In a tiny midwestern town we strolled to the community center to play ping pong after Christmas lunch. The women were cleaning up, but I followed my dad out the door. The brick building was shabby, the kind of place that does become a community center in dead downtowns. There was also a roller rink. In that town there was nothing to do except go to the community center or the roller rink. That was my impression. So we played ping pong lackadaisically.

For Dad, this little town was the world. He knew everyone at the café, the community center, and the church. Yet he was gloomy. “You’re lucky if you have one friend in the world.”

Yet it was more comfortable for a farm boy with a high school education, to live in a Faulknerian hamlet than in my larger, more sophisticated hometown, where he alienated co-workers, made inappropriate comments, harassed waitresses, and reduced us to tears in public.

And this Christmas he outdid himself. He described his 15 years with his first family, i.e., Mom and me, as “the bad old days.”

That was his take-away.

Hey, Dad, remember me? I’m your daughter, K, who just gate-crashed the Community Center with you and the guys. He did not consider my presence. He thought such cruel comments were funny. He never took it too seriously that he was my dad anyway. At this point, I couldn’t take it too seriously, either.

Still, I was determined to have a real conversation with him before the day was done. By my calculations, we hadn’t had a serious conversation that didn’t end in tears since the holidays when I was fifteen.

For complicated reasons, I moved in with Dad when he left Mom, or rather I moved in with the poet who let him sleep on the couch and me in the basement. The poet’s wife spent all day casting horoscopes. “She should clean her house,” Dad said. As a feminist, I thought he should clean her house if it mattered.

And then on Thanksgiving Dad and I were on our own. No idea what we ate for our holiday dinner– maybe pancakes? – but we did take a walk together. I remember crunching through dead leaves, crossing the bridge, and looking at the river. Like any uninhibited teen, I babbled about school, what my witty best friend said, and the satire she and I were co-writing. “It’s so witty!” That riled him up a bit: he resented it when anyone did anything even faintly “artistic.” But except for that glimpse behind the mask, it was a relatively ordinary father-daughter conversation.

Finally we moved into a tiny apartment, and Dad worked nights and was seldom around. The apartment soon became a salon for my friends and me. We co-wrote our satire, baked cookies, glittered tampons to hang on trees (feminist art), and watched old movies on TV like Auntie Mame and Georgy Girl. We got into trouble only once, when an incense burner clattered down the stairs and broke – but without burning the house down, thank God. But, yes, I was punished for breaking a “beautiful thing.” I did not bother to explain that the incense burner was mass-produced in a factory, because no one ever said Dad was a connoisseur.

But back to the community center: Me to Dad: “Do you really believe it was ‘the bad old days’ when you lived with our family?”

He looked at me. Apparently I was invisible before. “It’s time to be heading back.” He got out of there fast.

I hit the ping pong ball against the wall a couple of times and wiped away tears before walking back to the house with my husband, who said that Dad was “an asshole who didn’t deserve you or your mom.”

This “bad old days” comment was a turning point. It was the pattern for all conversations with Dad. Yes, he was my dad. But we made other plans for the holidays.