Reverse Engineering My Father

I was seventeen years old the first time I saw the whites of my dad’s eyes. My parents had cornered me in our basement family room, insisting that I sign a behavioral contract—my only option, they said, to continue living under their roof. It was six in the evening, and I was still hungover from the previous night out drinking with my cousins. Skipping school and sleeping all day had not cured my aching head or queasy stomach.

“Seven months. Seven months, and I am out of here,” I thought, as I boldly stared through my mother’s eyes. I constantly counted down the days. I could not wait to ship out to the Army and leave small town Connecticut behind.

“How can they not see that everything is under control? Why do they have to make mountains out of molehills anyway?” Fully exasperated, I stood up abruptly, leaving the unsigned contract on the coffee table. I breezed past my mother who stood, mouth agape, in disbelief. My father, ill-equipped, steadied himself. I was the fourth and final daughter. Although my sisters had presented my parents with a fair number of challenges, nothing could have prepared them for this level of insolence.

I can still see my dad assuming his stance. Feet shoulder-width apart and knees slightly bent—for balance and agility I suppose. His arms behind his back, hands firmly gripping the opposite wrist—his way of restraining himself. He had the urge to throttle me, I’m sure, but had the foresight to know that would lead nowhere. The bass in his voice reverberated in our sparse basement, shaking the furniture with each bellow. Somehow, I stood there, ghostly and unconcerned.

“Where do you think you are going? Where do you think you are going?” As my dad repeated himself, his tone deepened to his serious and intimidating voice, the one he reserved for telephone calls and first impressions. Only this time, there was an unfamiliar edge of anger and disgust.

My dad’s eyes are shaped and sized like shelled almonds. His left eye is slightly smaller than his right when he is most awake. As he gets sleepy or weary, his left eye begins to progressively shrink, until it appears as if he is winking. As I stood face to face with my father that evening, his eyes were not at all diminutive. They were substantial and spherical. His large black pupils appeared dilated and centered on glassy white marbles. In that instant, his eyes were as imposing as his voice. My five-foot, five inch, medium-statured, mild-tempered father was suddenly tempestuously towering over me. Despite all this, I remained inexpressive as I made my way past my father, up the basement stairs, and out of my parents’ home.

Sometimes, during my most introspective moments, I study the snapshot my mind holds of my dad as his eyes are at their widest. I listen closely to the recording locked in my memory as his booming voice plays back. And I watch and re-watch his movements that I have stored carefully in my heart, sometimes in slow motion and sometimes sped up. I comb through the minutiae trying to make sense of my dad.

My father is a first generation Filipino American. His father emigrated from the Philippines through enlisting in the United States Navy. My dad and his twin brother were born in Hawaii, and in 1938, as toddlers, traveled by rail from California to New York with my Filipino grandmother. Family has always been very important to my father, and my Filipino relatives were more present in my life growing up than my mother’s Daughter of the Mayflower side of the family.

Aside from their size and shape, my dad’s eyes are also very expressive. I know this from having seen his eyes peer over a newspaper and being able to gauge his mood. Subtleties that perhaps only a daughter could know. Happiness. Exhaustion. Disappointment. Goofiness. Love. Guilt. Care. Expectation. Nuances only this daughter could know. Anger. Disgust.

I recognize now that the nuances for which I took credit might have been misinterpreted. What if his physical and emotional transformation that night had been a result of his feeling a loss of control? What if my dad was experiencing fear rather than anger, and frustration rather than disgust? Fear that he had failed as a father. Frustration that he had worked so many years to support and nurture his daughters, only to blow it on the last one.

Revisiting the use of his so-called telephone voice serves to confirm this theory. My dad only used this voice when in new or unknown situations. I had seen and heard my dad angry in other scenarios, but I don’t recall his invoking the telephone voice.

I was fifteen when I learned that my dad was a prodigious pool player. One day, out of the blue, some boys in my high school questioned me for an entire class period on why I hadn’t been more open about my dad’s pool prowess. They had apparently played in the local pool hall over the weekend and had seen the many photos of my dad decorating the walls. I knew my dad had played in a pool league because every Tuesday after dinner he would leave the house carrying his personal cue stick, which was safely protected from outside elements in its leather carrying case. It never occurred to me that he would be anything but great. It also never occurred to me that my dad’s pool skills would elevate my standing within the ranks of my classmates.

The positive discussion surrounding my father’s pool hall capabilities was in stark contrast to the cruelty and rancor that I had received from other boys years earlier. Those boys thought they were hilarious when they would ask me if my dad had served us monkey brains for dinner. They cracked up and slapped each other’s back as they squinted their eyes and grossly lampooned an Asian accent, being sure to make their already falsetto adolescent voices extra squeaky. Seemingly innocuous questions were bullets shot through my heart.

“Did your dad plant that vegetable garden in your backyard?”

I didn’t know how they were going to do it, but they were about to humiliate me.

“What kind of tractor did he use? A HON-DA?!” The boy squinched his eyes, protruded out his upper bite giving the appearance of buck teeth, and practically screeched the word Honda.

Looking back, it’s no wonder my dad had adopted his bass telephone voice. The boys who had ridiculed me had to have learned that behavior from somewhere. Even though the only trace of an accent that my dad bears is that of a Connecticut Yankee, it’s unlikely that he traversed his young years unscathed by the ignorance that I faced in junior high school. Deepening his voice may have been his way of preventing such derision.

“Stay in the right lane,” my dad directed. I was sixteen and it was one of my first times driving on I-95. The left lane of the normally two-lane highway was closing, and traffic was merging into my lane. We had all but slowed to a stop when a car whizzed by.

“Weasels!” My dad exclaimed. My dad could not stand weasels—drivers that ignored the merge signs to avoid waiting in the single line of merged traffic and then weaseling their way back in at the last possible second. He equated them with rule-breakers, and there is nothing he loathed more than cheaters. My dad has always stuck to a strong ethical code. I do not know for sure where his sense of right and wrong originates—he is not a religious man and never served in the military or in law enforcement. But somehow, he possesses a clear idea of what is fair.

“Baby Jimmy is coming over to play,” my dad announced. I loved playing with my baby cousin. I was five and he was a little over a year old. My only worry was that he would break my toys, so I was sure to hide the best of the best. I had a book-sized hard plastic case that when opened, became a bowling alley lane. Collapsible pins stood at attention at one end of the lane. The bowling ball was a small piece with mechanical feet that wound up and marched down the lane. If aimed just so at the outset, achieving a strike was possible. This game had been my prized possession. I could not risk Baby Jimmy breaking it, so I hid it in the laundry room prior to his arrival.

“Hey, let’s show Baby Jimmy your bowling game!” my dad suggested earnestly. I pretended to be confused, as though I did not know where it was. My dad accepted my deceit as truth. I remember thinking how easy it had been to mislead my dad. I also remember that I had been unfocused as I played with Baby Jimmy that night. My mind had been fixated on my bowling game. As soon as we had said our goodbyes and the door shut behind my baby cousin, I made my way to retrieve the game.

“Wow, look what I found,” I raised my eyes with feigned incredulousness to my dad. My dad looked momentarily bewildered. Bewilderment quickly morphed into anger. If he had words for me that night, I don’t recall them. I only remember the stinging sensation of my backside being struck and my subsequent feelings of contrition. My dad had never before and would never again use corporal punishment on me.

Having lived much of my adult life in a state of regret and depression, I have a tendency toward performing armchair psychoanalysis. I sometimes wonder what the substance of my dad’s dreams are when he closes his eyes at night. My dreams, often vivid and horrifying, reflect my disappointment resulting from specific events in my life. My dad has always been a family man. He remained loyal to one employer for thirty years, making sure he could always provide for his family. He and my mother celebrated fifty years of marriage last year. He brought his children up in a small Connecticut town, where he served as treasurer of the volunteer fire department for many years. He raised money for town services by volunteering to help organize the annual town fair. He was always active in pool, bowling, and golf leagues sponsored by his employer. He tended a garden every summer in his yard, giving the excess harvest to family, friends, and neighbors. I never heard my dad curse, except for the occasionally justified, “Oh shit!” My dad had quit smoking years before I was born, and seldom drank alcohol. My dad was also a devoted son. He visited my grandmother multiple times a week for as long as I can remember. Every Sunday we gathered at my grandparents’ house in New London for the entire day. My dad would help them with odd jobs and run errands for them around town. I have no memories of my dad disagreeing with or disrespecting my grandparents in any form. For these many reasons, it is hard for me to imagine that my dad harbors the same type of dissatisfaction with life that haunts me.

Reflecting on this now leaves me feeling filthily self-absorbed and arrogant. How dare I attempt to know the extent of my father’s self-identified burden without ever having asked him how he emotionally responded to certain milestones in his life? Presenting my dad as an utterly assimilated, first generation son of immigrants, without a character defect to be had is ludicrous at best. If he was without self-doubts before, a cursory read of my description of him would probably absolve him of that. Perspective is crucial. I have always thought that nobody is completely self-assured, yet I have carelessly assigned such confidence to my own father. Furthermore, I contend that most rational people retain a certain amount of humility. I can see my dad reacting to this picture-perfect presentation of his personality with disdain. He might question what he had done wrong in raising his fourth daughter, who unfairly cast him as the consummate caregiver. I see now that this depiction could consequently lead to an unachievable ideal that my dad suddenly feels he needs to uphold. Perhaps it is this angst that truly infiltrates his dreams at night? Or not. He is my dad. I am his daughter.