It occurred to me after
we divorced that I never
showed my wife
a photograph of my father.
What she thinks he looked like:
something like me wearing
a shirt from the eighties with a
five o’clock shadow.
There is space that takes
its shape from absence.
I have never seen
a photograph of my grandfather. But
he looks like James Dean
with my father’s dark hair. When I think of him
he is
sitting on a barstool with one leg up revealing
the diamond pattern on his trouser socks.
He has my father’s black eyes.
I’ve heard people say I look just like
my mother. I see this resemblance, too
in its totality: the same
eyes, the same hair. I have learned to mirror
the particular way that her father holds
his hands.
There is space that takes shape around
absence. Walking
hand-in- hand one hopeful
winter we passed a couple on the sidewalk. Exchanging
a boy between them.
How will
I explain it to people. When they expect
the writer in me
to fill the silence. I remember
when my father died.
We learned he did not have a
copy of his birth
certificate. And my mother had to prove to the government that
my father had been who he’d told her
he was.
Without disturbing my mother’s
memory I found my grandfather’s name on
the document. In a lockbox
in her closet.
They all have the same name:
my grandfather’s, the sum
of both my father’s and my uncle’s. I put
everything back. The way I found it.
There is a certain morbidity to you. My wife would tell me this,
perhaps because I do not mind it when holes appear in the heels of my socks. And I leave
wet laundry in the washing machine for so long that I must wash it again.
To get the hush of mildew out of the fibers.
We auditioned to be parents
at the fertility clinic. When I am asked about
my father’s family I say: “They’re all dead.” I wouldn’t expect me
to be a good mother. My wife and
I have already sat up nights
with our heads
touching at the temples. Parsing through
the donor registry. Studying jawlines, the emptiness of
color or a man’s eyes. She does not fault me
if I say again I’ll know him when
I see him. Everything
I should know from the sight of
a photograph. If the donor should look like
my wife when I met her?
On a summer afternoon in Vermont,
when she was just old enough
that laugh lines like
her mother’s were beginning to form at the corners
of her mouth. And
her eyes. There is space
that takes it shape from absence. Even this
moment if I think about it for too long,
I have a hard time remembering
her mother.
On the phone I tell my mother that we
are planning to have a child. I see the way she clenches down her
own
maternal desire to hold her grandchild.
Her jaw. She asks
if we have designated a strong male role
model for her?
I want to say something
other than nothing.
I have not thought about it. I have.
“You take after
your dad.” she told me. One night when
I’d finished washing the dishes. And around the sink
I’ve left
a sort of moat floating with soap bubbles.
My wife is chuckling one afternoon when she brings in the mail.
Because my grandmother has spelled our last
name incorrectly for the third time.
We do not have anything
to say in defense of our selves.
Because we were there the day she learned
it was a round cancer growing inside
her womb. Three children later. And so many of
us
grandkids I must stop to count. But we watched my grandfather tuck
her into that place. Where the nook of
his shoulder was hollowed out by God to the shape of
her. There is
space that takes
its shape from
absence. What our daughter looks like:
with my mother’s hair and freckles
and my father’s long lashes.
But when she laughs,
her voice carries my wife’s in
an echo, and her handwriting looks
like her mother’s.