The most action Dad saw during the Korean War was puking over the side of a ship docked at Parris Island.  Gin, he said.  He never made it overseas and after his stateside tour was up he hopped a train back North and fired his weapons from behind a desk at an insurance company.  After three decades of grievously wounding enemy combatants, he was fired a year short of receiving full retirement. 

Physical reminders of Dad’s brief military service appear on his checks and on a notepad he keeps in his home office. There are also behavioral reminders:  He eats his dinner in five minutes and he rises before the sun.  His idea of a summer vacation was to march the family into pup tents he’d clumsily stake on a South Carolina beach and to serve them rations like creamed corn and shit on a shingle (“Too much salt,” my mother worried).   I grew up with some awareness that military service might cause permanent psychological damage even to those who never saw action.  This damage manifested as major and overt hostility to the enemy, and that enemy might be either neutral—the car ahead at a stoplight-- or someone simply attempting to be friendly.  A neighbor, for instance, was a spy, an asshole, or a pervert, especially if his seagoing vessel had a bigger motor than Dad’s.

Dad isn’t so gung-ho as to have a Marine Corps license plate holder, or, God forbid, to do something so frontally tacky as wearing a Marine Corps t-shirt.  When the Korean vets sit outside the supermarket on Memorial Day, their flags a small but brave display of patriotism, Dad pulls out his shotgun and briefly waves it around the driveway, waiting for a random heroic moment that in all likelihood will never arrive. His pride in Marine Corps service is large, even as the America he was hoping to defend deteriorates into a small something he no longer recognizes or approves.

He is now unable to buy ammo.  He blames the Obama administration. Whether the lack of ammo is a good thing or even the fault of the Obama administration is open to interpretation.

The Marine Corps may have taught Dad to shoot, but it did not teach him to handle any sort of repair or anything that involves instruction manuals. For these delicate maneuvers, there are people who accept money in exchange for having greater skill and knowledge.  There is no reason Dad can see to paint his own fence, mow his own lawn, or put on a spare tire.  This is what AAA and warranties are for.  And, should the service prove unacceptable, there is always a shiny newer model waiting to be purchased.

He will try his hand, however, at smallish tasks that might not perplex a ten-year-old.   Last week, he was on his back under his desk, attempting to free a stuck drawer.  The drawer had jammed on one side and it could neither be open nor closed.  It moved an inch in either direction and then stuck, and Dad lay on his back pushing it forward and pulling it back.  The desk was one he purchased for its simplicity.  It had the one drawer but no cabinet doors that could come off their hinges.  He keeps very little in this desk, but having the drawer not working was unacceptable.  That he was attempting to fix it instead of rushing out to purchase a new one—as he had with cars, washing machines, and tennis rackets that needed restringing—signaled a new and mellower Dad, one who had some concern about the economy.  This was a vastly different Dad than the one who insisted I sell a car when it needed a water pump and the one who considered replacing vacuum cleaner belts tantamount to rebuilding Iraq.  For years, we were a prime destination for trash pickers, since we could be counted on to have televisions, power washers, and expensive hand tools that had been used exactly once.  Once, a driver was so startled by the bounty at the end of our driveway that he lost control of his car, crossed over into the oncoming lane, and bounced through a hedge, where he promptly hit the neighbor’s house and himself on the head.  Watching the people come over the hill and screech to a stop at our driveway became a favorite Saturday activity, better even than buying new shoes or looking at Ford station wagons that would break down as soon as they were driven off the lot.

Quick! Dad would shout, calling us down from trees or out of the basements, where we’d been trying to build exciting but ineffective bombs.  Here they come! Here come the sons of bitches now! We’d stand together, a hybrid military/family unit at a bay window, and watch as families poured out of cars to scoop up what Dad considered trash.  It dawned on me that Dad got more pleasure out of watching the scavengers and insulting them than the scavengers got out of our week-old lawnmower or the fan that had failed to circulate air properly and was too much trouble to return to the store.

Let me tell you something, Dad would say.  This is a tight ship.  A tight ship meant being able to pack up and move within an hour, something else he had learned from the Marines.  If you couldn’t put it on your back and hike it down the road, then it wasn’t worth carrying.  Possessions were a burden, something that could only weigh you down and prevent the forward march.  Somebody else might get there first.  This philosophy meant that you never got a Big Mac until you got a driver’s license, because there were other cars ahead in the drive-through line.

The man my father is seems unrecognizable from a photo of him on leave, taken in 1953 in the back yard of my grandmother’s house.  Then, he was the pride of the mother who implored him to invite his friends home, something he never did, and nothing he would ever do throughout his life.  He grew up immune to friendships or to male bonding; he preferred the company of women, at times rather vocally. His mother told him he must invite people to their home, to show off their new divan all covered in plastic or to admire a new coat of white paint on the kitchen cabinets.  My father saw his shoe salesman father and housewife mother as barely removed from the Taunton shoe factories and tenement housing in which they had been reared; their pride in owning their own home overshadowed the obvious reality that their small, well-kept home with threadbare woven rug might not be on a social par with that of other sons of Harvard. This did not stop my grandmother from impressing upon Dad that he was of a certain class and should act accordingly; there was no difference in her mind between being invited to the polo field and being invited to a Sunday dinner of corned beef and cabbage.  Dad looks unstressed and even happy in the photo, as strange a facial expression and emotion as can be imagined considering the hostile face that fronted his later adult world.  He stands thin in his uniform, his cap appearing too large for his head, and at his side my mother—they are still just dating at this time—beams in her red Revlon lipstick and Rita Hayworth skunk streak.  You don’t see that his eyes are light blue, and that when he set his eyes upon my mother—the first girl he had dated outside of a grope or two in the local movie theatre—he made a lifelong commitment.  They had met at a commuter mixer, a college party for those who couldn’t afford to live in dormitories.  At these parties, they chatted about suburbia (Dad apparently the only person who despised its various suffocations) and played bridge.  He met my mother when she dropped something under a table; on their first date he asked her to marry him.  My mother had been very popular and was at that time enamored of a red-haired boy who had dumped her for a blonde.  She was therefore in full avenging mode when the red-haired boy returned and she was able to tell him she was engaged.  To a Marine.

Dad is like any other new serviceman in this photo:  too young.  There is nothing remarkable about him except that he is smiling and to know that he is, at that time, remarkably unfulfilled.

As a young adult, Dad wanted two things:  He wanted to go to school at Stanford and he wanted to become a theatrical director.  His mother would allow neither.  He wasn’t intrepid enough to hitchhike across country and so he returned home each night on the subway, missing the chance to star on the swim team because the train stopped running before the practice was over.  The theatre was out of bounds and was the province of the swishy, which Dad was not, neither in nor out of his Marine uniform.  Any skirmish would be with the opposite sex, whether marital, extra-, or martial on the field of sexual battle.

It seemed that military service gave Dad discipline and an animosity towards those people or things that lacked it.  Desks could not talk back or offer up resistance, so as Dad lay on his back trying to force the drawer into performing against its will he felt free to verbally abuse it for its weaknesses and lack of character.  It was a classic battle of Man against wood, sure to be of as much historical and intellectual value as Dad’s favorite Antietam.

What would it take to make him happy as he approached eighty years of age, or happy ever?  Not the ice-blue Mustang he bought in 1967, which might now be viewed as a bit of rebellion, his own form of countercultural resistance.  This was the sixties, when the idea of revolution among the middle class meant mostly that the suburban white-collar worker would grow some itchy-looking sideburns and shop for polyester bell bottoms and embarrass himself at an office holiday party by awkwardly using a clutch of modern idiom on the department secretary.  After that, Dad disappeared into corporate responsibility and the complex professional demands that ensured he would never be in complete control of his world, if he ever had been in the first place.  Every morning, he got up and went into battle, and if there weren’t a battle he would manufacture one.  The battles were easy to find.  Eventually this process of discovery became a joy. There was traffic, airline ticket agents, unyielding steaks, and beaches with high surf.  Dad became more oppositional, until my mother remarked that his only friend was a neighbor’s three-year-old child.  What she meant was that the toddler was the only person to whom Dad could relate.

Due to this inability to relate to the outside world, the issue with the desk was blown out of proportion.  It made no sense that the drawer wouldn’t close; it had closed perfectly well the day before and nothing had been added to its contents so Dad was blameless for its stubbornness. The drawer had developed rebellion, overnight like a teenager, and now had become the focus of an afternoon that might otherwise have been spent drinking in the back yard and sweating that special sweat you get when you live near a swamp.  It had to be fixed or the day would fall apart, and where do you go from there? 

My mother recently purchased the Tennis Channel.  Tennis has been her obsession for sixty years, and as is typically the case with Alzheimer’s patients, she can recall the most distant details of the past, which in her case means a spirited debate about the quality of play in the men’s U. S. Open final in 1975.  That shot was out, but it wasn’t really out, not from the vantage point of half the stadium, and who can forget poor Jimmy Connors’ diarrhea at the same tournament in1983?  The Tennis Channel has distracted my mother in her dotage, but in a good way that doesn’t disturb Dad, unlike her daily burning of the green peppers that he will eat without comment about their blackness.

On his last birthday, Dad remarked that he had outlived his father.  His father had died suddenly, of heart failure, while on economy vacation to Cape Cod.  I remember the call; my grandfather had been taken to Hyannis Hospital and my grandmother was now a widow without a driver’s license. They had a brand-new Pontiac LeMans with yellow racing stripe glued to the side, a special touch for my grandfather, who had grown up riding a lame horse.  Dad had both wonder and fear in his voice as he spoke of his father’s passing.  It is my healthy cooking, my mother said, that is responsible for this milestone.

This day, I was watching tennis with my mother when I looked over and saw Dad on his back, fussing with the desk drawer.  From my vantage point, I could see that he had bent one leg at the knee while he tried to jimmy the drawer open. Even from the living room, I could see the varicose veins and the sagging, dried skin where there had once been lean Marine muscle.  His skin looked like parchment and was thin as papyrus, stretched over arthritic bones that in my imagination were bleached as white as a bone left in the desert.

Do you think he needs help? I asked Mother.

I got up and went into his office.  I am not a technical person, but I am too poor to resort to the learned tendency to pay for resolution. I have fixed things in my life, occasionally with success.  I can fix a vacuum cleaner and I can fix a toilet.  One of my proudest moments in repair was advising a neighbor that his use of powdered carpet freshener had likely caused a cement-like build-up in his intake tube. Dad’s drawer was stuck, so it seemed that the thing to do was to see how it worked.  I sat down and looked at the mechanism.

That won’t do shit, Dad said.  You’re wasting time. Just push it backwards.  I did and it stuck; it did the same thing it had been doing all along.  Pull it, he ordered.  For God’s sake, don’t break the fucking thing.  

I pushed and pulled while at the same time observing how it worked; there were two flexible tabs on either side of it and these were in different positions.  One was forward of a wooden bar that extended the horizontal length of the desk and the other was behind it.  I flipped them into the same position and pushed the drawer.  It slid back into proper position.

I think I fixed it. 

Bullshit, Dad said. 

No, I think I really fixed it, I said.

Still on his back, he slid the drawer forward.

Get out of here, he said.

I went back to watching tennis with my mother.  The color was off on the TV and the court was orange as a pumpkin; a player’s skin looked jaundiced.  This was not an improvement over the last time I watched tennis with my mother, when the tint had been so greenish-yellow that you got the idea there might be an imminent tornado.  I sat there and chatted about how the Williams sisters always appear stuffed as homemade sausages into costumes of their own design and how “Rafa” was someone that even an eighty-year-old woman might take, if not to her bed, then at least to her bedtime fantasies.

And then I looked over and saw that Dad had not moved from underneath his desk.  The right leg was still bent as it had been, the skin thin over the cord of the ligament. I looked over at my mother and then looked back at what I could see of Dad and I said nothing.  The thought went through my head that he was dead there, on his back, after a monumental battle with a drawer. Killed by a desk. Dead by a complete lack of mechanical know-how.  Stopped short on a Saturday afternoon, when he was supposed to have hot dogs for dinner.  Was this how things ended?

I got up and walked into his office.  I asked if here were all right.  He opened his eyes.  I can’t get up, he said.

I extended my hand.  Take my hand, Dad, I said.

Fuck off, he said.

No, Dad, take it.  I leaned over.  I put some stretch into my arm, as if I were suddenly graceful and could make my arm go on swan-like and long forever, or at least to that point where Dad would have to take it because to not do so would be outright stupid.

Fuck off, he repeated.

I went back and sat down with my mother.  Rafa was serving.  He was wearing orange and doing that thing where he picks his jockstrap out of his crack before he serves.  People have weird tics that other people make fun of. My mother asked about Dad and I grimaced; I pulled my mouth down at the corners and I may have bared my teeth. My mother warned me never to grimace in public, lest I be known as “the girl who grimaces.”  It was not really okay in her house either, but she would let me slide this one time out of a pleasant and engaging smile because as we both grow older we have had a meeting of the minds about the human condition and I have come to understand that my mother has a comedic bent hitherto unsuspected.

Dad called out from his office.  Can I get some fucking help in here? he asked.

Go help your father, Mother said. 

I went back to the office.  Dad had moved a bit, and now was lying perpendicular to the desk.  He rolled side to side on his back like someone doing physical therapy after a car accident.

I stepped closer.  Grab my leg, I said.  If you can’t take my hand, take my ankle.

Get out of here.  Go home.  I don’t want you in my house. 

I went back to the living room and watched him.  He rolled right. He rolled left. On the wall above him were his multiple degrees, conferred on this day in 1952, a commendation from Richard M. Nixon, a picture of him that appeared on the front page of the business section of the Boston Globe in 1985, something else from Who’s Who, dating from the early nineties.  I always hated Who’s Who, because every time I’d have a job interview in this new city I’d come to as an economic refugee, my mother would say, Does that manager know your father is in Who’s Who?  And that you also are?  She made no distinction between Dad’s accomplishments and the passing mention of his descendants as genealogical record, just as she insisted that I trumpet my mediocre college accomplishments a quarter century after I had graduated.

What could he do?  He puffed to a standing position, drew himself up, farted, and walked into the living room.  Thanks a lot, he said.  Thanks a fucking lot.  I was in there unable to get up and no one gave a shit.   

Oh, dear, Mother said.

What he could see was this:  A Marine rendered helpless by age.  Once crawling with machismo through the swamps, M1 over his head, now reduced to flailing about and feebly grabbing for his daughter’s ankle, that daughter through passage of time now stronger and therefore an omen of imminent death, if not today then tomorrow.  He has done his duty to his country and to his family, and why must it end like this, in a stringy mess of weakened human fiber and the reluctance of a cheap pine desk? He changes the television channel, oblivious to Mother’s complaint otherwise.  There are mosquitoes threatening the back yard. Atta-boy, soldier, with the bug repellent. It’s on the second shelf in the garage, next to the five bottles of window cleaner. There is a lot of work to do still. The world has gone to shit, he says.  Never seen anything like it.  They are going to tax the shit out of me and take away everything and give it away.  Everything I worked for to make sure you and your brother were taken care of, provided for.  From the corner of his eye, the one I can see and probably the other one also, a small tear.