everybody everybody. i have a piece coming out in the UK Guardian tomorrow. it would be more exciting had the piece involved more than me collapsing my book into a 2,000 essay. the thing is, i’d written another essay for them that was completely original but then they were all like WHERE’S THE WINE and i was all like OH YOU WANT EXACTLY WHAT I ALREADY WROTE IN THE BOOK. so now i have this useless essay, which perhaps one day i will try to sell for money and goats. for now, here it is. for you.
Daddy dearest (please don’t die.)
By Kathryn Borel
My relationship with the world changed when my father fell into a hole.
When fathers are around their daughters, they should be disallowed from doing three things: crying, vomiting and falling into holes. It is in these activities that we realize that they are – like us – simply bags of skin filled with a complex kinetic mush, held upright with bones that are breakable and governed by a grayish-pinkish glob that will one day die.
It is one of the inherent flaws in any child’s relationship with their parent: their survival is reliant on the belief that parents can do anything, while their introduction to reality is reliant on the initial recognition that their parents are fallible.
I wasn’t there when he fell into the hole. My mother called me from our large log cabin in the woods of Quebec on the infuriating satellite phone with a delay that made it seem as though she’d traveled back in time, as a lark, just so she could communicate with me from the Iron Age. (“Surprise! It’s Mum! All this smelting is ravaging my complexion!”) I was on the couch in my Toronto apartment, trouserless, working my way through a medium-sized pizza and contemplating breaking up with the Norwegian computer programmer I was dating.
“Lovey? It’s krchhhtt krchhhtt – your father has had a small accident.” My mother’s voice was higher than usual. The change in octave precluded her claim that the accident was small.
My heart went thrashy and I sat up quickly, causing the plate of food on my chest to shift sideways. The pizza flopped onto the floor and splattered red sauce all over the place.
She described the sequence of events: My dad had been engaged in his springtime bout of ill-advised and under-researched woodland retirement activities – transplanting a proud-looking cedar tree he’d found deep in the woods to a spot closer to the house. While he was digging a pit to accommodate the root system, he’d hit a hard patch of dirt. When he kicked the shovel to bust through it, the earth caved in around him, causing him to lose his balance and topple over at a weird angle. His knees had always been weak – he was a marathoner – and the tendon in the right one snapped. After hearing his frightened shouting, my mother came running and slid him out of the hole with the help of a small plastic sled.
I asked if he could walk.
“With difficulty. But he has an appointment with the doctor next week. It’s not a very invasive operation. Please don’t worry.”
Two months later, I flew home for a visit. As I deplaned, a little planet of anxiety plunked itself onto my sternum. How would my elegant Frenchman father be different? How bad was his limp? Would he have a cane with a duck head on top? How could he chase me around the house with a kitchen knife for mistaking a Burgundy for a Bordeaux with a cane?
Near the luggage carousel, I saw a flash of familiar peppery hair above the throng. I jumped in the air to make eye contact with the head. My father, still so handsome with his nut brown eyes and fine jaw, saw me and waved an old golf putter in the air. I trotted over to them and found the pair – fair Mum and dark Dad (who was now leaning on the putter for support) – and wrapped my arms around them both, poking my nose into my father’s shoulder desperately like some kind of demented fawn. Pulling back, I nervously scanned him for changes. Is it me or is his hair whiter? That brown thing on his temple – beauty mark or liver spot? Why is he wearing SWEAT PANTS in public?
Making sure to steady my voice, I tapped the putter and did what I do when I need to make impotent a big hard feeling.
“What’s your handicap?” I said.
My mother laughed. In one fluid motion, my father took a few steps back, assumed a fencing stance, raised the putter and swiftly jabbed it into my belly. I coughed out a cough, and then a huge laugh. This was all going to be fine.
We walked quickly, though a bit clunkily, through the parking lot to his fast black European sports car. He handed me his sports cane and I placed it on my lap for safekeeping during the ride.
Once we were on the highway and my father was deftly weaving between the lanes, I annihilated the idea of him as an infirm. This was my goddamn DAD. Teenage lothario, amateur boxer, poverty-stricken self-taught classical French cook who’d sailed through the ranks to become the youngest night chef in the history of the Georges V hotel in Paris. He was the man whose father had been instrumental in smuggling Jewish children out of France during World War II and then scraped together everything he had to move his young family to Canada to start anew.
Philippe Borel lasered in on my mother, knew she was his destiny, corrected her quiche-making technique on their first date (she didn’t blanch the bacon), five years later impregnated her with me out of wedlock, stoically and graciously abided the cruelty of her father (who called him his sin-in-law), and married her on a beautiful sailboat when I was a year and a half old. He stopped cooking. He started collecting wines and managing hotels. He was asked to take over the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, the most photographed hotel in the world. He was awarded one of France’s highest honours, the Chevalier de la legion d’honneur.
My father was 1,000 feet tall and made of solid gold and we were driving along this highway in his racecar at 1,000 kilometers per hour and I was the idiot me for becoming mired in all this mortality stuff because he was going to live forever.
We arrived at the cabin two hours later. The sun was high in the sky and casting the trees and plants and water in a light that was grotesquely optimistic. The lake shimmered like oil in a hot pan that had been left on the stove by a careless cook. My mother unloaded the groceries from the trunk and I demanded my father bring me to the site of his accident so that I could better understand the mechanics of his fall – to mock the dumb dirt and the dumb tree who’d been dumbly lucky enough to see this noble man in a rare moment indignity. I grabbed his hand and laid it on my shoulder, for support. My knees shook a little under his weight. He led me to the cedar and told me he’d named it The Crippler. Turning our backs to the woods, we walked up to the house while my father rattled off the names of the Burgundies he’d selected especially for me for dinner that night.
Inside, my mother was chopping food and pushing around pans on the stove. I went into the living room and settled onto the couch to read. Looking up from my book, I saw my father shuffling around at the top of the staircase that led to the basement and his cellar. He leaned his golf club on the railing and started down the wooden steps with an uneven thumping – a sort of thu-thunk, thu-thunk. Then there was a big thunk, a real THUNK, and a bellowing that went oooohhhhhhpps, and a crack and a crash, and then some defeated groaning. At the oooohhhhhhpps, I’d shot off the couch and run to the landing. He was at the bottom of the stairs, his body as curved as a shrimp’s, perfectly still save for the gentle rise and fall of his shoulder. My heart charley-horsed.
My mother and I helped him to his feet. We lumbered back up the stairs and put him in his armchair. We did some knee-patting and hair-smoothing and general fussing. He sighed and said he was fine. His Lynx point Siamese cat, Taomina, leapt onto his lap and began mincing around, searching for a comfortable spot. I was having insane thoughts: I had to laminate him, or find the largest pickling jar and store him in formaldehyde. Where was cryogenic technology? Wasn’t Walt Disney still alive in some smoking ice vat underground? Couldn’t we just do that to my funny, crazy, wise, wonderful dad? He was too rare to die. I wanted to put him under museum glass that would never break.
I realized I was standing there, slack-jawed from unreasonable scientific solutioneering, so I turned to him and asked if he wanted me to fetch the Burgundies. He gave me a list of four names.
Once downstairs, I hauled the wooden decoy panel off the wall to reveal the cellar door. My father had spent a few years smuggling attractive wooden wine crates out of the Chateau Frontenac and had a carpenter break them down, hot-glue and frame them. He was worried about intruders. (There were also two other decoy panels hanging on two adjacent walls, but they were ornamental. My father was also worried that the initial decoy looked too much like a decoy.)
Opening the door, I was hit with a cool blast and a familiar smell of earth and wet and mushrooms. I stepped inside and turned on the light. As I was poking around for the Burgundies, I ran my hand over some of the older bottles, their bodies gritty with compacted dust. I located my birthday bottle, a 1979 La Romanée my father had given to me in my late teens. It would be ready to drink in a few years. I scanned the other labels – a bottle of Taylor Fladgate port from 1945, a series of Madeiras from 1973, 1951, 1830. 1830. I reeled at the idea of consuming a soul that had been around to witness the independence of Belgium, the rise and fall of disco and also spaceships, all in one lifetime. There were pockets of the cellar that were empty, too. It was clear that since my father’s retirement, my parents had not been taking lightly this business of honouring their collection. They were drinking. They were living. They were releasing this stuff from the glass and putting it inside of them in the name of sensuality and joy and occasional moderate tipsiness. The metaphor was all around me, whacking me in all the parts of my head like so many cast iron frying pans: The wine is there to be drunk. Don’t fear its disappearance. Enjoy it, stupid.
“Hey dear DAUGHTER.” My father shouted from upstairs. He placed a long, liquid joke-emphasis on the “au”.
“What IS IT?” I shouted back.
“It is my desire to drink these bottles at some point tonight, not next year or the year after, hein?”
I located the four bottles he’d requested.
“Relax, old man. I’m coming.”
