Dawn Raffel was born in Wisconsin in 1957. She is the author of a story collection, In The Year of Long Division and of a forthcoming novel, Bedtime. She is also a magazine editor in New York.
Mark Raffel was born in Chicago in 1921, and moved to Milwaukee with his family during the Depression. He was the President of Raffel's, Inc. and The Mart furniture stores, and is now President of Raffel Product Development. He is also a licensed private pilot and a serious ballroom dancer.
DAWN RAFFEL
Dear Dad:
Do you remember my ninth birthday? I do. It was a birthday I anticipated eagerly, believing it would be special because, for the first recollectable time in my life, it was to fall on a Saturday; my party could take place on the actual, authentic date. But on that long-awaiting morning, I awoke with a blazing fever, and I lay abed, wretched, as my mother called the mothers of a dozen little girls to reschedule. To make matters worse, one of the mothers let slip that the following Saturday was her child's party, to which I had obviously not been invited, a bit of news that my mother, wounded herself, let slip to me.
After an interminable morning of ginger ale and tears, during which time you disappeared on an "errand," you and my mother came into my room in rare unison and delivered my gift. No, it was not a Barbie doll, a Ouiji Board, a game of Twister, or any of the other preadolescent, perisexual playthings then (and now) in vogue. My gift, fresh from Radio Shack, was a telegraphic device with which to tap out messages in Morse Code. Did I know Morse Code? No, I did not. But you, who spent most of your scant free time in our unfinished basement, signaling strangers in foreign lands with your home-made ham radio rig (which included not only desktop apparatus, but a tall, forbidding cabinet chock-a-block with wires and strange bluish bulbs, and which smelled untouchably metallic) pledged to teach me.
I was puzzled and delighted by my gift, but although you spent many hours coaching me, the exercise was hopeless. I could not seem to acquire even the most rudimentary facility with this unspoken language, nor could I decode the little messages you sent.
It was around this time, however, that you and I developed another pastime—that of reading together from a book titled The Restless Universe . It was, as I recall, a kind of astrophysics for laymen. I suspect it appealed to you because you spent seven days a week working in the family furniture store—a place as grounded in the objects of dailiness as one could find. We'd sit on my bed; you would read one page aloud and I the next. You claimed with pride that I understood what this book had to say about heavenly phenomena, but in truth, although I could usually sound out the big words, their meaning was opaque to me. It was my first experience with feeling both loved and misunderstood, and that lesson—that love so often comes with imperfect understanding or downright incomprehension—is one I still struggle to learn.
I grew up; we both drew away from our not-very-happy family. By my thirteenth birthday, I was calling you by your first name, sassy as you please in search of a reaction; none was forthcoming. Your attention was elsewhere. By my sweet sixteen party, you'd moved out of the house but, for appearance's sake, pretended otherwise. This was in the 1970s, when novelty was du jour, and my party's program was to tour a winery (in Wisconsin!) whose wine the guests were all too young to drink. You played the bland, gladhanding dad; my mother's smile fermented. Oh, the tipsy ritual cha-cha of the Middle West!
By my twentieth birthday, it was I who was leaving. You were taking me east for my junior year of college at the end of my final summer anywhere near home. (I remember saying goodbye to my mother in the driveway of the split-level house that would soon be sold while you sat in your car with your eight-tracks, waiting. "You're not coming back, are you?" my mother said, in her newfound "Don't lie to me" tone of voice.)
We sang "Happy Birthday" with a friend whose house was on our route. I still have a photo of that night; I'm bending over the cake, my long, dark hair too close to the flames.
"Whatever you do,"my mother said when I announced plans to visit New York, "stay out of Greenwich Village."
And so, of course, I moved there.
My mother toasted my twenty-first birthday with me uptown, at Tavern on the Green, a Wisconsin girl's vision of Oz.
Twenty years have come and gone since I have spent a birthday with you, Dad, not by design, but because we are a half a continent apart and because time escapes us. You live in Wisconsin still, farther out in the country now, in a place where you can see the stars in all their brilliance in the night, and even on a clear winter morning. The family's store, with its ever-hopeful, empty, pre-arranged rooms: the sofa, the loveseat, the La-Z-Boy recliner—ashtray on the coffee table, flame retardant toss pillows, tags attached (removal unlawful!) is closed down, gone.
Do you remember the same birthdays I do, in the same way? Or do you remember a whole different story? Experience loses so much in translation, memory, which is private, even more.
I have learned Russian, its tricky declensions; I have learned something that passes for French, but I have never learned Morse Code, nor have I learned to chart the restless universe between us, the way the light refracts.
Late last summer, my young son, named for your father who founded the store, had a cake at your house to fete his beloved, imagined companion. Joy was in his eyes. His heart had been opened, I suspect, to mystery and absence.
The candles were lit.
