After burying my guinea pig in the backyard, my dad leaned the shovel against
the willow and took my small hand into his big one. Sweat dripped off the
tip of his nose, the smoke from the camel cigarette perched between his lips
rose up to the cloudless sky. And after he pulled our car off to the side of the road
to ferry a box turtle across our country highway, and after he made me dozens of
pancakes on Sunday mornings in the shapes of bunnies, giraffes and frogs, and after
he picked me up at parties in sixth grade and piled eight or nine or ten of my friends
into our station wagon—which would be illegal now—and ferried each one to their
homes, and after he bought me a grey felt hippie hat with feathers in the brim and
hugged me farewell for my journey to the Middle East, his signature scent clinging
to my memory as I rode an actual camel around the actual pyramids, and after he
wrote me weekly for the six months I lived on a kibbutz what happened on each
episode of Soap, and even after I went to college and read Marilyn French’s
The Women’s Room and said in my new strident feminist voice, “Women make
fifty-nine cents to a man’s dollar,” and even after he said, “I find that very hard
to believe,” and even after there were shouts and tears and many years of only
“pass the butter,” except in our house it was margarine, still he gave me for
Chanukah a red toolbox filled with his favorite drill, and hammer and saw,
screwdrivers, Philips and flat, nuts and bolts and three and six penny nails.
Even after I finally came out to him and he hugged me as we ate wild apples from
abandoned orchards in the hills behind my Vermont home, and after he imagined
he would smoke less, and after his heart gave out on the rim of a canyon in
Mexico—our last picture of him smiling, holding a box turtle in one hand and a
cigarette in the other—and after his flight home to New York City in the cargo
section of the plane, it was a week or so after the funeral when chopping onions,
when I thought about the way he had shown me to hold the knife—three fingers
to set the blade, so I wouldn’t slice off a finger. But it was only after those tears
fell did the scent of his camel cigarettes start to follow me around my empty
backyard. Still, even then, it was only after many hours lying in bed with my lover
Mary, her breath labored and her silence deafening but for one word, “cigarettes,”
that I finally realized she was dying and that he would be the one to hold my hand
as he ferried her across.