December 2021
All around me are striking black-and-white images of young people who are taking their first steps into their identities, into the question of who they will become. Hopeful children raise candles at their confirmations, surrounded by solemn-faced adults—some of whom look terrified for what comes next. Girls and boys at a summer camp in Lake Placid, N.Y., dance free and loose in a circle, their twiggy arms twisting like empty tree branches against the backdrop of a lake. The wild abandon on their faces stirs me with longing, not for what I have lost, but for what I believe I never had.
“Where does childhood end and adulthood begin?” the exhibit placard wants to know, and I lean in to read more. Because I want to know, too. I don’t recognize myself in these photos—the rituals, the flickering lights, the free spirits, the joy. The gradual ascent to one’s self. I remember none of this.
Where was I when I came of age? What was my rite of passage at 13?
“For some, certain ages or ceremonial celebrations indicate the preparation for adulthood. Meanwhile, lived experiences force other individuals to accept adult obligations despite their age.”
Right, I remember. I was sitting on the floor of my dad’s hospital room.
♣♣♣
My father’s silence since my expulsion from my family has seared me most of all. But I have, so far, given him a pass in my lowest moments, not because I am convinced that he deserves it but because I am wired to shield him from pain.
I am wired to shield him from pain because I have been doing so since the 7th grade.
I am wired to shield him from pain because I know that he battles his bad memories, too. Because I know him to be gentle, and I know this spinning world flummoxes his need for balance. Because I know that my dad is the only part of my genetics that has ever made sense.
I need him to keep making sense.
His world became my escape from the dissonance of my childhood, from my preparation to become someone’s bauble. My coming of age began with my body, of course. It began with how I looked, with how my mother thought I looked. It began with the outer shell of me.
It began here:
I was observed to be bow-legged and awkward.
I was observed to be short-waisted, “but who knows, maybe with your longer legs you’ll wind up tall like Aunt Fergie,” my mother said.
I was observed to need contacts because glasses were for ugly girls.
I was observed to have grown mousy brown hair, which required a dose of the lemon-juice-infused spray-on lightener Sun-In—the gateway drug of hair bleaching—to help return it to the blond promise of its youth.
I was 11 years old, and either my childhood was over or my warranty was about to expire.
These facts landed me in Melinda Hale’s School of Modeling and Self-Improvement on Saturday mornings, in a 1920s building in downtown Charleston with checkerboard flooring, brass-and-mirror elevators, transom windows, and the frosted glass office doors of an old detective agency. There, 10 prepubescent girls laid waste to all that cinematic charm—that perfect backdrop for the clickety-clack of a typewriter—by lining up with their sleepy legs and candy-bowl stomachs and preparing to strut as unnaturally as possible across a runway riser.
“Pretend you are on a tightrope,” we were instructed. “It’s heel-toe, heel-toe.”
Melinda demonstrated; I cowered. The ground shook as she launched herself forward. She swung her arms threateningly by her side like she was trying to bully the starlings off a power line. The weight of all of her bones thrummed under her heels with ferocity.
“Now,” she continued, “at the end of your tightrope, you do a small spin by crossing your right foot on the other side of the left, turning, and following through, like so. Now, stop. Point your right foot slightly to the side, your left foot forward. Now, relax. Bend your left knee slightly and put your hand on your hip.
“Smile. Give them a chance to look at you. Then pivot halfway and return, like so.”
Like so. At home, I saw my sister, a Valerie Bertinelli doppelganger, trying to be like so, too, trying to be more beautiful than she already was, trying to be the right kind of girl. There were weight-loss programs and a visit to a renowned medical clinic. A therapy session that involved many families sitting on folding chairs in a sharing circle. There was me feeling a shame throughout it that I could not define. Me, grasping that skinny and pleasing was the right kind of girl, too.
I don’t remember all the details. Most are buried and I cannot, or will not, reach them. I hid them somewhere in the hallway between where my mother spent her time and where my father spent his. I dropped them off on my way to our television room, on the way to him, where together we watched the only spectacle capable of going toe-to-toe with the soft savagery of sequins and scales and shrinking waists.
We watched football.
“Watch this,” he would instruct. “They’re gonna call a reverse.”
“Flea flicker! Flea flicker!”
“Why did you run the ball up the middle again? Idiots.”
“Well, of course Notre Dame is gonna get that call. Of course.”
They did not just stand around and take a punch to the stomach in this game; they bore into each other with all the anger and sadness and vulnerability they were not allowed to display elsewhere. The anger and sadness and vulnerability for which I also had no release, except within the confines of our TV room, in front of a glowing screen that delivered the experience that became my church. And because my dad had grown up an hour from its campus in central Pennsylvania, our denomination in this spiritual journey was Penn State.
His youngest brother had season tickets, and we made the six-hour drive from our home in southern West Virginia to State College once or twice a season to avail ourselves of them. Standing inside that metal beast of a stadium, feeling it reverberate and growl and march under my feet … Well. The place cast some sort of spell on my introverted young heart.
It was the first university campus I had visited, and it was where I first matched an image to where my life could take me. My father was not an alumnus; neither he nor my mother had gone to college. But I thought I could. I thought I would.
I drew a connection between the mountains that surrounded my backyard daydreams and the mountains that rose beyond Beaver Stadium, above libraries and class buildings and an ecosystem of young people let loose to think for themselves, to discover themselves below. The hope of all that, the feel of all that, held a part of me that I instantly recognized. It held a future that I craved.
I became my father’s daughter through those experiences. I was my father’s daughter for a simple reason: He never told me otherwise. To be his daughter, I required no fixing. No alterations. No contact lenses. No blond hair. No perfect grace. No like so. I was always just right.
All he required from me was a sense of wonder and an ability to believe. He gave me plenty of both.
♣♣♣
What I believed on January 16, 1986, when I walked down that hallway to answer an unexpected knock at our back door, was that every theme that unfolded on a football field could unfold in real life. I’m talking about the power of putting your faith in something bigger than yourself, even if that something was the last-ditch effort of an on-side kick.
Especially then.
I believed—when I saw my mother standing at our door in front of Richie, my dad’s co-worker—that improbable feats happened all the time in football if your devotion was strong enough.
I believed—when I saw the beads of sweat running trick plays on the smooth dome above Richie’s pale eyebrows—that if we sat in the right chair during every game and appealed to the right gods, those miracles would keep happening.
I believed—when Richie said, “Teddy has had a heart attack … We were at lunch, and he just wasn’t right. He’s in the ICU, I’ll drive you ...”
Well. I believed that we could control the uncontrollable. I believed that I could control the uncontrollable. Sit in the right chair. Use the lucky blanket. Wear the right shirt. Possibility with a capital-P.
I absolutely believed that every theme that unfolded on a football field could unfold in real life. I had to believe it. My dad had just turned 44. I was only 13.
He was following in the footsteps of his father, who had survived four heart attacks by then, and his grandmother, who had died at 50 from her first. I sat in homeroom that first Monday back at school and could not figure out how to live in both worlds at once, the one where my dad was having a tiny balloon surgically inflated inside his heart and the one where I had to learn about West Virginia history and study integers. I tried that morning to cinch my emotions, to wrap the anger and the sadness and the vulnerability around my ribs and hold them there against their will. I remember this clearly. And I remember failing, bursting wide with tears and emotion, arms encircling me, friends embracing me.
Ten days after Dad’s heart attack, I unfurled a Penn State blanket on the cold January floor of his room at the Charleston Area Medical Center, and we switched on Super Bowl XX and watched it together with 93 million other fans. There was no better year than 1986 for an irreverent quarterback in a white headband and a defensive tackle with a kitchen-appliance nickname to win the championship, all while my dad’s heart monitor beeped approvingly in the background.
He came home that week.
I am not saying that football mends hearts, because even I, a woman who sometimes concedes to the rational only after her irrationality has been beaten into submission, know that this is a ridiculous statement.
What I am saying is that some 13-year-olds hold flames aloft in places of worship and some 13-year-olds dance wildly by a summer lake and some 13-year-olds sit on a cold floor in a cold place in a cold month praying to the right gods for their heroes to prevail, and all of it—every candle, every chant, every joyful dance, every single third-and-forever—is an act of faith.
I am saying that football is never only about football, not for me. And not for my father, either.
I am saying that a sensitive boy who felt his emotions deeply, who grew up in a railroad company row house on Sixth Avenue in Altoona, Pennsylvania, whose own life turned upside down at age 13, might fasten himself to games that spoke of possibilities. He might have needed a dose of wonder as his parents split, as his mother struggled with her mental health, as his domineering grandfather stepped in to help raise him and his two younger brothers. I am saying that a 13-year-old boy with a magically mathematical mind and a genetically broken heart might have found solace in his ability to follow the patterns, to predict the unpredictable, to hope for miracles, to call a reverse.
I am saying that 13 does not always propel you forward. Sometimes, 13 holds on tight to all the decades that follow.
Less than a year after his heart tried to quit on him, I nervously followed my dad’s slow and careful climb up, up, up the Beaver Stadium bleachers to our usual seats in row 90. I pictured the tiny amber vial of nitroglycerin tablets on standby in his pocket and attempted to calculate how long it would take EMT personnel to reach us at the very top of that metal mountain.
Weeks later, I watched him go airborne from our couch in celebration as the Nittany Lions won their second national title. And in the midst of my own celebrating, while my 14-year-old arms danced like twiggy tree branches against the backdrop of our TV room—a whole year older, a whole year antsier—I watched my dad’s leaping joy and thought: Oh, be careful. Oh, be careful. I need you. Please be careful.
“I’m trying to keep you alive,” my mother would say to him in the months and years that followed his heart attack, as our lives became one carefully measured meal, one weigh-in, one stress test, one palpitating day after another, a perfect spiral into a state of anticipatory loss. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”
We were all living like so after that. And we stayed that way, and stayed that way, and stayed that way.
And now I am standing here in this spacious art gallery with its clean white walls and impeccable lighting 35 years later, looking at this Bill Bamberger photo of two teenagers sitting beside each other in a cramped school stairwell. I am looking at the silent hope and sadness and vulnerability on their faces.
And what I see is the only rite of passage I recall: How I learned to squeeze myself into narrow vessels, into blocked arteries, into mother’s child and father’s daughter; into belonging through a fan base, a college football team, a hair color, a pivot on a tightrope, a skirt on my hips, a number on a scale; into a need to be small, a need to be heard, a need to make sense of the chaos that all of our bodies contain. Our hearts, our lungs, our bones, our waists, our skin, our minds, our voices.
I am standing here thinking how badly I needed space for my hopes to coexist with my anxieties. Room to leap, to dance, to light a fire, to grow with wild abandon. To be 13 and nothing more. ♣