Father Figure by Rebecca Tiger
In her creative nonfiction flash “Father Figure,” Rebecca Tiger uses a list, or enumeration, to dramatize conversations with her mother during visits to the memory care center at the hospital. “Where is your father?” her mother repeatedly asks. “Have you seen your father?” As so often in patients with dementia, her mother keeps circling back to the same question, unable to accept or perhaps to process or perhaps to remember the daughter-narrator’s first answer: “He’s dead, Mommy.” As her mother approaches her own death, the daughter’s answers change. Tiger explains in her author’s note: “The form demonstrated the escalation and stakes of the lies I had to tell.”
Listing is a way of creating order, and we see how desperately the narrator craves order in the face of her mother’s advancing dementia and imminent death. According to Umberto Eco, who curated an exhibition at the Louvre on lists, listing is at the very “origin of culture,” a way “to make infinity comprehensible.” “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
Listing is not an uncommon device in flash fiction and nonfiction. (See Alina Stefanescu’s “The Art of Enumeration” for a list of over seventy examples.) But as Tommy Dean points out in his craft essay “The List Story,” the form presents challenges: “If characters are often revealed through their actions, then how do we make something static, like a list, come alive and immerse us in the experience of a character’s life or moment?” The characters in “Father Figure”—the daughter narrator, her mother, her absent father—are vividly evoked through a numbered series of short dialogues, brief descriptions, and mini-scenes. While a list could be an impersonal form, the list in “Father Figure” is suffused with tenderness, an expression of love. —CRAFT
Where is your father?
- He’s dead, Mommy. She sobs over the piece of frosted layer cake the memory care center has given her as a welcome celebration. She forks bites of chocolate and thick white buttercream into her mouth. When she asks how she will live without her partner in crime, I tell her that she’ll be okay, she’s with me now.
Have you seen your father?
- He died, Mom. She starts to cry, so I tell her the story my brother and I concocted when we heard hospice removed his body while my mother was asleep. You were holding Dad’s hand as he died. I don’t remember, she tells me. You must be in shock, I say. What is happening to my mind?
Did you see Dad on your way in?
- I’ve come to take my mother to the podiatrist so he can cut her overgrown and infected toenails. Her feet look like a wild animal’s, thickened and calloused. Her moon-shaped eyes start to tear up before I say anything. Don’t tell me, she wails. Don’t tell me!
Daddy’s not here, he went to the funeral.
- Whose funeral? JFK’s! I’m too sick to go but your father is there. JFK died before I was born so I am careful not to say anything that will jar her into this realization. I tell my mother that I’m sure the funeral is being recorded; we can watch it on the television in the café. He was such a good man, she sobs. Such a very good man.
Your father’s golfing with the other men.
- I laugh at the thought of my uncoordinated father holding a club. Stranger things have happened, my mother says with a conspiratorial smile. I am taking her to the salon on the second floor to get her greasy hair washed and cut. When I expressed concern that she’d stopped showering, the hospice nurse said casually: Why bother? My mother’s stomach is protruding with a tumor that will soon kill her. The stylist uses a curling iron to make ringlets in her thin gray hair. Do you think your father will like it? Of course he will, Mom. You look beautiful.
Today is my wedding anniversary.
- It’s December, Mom. You and Dad were married in September. I’m talking about my first husband. I had a whole life before your father. Before you. I once overheard her telling a health aide that she had four kids, but there’s only three of us. When we cleared out her house, we found money stashed in drawers along with a letter from Nathan’s Mini Storage threatening to auction off the contents of a unit she rented. Unit B44 was filled with Christmas decorations, there since 2009; my mother spent $15,600 to hide ornaments from my father.
Dad has run off with another woman.
- That seems unlikely. No, it’s true! Did you know that there are whores who come into the lobby to steal our men? Who told you that, Mom? One of my friends. It would be just like your father to do that. I assure her that I will find him and convince him to come back. Thank you, she says. You’re the only one I can trust.
We come to this resort because your father loves the food.
- Sometimes my mother thinks she’s in a hotel. Do you like it here? Get real, I’d like out of this hospital. Other times, a prison. She is sitting with her best friend Nancy, a stout woman with a pockmarked face who my mother earlier called ugly; they are holding hands, singing to “Yesterday Once More” as it plays through the café’s speaker. My mother can no longer walk so I wheel her around. She often forgets and tries to stand up, only to end up on the floor. Her arms are filled with bloody cuts and deep purple bruises.
Where is your father?
- He’s on his way. My mother has not left the hospital bed for a week. She has stopped eating and sips tiny bits of water I offer her on a sponge. She opens her mouth, like a baby chick reaching for a worm. The cotton sheets are covered with a dark substance that oozes from her mouth, coats her teeth. The hospice nurse leans down to hold my mother’s hand. Go to your husband, she says, he is waiting for you. Where is he? she asks. I can hear him in the hall, Mommy. He’ll be back to see you soon.
REBECCA TIGER is a sociologist and writer who divides her time between New York City and Athens. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and published in Bending Genres, Cowboy Jamboree, CRAFT, Pithead Chapel, trampset, and elsewhere. She is the flash fiction editor for Blood+Honey Lit. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @rtigernyc.
Featured image by Anna Keibalo, courtesy of Unsplash.
