Inheritance of Misanthropy

The unique tone of my voice comes from the countryside — the West Texas plains, the harshness, the wind. It is the same southern cheery dialect of my aunts. Their voices are buoyant and animated and refined by decades of singing a capella harmonies in country churches.

But the sadness in my sound is a special inheritance of mistakes, world weariness and an unsatisfied longing to be wanted more than endured. 

—-

I’m standing at the bed in my mother’s room. A beige telephone is facedown on the headboard. The cord moves under my feet. Can he hear me standing here? Yesterday my mother said she’d make me go to live with him if I didn’t act right. I don’t think she will really make me go live with him but now he’s here on the phone waiting for me to talk.

The blinds are shut. The yellow light from the bathroom glows at my back. I steady my breath and bring the phone to my ear. “Hello? Brittany?” His voice rings through as if he’s in the darkness next to me. 

I look for my notes. Letters are scrawled somewhere, big and uneven, on a steno pad. I panic when they are obscured by my shadow. “Hi?” I ring back. 

This is my “real” dad, Kerry. I remember my mom talking to him for hours at our old house. The phone line coiled behind her as she organized my Barbies. He was apparently very funny. When she hung up she seemed surprised by my surprise that “my father” was so funny – in contrast to my stepdad, Scott, whom she called “your dad”, and who was apparently not funny at all.

Kerry and his wife Robin, an ambitious law student from Texas Tech, lived in San Francisco and always sent clothes and puzzles, books and games that you can only find in a big city. My mother bragged one year that I was wearing clothes from Nordstrom on the first day of school. The white denim dress had about 1000 hooks up the front and an orange pink bodysuit to wear underneath. I only wore it once. But the oversized David Copperfield t-shirt was the softest in my drawer. I’d get out of the shower and slick my hair back. I’d envision this mysterious “Kerry and Robin” as I put on the shirt. I guess we had met in person before though I did not remember. 

I can hear Kerry’s voice on the phone asking me if I have been behaving or getting into trouble. I recount the story my mother wanted me to tell, that I jumped off the roof of our new house onto the trampoline. I try to sound like I am smiling because he seems to know something I do not. I speak in self deprecating tones to cover my tension. Does he know he is being used to punish me?

For the next 7 years I lived in seasonal terror and agony that came at the mere thought of Kerry, having to see Kerry, talk to Kerry, write Christmas and birthday cards to Kerry, and spend time alone with Kerry. When they came to visit, this “Kerry and Robin” would sit on the couch looking as if they were just as scared of me. They still lured me into the living room with gifts and clothes.

But as a teenager, when my mother and Scott were at the height of their unhappiness, my perspective started to turn. I became obsessed with Kerry and Robin and their fancy clothes, high end coffees, thanksgiving brunches at the Ritz and frequent flyer miles. 

I opted to fly out every few months. I wanted their life. I wanted the smell of their city. The metallic whoosh of their Bart Train flying across the rails. The lesbians holding hands at church. 

While Robin worked in her law firm, my father took me to run errands all over the city. He often had a day or two of stubble and a sweatshirt on inside out. A worn out stocking cap covered his curly hair and we’d stop for coffee at least twice a day. 

He’d give me some piece of financial advice and pause for a second glaring into my eyes to be sure I understood. I tried to understand. I tried to act like I belonged to him and therefore could naturally understand. 

Weaving toward Hayes Valley in the crowded streets of San Francisco I felt like Neo in the Matrix. Kerry was my Morpheus teaching me about what must have been the real world. 

It was hard to reconcile having a mother and a father with such vastly different ideologies. I came to straddle two identities. I was both idolized and shamed by either my conservatism or my liberalism depending on the audience. In San Francisco, my thoughts were too Bible Belt. In Lubbock I was too liberal. They melded together like oil and water and in retrospect it came at no surprise that my mother had that quiet smirk on her face when she told me that my father was a recovering addict. 

I was shocked. How could this successful, charming and intelligent man, my father, have been a drug addict? She didn’t mention that she too had been on the scene and that’s how they met. 

It would be another 8 years before I caught a glimpse of that victimized self centeredness you often find in an addict. He began to describe himself as a “misanthrope with a terrible memory”. He would sometimes respond to texts with cryptic things like, “Wondering how it would be to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.” 

When our relationship finally dissolved I was in my 13th year in Northwest Arkansas. I had moved there to be with a boyfriend near Kerry and Robin’s summer home and my grandparents. I worked as a property manager for Kerry until I graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Sociology and a minor in French. But I had a terrible longing to be a coffee expert and Kerry’s hope of having a shop of his own was running in my veins.

To that end, I thoroughly mastered the ideologies, plant varieties and processing techniques that gained popularity in third wave San Francisco coffee shops such as, Ritual, Blue Bottle and Andytown – places where everyone knew Kerry and Robin by name.

I managed cafes, trained baristas, marketed for roasteries, worked at washing stations and on farms. I tracked exports from Africa and imports from Central America. And when the little company I worked for imported the first ever containers of single origin natural process Burundian coffee to the famous Blue Bottle, I felt I had arrived.  

I was never more safe and at ease than on the cherry shores of lake Tanganyika in western Burundi. I laid on the sandy beach watching Burundians swim in the dark water. Their skin was almost invisible beneath the waves. My co-worker was offended, “Most people don’t think of the Heart of Africa as a safe place.” She scoffed and indeed signs of the recent Hutu and Tutsi war were still on the roads. The cities and hamlets were still ensconced in barbed wire fences, after-dark curfews, rubble and destruction, and the helpers in our compound still shell shocked by the loss of their loved ones.  

Kerry and Robin, though, were unimpressed. On the lawn of our very own little coffee shop that we were building together in Fayetteville, Morpheus quietly acknowledged that maybe he was a little bit begrudging and his eyes shifted beneath his eyebrows in a way I hadn’t seen before. 

When he left the worksite that day, I never saw him again.