A Father's Mistress

“Which tie should I wear?”

She slightly moves her head away from the television and feels a familiar queasiness in her stomach flare to life.

“The blue one.”

He looks at the two ties: one a stingingly, bright, red tie and the other a muted blue.

“Nah, the red one is better.”

She sighs.

“What have I said about sighing?”

A familiar, quick rage sparks in his voice, but she is not having it today.

“Then, why ask my opinion? You always ask me then choose the other.”

“Because.” There he goes. They could never have a normal conversation. He can never just be ordinary, bland or dull. “I can do what I want. Because I can ask what I want and decide what I want.”

She sinks back into the sweat-stained and dog-hair covered couch feeding off of her anger. She seethes as the couch massages her resentment and she mumbles, “Can you?”

She doesn’t know if she could do this anymore: be a lifeline to a slow and toxic sinking ship.

This tie is more than a piece of fabric. She knows. It is his manhood. As a classically, overly-masculine Italian man, this tie represents his status, identity and purpose. He hasn’t been able to keep a job in years. He used to be an idyllic symbol of immigrant hope: fulfilling the American dream. He clawed his way through the poverty of a single-mother household living on the outskirts of San Francisco. He saw the bright lights and success of the city as his beacon. Then, like Gatsby, he made it. He created his own business, bought his own home and married his dream girl. He woke up to a picturesque, tall and tan, San Diego native. Her brown curls matching her chocolate, brown eyes. He was able to make this smart, successful and kind woman laugh until she cried. What a smile she had? Wide, charming and sincere. Then, these two became three. He watched as his tow-headed daughter learned to crawl then walk then run in the lush backyard on a cul-de-sac that he provided. All he needed was a white picket fence to display to the world his success. Warm dinners, soulful music and paw prints painted themselves onto his heart. He did all this. He accomplished his wildest dreams. But, just like any hero, there is a villain that wants to take it all away.

It began slowing. He wasn’t able to sleep through the night. There was a bite that was starting to edge itself into his voice whenever his wife asked a question. Deep, black bags lived permanently under his eyes. His fingers wouldn’t stop tapping and his thoughts wouldn’t stop racing.

Then, a beautiful, sweet and loving bundle of joy entered this pleasantly, naive family’s life. His wife’s success grew taking her on trips across the country. The cries and whines of his second daughter drilled holes into the already broken cement of his mind. His oldest daughter tried to quiet her sister’s pain while he struggled. Though his mind was on a high-speed track, he lived in slow-motion. He painfully began to get trapped in the quicksand of his mind. To break away from this imprisonment, his screams in his mind echoed and blasted at his two young daughters. Then, at his wife. Then, to his employees. Then, to his clients. His family started to splinter and crack as his business crumbled to an end.

The laughter and joy he brought to his family became tension and stress. His daughters started to not bring their friends over. The annual New Year's party dwindled to him on the couch alone.

The couch. The couch became his sanctuary. His new love. His new everything. The couch formed and adapted to his mood swings, days and weeks of immobility, and encouraged, comforted him during his downward spiral. The couch patted him when he saw the resentment and anger in his youngest daughter’s eyes: the disgust in her voice whenever she deemed to give him any acknowledgment.

“She doesn’t understand. I’m where you belong.”

The couch sucked him into its crevices. The crumbs that found salvation in the depths of its foundation encouraged the feelings he received from mesmerizing source of joy: the tv. What more does he need? He has an enabling couch surrounding him in security while the television gave him the control he so desperately desired. With the click of a button, he manipulated it to give him what he wanted. Westerns? Check. Classic movies? Check. Anything to numb him from the reality that prattled on around him. Check.

The vibrant sunshine his wife exuded before diminished into the slow-burning fire. She didn’t try anymore to break him from his spell: from the war that raged in his mind. She retreated waving the white flag. Slowly, his house became a single-mother household. He was physically there laying like a blob in the corner, reclined on his couch, but she knew she had to become their daughters’ parent. She over-extended herself. She was her oldest’s Girl Scout leader, bringing oranges to her soccer games while fixing a tear in her youngest’s cheer uniform and volunteering at their school’s fundraisers along with being the breadwinner and putting that hard-earned bread on the dinner table. She was pulled in every direction. She started to wonder. Would it be easier if she was just a single mother instead of a wife to a destructive and noxious stranger? She could see the chips gradually start to dig themselves into her daughters’ shoulders. The shyness of her oldest turned into distrust and pernicious self-doubt. Her bubbly and effervescent youngest morphed into a viciously hurt husk.

But, she took a vow. Wasn’t she supposed to love in sickness and in health? Her husband was sick. It may not be in the formation of a cancerous tumor, but it was more devious and putrid. His mind was rotting and eating any goodness that this man had inside of him. But what else could she do? He wouldn’t go to therapy, he wouldn’t listen to the cries of his daughters and his heinousness only sucked them all into his darkness.

As her oldest packed up and went to college, she ticked down the days until her youngest left these four walls too. She went to bed crying, worried and scared every night to get up and start all over again. She could not remember a time when her heart did not race, egg shells were not laid wherever she walked and the calm of knowing that she could do no wrong. She threw herself into being everything to her youngest, but the rage that emanated from the couch already sunk their claws into her youngest. Her youngest’s resentment lashed out at everything her mother tried to do. This mother drifted into a numbness of understanding that this is what it would be until her youngest turned eighteen.

5 years later.

Finally, when her imprisonment ended and her sentence was lifted, she ran. Sprinting. Squealing in delight. She did it. She made it. Her youngest was off to the safety of college. While her husband’s body fused into the fibers of the couch, she ravaged the house: grabbing and gathering anything that she could that showed the joys and laughter that this house used to have: picture albums, school projects, dog toys.

She found her new sanctuary in the hills beyond. She filed the paperwork to emancipated herself from the chains of the dragon that used to be the love of her life. While the processing happened, he laid. Glued to the couch and watching reruns of “Gunsmoke,” he was oblivious to the freedom that the courts were granting his wife.

When all the women in his life began to gain independence, he finally realized the power they were granted.

“You can’t let that happen,” the couch hissed into his ears, “you’re the man of this house. You built this house and created these opportunities for those ungrateful kids and wife. You must get them back.”

Incessant phone calls began. Voicemails filled with remorse and manipulation clogged up each of their phones. His wife and youngest were immune to the poisonous spell he was trying to cast. But, his oldest. She still had memories of the past: of the heart-warming laughter that he use to create, the comfort that his strong arms use to provide and of the man he used to be.

She wanted her father back, so she packed her new adulthood and slipped back into her old bedroom.

“We can get this family back together. I’ll get a job. I’ll clean up this house. I’ll be better.”

But, the couch would not let him. Everytime he received a “no” from a prospective job, the dull lull of the couch called to him. Every time he saw the laundry, dishes and dirt pile up around the house; there was the couch calling him back to complacency.

His oldest tried to clean, comfort and corral him into fulfilling his promises, but the couch wouldn’t let him. He started to resent that she would not listen, and did not understand that this is what the couch wanted.

So, she sat staring at someone that use to be a husband, dad, a success while he held up two ties. Now, he was just a follower and member of the leeching couch. She looked at her father’s faded eyes. She realized she could not save him. The couch was too powerful. For a few nights, she snuck her possessions into the truck of her car until one day she said good-bye to what could have been and left her father in the grasps of his couch.