When I was six, I walked by my brother Jackson’s side as he toured colleges. Jackson and I had electric-blue eyes and blond hair that curled if we let it grow too long, the spitting image of our mom, but Carey was the only one of us three who resembled our dad, with straight dark hair and green eyes flecked with amber. Jackson mentioned to my parents how his first choice was Swarthmore, the school that our mom had graduated from decades ago and to which our sister Carey had already been accepted. Dad affected a heavy groan and lamented the fact that no one wanted to go to Harvard and follow in his footsteps. Even she had abandoned him, he sighed.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” I piped up in a brief moment of sympathy. I didn’t fully get sarcasm, or how everyone knew it was time to play along with a joke when Dad put on that tone, and my sense of humor wasn’t composed of eighty-five percent sardonic jabs like it would later be. “I’ll go to Harvard for you!”
Jackson snorted while my parents laughed, none of them clearly taking me seriously, but Dad ruffled my hair and thanked me cheerfully anyway.
I remember Dad walking through the creaky door late one evening when I was nine. He towered over me as he shook the rain off his long coat and the odd hat he’d picked off his too-large rack for the day. He reached down and gave me a tight hug, and I pretended to be annoyed when his dark hickory stubble scratched my forehead. Earlier that day, the idea had inexplicably entered my head that I should read the Odyssey. Dad’s eyes lit up when I brought up the thick, dusty volumes that sat too high on our shelves for me to reach, thrilled that his youngest kid who didn’t read his old Superman comics and was too used to his bad puns to even groan at them shared an interest of his, that I wanted to spend time with him during his scant evening hours at home. That night after changing into a scruffy flannel shirt and jeans that he called his casual clothes––something I could barely understand, with my closet full of graphic tees and dinosaur socks––he sat me down on the couch and began to read line after rhythmic line of the world’s strangest bedtime story. He adjusted his heavy square glasses on his nose, cleared his throat authoritatively, then tilted his head in confusion, and tried and failed to pronounce the first lengthy Greek name.
He blinked briefly and glossed over the name, starting to read in earnest with a reverent storyteller’s voice. He blazed enthusiastically through the story of Odysseus’s son, pitching his voice up and down as he spoke for different characters. And when he continued faltering on the names of the suitors or spirits, I was all too eager to strut what I’d learned from devouring the Percy Jackson books, an incredibly extensive knowledge of maybe six actual Greek words and some vague rules of pronunciation.
“…But now did Ante- er, Anti-”
I peered at the page. “Antinous, Dad,” I scoffed at his foolishness.
“Oh, of course. Thanks, O!” He smiled, the snark in my voice either ignored or unheard, and continued laying out the suitors’ many attempts to ambush Odysseus’s son as he searched for his father.
Once he knew he had my attention and that I wouldn’t just feign sleep, Dad insisted on teaching me about the writing style. He read every line like a heartbeat, accenting every other syllable by tapping his hand on his knee in order to teach me about iambic pentameter. I wouldn’t need to know what iambic pentameter was for another seven years. Despite my best efforts to ignore his lessons, I became invested in Odysseus’s journey, my eyes widening when Dad’s voice rose and he described the raging whirlpool of Charybdis or Odysseus shooting an arrow through twelve targets at once, and he began to read more naturally until we finally closed the book.
The night afterward, I asked him to start reading me the Iliad.
By the age of eleven, I had stopped asking for bedtime stories. After finishing both lengthy books, my interests had begun to shift. My left hand skirted across printer paper with a ballpoint writing pen as I planned out my first comic. Dad loomed over my shoulder with a casual “Whatcha drawing, O?” as he gazed intently at my too-large heads and my colors so flat I could’ve balanced a house of cards on them. I tore my eyes away long enough to give him a nonchalant “nothing” before returning to the paper, but he continued to peer at my drawing through his thick glasses. I regularly felt relieved to have good vision, the only one in the family besides Carey who didn’t wear glasses, but now I cursed my sight, as it and Dad’s gaze made me all the more aware of how I colored inefficiently and scratched out faces and let my pen weave drunkenly across the page. He immediately seized on what he saw as an opportunity for bonding and foisted a large cardboard box of DC and Marvel comics, pages yellowed and crackling like pirates’ treasure maps, onto me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my life I have taken whatever chances I can find to try and push my own interests onto other people, a habit I must have picked up from him. I stowed the box away in my closet, leaving the carefully kept comics to gather dust. I quietly vowed to draw alone from then on, away from my parents’ inexplicably irritating requests to see my art and from the comics I saw as reminders of my own lack of skill.
Dad spent long hours at work but seemed to try and make up for it by insisting I try everything Jackson and Carey had enjoyed or endured with him, from reading poetry around the dinner table to hefting his guitar, far too big for my arms to fit around, and sinking my fingers deep enough into the steel strings to cut before I could even strum a note. Nothing seemed to hit home, and as I quietly closed my closet door on the comics, the tradition of rejecting his interests continued.
When I was thirteen, we moved to a new house, closer to my school and to Dad’s job in the city. He got home earlier in the evenings and left later in the mornings, and I woke up at six rather than at five (for what was still a stupidly early bus). Sometimes I saw him for a few minutes in the morning before he left; sometimes it was the garage door grinding open as he unlocked his car that woke me up. On days when I saw him, he invariably gave me a perky, “Morning, O!”— glad to share the early rise with me and to see me for more than a few hours at night. Even before I knew how little or how badly he often slept, I always wondered how he could be so chipper so early and usually gave him a surly greeting, annoyed at his perfect example, before trudging to the fridge to snatch a bagel from its depths.
Our new house was in a neighborhood of old people and winding streets. It hampered my seeing most of my friends outside of school while letting me make few new friends who stuck. I needed to blame someone for keeping me bored, for rightfully not letting me use a phone or a computer 24/7, and seeing through my thin excuse that I would only use them to talk to friends. When I was young, I hadn’t felt constricted by my parents, but I also hadn’t known there was much more to the world. I had begun trying to live in my own world, and to me Dad seemed too determined to keep me in his. He was a high-school football player, a Harvard graduate, a publishing executive, and an editor of authors who hit the New York Times’ bestseller list regularly. None of those lofty positions aligned with my dreams, or what I believed them to be, and I believed that rather than acknowledge him and his different accomplishments, I needed to actively separate myself from him. Even the middle name he’d given me, Ellington, felt awkward and pompous to me, perhaps more fitting for the second step-cousin six times removed of Queen Elizabeth II. I asked for my middle-school diploma to read plainly, “Owen Pietsch,” and ignored his attempts to get me to listen to Duke Ellington’s music as a way to connect.
I tried to distance myself from his music in general. I always hummed to myself as I walked through the house, drew, and worked, keeping my music in my earbuds, my room, and my mind. Dad always whistled, broadcasting his own music loud and proud and often carelessly out of tune, or sang breathily as his fingers coaxed chords out of a jangly acoustic guitar whose sound inevitably slipped through the cracks between my door and wall as I tried to work. He often paused every few seconds to glance at the lyrics or tablature he had pulled up on his phone, mouthing the words for a moment like he was trying to work out a tricky Greek pronunciation in his head. He had gotten a speaker system built into the kitchen and living room of our new house so he could play his Replacements albums on loop as he cooked or worked at his desk.
One weekend, Dad insisted on a “jam session” together, which I cast about for every opportunity to avoid. Eventually I found myself sitting in front of the old Yamaha keyboard we kept in the guest room, Dad in the door with his guitar across it like a rope between two stanchions, barring me from escape. The song was “I’m Always in Love” by Wilco, and he insisted on playing and singing himself, which locked me into the minuscule role of pressing the same eight keys every twenty seconds or so. My mind hearkened back to the Odyssey, to the story of Calypso, the Titan who healed travelers who came to her island. The gods had cursed Calypso to fall in love with whoever arrived at her island, and to only let the travelers leave once she had fallen for them in order to torture her. I felt like a weary traveler, bound into sharing a space with the Titan who towered over me in the door and unable to leave before forming a connection. The synth part in the song was high and whiny, as if the band had rigged a mosquito up with a microphone and told it to go to town. I jabbed the keys as hard as I could, although the artificial, volume-controlled sound eliminated most of the satisfaction in this act.
After I’d taken out my frustration on the keys for ten minutes or so, Mom walked past the door and saw me sitting slumped in the chair, fingers still playing out the same tired riff while Dad kept singing with gusto, trying to get me energized through his own enthusiasm. After the session was over, I darted back to my room, smashing the on button on my wheezy old CD player and blasting the mix my siblings made for my last birthday (with no Wilco), in the hope that anything would scare away the mosquito still buzzing around my head. I sang in my head with zeal, let my fingers work out the chords on an air guitar that didn’t cut them, and wished for a respite greater than the five days a week I barely saw Dad.
Mom knocked on my door, calling, “Owen Ellington,” and my teeth set themselves on edge. She opened the door without a reply, telling me I had been rude and ruined the fun Dad was trying to have with me.
I couldn’t find it in me to tell her what was going on in my head. How I just wanted Dad to leave me to find my own path. How I simply didn’t feel a need to have a first-day-of-school bonding exercise over whatever we had slightly in common. How I was grateful that Dad didn’t really expect me to go to Harvard like him, or to become a publisher like him, but I wished that great future where I would be free from his looming shadow could extend just an inch farther to where I was now.
I couldn’t find it in me to say it out loud, or to do anything but nod along with her reproval and numbly apologize to Dad.
“Sorry, Dad. I didn’t accompany you like I should have,” I mumbled with my head down.
“It’s okay, O,” he replied breezily, his fingers already on the guitar again. “If you don’t like the song, just say so.”
I conveniently left out the fact that I didn’t want to accompany him at all.
I had entered high school around this time, and for several months I kept to the same circumspect schedule I had in middle school––wake up early, take the bus to school, take the bus home, maybe leave the house once a weekend. But that winter, I started staying later at school for rehearsals in the musical and taking the train home in the evenings, and one night I saw my friends stay after rehearsal for a movie screening. My parents said yes, I could stay if I walked to the train with the others. As I walked down the hill to the station and watched my breath freeze in the dim light of a streetlamp, I realized this was what I’d been looking for––the chance to live in my own world. Over time, I started drawing around people again, rediscovered my love for Roman mythology in Latin classes, learned to analyze and (on occasion) enjoy poems, and even picked up a guitar once or twice without a thought, but it was only when I spotted one of Dad’s odd hats on a train home from rehearsal that I realized how I had been drawn back to what I shared with him. It didn’t feel constricting because I hadn’t done any of it to try and break away from him or get closer with him, but for myself.
One day a couple months later, I suddenly realized I could whistle. I stood in the kitchen, the speakers overhead quiet, and tried to remember a song I had heard earlier on the bus. I exhaled, my lips in an O, and out came a recognizable note. I had never been able to whistle before and wasn’t sure what switch had flipped in my mind to let me do so, but I made full use of the skill and started to whistle all the time.
Sometimes, Dad wouldn’t hear me whistling and would strike up his own tune at what always seemed to be the perfect time to cut me off. I felt aggrieved the first time I heard him do this, as if he were encroaching on some personal space of mine, but soon I learned to just keep whistling by myself. He wasn’t doing any harm, nor was he a bad whistler. He was just doing it for himself, as was I, and so we kept whistling, our notes clashing and grinding against each other without a care.