The Trophy Mug

By Diana Rojas

(Originally Published in Anti-Heroin Chic)

Rob LeBer CC

   After he died, I started listening to the sounds men made to try and hear him again. I sought his voice in those men who have the look of people who used to be brash and now had nothing to say, but still said something, usually nonsense. Sometimes I’d hear bits of him in the young men who are still clowning around with each other as they walk down the street, the noisy ones who don’t care who their noise might bother – the ones who invite inspection through their boisterous presence. I’d hear him in all the men who still wanted to be noticed, the middle-aged men who silently made eye contact with women, hoping against hope that the women would show signs of attraction before walking off. And in men who still had the insouciance to catcall. And from men who still doffed caps to wish passersby good morning.

   But after he was gone, when the freshest memory of him was of a man diminished, I heard him loudest in the quiet old men on the street, the ones who are having trouble walking, men who have to concentrate on the next step, who avoid eye contact, embarrassed by their weakness, worried that they might fall in public. The ones who purse their lips to keep sound from emitting.

   My father wasn’t always noisy. But his presence was noisy. He drank too much and his sullen drunkenness in his late middle age made the world around him buzz more loudly than when he was the life-of-the-party drinker and told jokes and could break out in song and a spontaneous grito when the collective mood called for one. When he stopped drinking, when the brain tumor caused the seizures that made him take a cocktail of drugs every day that would interact very adversely with alcohol, when that happened, he descended into quietude. I started to feel an urge to scream in his presence, to make the noise that he had stopped making, the noise that had pushed me away back when I couldn’t hear the melody of life in it.

   Other people heard it. He was generally liked, when he was not being the belligerent, sullen, solo basement drinker at home. He was appreciated in the office, where they’d pretend not to notice that he spent his lunches eating a sandwich from home in his car in the parking lot so that he could take a few nips at the flask he kept there, a little sustenance for the long afternoon ahead. He was a talker, he was opinionated, he had things to say, he was interested. If you could engage him in life before he’d taken too many sips, there was so much to like about Dad – not least his bright, intelligent eyes and radiant smile.

   Before the tumor announced itself, I found his noise obnoxious. His drinking went off the charts as I hit full fledged adulthood. I wanted him to shut up. I wanted him to stay away. I didn’t protest when Mom said they couldn’t come to my 40th birthday party. I knew she was keeping him away so he wouldn’t ruin the celebration with his noise. She knew the clang of his presence bothered me.

   Nature can be merciless in its punishment. The cancer, the seizures, the drugs that forced him to stop drinking, unmasked him, and revealed him to be an anxious mess, nothing like the brash bon vivant we grew up knowing. But in an act of mercy, nature also took care to protect him from realizing this. So the cancer and the seizures and the drugs, made him start losing his moxie. Drop by drop, during the nearly decade-long ordeal, until there came a point where he could best be described as a timorous version of himself. He became quieter. He had run out of things to talk about, or maybe talking about new things was exhausting for him, so he talked about his condition. And the weather. And his daily schedule.

   He'd announce his naptime. His napito. It was ceremonious. He’d have had his breakfast after he made the bed. He would groom. He’d come out dressed as if he were about to leave the house, and he’d take the first of his drug cocktails. He’d have a second cup of coffee. Only then would announce that it was time for his napito. Mom would be a step ahead of him, looking impatient, ready to put him down for his nap so that she could have a little break, too. It reminded me of when I was post-partum and Mom came to take care of me and the babies and she would talk through the morning routine: breakfast, then bath, then warm clean clothes that would lull the baby into a soothing comfort, then naptime. “Every day the same thing,” she’d remind me, “and you won’t get impatient.”

   Every day it was the same thing for my not-old-enough father with the brain cancer who was becoming more infantile in his needs. Wherever he was, he needed his routine. Part of his routine was a glass of water set on his night table so he could sip from it as needed to quench the thirst the drugs cause. At my house, he’d request the only beer stein I owned for this purpose.

   My tall glass mug wasn’t the last guy standing from a set of four I had picked up on sale at TJMaxx, on a whim. No. This was singular, unique in my cupboard. It was my trophy mug, awarded to me by the PTA when my youngest child was about to leave elementary school. It was, ostensibly, my prize for the years of service to the neighborhood public schools while my children went through them. I took it as my ‘atta girl for contributing to society, for making Myself Useful and Necessary by raising money and running auctions. My name etched in the glass was my reminder to never stop trying. It was my recompense after having chipped away at my fledgling dream career as a reporter once I had kids, until journalism amounted to a freelance article every few months or so, and the kids and the household took over just about every other minute – except for those when I was giving back, playing with the PTA. The trophy mug was proof to me that Society viewed me as more than just a mother, that I had made some noise and that someone, somebodies had noticed, had heard me. Its laser-cut inscription noted “outstanding” service. Me, the outstanding servant. This was announced out loud, amplified through a mic, to a not-full auditorium at a PTA meeting.

   When he’d shuffle into the kitchen to ask me for it, I’d try to steer Dad to other glasses in the house like one of the ladies from the Price is Right. “How about this mug, Dad?” I’d ask, smiling, hand gently waving at a cup I had pre-positioned on the countertop. “It’s ceramic but the lip is perfect and it holds so much liquid.” Then I’d shift my stance, and use my other upturned hand to demonstrate toward a glass on another countertop. “Or check out this tall glass, with divots where your fingers can grasp hard onto it. Neat, huh?” I was afraid he’d break it, this thing that perpetuated the lie I told myself everyday – that the motherhood job I loved was just a placeholder for the real me, the noisy me, the me that would go places, whose entrance would be heralded in rooms, who would be recognized for her greatness – that someday people would know my name wasn’t just Mom.

   “If it’s dirty, I can wait until you wash it,” he would say. His voice by then had taken on a gravelly low volume, lips barely moving. I’d often have to lean in my ear to hear him. “It’s the perfect water mug for me.”

   Dad had loved my original choice of career. In the early days, when my byline was a novel thrill and I was still living in my parent’s house, he’d assign himself some credit for it: “Remember how you used to sit on my lap and read the New Haven Register with me every day?” The truth was that I had only the vaguest of recollections of that, but I’d lie and say I remembered and he’d go on to insist it was he who planted the seed in me to become a journalist, that he had always loved my imaginative stories, that he had always known I was going to be a writer, a storyteller. I imagined that he imagined that I was going to win awards. Be famous. Be someone.

   Sometimes he’d call me Dianita. Sometimes he’d still refer to my manzanitas – the apple cheeks of my baby self. Maybe I had willingly sat in his lap, enjoying paternal tenderness. But I only remember the later years, being repulsed by his occasional sweetness because it often was spoken by lips and teeth stained purple by the cheap gallon jugs of wine he drank from. I’d act like a teen way into my adulthood, rolling my eyes and making a hasty split to alleviate the discomfort, the pain of wanting that embrace, of words or flesh, but hating the smell of it. Of hating the slur of his loving words.

   And still, I never wanted to disappoint him. He, who would repeat often that he had wanted to go to college, who would remind us that he had almost become an accountant, whose private office in the bowels of his house was lined with erudite books, some of which had intact spines. He had immigrated, a poor boy, and worked in factories as a young man. Just when he thought the middle class was comfortably in his grasp, the rug was pulled out from under him and he had to start all over again – but this time with a wife, five daughters and a mountain of debt on his back.  Who, when he got his mojo back in middle age and landed jobs as an international salesman – jobs that required him to wear a tie and go to an office, and prove his acquired knowledge alongside diploma-toting chemical engineers – he went off the rails, intoxicated by his sense of self-importance, too often forgetting the wife who had stood by his side when he was a nobody if some younger, self-interested broad in a third world country cozied up to him for his perceived importance and the possibility of a green card.

   Of course we drifted. We all drifted from him. It was never going to be a fair fight: he was a sole man among women. Dad to five daughters. Even the dogs were always bitches, we’d jokingly say. He became Men, always behaving badly. Down with the patriarchy! We chose not to try to understand. We scoffed at Mom for not being stronger, for never walking off. We became entrenched in our umbrage as we all became wives and mothers. Usually, I kept quiet about the depths of my resentment.

   When we leave our parents’ home, we hide ourselves in new, modern glass houses and we think we can see the leaves from the trees from the comfort of our sitting rooms. But early on we start to neglect the upkeep because, you know, life, and the glass that surrounds us becomes streaked with layers of soot and bits of dried leaves and bird droppings, and hard water remnants turn it cloudy, and we get used to seeing the world outside through the obscuration. We almost immediately forget that the sound outside our house is muffled by the glass so that we don’t really catch every word, and alongside the blurring, we stop hearing the nuance in the song; we only catch the beat. The pane separates us.

   My choice to be Wife and Mother instead of the career woman was an act of true love. I loved playing toys and board games. I loved pushing my babies in strollers and setting off to explore their provincial world. I loved the routine. I loved cooking dinner at 5, eating at 6, baths at 7 and bedtime before 8. I loved reading books in their beds at the end of another wonderful, nothing day. He had played with us. He had read us books. But I had one over on him: I could love that, as they grew, my children had a home that bore no surprises, in which they could talk to either parent after 5 without fear that the sober window had closed and they were too late. I loved fabricating the perfect parenthood he had failed at. I didn’t want his imperfection to mar it.

   Of course, I never told him any of this. How much I loved motherhood. How saddened I was by his alcoholism. By the fact that it stole the only father I’d ever have away. Instead, I was dutiful. I’d call often. I’d rush through talking about the kids with him, reserving the details for Mom, for whom I’d clear a circular area of the cloudy glass to share an unobstructed view. I never did this for Dad. I figured he didn’t want to see in; I figured he was fine speaking through the divide. I didn’t even want him to guess at my motives. I never asked him to explain his.  With him I’d talk about the news, I’d aggrandize my side gigs – the fundraising, the occasional freelance article. I wanted him to think that I was important even when I was convinced  that society was judging me as inconsequential. I didn’t want Dad to ever think I had wasted my mind the way I thought he had squandered his. I didn’t let on that one of my biggest fears what that I would be remembered as wasting the fruit of feminist labor by giving up working outside the home. I wanted him to think I was keeping up. I didn’t think he saw me at all.

   In college, so many classmates had spoken of their existential crises. I was in higher ed thanks to an unpaid mandate from Mom and Dad, a meaty merit scholarship and several jobs to fund the rest of the bill. I’d want to shake these hand-wringing classmates and berate them for having way too much time on their hands. I judged them: existential crises are a luxury of the idle. My parents hadn’t had time for one. Neither had I. “Get busy,” I wanted to yell at those pampered kids.

   The gentle rhythm of my life as mother, the lull of its ease, made me idle. I had begun to think about the meaning of the space I occupied in the world. It coincided with Dad’s illness, his long decline. My existential crisis took aboard concerns about his life: Was he disappointed in how his life had turned out? Had he achieved what he wanted, or had he been hoping to become more before the tumor, the drugs started silencing him. In his new slavish adherence to his infantile schedule, was he trying to prove that he still had the discipline to live a well-ordered life, despite the unexpected bumps in the road or flask in the car or the tumor in the brain? Did he wish he had said so much more?

   “You should write my story,” Dad would say to me every so often, encouraging me to keep writing. He’d say it when he visited and was still hale and would play rough and tumble with the grandkids. Or when he’d volunteer to paint the walls of my various houses. Or when he’d come to visit me during my times abroad, always game for a tour and some fun. Then when he was sick, he’d say it in times of lucidity. “What a story mine is! If you write it, you’ll become famous.”

   I’d smile at him and shake my head, saying biography and memoir was not my thing. I never told him I didn’t want his story to be the cause of my fame. I never asked what his story would say. I never asked why he wanted me to tell his story. I never asked him enough questions. His story scared me. It wasn’t an easy one. How do you be lovely and fascinating and repulsive all at the same time? Maybe I feared his story would be monstrous. Maybe I just didn’t want to hear the truth of it.

   Randomly, I hear lyrics from the music that flowed from the pile of albums that Dad would stack on the spindle, dropping one after another after another on Saturday afternoons. He’d sit on the armchair with his conga drum at the ready, never-ending six pack by his side. He’d sing. He’d drum. There were no doors onto the living room. His noise/music would fill the house. The soundtrack of my childhood. “Once the story’s told, it cannot but grow old.” (Rita Coolidge)

   He was growing too old, too fast, before his story was even supposed to be finished.

   The first time he held the trophy mug, he made notice of my name engraved on it. “Oh, look!” he said, the timbre of his voice light and musical; his lips for a second frozen on the “o” they were wrapped around, extending that note. “This has your name on it!”

   That’s all he said. No questions about my outstanding service. No questions about its provenance. He didn’t ask to hear my story about it. But from then on, he’d put on his cut off gloves because the brain cancer made his hands always feel cold, and he’d precariously hold the handle, the beer stein trembling along with his unsteady hand all the way to the guest room. Mom would watch, impatient to put him down for his nap, fretting he’d break the beer stein.

She’d offer to carry for him, but he’d wave off her help, annoyed. Mom had read the inscription. She knew it meant something to me. “It’s just a glass,” I’d finally say, flippantly, clicking my tongue for dismissive emphasis. But I didn’t fool her. She’d stare at me, wanting to say something, giving me tacit permission to contradict and disobey my father.

   “Can I take this glass home with me,” Dad started asking one day. “It really is perfect – not too heavy, the handle is just the right size for my grip. It’s so easy to carry.”

   Mom would cluck her tongue chidingly, embarrassed by him. Along with his cognitive sharpness, Dad had also lost a little of the intense pride that had dictated his life before the brain cancer took hold. He’d become somewhat of a beggar, asking for souvenirs in a way that made it hard not to comply. I did not comply with the request for the trophy mug, though.

   I resented having to lend it to him. I hated the idea that he might break it before ever recognizing the symbolic importance of that inscription, the part that proved that I had been more than just a mother, that I had tried to live up to his image of me. He was leaving us, bit by bit, but I pretended not to hear him when he suggested taking my trophy mug with him.

   I hear now what he was wanting to say when he asked us for so many random souvenirs from our everyday lives: he wanted to be remembered. He wanted us to remember that he, too, had been somebody. He wanted tokens to commemorate his being, his place in the world.  “I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains.” (Simon and Garfunkel)

   Today my trophy mug lives in the back of the glass-fronted cupboard, the glass of last resort when all the others are dirty.

   As he lay dying, Mom had me go through Dad’s neatly kept briefcases of papers and mementos. He was still upstairs, barely, but he was there. I felt like I was spying on him. It was a last-ditch effort at getting to know Dad, really getting to know him, after years of avoiding the drunk Dad, and then years of not knowing how to talk to the terminal Dad, and now, the dying Dad couldn’t talk and, anyway, I wouldn’t have known how to ask him questions if I wanted to. Among his papers I overstuffed manila envelopes. In one of the smaller one were clippings from newspapers. Hundreds of them. He had saved every single thing I had ever written. It didn’t matter if it was a byline or a tagline. It didn’t matter if it was a brief about a vote at a school board meeting in some podunk town, or a multi-page feature about Cuba. He even had stuff from the college paper I had forgotten I’d written for, and a few things I had sent to him from the trade newsletters I had relegated myself to post children. I had interviewed so many people. I had told so many people’s stories. He had noticed.

   I chose to believe that he hadn’t kept them as a lament about me not pursuing my career. Or resentment that I hadn’t chosen to tell his story.  The envelope was deep in his stuff, buried way underneath so many other manila envelopes loaded with paraphernalia from my sisters’ existence, and all those were topped by another giant, bulging manila envelope. That one contained the countless birthday cards he’d received from children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, his wife. It included childish drawings made for him adorned with lots of hearts and smiley faces. I realized, as I leafed through that noisy collection of love and pride and exclamation points and hearts and smiley faces, that I never had a chance to talk to him about the meaning of life. Maybe he had realized after the cancer hit what I had realized the year after he died: that the ambition, the fears of what would be written on our tombstones, the worrying about what others would think of us, our accomplishments, or lack thereof, none of it mattered. Life was too short for it to matter.

   In honor of my father’s 80th birthday this year, I should like to present him with a trophy mug that bears his name inscribed in the glass, with the words Outstanding Service, etched in beneath it. My presentation speech is titled: “In the End, You Were Heard.”

   Tap, tap, tap. Mic check. “Can you hear me?” The feedback screeches. I squint in the lights and see people grimacing, some reaching to cover their ears. The mic regulates. They hear me. Dad is in the front row, unbothered, smiling.

   I speak into the mic, amplifying my voice so he can hear me from beyond the stage. I tell him that the mug is his ‘atta boy for never having thrown in the towel, for not giving in to the maw of existential doubt that it would be all worthwhile, for not giving into the temptation to open the door to those intrusive guests of the mind who would show up to beckon him to just give up when the going was still good. I tell him that, while I still resent that he chose booze over us, I am finally starting to understand that it was never an easy choice, that it likely wasn’t a choice at all. That maybe it was the only way to shut up those uninvited voices. I tell him that those demons sometimes come knocking at my door, too. I tell him that I think of him when they do, and I marvel from the cushiness of my life that he was able to fend them off from the hardness of his. I tell him I think he was heroic.  I tell him that I heard his compliments and that I was now accepting them, with love and gratitude that he had heard me, that even though the fog settled in too deeply over his brain, he was looking, listening.

   The trophy mug would be in commemoration of his outstanding service to this experiment called life.

   He doesn’t speak, but he would hear the crowd’s cheers roaring in his ears.

   If I had given him his own trophy mug, I would have wanted it to sit on his desk, collecting dust, maybe sometimes being rinsed out and used to sneak a drink from the hooch he thought I didn’t know about, hidden beneath his desk. I wouldn’t resent that as much anymore. I’d sit with him and tell him that my midlife existential crisis finally ended during the Covid lockdown, just as everyone else’s was ramping up. I’d confess that after all the volunteering, the community service, the quest for Relevance and Importance, I finally figured out the riddle of the meaning of life. Ready for it, Dad? None of it mattered. That’s the answer to the riddle. No one had ever really been looking at me, us. We had always been free to do and be whatever we wanted to be. I’d tell him that he probably never even needed the booze. That, had he been idle long enough to have his own existential crisis, he might have figured that out. I’d tell him that I watched him at his bedside when he had gone mostly silent, when his weak wheezing breath sounds were the loudest he got. I’d watch his eyeballs moving beneath his eyelids and would godlessly, wordlessly, pray that he was accepting that he had done the best he could with his life, that he was limiting his regrets, that he was holding his own trophy mug and understanding that he had been a champion.

   Several months after he died, he called me during a bout of insomniac twilight sleep. “Diana!” It was his voice, strong, like before he got sick. It was unmistakable – a voice I knew on a cellular level, all my life. The shock of it clanged in my brain. “Diana!” he called again. And I was wide awake, eyes open, looking for him in the pitch dark of my room. I didn’t see him. He sounded hale and, dare I say, happy.

   I hold on to the remnants of that last call. I try to remember the quality of the real-life voice, the one I heard so clearly in my mind. The purity of it, unlike the video versions warped by the aging tapes. He’s never called me again, even though I talk silently to him often. I tell him about the stories I’m writing. I ask him if he enjoys the tales. I see his face. I imagine his silent image approves of me, my life, my story.

   I'm now old enough to have regrets. I regret that I wasted time worrying about being Important. I regret that I didn’t hear my father’s story. And I regret that I didn’t give my father my trophy mug when he asked for it.

   He will never have an 80th birthday.