Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Pop took a credit card out of his wallet and slid it down the doorjamb.

  “Voilà!” he said, pushing the door open and ushering me through. “I’m way over the limit on that card anyway,” he said.

  We were in my favorite room—the dioramas of aboriginal life. It was empty except for us and a troupe of black Girl Scouts whose noses were pressed to the glass to see Cro-Magnon man forage and the Vikings set to sea. I peered in over their heads; I love ant colonies, too, and model trains, quattrocento crucifixions—those representations of life where everyone takes part, whether sowing or winnowing, rowing or raising the sail. You never see anyone like me, loitering at the edge of the scene, too fearful to make an effort, wishing only to escape his little glassed-in world.

  My father checked his watch. He had done the fatherly thing by bringing me: now what? He turned his attention to the scouts. He’s friend to all little girls now, watching them on the street, in the library or the supermarket, befriending them in elevators, smiling down over them with an unbearable nostalgia. Nostalgia for me, I suppose, though like most nostalgia this was not yearning for something lost but for something that had never been; an old wish so deeply etched into memory that finally it was clear as if real. Every one of these children was the child I might have been—a child who flew off the schoolbus into her father’s arms and who was gentle and delicate, shy and kind. I had been most disappointing, talking too much, laughing too loudly, though “unnaturally” silent with him. He was still saving elephant jokes for me while I was soldiering my pompous twelve-year-old way through The Feminine Mystique, and I could tell from his face, when he walked in to find me reading it in the bathtub, that he was certain it must be filth. He stood there looking down at me with his characteristic puzzled, hurt expression, wondering what could be wrong, how I could have become the way I was. “Does your mother know you’re reading that?” he asked finally, but he left before I could answer as if he had to get away from me. Even my body was becoming obscene.

  Now he looked down over these little girls in their uniforms and berets as if he might find a new daughter among them. Two of them, whispering together, became gradually aware of him and grew silent.

  “Why you staring?” one of them asked, sharp as her own mother, I supposed. The mother who had woven those hundred braids and fastened them with red and yellow beads.

  “I was wondering which badges you have there,” he told her.

  She was maybe seven; pride quickly overwhelmed her suspicion. She lifted her sash and began, in a careful, earnest voice, to describe them, pressing a finger to each embroidered circle: there was one for reading, one for learning to swim, one for refusing drugs. He bent to look more closely, asking how how she had earned them, expressing amazement that such a small girl could have accomplished such difficult tasks. The whole troupe, wary at first, then eager, reconstellated around him.

  “Girls?” Their leader fixed a level gaze on them—they had been taught not to take up with strangers, in fact there was a badge for that, too. They turned unwillingly from my father’s attention and reformed their line of pairs, holding hands as they went on toward the Bird Room. The one with the red and yellow beads took a last quick glance over her shoulder at us as she left the room.

  “It’s terrific,” he said, watching them. “They’re from Paterson. You know what a sewer Paterson is? But that little girl, she looked me right in the eye when I spoke to her, she—”

  He broke off. His eyes were brimming.

  “If I could find the right woman,” he said, “I’d start all over again, and this time it wouldn’t be one child, I’d like to have four or five—or six! or seven! I suppose that surprises you…,” he said with some kind of belligerence.

  “Not at all,” I said. I’d have been surprised if he didn’t dream of such things, but it seems his penance for never having completely entered into marriage is that he can’t get completely divorced. He never dated anyone after my mother. He told me once that as a young man he had assumed that husband and wife became, sexually, one being, so that if split, both halves must die. Adultery must then be physically appalling: when a colleague of his had casually mentioned a mistress, my father had begun to retch as if he’d heard of a bestial crime.

  “I’m so glad we can talk to each other!” he said now. We had come to the Hall of Dinosaurs, and I made a show of studying a stegosaurus spine.

  “People have such awful relations with their children these days,” he went on. “But I feel there’s nothing I wouldn’t be comfortable telling you.”

  I was afraid this might be true, and indeed, a minute later he was feeling comfortable enough to tell me about a sore he had on his back, somewhere near the seventh vertebra—no, he hadn’t been to the doctor—and here, with his arm twisted and groping in the back of his shirt, he stopped to ponder medical costs and the arrogance of the educated, and to remind me that he had treated his own athlete’s foot for years with a simple formula of diluted sulfuric acid. But this thing was painful, and he couldn’t see it, that was the real problem.

  “It’s there, there, a little up,” he said, turning his back to me and trying to reach it with his thumb.

  “A little up,” he said again, with irritation, because I was supposed, apparently, to examine it. I looked around in the vain hope that someone might come through, some white rabbit of a scientist carrying a large bone, the kind of man I always dream will save me.

  “Up, up, there,” Pop said, giving a little moan as I touched the sore. “It hurts,” he said, in the voice of a child.

  “I’ll look at it when we get back to the Island,” I promised, thinking he’d forget it by then.

  The Hall of African Mammals opened before us, long, cool and dark like the nave of a cathedral, its polished marble walls glistening, its chapels dedicated not to saints but to species endangered or extinct. In the center was a stuffed woolly mammoth lifting its trumpeting head. A young waiter in a tuxedo shirt was arranging café tables around it.

  “Hello!” my father called to him, across the room. “Is this a private party?”

  No, it was a regular thing on Fridays, came the answer, though not until five.

  It was a quarter past four. Could my father prevail upon him—? He’d been bringing me here since I was six—

  The waiter interrupted him—sit anywhere, he said. It was easier to pour a couple of early drinks than listen to the story. He brought us two gin-and-tonics and a cup of Goldfish crackers and left us alone.

  As I lifted my drink my father looked me up and down quickly, startled, as if he had just realized again that he was out with a woman. I was glad the waiter had gone—I didn’t think I could bear to have myself explained again.

  “So, what’s this job in Columbus?” Pop asked, the way he had used to ask me about school.

  “Cincinnati,” I said, but though he had asked the same question, with the same error, at lunch, I was relieved to hear it. It’s the sort of thing fathers and daughters talk about, and I had, for once, a good answer.

  “Assistant professor,” I told him, “I mean, it’s mainly teaching composition, but—”

  “But it’s a job,” he said. “You won’t be on the dole anymore.”

  “A teaching fellowship isn’t quite the dole.”

  “It’s all Greek to me, sweetie,” he said with a laugh. “I’m sure it’s very important. Nothing wrong with a little work, though.”

  If he saw the irony in this, it didn’t show in his face. These were phrases he’d heard, ‘Greek to me,’ and ‘Nothing wrong with a little work’. He repeated them just to have something to say. He hadn’t gone to college—his mother thought it extravagant, so he’d never quite understood what I’d been doing studying all the time. To deal him a sharp reply would have been like striking a child.

  “It’ll be a lot of work,” I said, careful to keep the eager, Horatio Alger note in my voice. “But it’s great just to get an interview. You wouldn’t believe it, but they said
almost two hundred people applied. And now it’s just between me and two others. And they’ve been so nice, you should have heard what they said about my articles.… Considering the market,” I said, thinking now that in fact I hadn’t done so terribly badly, had accomplished a little and had time to accomplish more, that I could really give him something to be proud of, that he might even see that if there was promise in my life, his, too, could be redeemed, “I’m doing pretty well.”

  “You can go pretty far with a nice set of tits these days,” he said.

  He was smiling as if he had just gotten off a wonderful mot, and I wanted to smile, too, because if I smiled we could go on as if he hadn’t said this, and soon it would really seem he had not. I couldn’t manage it, but I carefully avoided looking down to see if my sweater was too tight, or crossing my arms over my chest, or cringing or shrinking in any way. I looked past him for a minute, at a Kudu, lithe and proud in its glass enclosure, looking out over a glittering lake.

  You’re all he’s got, I said to myself. Be kind.

  “Do you suppose that’s real water?” I asked, hoping to lead him back to safety. He likes a mechanical question, and can spend hours explaining about pistons and spark plugs, how the keystone holds the arch and the moon pulls the tide. Now he began on the properties of chlorine, but a morose fog settled into his voice and he stared a long time into the scene.

  “No,” he said suddenly, rousing himself. “By God, I wouldn’t mind marrying again, not one little bit.” His voice rang against the marble walls. “I’d like to find a woman who loves to cook, and loves to talk, and loves to hike, and loves to fuck—”

  He paused, darting a glance toward me, worrying I might be offended? Hoping so? Testing, to see if I might be the woman described?

  “And then I’d like to buy a piece of property on the sunny side of a good, serious hill, and we’d start building a house there.”

  He drained his drink and looked around for the waiter.

  “I was right,” he told me, “I knew T-bills were going to turn around this week. If only I’d been able to get a solid position, we could be having this drink … on Antigua! Or, how would you like Positano? Looking out over the Bay of Naples? Bougainvillea cascading down the hillsides? What would you think about that?

  “I’ve been making money,” he said again. “This time next year, who knows?” He lifted the empty glass to his lips again.

  “Where is he?” I asked, but the waiter was gone.

  Then came the Girl Scouts, two by two, swinging their clasped hands, unable to quite keep themselves from skipping until they stood before the woolly mammoth, whereupon a hush seized them as if they were in the presence of a god or a living dream. Daneesha, the one with the red and yellow beads, greeted my father now as an old friend, shaking off her partner and running to him to show off a new gyroscope from the souvenir shop.

  He woke up. For a minute he was in the thrall not of the past or the future but of Daneesha and her gyroscope, which he spun for her on his fingertip, then along its string. Soon he was writing out his phone number, inviting her to dinner the next time she came into town.

  “Your whole family,” he told her. “Do you like spaghetti?”

  It was just her mother and herself, she said, and they loved spaghetti. She was hungry, as I’d been: she wanted to draw her hand along a man’s scratchy cheek, to be lifted in a pair of arms that could carry her anywhere. As she took the business card with his number, her clear smile faded into an expression of secret greed. She pocketed it quickly, and, as if afraid he would snatch it back from her, ran back to the troupe, whose leader turned a hard warning glance at him. I remembered that the mother of a little girl in his building had told him if she found her daughter at his place one more time she’d call the police. Nobody gets it, I thought—it’s not that he wants sex with little girls, it’s that he wants to live like they do, in a world before all that.

  “It’s hard to believe that you used to be that age,” he said, as the Scouts went off toward the planetarium. He checked his watch.

  “If we leave now,” he began, “we can change at the World Trade Center before the crush…” Call Hunan Kitchen from the ferry terminal, catch the 5:40 boat, be on the island by 6:15, and pick up dinner on the way home. And he was off into the city with me only one step behind. The subway station felt just like always, comforting in its clangor, the crowd of preoccupied faces pressing onto the escalator, the couple of latecomers running edgewise down the stairs. The doors of one train closed with hydraulic authority and it slid smoothly off as another slammed in around the bend. Pop put one token in the stile for me, wave me through and strode ahead of me again toward the first car. From here we could easily cross to the express at Grand Central. And it was waiting, already packed. I folded myself between two men in suits and swayed with them all the way downtown. I do, I thought, I love it here. At South Ferry we ran up the ramp, and though the boat was boarding Pop dialed Hunan Kitchen: he could see by the size of the crowd that there was plenty of time.

  We were the last up the gangplank, and the first to disembark, running down the iron stairway down to the street, crossing with the light, turning up the street past the Hadassah Thrift Shop and Winnie’s Bridal and Formal, and Island Cleaners, where suits and dresses moved in stately procession on their conveyor, and as we opened the door at Hunan Kitchen they were calling our number.

  “Steaming!” Pop said, opening the little cartons and setting them in the center of the table, as proud as if we had ridden unscathed through the gears of a great machine.

  “It’s all in the timing,” he told me, feeling paternal now, ready to share the wisdom of his lifetime with me. “It’s an instinct—you have to have a sense for it. The crowd is going one direction, everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, and you have to be willing to stop and think, ‘Maybe there’s another way.’ I’m always ready to take the risk, move against the prevailing winds, and it’s paid off for me.”

  He gestured in the direction of the newspaper, still folded to the market tables. “What I would have done this week, if I’d had the money,” he said, “nobody else even considered, but it would have been very profitable.”

  He shook his head. “But for a lack of cash, really, I’d be on top of the world today. I’ve just gotta back in there, sweetie, and with this kind of opportunity, you know, by November, the clouds are closing in here, and I can be thinking where I’d like to retire to.”

  He popped the beer top as if it were champagne, but in another minute he was lost to his thoughts again. The lamp over the table, all four hundred watts of it (he had hated my mother’s dinners by candle) shone pitilessly down on his face. Everything in his apartment, the bare bulbs, the month’s worth of newspapers piled by the couch, the box of sugar he plunked down defiantly before me as if to say, “I suppose you expected a bowl,” still set itself against my mother. But on the wall facing his chair hung her engagement photograph, taken when she was twenty and secure in a luxuriant beauty. I had nothing of her in me, I thought—I was his daughter exactly and it made me want to rip at my skin.

  “Curaçao is nice,” Pop said suddenly. “Coves, inlets, nice private spots. I don’t need a glittering nightlife, wide beaches, high-rise hotels…” His voice swelled. “Some people have to have that, the glamour—it makes them feel like they are somebody, I guess … I never felt that way. That’s one thing I like about Beverly Dill” (this was the news anchor he admired) “—she’s down to earth. She’s smart, but not so smart you wouldn’t trust her. She’s not looking for fame or money, not the kind of gal who would turn up her nose at—”

  “I have found you ridiculous since the time I was old enough to laugh.” I could taste these words on my tongue, and they were delicious. To have nothing to be proud of but the fact that you didn’t like high-rise hotels! To be cooped in your deathly apartment beneath a photograph of your former wife, sketching, sketching on the blueprints for the next one as if anyone at all could bear to l
ove you!

  But it was valor, almost, his relentless optimism, the way, though his life had eroded beneath him, he refused to feel the loss, counting his blessings, keeping his eye on the future even if by now he could see no more in the future than these worn old fantasies, the escape to the island, the beautiful woman’s love. To despise him was to remember, suddenly, a time when I was twelve and he had driven me to the dentist for an extraction that went awry. An hour of bloody probing and wrenching ended in an operation with scant anesthesia, but the worst part was seeing Pop stand by helpless, one minute trying to make light of it, the next turning away, aghast. If I’d ever dreamed he could take care of me I had to admit myself wrong that day. On the way home we passed a Kmart and suddenly he was doubling back, determined to buy me a gift. Dazed and aching, I waded in behind him among racks of too-blue jeans and stacks of lawn furniture poised to fall. In the music department I grabbed the first thing on the rack, just to get it over with. It was Yellow Submarine, and I still can’t hear it without thinking of everything I wanted that purchase to assuage: he was failing, at marriage, at work, at fatherhood, and he had one hope left, the hope that I was too young to see.

  Now I continued to pretend. “—at the simpler things in life,” I said. This was a phrase of his, and to speak it was a way to say, covertly, “It’s okay, it’s only money you’ve lost, nothing important.”

  “The simpler things in life. Exactly,” he said. “Exactly. There are so few people, sweetie, who really understand.…” He turned to me with a true smile, even a loving smile, and I felt, and despised myself for feeling, overjoyed. His discourse on simplicity carried us to bedtime, when he cleared the newspapers off the sofa, pulled it out for me, and gave me sheets, the same ones Grammy had ripped up their worn middles and restitched for him before she died. As I made up the bed I heard him brush his teeth while the bathroom radio gave the financial news. A cold rain pricked at the window, and under the marquee of the defunct movie house across the street a tired prostitute looked up and down the empty street. I went to pull the curtain, but of course there wasn’t any.