An Economic Girlie Man

            My family hosted an exchange student from Holland, Annik Kropman, most of my junior year of high school. She went home early at the end of March; she had had a tough year. Her boyfriend was in Holland, and being apart tore her up. They had a tumultuous relationship, and each day would end with her crying to him on the phone for a few hours. She and I had our ups and downs; it is hard to adjust to a new member of the household. But we parted on good terms.

            At dinner the day after she left, my dad said he needed to have a family meeting. He had something he needed to talk about, and he had not wanted to burden Annik with it. I assumed it was going to be about the immature way I treated her, and prepared for the worst. What my dad said, no one had expected. “I have been thinking about this for a while now, and have talked to my doctor. I really think I would feel more comfortable as a woman.” An awkward silence spread across the table, and Karl and I exchanged uncomfortable glances. We struggled with our thoughts, and tried to think of appropriate responses.

            My mom finally broke the quiet. “Okay honey, if that will make you happy.” I had lost my appetite. I imagined my dad in a dress, hairy legs protruding out of a miniskirt, lipstick clumped in his beard. “I’ve made an appointment to get the surgery done,” he said, as a smile was forming at the edges of his lips. “APRIL FOOLS!” he burst out laughing.

            My dad was not a joker. He was the boss of the household, the stoic leader. He sent us to another room when we burped at the table, and barked orders at Karl from his seat on the couch.

            “Kaaal, fetch me a beer,” he would demand in his Arnold Schwarzenegger Austrian accent. Karl’s friends love mimicking his accent. I have been exposed to it so long that I don’t notice he speaks differently at all, but strangers can barely understand him. They ask him to repeat phrases like “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista baby.”

            When he came home from the grocery store, he would walk in empty handed and send us out to carry in food bags. He thinks linearly- if he drinks the last beer, he goes to the liquor store and buys more, instead of putting it on a shopping list and getting beer while out grocery shopping. My mom always reminds him to ask if she needs anything before leaving on a necessity spree. If my mom asks something of him, he would delegate the work to Karl, saying that the reason he had children was so that he would have elves to do work for him. He was raised by strict European parents, who made him labor unbearable amounts, and whipped him when he transgressed. Although my dad’s discipline was less violent, Karl knew who was the boss.

            Karl always had the short end of the stick. Since I was older and smarter, I knew how to get out of chores, and how to get what I wanted. My dad has one soft spot, and that is me. When I desired something, I always went to Pop. He couldn’t say no to me. I knew how to do just enough work around the house to not get yelled at for being lazy. Karl never had any sense of appeasement or compromise, and was always at arms with my parents. They got what they wanted from him, and I got what I wanted from them.

            My dad was born without a tactful nerve in his body. My mom tried a new recipe one night for dinner when we had guests over, salmon cooked in parchment paper. Since it was wrapped up, my mom couldn’t tell if it was cooked through or not. She gave my dad a piece and asked him to taste it. He unwrapped the fish, cut off a corner, and put it in his mouth. His eyes shut and his mouth crumpled up.

            “The fish isn’t done,” he moaned flatly. He rolled it back up in the paper, a look of utter disgust on his face, and handed it back to my mom, who was glaring at him from by the oven,. My mom threw the recipe out, and we haven’t tried anything in parchment since.

            For my birthday one year, we tried out a new restaurant because they advertised a free meal on your birthday. My dad and my brother were going to catch a movie after our meal, and were on a tight schedule to make it on time. The food was taking a while to come out of the kitchen, and my dad took his impatience out on our waiter.

            “I told you already once that I have somewhere to be, hurry up with my food,” he said.

 “I’m sorry, but the kitchen is very busy. I told them you were in a rush and they are hurrying.” That wasn’t an acceptable response for my dad, and began insulting the waiter, the food, and the restaurant’s atmosphere. It was my birthday and I wanted to have a nice meal out, but he was ruining it.

            I asked him to leave the waiter alone and just wait for the food, and he said, “No Anna. I will not be treated like this. This man is not getting a tip, and we are never coming back here.”           

            Björk used to be one of my favorite singers, and when the movie Dancer in the Dark came out, starring her, I had to see it. I rented it and was watching it in the living room, and my dad came into the kitchen to wash vegetables for dinner. It was at a scene in the movie where David Morse had stolen Björk’s life savings, and she was at his house to get them back. They started arguing and she shot him.

            “Turn this off right now Anna, it’s too depressing,” Pop said.

            It was depressing, but it was also suspenseful. I wanted to see what happened.

            “Off Anna, now,” he demanded.

            “FINE!” I threw the remote down, turned off the VCR, and ran upstairs. The movie had been depressing, so the tears I cried were due to that as well as Pop’s demand. “I’m running away and never coming back!”

            “You can’t run away young lady, you have to walk your dog,” he reminded me. I grabbed my dog Sapphy and her leash and ran into the woods, looking for landmarks from my childhood adventures. I sat on the mossy rock next to my giraffe tree, a crooked birch sapling which had always resembled the African animal, and cried into Sapphy’s fur. I found cracked boulder which Mom always called the Hansel and Gretel rocks and swept the dust from the crevices to keep my mind clear. I walked up and down the property line, and finally went back home, avoiding my dad. Pop couldn’t stand to see me cry, and when I had to see him again at dinner that night, he apologized.

            My dad works for the State of Connecticut Treasury Department as a computer programmer, and works from home a few days a week. He takes breaks throughout the day to watch television in the living room, but when he goes back to work he leaves the tv blaring. If others are in the living room and turn it off for peace and quiet, when he comes back into the room on another break a few hours later his eyes widen, his jaw drops and he says, “Op op op! Who turned off my television show? I was in the middle of it!”

            Even worse is if we change the channel and begin watching something ourselves.

            “Ahem! Who changed my channel?” He shoos us off of his tv and sits down with his ever present bag of nacho Doritoes.

            During my time in Finland, I gained about fifteen pounds. I outgrew a few pairs of pants, and the weight was noticeable. My dad thought it was necessary to alert me, often, of how much I had put on. My family came to visit me for a week during my year abroad, and had dinner one night with my host family. My host mom, Mervi, had prepared a traditional Finnish meal with ample portions of dessert. She explained to my parents how she was worried about my eating habits.

            “Anna eats so less food. She is like little bird,” Mervi said.

            “Look at Anna! I don’t think you should be feeding her at all anymore,” my dad replied. I was never one to take things personally, so it didn’t affect my self-esteem.

            In the summer, when my parents met me at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, one of the first things out of Pop’s mouth was, “Wow, one daughter left for Finland, and one-and-a-half daughters have returned.”

            One day swimming at the pond, he pinched my stomach, pinched his, and laughed, “Yours is almost as big as mine!” It got old pretty quickly. After that though, I didn’t feel so rude making fun of his weight.

            April 1st, though, Pop’s other side showed through. A comedian was hidden deep within in. Karl and I had always known that a crazy, funny streak lay in him. Once we were old enough to not follow in his footsteps, he told us of his adventures growing up in Austria. He was the worst student in school, and came home drunk every night as a teenager. His teachers all knew him as a comedian, a troublemaker, and an incessant talker. He fell in a fountain one night in the city square, trying to ice skate on thin ice. He had flaming red hair and was teased unmercifully for it. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and drove 150 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn. He had been a womanizer, and was already married and divorced by the time my mom met him.

            She brought about the change in him. They met at a New Years party in 1975, when my mom was an exchange student in Austria. She threw up on his couch, and the rest is history. She went home in the summer, they wrote every day, and he came to America in the summer of 1976. He has lived in America ever since, returning home only for short visits. My mom tamed him and reeled him in, stifling the renegade in him. He has always said that if Mom hadn’t rescued him from the crazy life he had led, he would already be dead from alcohol or cigarette related problems. She was his knight in shining armor.

                        My dad worries unnecessarily whenever Karl and I want to play outside alone. In the winters, he has to test the ice on our pond to make sure it is thick enough. When I first got my license, he would lecture me about driving safely every time before I left the house. He goes to bed before nine. He sets cruise control at 64 miles per hour on the highway. He stopped smoking as soon as he got to America, and drinks only on occasion. He is the most curt person I have ever met, and cannot carry on a phone conversation with his own daughter. When I call home and he answers, he says hello and little else, and hands me over as quickly as he can to my mom.

            My dad had an interesting childhood, but it’s one part of his life he has never shared with us. Maybe we have just never asked about it. My mom has told me stories, though. When he was little, he loved American music. GIs occupied Salzburg until the mid-1950s, so he heard country and hillbilly music on Armed Forces Radio. That is where he first heard Elvis, who has been his favorite artist ever since. Once, he saw a fight start outside a bar, and brawny American Military Police were soon on the scene with nightsticks to settle things down. But the American soldiers were always nice to the native children in the streets; my dad often received chocolate bars and chewing gum from them. The first black people he saw were GIs on patrol in the city. His first encounter with American civilians, however, was not a good one. He was one of the natives that American parents didn’t want their children to play with. Once he was playing with an American boy, and had to use the bathroom, and the boy’s mother wouldn’t let my dad into their house. He didn’t understand English, but he could tell the woman was scolding her son for playing with ‘those kids’. Luckily for my family, he didn’t hold a grudge against all Americans.

            As a teenager it’s always easier to notice peoples’ flaws than their strengths, and my mom always chastises me for being overly critical. Although my dad is curt with strangers, he has a social side with friends, and a European sense of hospitality. Our house is always full of friends who drop by to say hi and end up staying for dinner. We are always ready to set an extra place at the table, and throw an extra slab of meat on the grill. My dad is a social drinker, and will always invite visitors to come in for a beer. He is also very flexible. Karl has a close group of about six best friends, and often asks, last minute, if they can all spend the night. Pop is on a very different schedule than we are; he goes to bed by nine and is up at four. But he has gotten used to sleeping through loud boys galloping around the house in wee hours of the night, and although he’ll complain about it the next morning, he still allows it the next time Karl asks. We have had two exchange students over the past three years, and are getting another next year. Although my mom is the one who pushed the idea initially, my dad has been more than willing to take people into our home.

            My dad is also generous with money- too generous, my mom might say. He feels that money is something that should be spent, and has a hard time being frugal like my mom. My half sister is a struggling art teacher in Austria, with two children and a new husband, and my dad paid for them to come spend the summer with us in America. For Christmas a few years ago, I asked for an iMac, and my mom said that we were in austerity mode, and they couldn’t afford it. Unbeknownst to my mom, Pop bought me one anyway. Come Christmas, I got double the presents I was supposed to, because Mom had bought enough to make up for not being able to afford a computer under the tree.

            Harsh judgments of my father are more like harsh judgments of myself. While Karl takes after my mom in looks and personality, I am definitely my dad’s daughter. I have his thick red hair and his blue eyes. From his side of the family I inherited fair skin, good teeth, and a well endowed upper body. He and I are similar mentally, too. We lack tact. We are always punctual and are the ones waiting in the car while Mom and Karl are still getting ready. We are logical in our thoughts. We make quick decisions about our opinions of other people, and are quick to be overly critical. I used to think that my dad and I were always fighting because of his old-fashioned ways and European upbringing. However, our similarities are why we often argue. I’ve come to realize that my criticisms of him are a facade for self-critque. When I grow up, I will live just as he does. And it scares me, because I’m sure my kids will judge me, just as I have always judged him. But I’m proud to be like him, because with the bad genes came the good. My dad has made a life for himself in another country with a foreign language, which I hope to do also.