Resemblances

I strongly resemble my mother. In school, people always knew if she showed up there, and the news would reach me: “Your mother’s here. She was in the hall heading to the office.” What? How did they know? “You look exactly like her.”

I want to tell you what my father looked like. You can’t really see him by looking at me. He had curly hair, which was brown, a regular brown and not dark like mine was back while he was alive. When he was in the sun, there was almost a red hint. Whenever he grew a moustache and beard, red would show up along with the brown. Dad’s eyes were blue. Sometimes they appeared greenish, or grey. We girls used to tell Dad that they changed depending on what color shirt he wore. That he had “mood eyes.” On the last day I saw him alive, his left eye was such a brilliant blue, I was startled. I felt guilty, too, for softly pulling up his eyelid to peek beneath it while he was so deeply asleep. I didn’t see a color that blue until nearly 20 years later, when I visited the Bahamas. The water was impossibly blue, like Dad’s eye.

My father had a receding hairline, hairy chest and arms, and hair in his belly button. On Saturday visits with him, he’d sometimes nap on the murphy bed in his apartment while we girls watched TV beside him. While he was asleep, we’d roll up his pantlegs and roll down his socks, giggling at his hairy white legs. Then we’d peek into his bellybutton for lint. He’d snore slightly, until our fussing over him woke him up. Lying down, Dad’s ribcage seemed large. His voice rumbled up out of his chest when he spoke. He was a man of average height, not heavyset, with good posture, and when he needed to command attention, he could. He could have been a police officer, but he wasn’t. He worked in the public schools and liked people. They liked him, and his voice. Usually when he conversed with others, they shared a chuckle before parting ways.

Dad was fair, as a British descendant, and his skin was sensitive to anything harsh. When he worked at a deli counter for a summer, wrapping meat in paper and string, trying to break the string cut his hands. He was the only one who had to reach for the scissors. I remember the time he got burned from a grease fire on the stove. When he moved the pan into the sink, flames wafted over the back of his wrist and gave him 3rd-degree burns. I’d just had first-aid training in 6th grade at school, and I forced him to let me examine his hand. The skin was red, and purple, and blue, with an open wound. Dad had wrapped it himself, and I insisted that we take him to a doctor. Dad’s teeth were slightly crooked and the top canines were pointed. We liked it when he bared them a little, and called him a vampire.

I don’t look like my father. My hair was dark, like my mother’s, before it went salt-and-pepper. My eyes are so dark a brown as to be nearly black. My coloring is not as pale as his, though lighter than if I weren’t sensitive to the sun, so perhaps I inherited something of my father’s sensitive skin. Here – where I mostly take after Dad is in my hands. I’m left-handed like he was, and my palms are somewhat square like his. The tips of my fingers aren’t elegantly oval like my mother’s but spatulate, like Dad’s. On a sidewalk in a suburb of Michigan, there are four handprints pressed lightly into the cement: Dad’s, Mom’s, my older sister’s, and mine. The mark nearby is from my younger sister’s shoe when she twisted away, afraid to let Mom put her hand into the wet cement beside ours. 25 years after Dad died, I placed my hand in the print Dad had left. His hand appeared only slightly larger than mine, surprisingly. When I remember holding his hand, warm and slightly moist, it always seemed much bigger. Oh – my thumbs are his. Just after he died, I was reading a book. I noticed my hands holding the pages open, noticed my right thumb. I cried.