Loving Dad From Across a Stranger's Swimming Pool
Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the houses of strangers. My father was an electrician, and every other weekend, he would bring me along on for his “side jobs.” He left my mom for another woman when I was a baby but remained, if not exactly in my life, then of it, orbiting me like a moon. I lived for the moments when he was visible to me—the weekends in his care from 3 p.m. on Saturday to 6 on Sunday—and I joined him on his jobs not because I enjoyed watching him work, but because I was desperate to spend time with him. He wasn’t the grand, charismatic man some fathers are; he was nervous and stressed, always in a rush and rushing away from me, but I loved him in the peculiar way we love people who give us only what’s left of themselves.
And he rarely had much to give me. In addition to electrical contracting, my dad bussed tables and delivered Arizona iced tea to bodegas and maintained the grounds of a hulking pharmaceutical plant all to support his second wife and her family. I resented him for working so much, especially on our weekends together; I would have preferred spending time with him at the movies or playing basketball or reading the comics—but I accepted the time I was granted.
While my father worked in the houses of strangers, I parked myself on their couches trying to make sense of unfamiliar TV remotes. In these houses, I learned how to fit myself within others’ lives. I learned which houses were made for conversation and which were bastions of silence. I knew when to take off my shoes without asking. I could tell whether someone drank tap water or used a Brita before I even asked for a glass. I intuited whether to go unnoticed or to speak. Most importantly, I learned how to not bother my father.
On those weekends, my dad was a messy blur of a man, hauling his canvas tool bag—impossible for me to lift—into bedrooms and bathrooms and basements. Occasionally, he would mess my hair as he passed, or lunge for my nose and pretend to pull it off, or simply shoot me a wink. I think he liked seeing me on strangers’ couches watching enormous TVs, drinking out of glasses that had come in a set, rather than glasses accumulated arbitrarily over the years. On those weekends, he gave me a life he couldn’t provide otherwise. Though it was an illusion of that life. We never truly lived in these houses—we came to make their lives better than they already were.
Many of the homeowners found my father through the pharmaceutical plant where he worked as a maintenance man. He had a desk in the back corner of a warehouse filled with fenced-in ladders and small bucket trucks. Employees from the office side of the plant would snatch up my father at lunch to tell him about some work they needed done on their houses. They lived in the repetitive suburbs of New Jersey, their houses as uninteresting as envelopes. These homeowners, however, often had pools, and in the summer, when I joined my father for work, he would advise me to bring a swimming suit with me before I left my mom’s house.
My father never owned a house with a pool or even lived in an apartment complex that was home to a pool. But he believed in their value as symbols of wealth and safety. Both his parents died before he turned 10, and after pinballing through foster homes, he and his brother were adopted by a man who owned, quite possibly, the cleanest in-ground pool in New Jersey. As teenagers, it was their job to skim the water every morning, netting every leaf and dragonfly wing and beetle. Pools, for my father, were proof of a better life. And though he couldn’t give me one himself, he could give me a few hours paddling inside a homeowner’s pool.
Those weekends when he advised me to bring a swimsuit were always disappointing. When he picked me up at my mom’s house, I was hopeful we would spend time together, but if I needed a swimsuit, that meant I would be on my own as he worked. The summer I turned nine, he worked for a wealthy family that whole sticky season, and my weekends with him were spent swimming in a pool under the shadow of a brawny McMansion. I was an only child, while there was a family of children—three of them, one a year younger, the other two older by one and two years—who endlessly fought. I would splash in the pool with these children, sword fighting with noodles, arguing, ignoring, desperate for my dad to stop working.
On the rides back to my mom’s house, he would ask if I’d had a good time, and I would assure him that I did. We both understood he was trying his best, and I was trying my best to pretend that these strangers were adequate substitutions for his love. He wanted to believe we belonged in these houses—or he wanted me to believe it. He was trying to give me what all parents wish to give to their children: a better life. In some ways, he succeeded. He gave me a better life for a few hours on the weekends. But it was never a life that we shared.
As I swam, my father stretched his legs over beams in attics and dug his arms into walls, scraping the skin from his wrists to his elbows, sucking in insulation, jolts of electricity vibrating his body. A vast divide separated my father and the homeowners; I existed somewhere in the middle. Though he tried, through his work, to tip me toward the homeowners’ lives, I couldn’t shake who I was: the child of my father, here to repair the house rather than live in it.
The summer I turned 10, I joined my dad on a job for a couple he knew from the restaurant where he bussed tables. The couple was gentle and well meaning, a pair of white empty nesters in their late 50s stuck with a pool and no kids. On this Sunday, the husband of the house brought me a drink as I swam. He asked me what “mommy” was doing that day.
It took me a second to realize he meant my dad’s current wife, who waited tables at the restaurant where my dad bussed, and as innocuous as the question was, it ruptured the illusion my father had worked so hard to create. This man my father believed was a friend knew nothing about his only child. I told the husband the truth. I didn’t know what she was doing.
My dad and I had access to the intimate sites of this person’s life—to so many lives—the sloppy bedrooms and damp bathrooms and attics overflowing with moth-eaten clothes. But these people knew nothing about us. The simple little mistake highlighted everything I found uncomfortable about these weekends with my father. He wanted to give me a better life, whereas I only ever wanted to spend time with him; these desires were in conflict with each other, and they would remain in conflict throughout the rest of my childhood.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve worked hard to chip away at the resentment I once felt over those weekends on the edge of his life. He didn’t know how to give himself to me, so he gave himself for me. He exhausted himself for me. And no matter how distant we were as he rewired garages and tugged outlets out of the walls, we always had our time together in the cab of his truck—his forearms scratched, plaster dusting his mustache, my fingers wrinkled from swimming—as he ferried me back to my mom’s house. Back at her house, as he turned out of the driveway, I would fantasize about two Saturdays later, when his truck would return, when he might not ask me to pack a swimsuit into my bag.
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