It’s not even close.
“Symmetries”
A Poem by Daniel Jae Ho Bae
I will
stay on my
side. And you will
stay on an-
other
MY FATHER AND I WERE close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers.
He and I watched cricket together. I was his audience when he ran lines for auditions. When he was finally a famous Broadway actor, he would get me all the best parts for little girls, he’d say. I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.
Things started to change about four years ago, when I was thirteen. My mom got sick of living in a one-bedroom apartment. All her friends in Jamaica lived in their own houses. She got sick of my dad working in the same job for basically the same pay. She got sick of hearing what would happen when his ship came in. She never said anything to him, though, only to me.
You children too big to be sleeping in the living room now. You need you privacy.
I never going to have a real kitchen and a real fridge. Is time for him to give up that foolishness now.
And then he lost his job. I don’t know if he was fired or laid off. My mom said once that she thought he quit, but she couldn’t prove it.
On the day it happened he said: “Maybe is a blessing in disguise. Give me more time to pursue me acting.”
I don’t know who he was talking to, but no one responded.
Now that he wasn’t working, he said he would audition for roles. But he hardly ever did. There was always an excuse:
Me not right for that part.
Them not going to like me accent, man.
Me getting too old now. Acting is a young man game.
When my mom got home from work in the evening, my father told her he was trying. But my brother and I knew better.
I still remember the first time we saw him disappear into a play. Peter and I had walked home from school. We knew something strange was up because the front door was hanging open. Our father was in the living room—our bedroom. I don’t know if he didn’t hear us come in, but he didn’t react. He was holding a book in his hand. Later I realized it was actually a play—A Raisin in the Sun.
He was wearing a white button-up shirt and slacks and reciting the lines. I’m not sure why he was even holding the play because he already had it memorized. I still remember parts of the monologue. The character said something about seeing his future stretched out in front of him and how it—the future—was just a looming empty space.
When my father finally noticed us watching, he scolded us for sneaking up on him. At first I thought he was just embarrassed. No one likes being caught unawares. Later, though, I realized it was more than that. He was ashamed, as if we’d caught him cheating or stealing.
After that he and I didn’t do much of anything together anymore. He stopped watching cricket. He turned down all my offers to help him memorize lines. His side of my parents’ bedroom grew more cluttered with stacks of used and yellowed paperbacks of famous plays. He knew all the roles, not just the leads but the bit parts as well.
Eventually he stopped with all pretense of auditioning or looking for a job. My mom gave up the pretense that we’d ever own a house or even find an apartment with more than one bedroom. She took extra shifts at work to make ends meet. Last summer, I got a job at McDonald’s instead of volunteering at New York Methodist hospital like I used to.
It’s been over three years of this. We come home from school to find him locked in his bedroom, running lines with no one. His favorite parts are the long, dramatic monologues. He is Macbeth and Walter Lee Younger. He complains bitterly about this or that actor and his lack of skill. He heaps praise on those he judges to be good.
Two months ago, through no fault of his own, he got a part. Someone he’d met years ago during one of his auditions was staging a production of A Raisin in the Sun. When he told my mom, the first thing she asked was “How much you getting paid?”
Not Congratulations. Not I’m so proud of you. Not Which part? or When is it? or Are you so excited? Just How much you getting paid?
She looked at him with flat eyes when she said it. Unimpressed eyes. Tired eyes that had just come off two shifts in a row.
I think we were all a little shocked. She’d even shocked herself. Yes, she’d been frustrated with him for years, but that one moment showed us all how far apart they really were now. Even Peter, who sides with my mother in all things, flinched a little.
Still. You couldn’t fault her. Not really. My father had been dreaming his life away for years. He lived in those plays instead of the real world. He still does. My mother didn’t have time for dreaming anymore.
Neither do I.
HE’S A LITTLE AFRAID OF NATASHA, to be honest. The things she’s interested in now? Chemistry and physics and math. Where did they come from? Sometimes when he looks at her doing her homework at the kitchen table, he thinks she belongs to someone else. Her world is bigger than him and the things he taught her to be interested in. He doesn’t know when she outgrew him.
One night after she and Peter had gone to bed, he went to the kitchen for water. She’d left her math book and homework on the table. Samuel doesn’t know what overcame him, but he turned on the light, sat down, and flipped through the book. It looked like hieroglyphics, like some ancient language left by a time and a people he could never hope to understand. It filled him with a kind of dread. He sat there for a long time, running his fingers over the symbols, wishing his skin were porous enough to let all the knowledge and history of the world in.