Satellite

For a time, my father lived on Montague Street. It was a small, two-story house, two doors down from the laundromat and across the street from an empty lot. He had the main floor and the basement; another tenant lived upstairs, though truth be told I think my father spent his share of time up there with her, too.

I remember a lot about that house, though it’s possible that I am conflating those memories with other places that he lived throughout my childhood. The bedroom was painted a deep teal — I remember helping him paint it — and the living room was some sort of peach or tangerine, maybe a deep yellow. Whenever I stayed over, I slept in the bedroom, and he slept on the pull-out couch in the living room.

Things I remember: hearing him jangling change in his pocket, standing outside the bedroom, waiting for me to go to sleep so he could steal the tooth under my pillow. Watching the premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and having nightmares afterwards. Losing my favourite stuffed rabbit, accusing him of throwing her out, and not relaxing until he found her folded up inside the couch. Learning that his cat had been hit by a car, and that I’d never see him again.

Childhood pleasures, childhood horrors. Right now, in my memory, it’s mostly horrors. He was a big man, and my life revolved around his. I was tethered to his vision, his ideas, his will.

Tonight, though, as I wait in the dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Perseids, I think of one of the best things we did at that house. There was so much less light pollution back then, and it was still possible, in the middle of the city, to pull a mattress out into the back yard and gaze up at the stars. We did this a lot, especially on hot July nights, watching, him alternating between the telling of tall tales and the enjoyment of long silences. We watched for satellites.

There was a trick to it. You had to soften your focus and let your peripheral vision pick up on movement among the stars. They were much harder to see dead on, so it was best not to try to look at those lights until we were sure they were moving. But when we sure, we tracked them as far as we could, until they disappeared beyond the roof of the next house, then soften our gazes once more. My eyesight was never as good as his; on our best night, I saw five satellites, and he saw nine.

These are the good memories. These are the things I want to remember. But looking back, these peaceful intervals seem so rare. My father wanted a daughter he could watch the stars with, but he wanted so much more, too. He wanted the best daughter. He wanted the perfect daughter. He wanted a daughter who was a champion in all things. He wanted me to live out all the dreams he never could. It’s impossible for one daughter to meet all those expectations, but I tried so hard.

There’s a light moving above me now. It’s not a meteor; it could be a satellite, but it could also be an airplane. So much has changed since those long July nights.

Except for the expectations. My father is long dead, but his expectations are not. We are still waiting for my meteoric rise to perfection, to fame, to the heights he could not achieve on his own.

But there’s one thing he failed to take into account when he pushed and pushed to make me climb as high as I could: meteors don’t rise.

They fall down.

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