How to Cook Your Daughter

by Jessica Hendra

  Whenever Kathy agreed to join us, I was genuinely thrilled. There was no food involved, and it gave me a sense of companionship with her that I rarely felt. I adored showing her around a scene that seemed so “me.” I wanted to share that with her, to be close to my sister, but it was hard for us to be intimate. So much remained unsaid. Part of me wanted to reach out to Kathy, to hug her, to hold her hand, to confide in her. But I just couldn’t. I still felt as I had since we were kids: I wasn’t sure my sister liked me. I suppose she had little reason to, really, especially when we were teenagers. I came off as self-important, ignorant, and pretentious. I fancied myself a political activist because of the music I liked and the way that I dressed, invariably in black. I said I hated Reagan when, in fact, I was too apathetic to read the newspaper or know anything about politics. In fact, I was barely making the grade at a private school where Kathy would have flourished; she slaved away at Stuyvesant. And then there was the fact that I had boyfriends. Kathy chose horses instead. After I shed my virginity, I had started dating aggressively. After all, I reasoned, I was sixteen and pretty much grown up. And what did I have to lose? Not my virginity. Not my innocence. So what the heck? Kathy must have known—not through some sibling telepathy as much as by her ears. We had had some renovations done in the loft; but sound still traveled.

  In the new and improved loft, the kitchen now looked like a real kitchen, and full walls offered us some privacy. The architect we hired was imaginative but ended up doing more cocaine with my dad than carpentry. Kathy and I now had small but fully enclosed rooms in the back. Mine, serendipitously enough, was situated so that the fire escape door now opened directly into my room. How could I resist using it now that had my own private entrance and exit?

  But like everything in my life at that time, I took it one step too far. At the time, I was dating a Haitian guy, Neville—a tall boy with sharp cheekbones, brown eyes, aristocratic features, and smooth, ebony skin. Dating is a euphemism for what we really were doing, which was hanging out in clubs and trying to find places to have sex. Neville was a little older than me, maybe eighteen, and it was not as if we or any of our friends lived alone. Once or twice we ended up on my roof—inspired by Krisztina’s example—but it hardly felt cozy. Finally I decided to sneak Neville into my room. He was game.

  It must have been around two in the morning when we made it down the fire escape and into my bedroom. My bed was small and narrow, and Neville was broad shouldered and stood about six-foot-three. Not that it really mattered. It was a bed, and we were teenagers. Compared to the roof, it felt like a luxury suite at the Four Seasons. We thought we were being quiet. Then I heard the footsteps. Dad! He must have just come home.

  “Neville!” I whispered. “Oh God, it’s my father!”

  “Fucking hell!” Completely naked, Neville dove off the bed and looked frantically for a place to hide.

  “Get in the closet!” I whispered. The footfalls sounded closer.

  Neville ducked into the closet and crouched behind an old coat. I slid the door shut and threw myself back into bed, pulling the covers over me just as my father turned the door knob.

  “What’s going on, Jessie?” He peered into the room. “I heard something in here.”

  I pretended I had just woken up, no doubt overdoing the yawning and blinking. But I was thinking fast.

  “Oh,” I said and yawned again. “I just shut the window. It was getting cold.” I think I might even have pulled the blankets up a bit more. Maybe I even shivered.

  “Don’t leave the window open at night…. that’s just fucking crazy,” he said. “Anyone could climb right up the fire escape and get in.”

  Dad leaned over to the window to make sure it was shut. Then he noticed the fire escape door.

  “Are you out of your mind, leaving this door unlocked? What’s wrong with you? Are you trying to get us robbed? Jesus.”

  Now I had to perk up. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Krisztina and I were out there this afternoon. We must have forgotten to shut it.”

  “Well, don’t be so fucking irresponsible.” Dad bolted the door. “Good night.”

  As soon as I heard him shut the door of my parents’ bedroom, I went to the closet.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. “He’s gone. You can come out now.”

  Neville looked as though he had broken in. He started searching for his clothes among the twisted sheets, as if he expected my father to storm back into the room at any moment. I tried to keep my voice down. “Why are you getting dressed? I mean he’s gone! He’s not going to come back. Look, I’ll lock the door if it really makes you nervous.” I moved toward the door.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Why? He’s gone!”

  “Jessie, you are a blonde, white girl, and I’m black. If your father finds me in here, no one will blame him for shooting me. And if he doesn’t kill me himself, he’ll take me down to the precinct, and the cops will do it for him.”

  “Neville, this isn’t the South. This is New York! What are you talking about!”

  “It’s all the same,” he said, still searching for his shirt. “When a white man finds a naked black kid in his house, it’s all the same.”

  I sat on the bed, sulking, and watched him get dressed. I didn’t want him to be right, but I knew that he was. However much reggae or hip-hop I listened to, however many black kids I hung out with, I would never come close to understanding what it was to be black—not even if I had taken HR up on his offer and moved to Ethiopia. I didn’t think my father would touch Neville, but he might have been pissed enough to take him to the local precinct. What we were doing might technically have been statutory rape. But I also thought how ironic it would be for Dad to turn in Neville when my father had done so much worse. I got up, unlocked the door, and watched Neville creep back out the fire escape. I thought I might never hear from him again. I was right.

  After that, I didn’t bring anyone else down the fire escape. But one night I woke up to soft knocking on the back door. I had made the mistake of telling a boy who had a crush on me about my system. Somehow he had managed to make his way into the building and down the fire escape to our place. I freaked out when I saw his pale face through the window and refused to open the door. I did, however, crack the window to tell him that I had no plans to let him in. He was way too intense, even for me. A poet of the Patti Smith school, he stuffed scribbled offerings in our mail slot. Kathy must have heard some of these whispered meetings, but she never said anything. The only person who knew all the details was Krisztina. I always told her everything.

  My parents might have been oblivious to my life, but I wasn’t to theirs, and I had some sense of the tight finances at home. I hated asking them for cash, so I worked odd jobs to make a buck. Sometimes it was babysitting (for those families that didn’t think my appearance would forever traumatize their children) or putting up street posters for a friend who worked at a club. But I wanted something more substantial and landed my first steady after-school-and-weekend gig at a clothing store around the corner. The store sold “vintage” clothing, some of which truly were vintage and the rest of which were the sort of crappy stuff Mrs. Kruger sold back in New Jersey. After working there a week, I learned how the racket worked.

  The owners bought most of the clothes from warehouses in Queens for a dollar a pound, then sold them at an incredible profit. I came on as sales girl, something for which I neither had the experience nor the aptitude. Supposedly, my job was to wander the floor, engaging the customers and sealing the deal. “That’d look great on you,” I might say. Or, “Wow, I can’t believe that’s so cheap!” Instead, I’d hide in the racks straightening beaded sweaters and bowling shirts until some desperate shopper searched me out. Luckily we got paid by the hour and not on commission. I started on the main floor, but after a few weeks, the manager began to notice that I hardly ever sold anything. I was sure I was going to be fired. Instead she took pity on me. I was sent downstairs to the bargain basement, a pl
ace that was perfect for me because there were plenty of places to hide. Then the manager suggested that I might want to train as cashier. That sounded good until I realized I had to be able to count, add, and subtract—fast. My dyslexia got in the way, and I grew flushed and sweaty each time I had to make change. My line was always the longest and slowest. But they kept me on because, for the first time in my life, I was considered reliable.

  My mother also had taken a job. She had done some book editing and began helping an eminent gynecologist with a book on childbirth. Neils Lauersen (Dr. L) was Danish, a hulk with shoulder-length blond hair, piercing blue eyes, a booming voice, and an even louder laugh. He was, by all appearances, a Viking in scrubs. My mom made her office in the kitchen of the loft, poring over theories on successful conception and ways to ease birthing pains. My father was predictably condescending. He never complained about the extra cash, but he did have a fit when he first saw Dr. L and his golden curls. When Mom went to meet Dr. L at his office, Dad made suggestive remarks about her “working late.” One night, Dad actually beat her home. I had stayed in for the evening, taking refuge in P. G. Wodehouse and a summer day in the English countryside, where the worst that ever happens is Bertie Wooster mislaying his spats. Kathy was studying in her room, as usual, and when Dad came up in the elevator, I could tell he was drunk.

  “You’re actually here for once,” he said by way of a greeting. “And where’s Ma?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t really want to talk to him. “Still working with Neils I guess.”

  “I doubt she’s doing any ‘work’ with that puffy, pompous prick.”

  I shrunk behind my paperback, and Dad must have realized I wasn’t going to take the bait. He dropped the subject and trudged off to the front room. I tried to get back to Bertie and Jeeves but was too distracted. Was Daddy jealous? But how could he be jealous of someone he doesn’t really love? I was certain that he couldn’t be in love with my mother. Not anymore. Not the way he treated her. I didn’t think Mom was having an affair, but even if she were, how could he blame her? I almost hoped she was sleeping with Dr. L. Imagining my mother doing something like that cast her in a totally different light. It made her alive in a way she never had seemed to be.

  In fact, my mom wasn’t sleeping with the doctor. But something else even more surprising had happened. Mom was pregnant.

  If my mother had managed to produce a son, my parents’ marriage might have lasted. Dad always had a Henry VIII-type obsession with having a boy, presumably to carry on the sacred Hendra name. I knew he was deeply disappointed when I turned out to be a girl. But my mother wasn’t destined to give birth to a boy. Her pregnancy, which might have been an accident or a plan to try to save their failing marriage, ended in a life-threatening miscarriage. She was forty by this time and had an ectopic pregnancy, and she was hospitalized and treated by the glorious Dr. L. My father called her room. He said he was sorry for what had happened, but it was simply too much for him to have to visit. She understood, didn’t she? After all, she knew he hated hospitals. Instead, he went to a bar.

  In the months that followed, my father embarked on a new venture, a satire of the Wall Street Journal that followed the formula of his successful 1978 project Not the New York Times. He had been around even less than usual and was back to disappearing overnight or for a day or two at a time. Then one night, he appeared at my bed. It was 12:28 A.M. At least that’s the time my clock showed when I heard him. The smell of his favorite cigars mixed with a bottle or two of red wine wafted over me. Mom had long since gone to sleep. Her mood had neither gotten worse nor better since the miscarriage. She just continued to maintain the same façade that she’d built before I was born—emotionless, contained, the antithesis of Dad.

  “Jessie,” he said in a voice a bit louder than a whisper. “Get up. I need to have a chat.”

  “A chat?” Part of me was relieved. He hadn’t touched me in years, but I could never be sure what he was thinking. A chat? What was this about? “Daddy, it’s the middle of the night. I have to go to school in the morning.”

  “Oh screw that bunch of fascists. Come across the street to Phebe’s. Have a drink with your old dad.”

  It was pointless to argue. It was always pointless to argue with my father. He had an amazing ability to make even the most bizarre proposition sound completely normal, to turn things around so that it seemed like you were the one with problem. Phebe’s was the local hang out on the corner of Fourth and the Bowery, and it was open late. I pulled on the jeans that were lying by my bed and smoothed out the bright red T-shirt I’d worn to sleep. Then I followed my father through the silent heat of the loft to the stairwell door. My mother didn’t stir.

  Dad and I went down the five flights of dusty stairs and out the front door. The streets were still humming. Club O, the S and M place downstairs, remained open, and we could still hear the ear-piercing shrieks as we passed. Kathy and I missed the primal screamers who used to use the space. They were a timid-looking crowd compared to the S-and-Mers, who wore head-to-toe black leather outfits and toted bags that were no doubt filled with whips and other sex toys.

  Dad and I walked briskly toward Phebe’s, my father deftly whistling Mozart’s “Jupiter Symphony.” He took my hand as we crossed the Bowery and smiled as he opened the bar’s door for me.

  Phebe’s had that sleazy dive smell—like someone had poured beer over the entire place and left it to rot. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, and large, thick men hunched over drinks at the bar. At least it was air conditioned. My father grabbed a place to sit, and as we waited for a waitress, I picked nervously at the vinyl-covered cushion. Someone had passed a weary night—perhaps waiting for a lover or a drug dealer—by burning cigarette holes all over the seat. Little patches of white foam poked through the black vinyl. I poked the foam back in as I waited to see what it was exactly that my father wanted to “chat” about. A tough-looking waitress in a Phebe’s shirt finally came by.

  “Hey Tony,” she said. “What you drinkin’?”

  My father smiled. “Two gin and tonics.”

  The waitress never hesitated. I’m not even sure she glanced at me. She just headed off to get our drinks. Dad looked across the table at me as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin cigar. He lit it and puffed, as if savoring my suspense.

  “Well, Jessie,” he began, slowly. “This isn’t so bad, eh? It’s not so bad to be out here having a drink?” Compared to what? I thought.

  “No, Dad, it’s nice,” I said, not really meaning it. I would much rather have stayed in bed, though the air-conditioned rot at Phebe’s wasn’t all that bad.

  “You want a puff?” He held out his cigar.

  “No, thanks,” I said, avoiding his gaze and still poking at my seat.

  “You want a cigarette, don’t you. Disgusting things. Fucking kill you, those will.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, treasure,” he said, “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  I looked up. “What, Daddy?”

  The waitress came and plunked the drinks down on the table.

  “Enjoy, Tony,” she said as if I wasn’t there.

  My father picked up his gin and tonic and tossed out the tiny straw.

  “Why do Americans put straws in everything?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy.” Now I was nervous.

  “Fucking everything. Straws in fucking everything.”

  Tell me, Dad! I felt like screaming.

  “Anyway, treasure, I wanted to tell you first.”

  What? Tell me. Just tell me already.

  He took a swig of his drink.

  “I’ve met someone, a really lovely woman, and I am going to live with her.” There…. there it was. I couldn’t believe it. “I think everyone will be much happier if I move out of the loft.” I barely heard the last part.

  “What about Ma?”

  “Jessie, listen, your mother and I have not been happy together for years.”

&
nbsp; Your mother! So she had already stopped being his wife, already stopped being Judy. Now she was Your Mother—my responsibility.

  “We were never happy. A big mistake, the whole thing.” He could’ve been talking about a bad first date, he seemed so casual. “We never should have gotten married in the first place.”

  No wonder he never went to see her in the hospital. He really had stopped caring for her. I sat there silently, head bowed, picking at the vinyl, harder, faster.

  “Well?” I looked up. Part of me felt like crying, but I didn’t. “Come on, Jessie. I wanted to tell you because I want you to understand why I’m doing this. I thought a long time about this. About telling you. And now you’re just going to pull this silent teenage bullshit?”

  My father took a deep pull on his cigar and turned away.