Hand Around a Bottle Neck
When my dad was in his early twenties, just a few years after he moved to Toronto from Kitchener, he wrote his first and only play. It was a two-act comedy written in rhyme that was put on at the Bathurst Jewish Community Centre almost entirely thanks to the efforts of my mother. He had met my mother, Rachel, soon upon moving to the city at a singles mixer arranged by his aunt at her synagogue. They told people they fell in love quickly but really it was more like they fell into each other’s lives quickly, and all of a sudden all the friends he had and all the things he liked to do were based around her.
He told me he was surprised at how much he enjoyed the routines of her life; she was surprised by how easily he fit into them. The trips to the deli with her parents on Friday mornings to get container after container of egg salad, tuna salad, cream cheese, half-off day-old bagels—trips she would attend mostly for the leftovers she got to take home afterward. The walks around her parents’ North Toronto neighbourhood in the evenings, the low heights of the well-kept bungalows allowing the orange evening light to reach everywhere, the sky seeming to be stretched low above them. He didn’t even mind staying with her parents, as they would do on long weekends or holidays, taking the Bathurst bus all the way North from her downtown apartment. He, sleeping in the basement guest room, and my mother, one floor above in her childhood bedroom. There was something he enjoyed about sleeping with a floor separating them, a closeness that wasn’t forced. Not having to deal with her wanting to talk or read aloud to him when he was tired from a long day, it was a simpler intimacy than her asking hands, pawing at him in bed, a closeness free of the shame he felt knowing that she was always the one to initiate sex and that he often refused. He found he could relax better into this slightly removed proximity, into that tender feeling he had towards his Rachel with a floor between them. An almost yearning he felt for her—lying there in the scent of her childhood home which he recognized from the scent of her apartment—knowing that he wouldn’t be asked to act upon it.
He liked catching glances of himself in the mirror behind the bar; he liked discovering the intimacies between men: standing side by side at the urinal, buying a beer for the man next to him.
So maybe they weren’t in love, but he found a love of the life they shared—as, he assumed, did she. A love of this life that looked more like the one their parents wanted for them than they expected: a romance started at the synagogue, a nice Jewish boy, fish salad, programming at the community center, a faith that was more habit than anything else. He found a love of watching hockey in sports bars with her friends’ boyfriends, this forced boys’ night so that Rachel and her friends could stay home and drink too much wine and probably disparage each of their boyfriends for his many wrongs. He knew, to her friends, he was seen as soft, not really a mensch. He wondered if Rachel complained about their sex life. He imagined her in those conversations, describing his sensitivity, his shyness, first with frustration, Sometimes you just want someone to grab you and fuck you, you know? And then with guilt, But he’s sweet to me. He could imagine that her friends might respond as though they were jealous, as though they envied this soft and feminine man, I wish Joel would put any thought into his clothing! Or into our home! I wish Joel would even once think to let me sleep at night instead of bugging me with his you-know-what!
He thought it was good, probably, for Rachel to get to talk with her friends. And, while he enjoyed the nights at the bar yelling at the television screen, he knew it really had nothing to do with enjoying the sport or even the specific men, per se. It was something about the novelty of watching television alongside them, feeling as though, by dating my mother, he could almost be one of them. He enjoyed the way he surprised himself by yelling at the screen with them, calling the team lazy, complacent, saying Coach, what are you doing? You’re ruining us, Coach! He liked to feel his cheeks flush, liked to watch the other men with their thick fingers around the necks of their beer bottles, the way they would sip from the sides of their mouths so that their eyes wouldn’t have to leave the screen for even a moment.
He told me one evening that he liked to feel himself act like such a man on those nights. I had come home from a high school party to find him drunk on the couch and I, also drunk, prompted him with more questions, taking advantage of what I imagined would be a rare opportunity for candidness. He said he liked to imagine how he must have seemed, just a man at the sports bar with his friends. He liked catching glances of himself in the mirror behind the bar; he liked discovering the intimacies between men: standing side by side at the urinal, buying a beer for the man next to him. He liked imagining that these men really could fix everything if only they were the coach instead of that idiot, that fucker, and he liked remembering that he got to see my mother at the end of the night and would be able fuck her if he wanted to, like all these other men who would go home and want to fuck their girlfriends. But he knew that as soon as she greeted him at the front door of the apartment, her breath and voice thick with the wine she had spent the evening drinking, that he would quickly leave behind the man he had been at the bar, the man with other men, clapping one another on the shoulders, drinking sideways from bottle after bottle with their lazy grips. He knew that he would become the shy man he always was in bed with her, that he would no longer want her, no longer even think of words like fuck. He’d go to bed and pretend to fall asleep quickly, and pretend not to mind her hot breath on his neck.
That same night he described to me my mother’s body which I had never really known—I hadn’t seen her since I was a young child. He described the way her thin frame widened softly at the hips and breasts, the hair up the middle of her back that lightened in the summer. You have her nose, by the way, he said, opening another bottle of beer first for himself and then one for me, something he usually wouldn’t have done, and so I knew he was truly drunk and would probably tell me anything.
Just trust me, he would say, she’s not someone you want to learn how to miss.
I was almost sad to find I wasn’t embarrassed by my father speaking about my mother in this way. It felt as though I was being left out, somehow, from the ubiquitous experience of being repulsed by your parents’ desire for one another. I felt only curiosity as my father described their attachment but perhaps not love, as he described their sex, her body, his quiet and sparse desire. I was embarrassed, instead, by his wished-for manhood, embarrassed, in fact, that it wasn’t gross to hear of his desire for my mother because it was so thin, so based on wishing. I was embarrassed to recognize this feeling in myself, in my few harried attempts at sexual exploits with the boys I guessed at having crushes on. I was embarrassed at us, a lonely father and his lonely daughter, sharing cheap beers on that stained couch.
We had rarely talked about my mother; her leaving was treated as an almost casual thing in our shared history, but that night he kept going with a certain fervour. He said he knew he had lost her the first time she didn’t want to sleep with him, the first time in his memory he ever tried to initiate something, which was also the first time she wasn’t interested. He assumed it was because of how her body was changing with the pregnancy, her widening ankles, larger nose, They never tell you that your nose will change, you know, she always said that was the worst part, the new coarse hairs on her chin and at the backs of her thighs. He imagined she didn’t feel sexy, didn’t want him to see her in a new way, as a mother like her mother had been. In truth, it was the first and maybe only time he remembered finding her sexy, this body that now carried an idea of what the coming years of their lives would be.
He told me, then, how he came home one day after skipping a class, a Wednesday, I think it was, because he was tired and wanted to lie with my mother, wanted to put his hand on her swelling belly. He walked in to the apartment they then shared and found her having sex with a man exactly his opposite, a man with a big and sculpted body, large arms, an ass that he saw ripple each time it thrust into the soon-to-be mother of his child, which he watched for what felt like minutes but was probably only seconds as he stood quietly at the door, this man’s ass that dimpled as my mother grabbed on to it tightly, their enthusiastic bodies that dripped sweat onto the thick cotton sheets she had stolen from the department store she used to work at, and he knew all at once that not only had he lost her but that he had never really had her and that, seeing the beauty of this man’s body, he had never really wanted her.
That was about six months after he put on his play. He had left the show on opening night (one of the three nights it was set to run) full of excitement and energy, ready to argue and engage about his work and about everything—about men and women and sex and laughing and theatre and good and bad ideas—only to find that my mother wasn’t there. At first he thought she had just stepped outside for a cigarette, which was uncharacteristic for her as she really only liked to smoke when she was drunk and was usually too cheap to buy her own, but that’s what he felt like doing himself so he figured maybe she had wanted to as well. But she wasn’t outside, nor did he find her in the women’s restroom when he opened the door gingerly and called her name, receiving angry looks from the two women standing at the sinks. He returned home and she wasn’t there either, wasn’t at the bar where she worked when he called, wasn’t with any of the girlfriends whose numbers he could remember.
He considered going to her favourite bars, her nearby friends’ houses, her favourite street corners, even, but thought about how this was, in a way, a test for how well he knew her and, in all regards, he was failing. He had failed in the first place by looking forward to her reaction to this show which she had helped plan and then quickly stopped caring about, in thinking that their argument afterward would be impassioned and exciting rather than repetitive and irritating, by thinking their sex that night might be incredible (though, in truth, it had never been), and then more thoroughly by not knowing where to look or call for her, by not even considering that she would skip his show, not believing her to be someone so careless or selfish, though in retrospect, he knew that she was. He then further failed by allowing his desire for a cigarette to make him believe that she would have also desired a cigarette and would be waiting outside and, finally, by so quickly running out of ideas of where to look for her. So he decided to wait for her, and he sat on the couch in their apartment where he had been, earlier in the night, when he had pictured leaving the show in excitement, where he had pictured that they might begin their fervent lovemaking, thinking that they would be too impatient to lay down with each other in bed. He sat and considered the woman whom he thought he loved, or at least the life they had which he thought he loved, the woman who would one day carry his child, though neither of them knew that yet, the woman who he kept pretending did not disappoint him or bore him or scare him.
I think about Clark, think about his love for Clark, onto which I project all of my love for the people in my life that I love in an unstructured way.
So I collected the little he told me about her as carefully as I could: my mother was a drunk (Not a drunk, per se, not back then. She just liked to drink. She’s probably a drunk now though), my mother was an insatiable lover, my mother was an impassioned arguer, my mother was beautiful and thin, my mother could be selfish and thoughtless, my mother liked smoking her friends’ cigarettes but not buying her own, my mother held her beer bottles with her pinky finger out, my mother didn’t like theatre or at least didn’t care about my father’s theatre, my mother liked men who were thin and sensitive like my father and also men who were big like her lover. From other conversations I gathered more fractured particularities: my mother got her driver’s licence when she was twenty-four, my mother once drove a light blue pickup truck around Vancouver that she ruined by stripping the transmission because she had never driven manual before, my mother had one great love before my father and probably many after, my mother was scared when she learned that she was pregnant with me and stopped wanting to have sex with my father, my mother had a bright red bicycle helmet that she would sometimes leave on long after she had arrived wherever she was going (the bar, a friend’s house, the grocery store). My mother had curls like mine but coarser, my mother had a temper like mine but coarser. My mother had recurring dreams about severed goose heads. My mother is not someone you want to learn how to miss.
Since my father’s sickness I have found myself trying to collect information about him in the same way I used to do with my mother, little pieces of who he is that might mean something more after he’s gone, when I’m desperate to know him more, when this grief I think I’ve become familiar with transforms into something new that I don’t recognize and I don’t understand and therefore scares me more, when he can no longer do something that surprises me: a late night confession over beer, a tender note left on the kitchen table when he left the house before I was up, Have a good day my girl, with a little flower in the bottom left corner and a sun in the top, a Supima cotton T-shirt he confessed to spending over a hundred dollars on.
I wonder, now, if anyone else went to the opening night of his play, if he had anyone else to argue with about it later. Anyone to tell him that the play was good, that it was interesting, that it was funny. If anyone else ever read it. If he would let me read it if only I would ask. I wonder about these dreams, these inevitable desires, and how they taper as life goes on, your first play that suddenly becomes your only play. I wonder if his best friend Clark saw his play. I wonder about his loneliness and about his desire for those men at the bar. I wonder about him being afraid of his own father as I have been, at times, of him. Him missing his own father as I will miss mine. How much of the way he talks to me acts as a front for his father talking to him. I wonder how much the things we say to others are really for us. About us, to us, a shrouded critique of ourselves. I wonder how I will speak to myself on behalf of my father when he is gone, and whether I will be kind. Whether I will have a daughter myself, or a thin man who loves me, a big man who loves me, a woman who leaves me. I wonder if I will learn how to miss someone. If any of us will. How to miss. I wonder about his loneliness. About his hands touching his body, rubbing psoriasis cream into his aging skin, about whether anyone else touched him while he was sick, while he was probably just wanting to be held. I imagine in it a yearning, something unfulfilled, something held at an arm’s length. I wonder if Clark ever touched him, or he Clark. Looks shared in the break room of their office, inside jokes between them that I’ll never know. I’m jealous of that closeness, to have spent forty years knowing my father. How to miss. I think about Clark, think about his love for Clark, onto which I project all of my love for the people in my life that I love in an unstructured way.
It’s all so personal and then it’s not. It’s your life and then it’s a story that happened that you tell your daughter. It’s your father or another, his hands on his body or someone else’s, or your own laid on his shoulder in shy comfort. Everyone has a play, or something, a thought or want at the very least. Everyone has something they don’t want to learn how to miss. Everyone has a particular hold on the neck of a beer bottle, or they don’t drink beer, or they like it only from a can. Everyone has a moment of confession, or many, or they yearn for one. Everyone pretends something. Everyone collects information about this and that, invented or with added flourish. Everyone thinks it’s embarrassing to say everyone, or at least some do. Everyone thought my mother was beautiful, especially when she wore this one shade of lipstick.
At the end of that evening on the couch my father carefully collected our beer bottles, six of his and two of mine. He was too tired or drunk to fall into the practiced aloofness he usually moved within. He kissed me sloppily on my forehead and went to bed and through his open door I could hear his heavy breathing. I lay on the couch all night and listened to his breath, to everyone’s breath, which was saying something like here I am.
Kate Brooks is a writer living in Toronto. Her work has been longlisted for the Room Magazine Fiction Contest, the Hope Prize, twice for the CBC Short Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Malahat Review Open Season Award and Metatron Press’ Prize for Rising Authors. Her writing has been published in the Hemlock Journal, Yolk Literary Journal, Headlight Anthology, and In The Mood Magazine, among others. She has published two chapbooks, Ficus (Metatron Press, 2024) and Everything (Folly House, 2026).