Galaxy of Holidays by Jenny Forrester
“Memories of my blood-father’s rageful behavior flash on the screen”
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I’m trapped here in some strange planet’s communication network. When my phone rings and I answer, a man starts talking and says that he’s my father.
I’m in what appears to be the slough of a giant river valley and the sun is shining. The phone attaches itself to my ear and I’m unable to remove it. There’s a screen hovering in front of me that flashes images and text, some of which are my actual memories.
I’ve had no need for a father for quite some time now, and yet, here is a man wanting to be one. I’ve been living without a father for over 37 years, so calling himself my father is a mystery to me.
I try to get my bearings – interplanetary travel can be disorienting.
This planet is called Thanksgiving, the man tells me. The screen shows images of families of multigenerational men, women and children. From the garbled symbolism and autumn-colored memes, I am seeing that planetary cultural norms state that I should have a relationship with my father on Thanksgiving planet.
He asks strange questions, like, “How’s She-air-uh?” and I say, “You mean, Chiara? I pronounce her name phonetically. kee-AH-rə. I have the distinct feeling, a sort of déjà vu feeling, that I’ve done this before for him. I think, K sound, as in Christmas, as in Jesus Christ, for God’s sake. The screen flashes his conservative and pseudo-religious affiliations so I don’t say the last part out loud. Memories of my blood-father’s rageful behavior flash on the screen.
I tell him that my daughter is still in college in Vermont. I shouldn’t be telling him my personal business, but I do. Who knows who he really is and what he could do with my information. Planets are not as far away from each other as they once were, but I am intrigued.
I say, “How do you almost know my daughter?”
He says, “Well, I have grandsons, too, but they are amazing and I mean really amazing.” He pronounces my nephews names and does so correctly. I start to think that he really is my father.
I tell him that I’m confused, but he has already started talking about himself and his grandsons’ achievements. “You know,” he says, “they are already in college.” The screen shows two teen boys – one is sixteen and the other is fifteen.
I tell him that’s a thing with homeschoolers now. They take community college classes for dual credit, I start to explain, but he’s already started talking about the planet, Colorado and says, “It’s different there, you know. Those boys are built better.”
He talks about the snow on Planet Colorado and how he could tell me stories about snow there and I get mad because I know he hasn’t been to that planet for 37 years now (1976, the screen says). Whereas, I grew up there, born and raised, until I was twenty-one and who the hell was he to tell me about Planet Colorado?
He talks for a long time about finding inexpensive ways to communicate via an interplanetary calling plan that includes long distance and he talks numbers of dollars and talks about his personal poverty for a long time. The mapping system on the screen, called Google Planet Thanksgiving, shows that he lives on 90 acres on Planet Alabama. The screen tells me that he has had several expensive surgeries to replace a hip and a knee. His work history shows a decided lack of effort. His voting record shows that he despises public assistance but his actual financial history shows that he gets plenty of it.
He’s really making me mad and all of my money issues are swirling across the screen. Marketing ads pop up for therapy techniques and therapists specializing in financial issues. A list of books scrolls along the side entitled: I Am a Money Magnet Even Though I Don’t Deserve It, Poverty Mind: Do You Really Have a Right to Be Comfortable Now?, and My Mama Suffered and I Should, Too.
He keeps telling stories and I hear something about deadbeat dads and a memory rolls down the screen of him saying that he just can’t stomach those deadbeat dads. The memory is nested inside another memory of him not paying child support but once.
But, I want to talk to him because, suddenly, I want him to be my father, interested in my life, but I can’t get a word in edgewise. I am a champion interrupter, but this guy is the 4-H purple ribbon to my blue.
He takes a breath to laugh at a joke he made that I didn’t catch.
“How’re your kids,” I say, taking a chance that this man is truly related to me, by asking about my blood-father’s stepdaughters and stepson and he says, “Hester lives with us, Hero never talks to us and Caesar Augustus has several patents with Big Oil and travels the world. He is very successful.”
This is the same man who was once my father. I can’t believe it.
The screen shows a history of Planet Thanksgiving dialogue of my father saying, “Hester’s got an abusive husband. He abuses her because she can’t have a baby.” Then a year later, “She’s had a hysterectomy,” followed another year later by, “She’s had a baby, but doesn’t get custody of her because her abusive ex-husband won’t let her see her own child.”
Their other daughter doesn’t speak to him and his wife. He faults Hero for this, but a memory flashes across the screen of him throwing her down the stairs when she was a teenager. I can understand Hero cutting ties and wonder how she managed to avoid the wormhole that sucked me into the Thanksgiving vortex. The Communication Vortex rings and I answer.
A memory shows my mother saying, “I don’t want you to regret anything. You don’t have to have a right relationship with your father. He never had one with you. So don’t beat yourself up.” I wish I could talk to her, but there is no wormhole, that I know of, to the planet of lovely, beloved, and departed mamas.
I can tell that something is happening on the other side of the line – my father’s stories have ceased. He says good-bye, I say, “I love you.” He says it back and it sounds like a flimsy chord in his vocal assemblage, but he says it. He hangs up, the phone disengages from my ear and I look for a star gate to take me home again.
My father texts me a few hours later, saying that he had just gotten a smart phone, but hadn’t used it to call me because it was so fancy. He wants me to have the new number.
The screen flashes ads for whiskey and tequila and gift giving ideas. The holiday dilithium crystals are lighting up.
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Jenny Forrester is co-editor of The People’s Apocalypse with Ariel Gore. She won the 2011 Richard Hugo House New Works Competition and was runner up with her fiction, “American Charity.” She curates the Unchaste Readers Series.