Winstons

Five

            I am sitting on the stairs that overlook the sublevel living room in my family’s first house, on Ash Street, a street I could not pronounce due to the lisp I had until age ten, when I underwent a long period of all sorts of therapies—speech, behavioral, you name it. I am sitting on the sandy colored carpet of the third stair from the top, head wedged between two banisters, observing my mother and father as they watch the channel twelve nine o’clock news. I sit there still as death, hoping my mother will feel my gaze and come retrieve me to spend an extra half hour or so up with my parents.

            When she finally does, she calls me downstairs, and I in my Pocahontas footie pajamas descend that set of stairs, then another from the kitchen into the living room, where my father picks me up and sits me on his lap. He has a Miller Genuine Draft resting in between his leg and the old armchair, and it sweats onto my pajamas as I lean into the worn flannel of his shirt. He will breathe raggedly, and I’ll ask why he whistles when he breathes, to which he will mumble something soft that I won’t really hear because I’m still listening to the whistle. When I turn my head and push my ear up against his chest for better acoustics, the smell will be acrid. It is rich and bitter, catching in the air and hanging like a smoked hickory stick on a cold day. I breathe it in and catalog it as distinctly “Dad,” because this smell is only ever on my father. It does not seep into the walls or linens because out of respect for my asthmatic mother he never smokes in the house or in the car with her. I only ever know my father is a smoker because I can see the shiny gold packaging that peeks out of the breast pockets of his flannels, or the butts that litter the grooves between planks on the deck.

Seven

            It is summer, and my father is sitting in the dining room, facing away from the kitchen with a pile of newspapers reaching high over his head. I am in the kitchen watching him, quiet, and he is quiet, but we are not quiet together. My mother asks my sister and I to play outside or in our rooms so daddy gets some tranquility. It is a word I cannot yet define, but I try to use it in sentences with my classmates to prove I’m highly evolved or maybe just someone you’d like to eat lunch with. I sit against the island in the kitchen with a pile of books and wait for my dad to get enough of this so-called tranquility and read a book with me. I cannot stay uninvolved, and so when my father snatches the box of cigarettes from his breast pocket and lifts one to his lips as he shuffles towards the front door, I prop myself up on his chair to look at what he’s reading. There are a great many different papers open and he makes chicken scratch notes in blue pen next to classifieds looking for financiers and money men. There is a separate notepad with numbers and names and deeply etched scratch-outs over more than a few. I realize that leaning on the papers is making my sleeves dirty with ink and so I go back into the kitchen, and when my father comes back in from the front door he seems renewed, with the cologne of Winstons heavy on him, to me smelling just as he should. His eyes are heavy and reddened, but he sees me in the kitchen and doesn’t seem to mind.

Eight

            It is a chilly morning in mid-April, and I am on a field trip to the Field Museum with my class, bouncing up and down in my saddle shoes. I am especially excited because my father is the chaperone of my group, the purple group. We are seated on the bus and dad gives me a grape juice box and lets me have the window seat, clearing off the fog with his sleeve and promising he will help me count the cars that pass and get the truckers to bleat their horns out at us. Roughly

ten minutes into the journey, my comically pear-shaped second grade teacher waddles her way through the aisles of the bus and seats herself across from my father, and I am uncomfortable when she touches his shoulder and asks. “How did you find out?” My father’s warm gaze turns from the traffic on the Ryan to the cold immediacy of the question, and once he gives a satisfactory answer she follows up with a barrage of extremely personal questions about his doctors, treatment regimen, surgery schedule, life insurance, family history, and the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables in his diet. My field trip is ruined because this naggy woman in too much eye makeup has stolen my day with my father, set his mind to the task of unpacking his horrific diagnosis instead of making off-color jokes to children, something I am sure to bring up when I run into her in a grocery store several years later.

            The museum is a blur, but as we leave my father looks wistfully at the janitors smoking near the entrance, and on the bus ride home I try to sleep on his lap, and hear him complain to my teacher that I “have a bony ass, just like her mother.” She does not ask him any more questions.

Eight, Again

            My mother and father are sitting a few steps apart on the stairs where I used to watch them watch the evening news, each with their head in their hands. My father’s back rises shallowly, and when I sit on the ground in front of the stairs I see a wet spot in between where his legs rest. It is then that I realize the world has fallen apart.

Nine

            My birthday is in October, and later that month I get candy cigarettes for Halloween. When my father is buried in January, I bury him with them and a note that says, “I love you.”

Fourteen

I visit my father’s grave for the first time with my mother, an aunt, and a good friend who is an Evangelical and convinces me that God only takes care of the souls we remember. She is shocked that I never saw the grave of my father, so I make a spectacle of myself and go. I wear all black, a tiered skirt and t-shirt, and I buy a dozen red roses to lie on his grave, so maybe I can send God the signal that my dad is not forgotten. It is a silly thing to do and when I remember the theatricality of it my stomach gets knotty and I think for a moment that I have made such a fool of myself that I will never recover.

            It takes us twenty minutes to find the grave and when we do I’m hysterical and lie there and smell the ground, distraught that the smell of Winstons is buried with him, and it will never rise up and tell me everything is going to be okay. The ground smells only of wet dirt and dandelions, and I am allergic to grass so when I leave my face is red and irritated and my eye is watering uncontrollably. Shortly after I lose touch with that friend, and make it a point not to visit the grave site for another three years.

Fifteen

            I fancy myself an activist and on my father’s birthday I wear a shirt my mother had made with his picture on the front and some propaganda about how smoking destroys families on the back. A girl I knew when my father died follows me in the hallway of my high school and yells, “Who is that?” And I wish so much that I had the courage to claim my relation and my pain and my pride, but instead I just shrug my shoulders and walk with my head down.

            Later that year, we move from the house that my parents had intended to raise my sister and I in, and the only room I am interested in packing up is my parent’s master bathroom. Inside it, my mother has managed to stop time. In the sink are yellow spittle stains from my father hacking as he got ready for work in the morning, somehow preserved after all these years. It

also reminds me of the bile they drained out of him while he wasted away in home care, the thick yellow death that sat in bags that felt warm against my chest as I leaned over the rails of his bed and hugged him with my arms that steadily grew thicker than his own.

            The vanity itself has two sets of drawers, the left and the right, and the left were used by dad. Inside I find a half empty bottle of Polo by Ralph Lauren, two unopened Schick razors, and a simple black comb. The Polo comes with me, and I reluctantly leave the marble vanity intact, the DNA of my father preserved like a fossil in the amber.

Sixteen

            I am sitting in a Denny’s at eleven on a school night, and two friends are smoking cigarettes across from me, informing me that girls don’t inhale. I am offered a cigarette and take it in my hands like a fetus, like something that’s meant to be inside of you and only come out after a long gestation period, and I stare at it and think to myself that this whole thing is stupid: I hate Denny’s terrible green vinyl booths and cleverly named breakfast offerings, these girls look like shit and their breath smells, but here I am, and what am I going to do about it? I smoke my first cigarette, if you can call sucking in some air and holding it in your cheeks smoking, and it is a Newport. It is in no way familiar to me, and shatters the ideas in my head about what a cigarette is and why it is in between your fingertips. I do not smoke another until I am eighteen, sitting on my bed while I stare my mother in the eyes, possibly my cruelest act of rebellion. Even then, it is not a Newport, which would be too much, but not quite a Winston, either—a Marlboro 100.

Twenty-One

            I am fighting with a man I am seeing, and so I leave his apartment in a huff at two in the morning, and only as I am a block down the road do I realize that I’m in an incredibly dangerous neighborhood without so much as a pocket knife. My fear leads me to dart into convenience stores every few blocks, hoping that the more places I’m seen the easier it will be to trace my route should I go missing. On a whim, I buy a pack of Marlboros at the first 7-11, and stuff them in my bag, only a little bigger than the box itself, hoping that I can barter with them. I open the pack for the sake of it, and catch the smell of old, mouldy tobacco, which I realize is what I smelled on my father. The Winstons were only a piece of the larger narrative of old tobacco. I smoke one as further research, and to stave off the oncoming distress of being out this late alone. The taste is sharp; it cloys on the tongue and I puff again just to bring some variety into the staleness pervading my mouth. It is, to me, an entirely unpleasant business, but it keeps both a hand and my mouth busy, enough to keep me going so that I’m home in no time, safe and sound. I realize that there are merits to being kept busy.

            When I finally lie down in my own bed, with the smell of the old cigarette still in my hair, it dawns on me that I’ve learned a lesson about my father. I’m told by regular smokers that cigarettes are worthless within a week of opening your pack, and it’s best to just buy a new box because they can be so unpleasant. And yet, I understand that my father never did this. That he kept worn packs of cigarettes around, which at the time seemed sensible. The romantic in me says, though, that he was aware of the unpleasantness, and it was a sort of self-discipline that kept him on the spoiled cigs. Maybe he was trying to quit, or remind himself of what he was doing to his body, or encourage less consumption in general.

            Or maybe, like me, he was just trying to keep busy.

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