count.”
I hugged him so hard that my mother was afraid I might break him. In my stocking was a strange black and white photograph of what looked like a fish in a bowl. Mom told me it was a picture of my baby sister in her belly. It was the best Christmas ever.
But the real gift came a few days later while Dad and I were still home on vacation. I was on the floor, trying to figure out how to draw eyeballs that didn’t look all creepy or cartoonish, when I heard my father’s door open.
“You busy?” he asked, standing in the doorway.
I held up my sketchpad for inspection.
“Alice,” he tried, “from Wonderland?”
“Anne,” I responded, “from Green Gables.” I dropped my pad. “I’m not busy. Why?”
“You think you could help me out with something?” he asked, and stepped to the side of his door.
“Me? In there?”
He nodded and went back inside the study. “You might want to bring that pad with you.”
I crawled up onto Dad’s lap as he was sharpening some pencils at his grand desk. He opened up a marble notebook, which revealed his handwriting. “You see, I finally figured out why I was having so much trouble with my book,” he said to me.
“Mm. Because Mommy and me were always making noise outside?” I surmised.
“No,” he said gently, opening my sketchpad to a fresh page.
I was confused. “Then what was it?”
“My story,” he said, “it was missing pictures.”
My father ruffled my hair with his big hand and handed me a pencil.