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Company

by AMANDA OLIVER

There are photographs of my father from when he was in the Navy. He has written on the back of most of them and he keeps them in the top drawer of his dresser.

When I was growing up he did not share the dresser with my mother or anyone else in our three-bedroom ranch house. It was his, one of the only things that was just his, for photographs and clothing. Mahogany wood bought with wedding money. He always let me go in and through it, though. My father never told me that anything was his, not mine, even when we got older and most people would think an adult has no business in another adult’s dresser drawers, even, maybe especially, their father's.

I think of people who only get to do this after their fathers, their mothers are gone. I have always been allowed there.

I used to pull out these photographs a lot. Walk across my parents' thick, red bedroom carpet, pull on the gold handles, and tug it open. In the summer the swollen wood would squeak and I’d have to shimmy it open, a little left, then right. I visited here when outside got boring or I had finished another book or my brothers were on play dates. When I felt little kid lonely, which seems like the worst lonely to be, even now. I would head to the top drawer in moments when I missed something I couldn’t name, couldn’t remember or call my own. As I got older I took the photographs out on days that I stayed in bed so long that there was no cool other side to any of the pillows. They kept me company.

They're thick, they're square, some are Polaroids. Some are pictures with postcard designs on the back.

I never read the backs when I was little. I was more interested in what country I had never been to that he had. Guessing which pictures he was high in. Wondering how long he had been on a particular ship for.

One of the last times I visited home my father told me, You can take some of them if you want. I carefully selected a stack, knowing I wanted them all, but couldn’t bear his dresser emptied, even though he’d have let me do it. I felt like a curator of something exceptional in a museum I had been given free reign over.

Now I keep them in a small box in my apartment hundreds of miles away from home. I was embarrassed with myself the first time I bothered to read the backs because I kept thinking I didn't know Dad could write well. I'd always pegged my reading and writing on my mother. She was the one who took me to the library, who read to me for a half hour before bed every night. The one who edited my papers for school and typed them on a typewriter, carefully whiting out the occasional mistake. She was the one who had finished college and then gone onto graduate school. One spring day when I felt guilty for disappearing for the summer she told me, "You are entitled to your life." She shares favorite quotes and books that arrive by mail in brown paper bag packaged boxes and pink enveloped cards. She signs my father's name to these things. 

My father shared his dresser drawers. He said Hi Puppy when I came home drunk in my teens and early twenties, ignoring or not noticing. My father finished one semester of college even though the Navy would have paid for all of it. My father let me charge the laptop I wanted in college to a credit card my mother ended up paying off. He is the one who told me once how he felt my first book in his bones, always had. I have never once disappointed him and I have done many disappointing things. My Dad keeps the phone calls short so I don't need more than one Okay, I'll talk to you soon.

Here I'm playing Old Salty as the ship sways one way I'm swaying the other. This is a good picture of the well deck of the LSD we're in. Behind me are 2 pusher boats. The ship's stern gate you lower to let us out, and of course the ocean. Notice the water line, see how we rock. This was taken on my old boat the 1609.

He tells me stories about being in the Navy sometimes. He always has. When we visit with each other, when we have both taken ourselves away from our phones and computers, when he is home from his second shift at work and I have just arrived by plane, he lets me ask him as many questions about his life as I want. My father is often as unfocused as I can be, but his patience for questions, for storytelling, is unending. I have only started to recognize how lucky this has made me.

I found myself on São Miguel Island last December, driving a car through thick fog down a muddy road that supposedly ended in a lagoon because my Dad mentioned the Azores once. He saw the islands in the distance from his ship heading to the Straits of Gibraltar. I google 59 Mercedes Benz model 219 because that is the car in the picture on a dirt road in a forest. He bought it from Chief Petty Officer Knight in Little Creek, Virginia and the guy who fixed it up before he went to head home didn't like sailors. Gave him a cracked distributor cap. The car, the beautiful grey car, broke down in the Poconos on the ride home with a guy name Ray who was a state basketball champ. A few months later my father sold it for five hundred dollars to a man who collected that particular model.

I find I write my sentences all of the ways my teachers called incorrect. Fragmented, spaced, told the wrong way. This began before I read my father's pictures, but my words ended up the same. I keep a pen, paper with me everywhere I go so I can write down individual words that taste good that day and sentences with no paragraph yet. My patience is for words and stories.

I worry sometimes about what it means to be a daughter to my mother and to my father. I hold myself to the expectations of the people I know, the people who raised me. My mother was thirty-one and my father was thirty-seven when I entered their lives, but for many years I held onto the childish belief that they barely existed before me.

I think about the people they were. My father on Navy ships he needed to climb aboard. My mother in a yellow hoodie not unlike the heather grey one I lived in for most of my early twenties. A picture of them wrapped around each other at a state park after a family picnic. The story my father tells about watching a fly go through a room on acid. It had ripples. The mistakes I swore for years my mother never made. My parents, with eight brothers and sisters apiece, growing up eating ketchup and mustard sandwiches less than ten miles away from one another. The people they were before they had to be something for me.

My father is sixty-five now, my mother fifty-nine. When they are in town visiting me my father drives around and watches people, notes how busy everyone is. “That guy’s yelling about something!” He tells me he loves it here and I ask him if he’s ever been to Berlin. He tells me no, Crete. Cannes. He points at a man dressed in nice pants, a button-down and hat, tells me, “Look at him!” and I do.

When I trade obligations for a suitcase or a backpack and trains and planes to new places I think about my father saying, Peaches, Daddy loves you. You kids are the best things I ever did. I know that my roots run deep down into oceans I’ve never been to. Started on ships I’ve never sailed on.

Amanda Oliver is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her website here.

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