THE LOST
DAUGHTER
COLLECTIVE
THE LOST
DAUGHTER
COLLECTIVE
A NOVEL
LINDSEY DRAGER
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
THE LOST DAUGHTER COLLECTIVE. Copyright © 2017, text by Lindsey Drager. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Drager, Lindsey, author.
Title: The lost daughter collective : a novel / Lindsey Drager.
Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031325 | ISBN 9781945814020 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and daughters--Fiction | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3604.R335 D73 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031325
First US edition: March 2017
Interior design by Michelle Dotter
This is a work of fiction. Characters and names appearing in this work are a product of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Printed in the United States of America
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THE LOST
DAUGHTER
COLLECTIVE
PART I:
THE ROOM WITH TWO DOORS
No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.
—Dorothy
It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.
—Alice
COME NIGHTS, THE GIRL crawls into bed to wait for her father to tell her a tale before sleep. He is down the hall working and she can just make out the sound of rapid typing from beyond his open office door. Because her room is one of the Institute’s closets, converted into a child’s private space, it is less a playground and more a chamber; the bookshelf also serves as a headboard and the door fails to open fully before hitting the foot of her bed.
At 1 a.m., the Scholar enters his daughter’s room, where he finds her manipulating her hands to make shadows on the wall.
Good morning, young one, he says. And happy birthday.
The daughter drops her hands and folds them neatly over the cuff of her blankets. Hello, she says. That her father looks exhausted tells her that he is busy, but his efforts are spent on things other than her. She works to stay out of his way, but she cannot always contain her curiosity about the ideas over which he toils. She considers her own work the work of being his child. Is she a good daughter? But then, how can one know?
He speaks: Because you are now five years old, the time has come to tell you a real story, he says, running his hand through his greying hair. He walks to her form, which swells from beneath the too-small bed, sits on its edge. A story about events that have come to pass, or what we call History. Do you feel ready for the truth?
The girl reaches up to stroke her father’s beard. It is rough between her tiny fingers and she thinks it feels the way a pet might. She collects as much hair as she can between the fingers of one hand and tugs. She squints to read what lies beyond his eyes, but learns nothing. She nods at him. He nods at her.
The Lost Daughter Collective gathers on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory in the downtown of a mid-sized city, he begins, and in beginning initiates The End. Down the hall, the men of the Wrist Institute will work through the night theorizing. In her room in the far east wing of the Institute, the girl will stay awake all night, too, having been installed with marvel that blossoms like blood from broken skin. For tonight is the first night she experiences what she will later understand as fear. And because fear is the bedmate of truth, it is tonight that the girl is inaugurated into her fifth year as well as the realm of history and horror.
Years later, he will publish the following in an introduction to the fifth edition of his seminal The Myth of the Wrist:
I have always believed that theory is not divorced from practice, but makes visible how all our experiences resonate and unite. As such, theory successfully illuminates the dark underpinnings of the human conundrum the same way art might. It is in this way that I hope my daughter’s story can live on, not in celebration of her life and accomplishments, but as a cautionary tale for those who practice fatherhood. After all, if our stories are not relayed in the service of future generations, there is no reason to commit them to word. We do not tell our stories to share—we tell our stories to warn.
Her last letter to me was conveyed through a personal advertisement she took out in a paper she knew I read. Let this missive—directed from a sick girl to her sad father—be your first lesson in exploring the father-daughter paradigm:
My father is inside me by law, irrevocably, the same way there will always be laughter in slaughter.
THE LOST DAUGHTER COLLECTIVE gathers on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory in the downtown of a mid-sized city. The group is composed of men who meet weekly to harness their mourning, a delicate practice best not undertaken alone. Along with the roomful of fathers, there is weak tea and a healthy supply of biscuits neither sweet nor tart. A rich store of tissues is hidden in nooks throughout the large, single-room loft that composes the thirty-third floor, out of sight so as not to invite tears. Despite this, crying often ensues, though most of the men use their sleeves.
The fathers categorize their lost daughters in two ways: dead or missing. A dead daughter is deemed a Dorothy, a missing one an Alice. Qualifying their lost girls in this way is a silently endorsed coping mechanism. When a new father arrives, no one need articulate the method of daughter-exit from his life. The others can tell whether he is the victim of a Dorothy or an Alice by the new father’s posture and gait. Father sorrow is best read through the mobile body.
Today one father—the plumber—has discovered his daughter is no longer an Alice, but a Dorothy. This is perhaps one of the hardest days for the father of an Alice, next to the day he learns she’s become one and Daughter’s Day.
The men take their seats, and the sound of folding-chair legs on the cement floor echoes through the empty loft. The chairs are arranged in a circle and the men change seats every week. Because they lead a life in which permanence reigns—a life where pink comforters lie disheveled in dusty bedrooms, where yellow hair ribbons and fruit-scented shampoo sit dormant on bathtub rims, where finger paintings of rainbows hang perpetually on refrigerator doors—they are only shyly acquainted with change and adopt it in meager kernels.
The leader of this troupe—the librarian—raises his eyes from his scuffed loafers to regard the plumber.
Do you want to start today?
The plumber looks out the window and scans the gray cityscape. Fatherhood is an industry and a daughter is a beach, he says, and a wave of gentle nods moves through the group. But what binds them is cycle and scope. You can put the contracts in your suitcase—you can put the shells in your pocket—but you can’t bring home the business or the shore. All the men in the room look at the walls or their shoes.
In other words, it won’t be easy to learn how to father a Dorothy, is that right? the librarian says, and the plumber purses his lips and makes a single jerk of his head such that his chin touches his chest, which they all read to mean yes. All the men who
father an Alice breathe in deeply and sit back in their chairs, aware that they have lost one of their own, and aware that they too could become the father of a Dorothy. It is a possibility that, when it enters the father psyche, men everywhere carefully displace.
After the story is told, the plumber rises and the rest of the group follows, stretching and wiping their faces of tear, rubbing their temples and avoiding each other’s gaze.
Because they know the night’s work has only just begun, some men take advantage of the break. Are the biscuits different this week? the real estate agent asks the landscaper, who shakes his head. Must be my taste is returning, the real estate agent says.
How long has it been? asks the bus driver.
Three years next Tuesday.
That’s about right, the bus driver says and takes a swig of his tea. Just know not to bother yourself with sweets.
Sweets? the real estate agent asks.
Some cruel trick of the tongue, he says, and runs his hand over his white crew cut.
The men listen to each other’s stories, a round robin arrangement where each gets the floor for twelve minutes. In those minutes, they share their cataloged tales of daughter-exit, here on the thirty-third floor of the abandoned umbrella factory—but too, across town in the attic of a church, the top floor of a library, the penthouse of a hotel. And too, across state lines and beyond the ends of the territory and even past the zones that designate time. And the stories travel across the weeks and months, across the years and beyond, carried and shared by voices to which the stories do not belong. In this way, the archive of daughter-exit is not shelved neatly, but rather casts a web over region and era, growing at an exponential rate. That the stories develop thus means both that the men have histories with which to anchor themselves, but also that girls exit every day, getting lost even now.
Each man holds the floor for twelve minutes to commemorate the age at which a girl-child becomes a young woman, a momentous event.
The narratives are told in several voices, by clans of men everywhere, simultaneously, until they become synchronized myth.
This is one attempt to share their story.
IN HER BOOK TITLED On Departing and Apartment, the woman who gave birth to the girl but whom was never called mother writes:
We cannot escape the place where from we come, for we move within invisible rooms with concealed walls that fail to break for door.
THE GIRL SPENDS THE first day of her fifth year in a haze, haunted by the threat of becoming lost. She roams the halls of the Wrist Institute seeking out the image of her father, who is shuttled between meetings and lectures. When he sees her in the hallways, she nods to him, and he nods to her.
The problem is this: when last night her father approached her, she had meant to ask him a question, but was put off by his immediate need to tell. What she now wants to share but finds herself struggling to reveal is that something is very wrong with her mouth. She had hoped to disclose this last night, but his mission seemed more important—to introduce her to the realm of the real. Before last night, she thought the event occurring in her mouth was a mere curiosity, but now, she thinks, absently working her hand to make shadows on the wide white wall, now all the facts of her life seem to harbor a secret. And suddenly her questions bear a certain heft. She is no longer concerned with how much ocean there is or from whence color comes because she realizes she knows so little about herself. For example, if her body can be lost, from where did her body derive?
The girl spends the afternoon in her room with the door shut and her lamp pointed coyly at the wall. She practices her shadow pup-pets and uses her tongue to investigate the occurrence in her mouth. The event can be explained quite simply: somehow, her teeth have become unfastened from her jaw. She thought at first it was one, but now a total of three seem to be free of their firm hold in her gums. She suspects this is punishment for saying an inappropriate word one afternoon in the cafeteria. She had called the asparagus stupid. Her father informed her that stupid was a blasphemous word that meant lazy, and when she had seen the asparagus hanging limply from her fork, she decided to test the word out since no one was there to hear. Certainly the event in her mouth is bound to this transgression. She assumes the teeth will resume their secure place if she discloses her crime, and as she wraps her hand in a towel in order to tilt the hot lamp, she decides this is what she will do tonight when her father comes. She will confess, and then apologize.
Years later, the girl will think of this day as one of her most bitter, but she will be wrong, for time will have cleanly amputated from her memory the other factor that overwhelmed the girl that day: it was the anniversary of her mother’s going. Her father had told her when she was very young that her birthday was the same day as the day her mother left the circuit of the living. But this was all before the girl had come to understand the relationship between time and story, that one shifts the other such that fact grows soft and breaks apart.
At 1 a.m. her father enters, too quietly, and because her back is to the door, working to craft shadows on her wall, when he speaks, she flinches.
Good morning, young one, his voice booms. He looks down at his daughter whose face he shares and he thinks briefly of hearing the news that she would be. Today I will tell you how the Lost Daughter Collective began. But now, how was your first day of age five?
She takes a deep breath and sighs loudly. I’m sorry, she says.
My love, her father whispers, placing himself on the edge of her bed. He stretches himself to reach his face close to hers and they rub noses slightly, their private sign for love. Never apologize for growing old.
The girl looks at him with eyes so wide he can’t decide if they harbor interest or fear.
I’ve not much time tonight, as we are preparing for the Wrist and Wing Convention, so let us begin. He clears his throat and adjusts his position on the bed, so that he does not look at her but at the blank wall and its blinding light. The first meeting of the Lost Daughter Collective occurred when several fathers in the same village recognized their loss went beyond their capacity for coping alone.
Years later she will pick up a copy of the only volume her parents co-wrote, Doors and the Rhetoric of Permitted Entry. A noted Room Scholar, her mother met her father at a conference concerning the intersections of flight and shelter. She will pick up the book and come to understand that her mother had written the story of her own end before she met it. The page reads:
Most pregnant women attempt or succeed at suicide by hanging—this is to ensure, to some degree, the child contained within is preserved. Suicide while pregnant is a rare space to occupy, as the psycho-logic demonstrates contradiction: ushering in a new body without the outer body itself. Room Studies is engaged in this particular brand of death because of its investment in concentric spaces and methods of exit. Places are emptied following the Law of Water; masses of people collect and flee the same way water moves down a drain, first consolidating where exits exist, then waiting patiently until the rush of leaving ensues. What Room Studies finds compelling about this image is the damage humans will inflict on each other at the first cry of trauma—fire, for example, or a bomb—without confirming a threat exists. Building on the theories of Wrist and later Wing Scholars, it is our contention that the human psyche not only fears at some rudimentary place the notion of moving down, but also always seeks an out. Therefore, Room Studies contends that existence on earth is perceived as containment and the abstract everything-after is seen as escape.
When she is six, she will ask her father about the place from where she came, and he will tell her it was like a closet without windows, confined and lightless. Like a prism in a storm, he will tell her, but she’ll hear prison, swarm.
THE FIRST MEETING OF the Lost Daughter Collective occurred when several fathers in the same village recognized their brand of grief as one that could not be shared with their spouses. It is said that the father-daughter relation is particularly complicated because the fat
her does not harbor the daughter within the body as the mother does. That fathers do not carry within them their offspring means the relation between a daughter and a father is considered prosthetic.
The first fathers gathered and shared their tales, attempting through story to acquaint each other not only with the inner workings of their lost girls, but also with their private grieving methods for the phenomenon they would term daughter-exit. Their conversations extended, eventually, toward healing, and word of the underground, anonymous group’s existence started traveling across the plains and mountains. In this way, the group grew; in the quake of their waves of loss, the seed of an idea was planted.
Those first fathers maintained their secrecy and anonymity, gaining membership through covert methods of invitation at the mourning ceremonies, whether grieving events or gatherings at governing structures to report their lost girls. To preserve their anonymity, the fathers identified themselves not by surname but occupation, a device that has persisted throughout the evolution of the Lost Daughter Collective even to its current iterations. The stories of these first fathers launched a rich catalog of narratives, a fractured and plural tragedy that emanates from the father body in complex ways.
The founding fathers include: The Barber, The Butcher, The Miller, The Woodsman, The Smith, The Angler, The Wainwright, and The Archivist.
THE GIRL WILL BECOME an ice sculptor. She will craft a theory called Cold Art Methodology and she will earn a position on the faculty of the Multiversity of the Mid-North. She will learn to cope with her childhood through harnessing and controlling light, then applying it to ice. She will spend her days in ice, trying to translate the stories her father told her into shadows cast from cold. She will translate her father’s tales, and then she’ll let them melt.
The Lost Daughter Collective Page 1
