Free The Story of My Father by Sue Miller

fool!
    That was it. We loved it. Do it again, Pop.
    There was “Thirty Dirty Purple Birds,” spoken thus: Toity doity poiple boids, sittin’ on a coibstone munchin’ woims an choipin’ an’ boipin’. Along comes Goity, the goil with the coils and the poils, and her boyfriend Hoibie, what woiks in a shoit factory in Joizey. An’
they
saw the toity doity poiple boids sittin’ on a coibstone munchin’ woims an’ choipin’ and boipin’, an’ they was p’toibed.
    Where did this come from, some old vaudeville routine? His days in Boy Scouts? Undergraduate nonsense at Yale? His resources for the ridiculous seemed endless.
    One summer we borrowed two cars for the trip—a favor, actually, to friends who’d moved to Massachusetts and needed someone to drive the cars east for them. One was a medium-sized sedan. My mother drove this one, with the bags and three of us children and her high-pitched temper. The other was an MG. We took turns riding in it one at a time with my father.
    The MG was dark green. Its turn indicators were fingerlength arrows that dropped from either side of the car and pointed left or right. It had bucket seats upholstered in leather whose smell somehow hinted at a kind of life completely unfamiliar to me. I have never been in a more satisfactory car. And my father seemed as at home in it as Stuart Little—or even Toad of Toad Hall—had in his.
    He was supposed to follow my mother on the road, and he did, more or less. But he often turned up at the agreed-upon stopping place somewhat later than planned, having taken a wrong turn here or there. Or here
and
there. He’d drive up to the sad-looking, overheated, waiting group with the smug privileged MG child, and Mother would let him have it. (In the meantime, the rest of us would have had to listen to the warmup. “Your father! That
man!
”) He was apologetic but basically impervious. He could never quite understand what the fuss was about. He’d gotten there, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what counted?
    At camp, as at home, my mother disappeared into chores— though here they were often shared with her sisters—and into adult pleasures. I can remember her long-limbed slow swim into the deepest water, away from us splashing children. I can remember that she and her sisters liked to sit together and talk over cup after cup of coffee and endless cigarettes, which they took from a seemingly inexhaustible red oval tin of one hundred. Pall Malls. In the evenings they did puzzles together and they talked, a joking, wisecracking kind of talk, full of puns and double entendres, which was too fast, impenetrable to me.
    But my father was more available to us here than at home. He still worked every day, of course, scholarly work, usually in one of the smaller cabins. And he too had chores—painting and caulking the rowboats, chopping wood, hauling the foul brimming bucket from the outhouse to the dump. But in the afternoons, he was ours. Patiently and slowly he taught us the skills we needed to negotiate camp independently. How to row a boat. How to hold the canoe paddle, turn it, flutter it. How to do a dead man’s float. How to swim. How to pull the cord on the dinky outboard motor, how to make sure you didn’t flood it, how to steer the boat away from the hidden underwater rocks that studded our cove. How to cast a fly. How to troll silently. How to reel a fish in, kill it, clean it—what those body parts were, how they functioned. How to tell which mushrooms were poisonous, which you could eat. How to recognize the song of a thrush, of a vireo. Where you were likely to find a lady slipper. How to recognize different varieties of ferns—by size, by texture, by the smell they gave off when you crushed a leaf. How to start a campfire, how to douse it. He’d been an Eagle Scout; I still have his badge. BE PREPARED, it says. And he tried to see that we were, for a kind of life none of us would lead.
    But even at home in Chicago it was he who showed