Stories My Father Tells

Ellene Glenn Moore

Sitting at my dining room, this is what my father says¹: In the spring of 2003, eighteen years ago precisely, he travels to the Middle East with a delegation tasked with setting up a provisional government in Iraq. The rest of us out here in the world don’t yet know a provisional government will be necessary; the Invasion of Iraq is several days away, Baghdad bustling, the floors of the Republican Palace still clear of the sleeping, half-dressed forms of US diplomats and aides and political attaches getting their shuteye while the city heaves. My father’s group stages in Kuwait at a defunct resort overtaken by US military officials, which is routinely bombed during their stay. A man not immediately attached to the group is killed on the periphery. While he still has sure access to a phone² my father calls my mother to tell her that he is there, in Kuwait, waiting to enter a war zone where the discernible future may shrink from years to weeks to days to hours to seconds. He won’t be dramatic, but he believes that when my mother tells us where he is³ we will, according to our age and ability, connect whatever dots we can and feel the appropriate sense of gravity.⁴ Then he deploys to Baghdad, not knowing (it is unknowable) that a member of his group, left behind to man the staging area, will be gunned down mere days later. After the Fall of Baghdad my father sleeps on the floor of Hussein’s palace in between work sessions, eating MREs, watching the sun fade, doing what has been asked of him. He finally gets his hands on a satphone. He will never mention the destruction that surrounds this bubble while he talks to his children, but he calls so we can at least know he is alive,⁵ he is thinking about us. My father walks to the only place he can get reception, into the courtyard that turns its back on the arms of Tigris. My mother picks up. I am asleep. My brother begins a sonatina for clarinet, juvenile warbling that literally has to leave this earth before reaching my father’s ears. In the middle of a musical phrase, the line goes dead. My father returns the satphone to its proprietor. He stands in the abrupt silence.⁶ Fortifications are going up, poured concrete, blast walls, barbed wire, the Arbataash Tamuz Bridge locked down by occupying Coalition forces, keeping out, or keeping in, the difference already as indistinguishable⁷ as one mortar plume from another.

¹This is what I know: When my parents divorced, my father moved into an apartment just blocks from our home, and my mother moved my middle brother and me to another city altogether. My father says he called often and urgently, laying siege to my mother’s efforts at alienation. Once, she told him I was asleep, even though it was nearly lunch time. Once, my brother was playing the clarinet for him when the call ended abruptly, unaccountably. I know this because in these recent years, now that we’ve started talking again, my father has mentioned these details a thousand times. Over and over again he asks for me and my mother tells him I am asleep. Over and over my brother plays a halting sonatina before the line goes dead.

²Somewhere a vague memory stretches. Hiding in my room when the phone rings. Hearing my brother play his clarinet into the receiver. There is nothing crisp or pat about these images: I imagine this interlude taking place in our old home on East Capitol Street, in the light-filled living room at the front of the house where my brother set up his music stand, or in the white stucco house on the hill where I lay on the carpet in my room under the eaves, or in a nebulous space that exists in my mind only for the span of a phone call cut short before folding in on itself and disappearing to wherever unasked-for dreams go when they’ve run their course.

³I think I am remembering now: keeping my father at arm’s length, rebuffing, through my mother, my father’s many calls, and perhaps even this call in particular. I remember the panic rising in my stomach as my mother and I looked at the phone and at each other, somehow intuiting that it must be my father calling. I remember feeling indignant that he would put me in the position of having to make a statement, of having to say “No.” I remember thinking why can’t he just leave me alone. I remember my mother telling me to go upstairs, that she would handle it, like this was her job as my mother, to protect me from my father who was calling to say hello, and in that hello force me to feel guilt for all the hellos I had already rejected. I clambered up the steps, past the high pile rugs shaped like autumn leaves, though it is March, and hear my mother spit her own hello into the phone. 

⁴Yes. I do remember. The exact quality of the light filtering up the basement stairs, dust motes billowing over the carpet, from the spotty window; the side of my mother’s expression muted by shadow as she walked into the alcove with the blue ceiling; how she looked at me to say with a laugh “Your father just called to say he was in Kuwait”; the scorn implied by her demeanor. I see how my mother trained me to look for intent pooling beneath a placid surface. I sense there is a joke being made, an invitation to contempt, but I can’t quite get there—don’t quite grasp the comedy—can’t quite dismantle the sentence “Your father just called to say he is in Kuwait” into the rhetorical components of a joke—so my impotent “hum” in response reaches for comic catharsis but provides no relief, which will become another premise for another future joke that I will also not understand. 

⁵I think of Anne Carson sitting on her porch as her brother’s death approaches her from across the ocean. But she is not sitting on the porch; she is sitting at her desk, writing about her brother’s death—or, more accurately, her ignorance of it—or, more accurately, the moment she becomes aware of it, not of her brother’s death but of her now-expired ignorance, and the strange mix of grief for her brother and grief for her own ignorance, for ignorance never really protects us from grief the way we think it might. I attempt to use this allegory to explain to my brother how I now feel, our father’s experience approaching me from across oceans and years to visit me now at my dining room table, but my brother has not read any Anne Carson, and so explaining my feelings by way of explaining this unrelated text is a little like explaining the punchline of a joke, only unlike my mother I am desperate for him to understand, to know what I now know.

⁶My brother remembers none of this. He does understand my disquiet, though, explaining back to me that “either the news of the full truth of the situation travels years through time before it gets to me today, or Dad had to travel halfway around the world before a bad confrontation finally found him over the phone (ironically while he was in the middle of a far more perilous situation). That either way, the idea that awful truths are out there, lying in wait for their time to spring on us, is indeed disturbing.” These are my brother’s exact words. I ask him to stop writing my essay for me.

⁷Though this after-dinner conversation only took place several months ago, already these details are being consigned to myth, picked over by my own desire to grasp their relevance. What I know is this: My father’s eyes are running over, closed for a moment as though in sleep. Or perhaps it is I who cries, or sleeps, or draws myself up the steps into spring light 6000 miles and 18 years from whatever is happening on the other end of the phone.