With each parent, this difficulty arises from opposite causes. My relationship with my mother is immense to me, and occupies so much space I can barely see around it. She is both my element and also somehow singular, slightly forbidding; she is not to be displeased. Though she is often quite tender to me, there is something about her which precludes ease; that’s the signal characteristic of our relation: intimacy without ease. “Mom” seems out of the question, its casual, everyday quality entirely wrong; there is some gravity or strain to our connection which prohibits it. A good boy, I am in some way her representative in the world of better possibilities than she has known; I am to do well in school, am somehow precious. Things are expected of me, and such a child would address his mother as “Mother”—but that feels weirdly stiff because it acknowledges an absence of spontaneity: the term makes us part of a drama, makes me an actor in a family play.

With my father it’s simpler: we simply lack connection. He’s a force on the horizon, but a distant one, like the sort of storm you see in the Midwest, visible across uncountable acres of cornfields. Maybe it will sweep in to give you trouble but probably not, not often. In my mind he is concerned with a particular universe of things that have to do with his work: shiny metal lunch box, domed like a vaulted chapel. Drafting tools set precisely in leather cases, three-sided rulers for measuring what? Shiny white hard hat. Little red castle, two-towered, on a decal on the windshield of his government truck, emblem of the Army Engineers. Mornings he eats shredded wheat soaked in milk from a tall drinking glass while the coffee percolates, then he’s gone. Home at night, home from a trip, sometimes he brings me something, some breakable little toy, reward for his absence. I manipulate him with expectation, make it clear that I will be so pleased to receive something (a “play-pretty,” our term for toy, something I used to say as a baby) as consolation, but I already know I don’t need consoling. Aftershave, boxer shorts, milk of magnesia in blue bottles: mostly I don’t need to call him anything.

Though just now I do, because I have done something wrong, and there is about to be a crisis, and only I can avert it.