The house on Herschel Street never really belonged to me, but I liked to think that the yellow walls of the bedroom that overlooked the backyard garden did. The shade was somewhere in between daffodil and mustard, with little black stars sponged in a line just below the ceiling. The room was a converted nursery decorated with the past owner’s peculiar taste when my father bought the house in Avondale, Florida, and despite my new stepmother’s desire to conceal it all with a less intense color from Benjamin Moore, I won the walls just as they were. The combination of displaced things made sense when they all existed together.
For a few weeks or days out of each year that I spent in the alternate reality of visiting Dad, I would lie down on my twin-sized trundle bed with a mix CD playing, staring at the walls until nighttime shadows dimmed their appearance, all while enjoying the absurdity of them—the strange backwardness of black stars against a yellow sky.
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Growing up, his mother used to tell me that I was a “daddy’s girl.” I adored the nu-metal songs he played me off Jacksonville’s alternative station and spent countless nights turning the pages of his color-image medical textbooks about communicable diseases. If my father ever wanted a son instead of a daughter, he had one while he lived on Herschel Street. Keeping my tan feet in light-up sandals from the boys’ department, I refused to comb my thick mane of dirt-colored hair and wore tie-dye shirts from The Salvation Army. I was a Polaroid of his childhood self, the same doughy face and resting pout. His skin was darker than mine, deepened by a higher dose of Filipino blood, and then slightly cooked by the North Florida sun. Otherwise, we were the same. We ripped our straw wrappers identical ways. We shared raunchy senses of humor. We visited the science museum gift shop that sold lollipops full of dead bugs together and every single time, he would dare me to try one. I never mustered the courage to do so, but I always insisted on stopping in to examine the flavors: cherry cricket, green apple roach, blue raspberry beetle.
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My dad knew that my favorite color was yellow, he knew that I liked to drink Mr. Pibb with pancakes in the morning. He knew that I could only fall asleep to soft music and the sound of thunderstorms, so he made me ambient mixes filled with acoustic songs and Celtic instrumentals to play softly against the beat of southern rain at night. What he didn’t know was that I was terrified of roller coasters, or that it wasn’t required to take annual trips to the amusement parks to be a good father after leaving.
It’s the summer of 2004 and my dad is driving his wife, her daughter, and me south to Orlando, where we cluster into a little raft for the Jurassic Park ride, pressing a metal bar across our laps. The attendant presses a button and the raft lurches, tipping slightly. I don’t even like boats, but I haven’t told him that. He grins at me and wriggles his eyebrows excitedly, the way he always does when he’s silently urging me to do the same and just have a good time. The raft glides down the decorative river, passing a calm series of animatronic dinosaurs snacking on grass, before it takes a sharp left into the “raptor room”. Here it comes. I shut my eyes and dig my pre-braces teeth into my bottom lip as the river disappears and wind scrapes my cheeks. A tyrannosaurus rex screeches in one of my ears, and my dad whoops in the other. He does this in the same manner I imagine him doing at the music festivals he frequents, losing himself in the amplified energy of juiced-up college rockers.
I want his fearless energy. Forcing my head down in between my arms like we used to do for lonely silent hour in kindergarten, I try to hear the music somewhere in all the screaming, the heartbeat rhythm of bongo drums under bourbon and cream vocals. I pretend we’re driving in his cherry-red Miata, wheels spinning over the Main Street Bridge with the Jacksonville skyline in view, and I’ll point out the Landing where we once went to ride our bikes, doesn’t he remember that day? Doesn’t he remember how much fun it was to order chicken tenders from our waiter named Marlin, because that’s a kind of fish, right? Doesn’t he realize that it’s so much better on those rare days when it’s just us two, and we don’t have to hear anything else but live recordings of Nickel Creek on the car stereo?
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A few years later, I’m standing on the eggplant and moss-colored carpeting in the Jacksonville International Airport, and my dad introduces me to a friend of his. She’s a striking young nurse that he’s worked with in the emergency room, and she’s just flown home to Florida to be with her daughters. Her low, honeyed voice reminds me of the sweet tea I drank in an Atlanta restaurant once when my mom brought me to visit my dad after a shift. That seems like centuries ago. Time has a funny habit of moving on hyper speed with him. Our lives have never quite unfolded at the same pace, and each time we see one another, we look and seem like different people, like strangers with vague familiarities.
After we part ways with his friend at baggage claim, my dad tells me that my stepfamily has moved out and he’s going to live somewhere else, too. “I’m sorry,” I say. It comes out in a monotone voice that makes it seem like I’m apologizing for an unfortunate traffic jam clogging the expressway. Likewise, my aunt has given him a greeting card that says, “Congratulations on your divorce!” in bulging letters.
“Don’t tell your stepmom that we saw my friend here,” he says, suggesting that his new ex-wife might still be lingering around nearby, like some cicada shells of two summers earlier that still hid in the crevices of porch steps. “You know how she gets.” I do know. We drive back to the empty house on Herschel Street, and while he orders dinner, I sit down on my suitcase in front of the stairs.
There is a gigantic stained-glass window overlooking them, which filters the burning sunlight in through its primary colors and lets it all dribble down each step, fading out into the maroon carpeting. Beside the staircase is a glass telephone booth, built into the wall for no obvious reason since it lacks an actual phone. Whenever I close myself in and sit down on the small wooden bench it feels more like a confessional, but of course it has no priest either.
“Mel, come here,” my dad beckons from the den. I dash across the wood floor and peer over his shoulder at the computer screen. He has the browser open to a pizza restaurant’s website, with the words, ‘ORDER ONLINE’ in letters that are as bold and excited as the ones on his divorce card. “Look, we can just order the pizza like it’s from Amazon or something.” I fold my arms with my hips angled to my right side; the less time I’ve spent with him in the past few years, the more I’m beginning to adopt the mannerisms of my mother.
“We don’t have to talk to anyone on the phone.” His last sentence draws a smile across my face. We share a weird and often inconvenient anxiety that causes us to avoid phone conversation altogether. Before the generation of smartphone apps, this forward-thinking pizza website is the cornerstone of innovation. He orders a large cheese pizza for us to devour while we watch the first season of Arrested Development on DVD.
I will cling to this moment for as long as I can; the hissing noise of his hard laughter, the grease leaking off my palms, the shared solitude of us on either end of his beige couch. I try to find the words to tell him that this is what I’ve wanted, rather than free-falling theme park rides and thirty-story hotels with shimmering comforters and flat-screen televisions on the walls and expensive champagne in the ice bucket.
I never did.
Instead, my ex-stepmother knocked on the front door during that exact moment, asking if he could talk for a while, which stretched out across the remaining hours of the night. You left and he’s mine again, I wanted to scream at her in frustration, but the words congealed together into lost thoughts before they reached my lips. I watched my dad slip through the doorway onto the front porch, pulling the knob shut to muffle the ensuing argument.
Arrested Development continued to play, but I couldn’t focus anymore. I went upstairs and sat in my yellow bedroom for the last time before my dad moved away from Herschel Street, counting the black stars, and hoping that someone would repaint it once my dad sold the house. The daffodils doused in mustard that had colored the walls were beginning to look childish. I turned on my metallic boombox, but somewhere in my mind, I could still hear the incessant whining of bleached-blonde cicadas who managed to overstay their predicted lifespans.
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It was seven years before I returned to the neighborhood that enveloped roads like Herschel Street and marked them with rich burgundy signposts. The last time I had seen it was from the inside of the stained glass window, but this time, I was watching everything unfold in the rearview mirror. The houses were oozing with Christmas decorations, while people lined their driveways with paper bags containing white candles. My dad parked, and warmly greeted a flock of young adults before introducing me. “This is my kid; she’s the one who goes to college in Chicago.” Someone handed me a plastic cup of champagne. I wasn’t wearing light-up sandals anymore.
Children with names like Edison and Banjo galloped around the tiny flames, shaking their colorful bracelets made out of woven rubber bands, while their bearded fathers drank craft beers and reminisced about college together. I tried to remember my dad and I both being that young, respectively, or what Avondale looked like when we were those younger versions of ourselves. The willow trees had always looked too old to belong to such a renovated neighborhood, with curved spines and grayish-green leaves sweeping the snake-filled grass, but in the winter they looked especially dry and decrepit. I wondered exactly how many blocks Herschel Street was from there, and if the new owners of his house had installed a landline into the glass phone booth. Maybe they simply removed it altogether.
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Yellow is no longer my favorite color, and I wonder if my dad knows that. We sit across the table from each other in his new house on the lake, drinking glasses of Jack Daniels splashed with Coca Cola Life and leaving rings on the wooden table. I finish the glass, smear my hand across the condensation, and he pours me another. Each sip causes my voice to crescendo, and I have to remind myself that I’m not at a bar in Chicago with my friends, but in the kitchen with my father. The bitter taste of whiskey flicks my tongue, which seems to widen the gap from my childhood until now. Was it really only a decade since those uneaten cricket lollipops and those burnt CDs filled with Enya and Bob Dylan?
He taps his phone and the music playing switches to a track by the alternative country-punk band, Lucero. He launches into a story about seeing them live and I recognize the flash in his sepia-toned eyes. We look less alike now that ten years have gone by, but the pieces of myself I still manage to excavate within him have more to do with personality than appearance. He talks about meeting Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, about traveling to Italy with his friend I met at the airport, a woman he later ended up marrying.
I remember being in middle school, head jammed up inside my locker, reading a postcard he mailed from Tanzania when he hiked Kilimanjaro. I remember leaving voicemails he wouldn’t hear until days later when he returned from weekend-long trips to see Dave Matthews play in Palm Springs. I remember receiving countless concert t-shirts for Christmas, printed with the names of cities I’d never heard of, much less been to. I remember not understanding his abilities to wander around, chasing strangers, climbing summits, always in search of something that he never mentioned, at least not to me.
Now I am old enough to sit across from him, the same drink flowing through my bloodstream, colored ink in my skin just like this, and I’ve done things like fly to Iceland for a music festival and breakup with someone from an airport eight-hundred miles away. I’m beginning to fathom the ingredients that compose our matching DNA. Restlessness echoes back and forth between the two of us. Nights like this are the only ones we’ll be sitting still.
“Put on Ben Harper,” I say, and he obliges, playing a song I remember from an old Herschel Street mixtape. I close my eyes and feel the heat of Jack Daniels leap like a campfire in my babyish cheeks, remembering what it was like to be nine years old, to have light brown legs bouncing impatiently beside my dad’s Miata. “Can we go already? If we leave right now, I’ll eat a cricket this time. Honest.”
It’s close to three in the morning now, and the cloak of black over the lake is beginning to come down, with purplish light spilling all over the water. We finish our third round and I pull myself up the stairs to the guest bedroom, falling into the ocean of comforter and closing my eyes while Ben Harper fades out. It doesn’t rain that night, for once, so I blast the sound of a violent downpour from my phone and let the whiskey lull me to sleep in the wake of an artificial storm.
Melaina K. de la Cruz is a Chicago-based writer who has moved around so much that she doesn’t really consider herself to be from anywhere. She’s decided to wander around the planet with a pen and notebook until she finds a suitable hometown. Currently, she is finishing her degree at Columbia College Chicago, where she studies creative nonfiction writing and radio production.
