Beautiful people

My father repeats himself. It's not that he forgets he's already said something: it's just that every time he says something he's trying it out on his own ears--testing it, like a new boat. Once he's decided it floats, he can't help himself: he has to repeat it again and again, tempering his tone, shading different parts--a creation--until he thinks he's nailed it along with his position as The One Who's Right. It can wear on you. It wears on my mother. It really wears on my kids. I try to be the buffer--he tends to isolate himself and then resent the hell out of being isolated--but when he starts rehearsing the rant about how Maisie doesn't respect him, I, too, get testy.

One of his rants is about Julia Roberts' mouth. "She's not attractive to me," he tells me. "Her mouth is too wide." And because he's a practicer, we hear quite a bit about why Julia Roberts is not attractive to him, and hence not attractive at all, which is an idle notion shared once, but begins to feel a bit bizarre at the 20th retelling, as if he's straining against the whole notion of subjectivity, even about something like beauty. "I'd kiss her," I tell him. He laughs.

I think of his retellings as a way of rooting--of holding on. Footholds. Back in 2000, when I conducted video interviews with members of my family, my father told me he had no memories of his childhood: none at all, not a one. "I left home at 15," he reminds me--and never mind that all of my own most powerful, psyche-acting memories precede age 15. I know the "left home at 15" story, believe me, and try to divert him from it to get to new ground: untold tales. But there's nothing there; he stares into the camera awkwardly, smiling nervously, relieved when I change the topic. Is he hiding a big awful? Or does he really not remember anything? It's an obsession of mine.

I know that my father was 6 when his infant brother, Martin, died from pneumonia. I know because I found a photograph of all of them--Dad and his remaining 9 siblings, and his parents, standing behind a white baby coffin in front of a ramshackle white barn. I know my father worries that he's the product of an affair his mother may or may not have had. I know his brother, Gustav, fell on his head when he was young, and that's why everyone excuses his tendencies toward perversion--including the Hallmark moment: when he hid in the bedroom closet and watched my mother and father--newlyweds--for two nights, until my father found him and trounced him. My mother told me these things. That's why I know. Dad doesn't tell.

All he'll tell me, again and again, is about why we can't walk on the grass, and why nobody should own credit cards, and how certain people have let him down, and how he's going to make jam, and get a cheaper phone plan. And how Julia Roberts is not beautiful. Her mouth is too wide.