Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

To them, my dad was a gentleman artiste, someone maybe luckier than they as he didn’t have to teach, someone who was living it, baby. Dad was asked by my tenth-grade English teacher to come and teach a writing class. He came in a suit, of course—my dad wears a suit, and often a hat, to the coffeemaker. He read the story in the Bible, John 11:35, where a bereft Jesus goes to his friend Lazarus’s tomb and demands the stone from his tomb be removed and orders Lazarus out. My father read the shortest phrase in the Bible from that story. “Jesus wept,” my father said, as his audience grew groggy.
    â€œDon’t ya just love that? Beautiful. It can’t be improved upon. If you can get your writing down to just what’s essential and then knock off five more words, you’ve got it. ‘Jesus wept.’ Now, raise your hand if you’ve read any Joyce at all and I mean even just opened it up and took a shot at it when you were feeling brave.”
    No hands were raised.
    â€œNothing to be embarrassed about, believe me. When the time’s right you’ll know. Now, the thing about Joyce . . .” The simplicity lesson my father was teaching then moved into Joyce and The Dubliners, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Proust, and a few English poets. I couldn’t really follow it and it seemed like other students were equally perplexed. Unlike at home, though, my father was cut off abruptly after forty minutes by a loud bell that sent children flying past him like preppy pigeons muttering niceties. “Thanks for coming to our class, Mr. Darst.” “Thanks for the writing lesson, have a nice weekend.”
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    HE NEVER GOT ANOTHER regular job despite my mother’s pleading, despite her feeling that he could get a teaching job—college, presumably, my father wouldn’t go any lower than that. But teaching, on any level, it seemed, was completely out of the question as far as my dad was concerned.
    When he wasn’t at the Bronxville library he was up in his office on the third floor, a stuffy garret that my six-foot, oneinch father had to stoop over to enter. It wasn’t a room, it was an unheated attic most of which served as stole storage, but after passing the Doris Gissy Museum of Ridiculous Fancy Childhoods, you entered a small open space that he had made into an office. There was nothing hanging on the walls, no carpet, no material comforts of any kind—just a giant desk, a giant desk chair, huge filing cabinets, his gray metal lamp with the ON button that you had to hold down until the long fluorescent bulb flickered like lightning as it came to life, pieces of paper with notes on them taped to walls, his microcassette recorder always within reach (“Note to self: Ah, reread Kempton’s latest New York Review of Books piece, terrific, just terrific”), a heavy magnifying glass, dictionaries everywhere that seemed to be mating and spawning baby dictionaries. It was appealing, if not entirely clear to me what went on in there. His gray filing cabinets, about the same height as me, were filled with his files, his writing, his ideas, notes on pieces to write, and also four files on each of us girls filled with report cards, pictures, notes we had written him or drawings we had made him. He seemed to be enjoying himself very much in his office even as other people seemed to be very, very angry with him. I saw my dad as a wanted man, a right-brain outlaw, with the authorities closing in on him.
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    HE WAS NOT JUST AROUND, he was available. Constantly. Positively up for chitchat, lots of it. With anyone.
    â€œI was talking to the checkout girl at the A&P. Turns out her grandfather was in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Probably knew Dagwood.”
    â€œThe checkout girl? How’d you get on that subject?” my mother asked.
    â€œOh, we were just chatting, you know. Hell of a nice