Pet Sound

"But let’s talk about it."

He pulled the familiar green and black cardboard out of the glove compartment and stuffed the white cassette in the deck. I couldn’t help tsking, “Can’t we put on some real rock & roll?” as the perfectly blended male voices filled the station wagon.

"But I can’t help how I act."

I should have known this would launch my father into a long diatribe of what “real rock & roll” was. Maybe this was what I was hoping for when I complained. I had always understood that this was how to get on my dad’s good side.

Our argument about whether The Beach Boys should exist on the same plane as Aerosmith lasted the 30 minutes to his office and the remaining 20 years of his life. It was a go-to when we didn’t know what to say to each other. A way to express our equal parts love and animosity towards each other.

When I didn’t know what to speak into the Build-A-Bear I sent him because I couldn’t get home and wanted him to hear my voice — the Build-A-Bear helper getting visibly annoyed as I cried in my boyfriend’s shoulder for the third time — I hastily called out “Let’s turn off this Beach Boy crap and put on some ‘Real Rock N’ Roll.’” I guess other cancer patients found it funny, this bear wrapped in plastic for the entirety of its existence.

"I would dream."

It was The Beach Boys who tempted me to San Francisco, their promises of California Girls, and how I always believed I could be one. (I couldn’t, but that knowledge wouldn’t come until later.) You can leave your heart in San Francisco, and I’ll be curious about it, but it isn’t the same as telling me who I could be if I would only live there.

The Beach Boys weren’t my music, though I could appreciate them on days I wasn’t in a snit, but hearing Pet Sounds week after week I came to understand the arc of time that their album built. Somehow the trip from dreaming with Wouldn’t It Be Nice to grieving in Caroline, No helped me to understand that not all dreams end in happy endings.

"There are words we both could say."

I knew that it wasn’t “rock n’ roll” I meant. I just didn’t have the words. Our only records at that point were The Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, and Simon & Garfunkel. My dad, new-tech junkie that he was, ran out and spent grocery money on a CD player just to hear Roy Orbison better. My parents just weren’t that hip.

New friendships had opened up my ears to different sounds, as I outgrew my love for New Kids on the Block and started tuning out White Snake and Aerosmith. I started to understand that I could like things other than what I had grown up with. Is there a moment in every child’s life where they realize they are not their parents?

"I keep looking for a place to fit in."

But there was more than musical differences I needed to convey.

I feared and loved my dad. His unpredictable moods creating a child who believed in following rules the way a first baseman believes in the color of his socks. My inability to spit or curse or even step on a crack through most of years of junior high stemmed from never knowing what caused my dad to snap.

My anger at the unfairness of being a girl expressed itself in cutting and starving myself. Decades later I would learn to express the disappointment that stemmed not from my sex, but from my father’s view of it. Hearing so often that they had “penis envy” and called a primadonna would get anyone down.

My recent essay about my dad made me remember this moment, I’ve been stewing over it for a week now. How his curiosity about so much never extended to me and my beliefs, my own opinions. His attitude colored my relationships for so long, until I took my husband seriously.

"But when I could, I gave strength to you."

Even so, the strengths my father passed along — his love of learning and his constant curiosity, the clarity with which he said his name on those strange sales calls in the basement, his odd sense of humor — carry me through my darkest days.

"God only knows what I’d be without you."

When the black dog visits I find myself cursing my father, his alcoholism, his misogyny, his lazy attitude towards all of his children. I wonder whether being an adult child of an alcoholic contributed to my depression or if it was a family history of undiagnosed depression that made so many of my ancestors drink.

But I am my father’s daughter. It’s my dad I hear when I speak. It is my dad’s laziness I need to overcome, and I will forever be searching for the next interesting fact. I hear his sounds come from my lips.

"The things that made me love you so much then?"

My dad was an East Coast Beach Boys’ song — joyous, but with an understanding of all that you lose behind that joy, and — through the lens of the present — not living up to the title he’s been given. Nostalgia and a sense of homecoming at the same time. Both had a view of women that I had a hard time overcoming.

"I know now but I have to find it by myself."

Since that long-ago day I’ve had a chance to listen to “Long Promised Road” and the non-Pet Sounds ouevre, and I can see that The Beach Boys could rock, but I stand by my assertion that the Pet Sounds is not rock. I may love it more than I did at 14, putting it on for my kids to listen to now, but not half as much as Get a Grip.

I’ve learned words to express myself more, though I’ve never developed a vernacular for music. I know what I like. I worked my way through hair metal and twee. Hootie and the Blowfish and Barenaked Ladies still grace my playlists, but female voices take up most of the space.

I never had the chance to talk to my dad about the important things. I never got to argue about what he said to his young girls, not that I believe it would have made any difference to him with his dependence on Rush Limbaugh. It would have made a difference to me. The things we leave unsaid leave scars we can never heal.

When he died I had so much anger it felt like there would be no room for sadness. I wasted so much time arguing about the little things in an effort to open up about the big, but it never worked. I didn’t realize how little time I would have once I was an adult.

"It’s here and gone so fast."

Originally published on Medium.