Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  Korine stood in front of her father. He was so tall. She rested her back against his knees. It was so good to do that. He would always fidget and squirm trying to move her about and that kind of tickled her back. There were heaps of things that she loved doing, things were just fun, no matter what anyone said, and this was definitely one of them.

  “What flavors do you want? You can choose three” The Father said.

  The ice-cream parlor was small. It had been somebody’s garage that they hollowed out to make a place that made kids happy. There was a line of freezers from the entrance along the right side of the wall all the way to the end. There were five freezer bins and in each one, there were about nine or ten different flavors of ice-cream. Most people didn’t know that so many different types of ice-cream existed.

  The Father took a bowl for Korine and picked her up in one arm, holding her over the glass lids so she could see inside at all of the different colors. For Korine, it was like staring at a hundred thousand bright colorful rainbows and being hurried into choosing only three.

  She wanted the blue one and the blue one with red dots and the white one and the other white one and the pink one and the red one because red is her favorite color and the rainbow one and the green one because green is daddy’s favorite color and she could give him some and he would be happy and…

  “Chocolate dada, I want chocolate,” she said, madly pointing at the glass.

  “Ok, chocolate,” said The Father, putting her on the floor so he could take one big scoop.

  Korine looked around at the other children who were sitting at their tables and eating their ice-cream. Their faces were all messy and creamy and their mums and dads were always reaching for those paper napkins to wipe their mouths, but they’d just get all messy again every time they did.

  Korine was excited, though. There was a shiver of electricity running through her. It made her want to shout out or grab onto her daddy or run about or a bunch of other stuff The Therapist said was ‘the bad’ inside of her that was doing no good.

  She didn’t feel bad, though.

  She just wanted to run around and swing her arms in big giant circles and then maybe turn into a bird or an airplane or a spaceship or a dragon and fly around the room in-between the tables and then all the other kids would put down their spoons and they’d jump off the tables too and they would turn into bees and butterflies and there’d be other dragons too, but they’d be baby dragons, cause she was the mummy dragon and they would fly around and eat all the monsters.

  “Second scoop?” said The Father.

  He was grumpy. He was always grumpy. Korine didn’t mind, though. He grumbled a lot and he sometimes said his words really loud like she did, when she wanted something really badly. But she was never really mad. She just wanted that thing right now even if she knew it wasn’t there to begin with and there was no way she could get it. She’d want it and she’d shout and she’d say her words really loud just like daddy was about to do if she kept fooling around behind his legs. She didn’t hate mummy or daddy, though. She just liked to shout a lot. It felt good, that’s all. And she knew, watching daddy’s face go red and his voice make harder and louder words, that he was also having fun.

  “Korine” he shouted.

  The other families looked up from their tables. The mother’s judged harshly. Their eyes twisted and turned. And one of them, a lady seating with her daughter by the cash register, the one who put only a slight dollop of ice-cream on her spoon and who chewed the ice-cream in her mouth as if it were a piece of tough meat, that one, she was staring with such a pinned expression that her nose scrunched up along with her top lip and her nostrils twitched and flared and she made the kind of face that people only make when they smell someone else’s fart.

  “Second scoop,” said The Father sternly.

  Korine was running in and out of his legs. She was laughing out loud and the other kids at the tables, they were looking at her now, itching to put down their spoons and join her. They would, were it not ice-cream on the tips of their tongues. If it was pasta or even pizza or stroganoff, even though kids loved stroganoff, they’d say ‘save it for later’ and they’d jump out of their seats and their parents would try but it’d be no use and they’d probably play chasey or something and they’d pick one kid, a younger one and they’d tease and taunt the child to chase them and the little kid would run around the tables and to the front and to the back of the shop but they’d never catch the other kids cause they were small and small was stupid and slow and probably, all of their ´parents would be watching and some would be thinking how cute it was that everyone followed their little prince or princess and others would be thinking, ‘I’d love to throttle that little fucker’.

  “Korine” shouted The Father.

  He lowered himself from all the way up there and his knees and legs were all scrunched up. Korine rested her hands on his legs. Korine smiled. She had such straight white teeth. All kids did. But hers were especially white. It was something The Father always looked at when she smiled and when other people did the same. He always looked at people’s teeth. Korine’s were really white and even on the backs, there was no yellow at all.

  He worried himself a lot, about brushing her teeth. He always did it, every night. He didn’t tell The Mother about his concern. She’d just think he was stupid and laugh at him and then apologize for laughing at him and then offer to give him a blow job or something and then he’d say no and she’d get offended and she’d walk off sobbing and then he’d follow her and try to hug her and she’d shrug him off and then he’d unzip his pants and then she’d say “what am I to you, a slut?”

  So this was one of the things he didn’t tell her about. There were others too. Scary stuff like the kids getting hurt and them having no money and having to move in with her mother or move to some shitty neighborhood where they’d probably get broken into and killed or raped or something and he was sure, that every time his wife took the car, especially with the kids, that they would have a car crash, on a highway somewhere and it always felt so real that he’d panic and start to cry. By the time they got home, though, he would look like he didn’t even notice that they were gone and this was the only expression The Mother ever saw on his face.

  The Father always worried though that he wasn’t washing her teeth right. He didn’t really do his own the way it was supposed to be done. He just brushed vigorously left and right and up and down for less than a minute, about five times each side, before spitting.

  He used to see people at work after lunch washing their teeth in the bathrooms. They’d be at it for at least ten minutes. They be left and right and up and down and back and forth and then when he’d think they’d be done, they’d flip their brush and start hacking at the backs of their tongues and all the while, they’d have their mouths hanging over the sink and white spit and foam would be spilling out onto the porcelain and to The Father, it all looked like so much. And it looked kind of sexual too. Like violent sex. All that shoving and poking and gargling and choking and frozen glares, like they were on the verge of some filthy and sweaty climax.

  The Father didn’t brush like others did. And he knew it wasn’t the greatest care he could be giving his teeth but they were his teeth to ignore, so he didn’t care all that much. But Korine’s were different. The second he became a father, all the things that didn’t matter all that much to him were things that for Korine, couldn’t be taken so lightly and scared the absolute shit out of him.

  And when he was scared, he’d get mad.

  “Korine. I can’t…”

  “Dada, I want grape,” she said.

  “You sure? You want grape? And what else? You have one more scoop. Three scoops remember.”

  “Ummmmm. I want green” she said.

  The Father closed his eyes.

  He squeezed them shut.

  It stopped the anger from spilling out.

  “Green’s not a flavor. What about mint? You want a mint?”<
br />
  “Is mint green?”

  “Yes. Mint is green.”

  “Daddy?” she asked.

  Korine took one of her daddy’s hands and with her other, she tried to push his chin upwards so she could see him, so she could look in his eyes. It was so hard, though. He must have had a sore neck or something because she pushed and pushed and his chin stayed down by his shoulder and he was still looking down at her shoes.

  “Do you have a hurt daddy?” she asked.

  He wanted to look her in the eyes.

  He wanted to.

  But he couldn’t.

  He was so scared.

  The Father filled Korine’s bowl with a scoop of grape and mint and then asked her if she wanted gummy bears and jelly mouths, which she did. There was a lot more. There were sour worms and there were nuts and sprinkles and there were jelly worms and there was fruit as well like strawberries and kiwi fruit and mango and there were crushed cashews and all sorts of toppings.

  They even had the one that goes hard.

  The Father weighed her plastic bowl and took it with her over to the far end of the parlor. As they walked past the different tables, he held his daughter’s hand. He didn’t hold it tight and leading like some parents did, the type of parents that squinted when they didn’t approve of something.

  He could feel, though, the slight glares of a few of the mother’s watching the curves on his back as he passed them by. He always flexed lightly, as if he were stretching or straining a muscle. It was enough though for his back, to bulge and push the rounds of his muscles out into the dressing of light. He always felt like someone was watching, even if nobody ever was. Usually, they did, though. He wasn’t at all unattractive. And he knew this.

  He had a beautiful daughter too. Her hair was golden. It was brown, but everyone called it blonde. And her eyes looked like two shallow ponds. She was dainty and girly, but she ran around like a little boy, climbing this and jumping about on that. She was scared of nothing. And when she smiled or when she did her pirouette, all the girls and ladies and women and mothers, they all caught in their hands, their melting hearts and they looked at her in such mystique as if she were the only one of her kind they had ever seen and they watched her as a dying man would, the going down of the sun.

  The Father could feel their eyes on his back and his buttocks and then at the feisty little girl in his hands and at how he held her hand so gently, even at the size that he was. He knew his daughter was beautiful. He knew they thought that. He knew too, that they all wanted a pretty little girl of their own. They were human. They were imprinted to feel this way. And he knew this made them want him more. To be strong and firm, with one gentle hand cupping his daughter’s and the other a fist, to keep monsters at bay.

  And he knew this. He could see how wives or girlfriends would quickly flick their eyes as they lifted from their bowls to focus on their lovers or their husbands. And though he wouldn’t act on it, it was nice to have beautiful women, ogling him with licking glares.

  “Sit down here,” he said. “I’m going to get mine.”

  Korine smiled.

  “Dada” she shouted as her father walked off.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She shook her hands while looking down at the space between her and the table.

  “Ok,” said The Father pushing her chair inwards so she could grip her bowl better.

  Then it was his turn.

  The Father looked for the biggest bowl he could find. There were so many to choose from but when he put them side by side, they were all the same size. What he wanted they didn’t have. He didn’t know what that was exactly. If someone was to ask him “Can I help you?” he wouldn’t at all be able to describe what he wanted, just that, whatever it was the he did want, it wasn’t here and all he’d be inclined to say would be “Is there anything out back?”

  The Father settled on an edible bowl. It was like an ice-cream cone except that it was a bowl. They always got a bit soggy but not completely, so at the end, it was like chewing wet cardboard.

  The Father went from bin to bin and he looked at the different colors in the same magic as Korine. He didn’t bother reading the tags on each tub. It didn’t matter, they all had names that sounded nothing like what was inside them so he just stared hard at each color and if he really wanted it, he scooped a tiny bit into his cone. And he went from tub to tub and from bin to bin and he packed bits of this upon bits of that and there were so many colors and so many tastes that they would all come together and either be incredible or absolutely horrendous but that didn’t matter cause he scooped in every color except chocolate.

  And vanilla.

  And when it came to toppings, The Father went straight for the jelly worms and sour worms and the jelly teeth and anything jelly really. He piled them on and onto the sides and underneath different scoops and he pressed down with the plastic grabber so he had more room for more candy. And on top of the jelly candy, he sprinkled lightly, a fine serving of crushed cashews.

  And then he went back to the table.

  And he ate.

  And Korine, she ate too.

  And they both gulped down their ice-cream. And they weren’t really different, she and he. They both had messy faces and different colored ice-cream on their chins, but The Father’s was funnier because his was dripping into his beard.

  “You look funny,” Korine said.

  The Father smiled, but he didn’t shift his stare.

  “Is that yummy?” she said as if she had none.

  The Father knew what that meant. He just didn’t want to give her any. He didn’t want to not have all that he wanted just for himself. He picked two jelly worms from his bowl. They were frozen solid from the cold and it kind of hurt trying to pick them out. He got them though and flicked them into Korine’s bowl.

  “Look, daddy, look,” she said, sticking sour worms to her upper lip and making roaring sounds while her little hands grasped at The Father’s shirt.

  And all he could think of was the tiny smudge on the wall by the window.

  “Look, daddy,” she said. “I’m a monster.”

  Yeah, but what kind of monster was she? One that lived in the murky depths of the sea, one that hid in icy caves or one that was too young to know any better?

  “I don’t want anymore,” she said, pushing her bowl aside. “I want some of yours,” she said.

  “Eat your own,” said The Father.

  “I don’t want to. Can I have some of yours?”

  “No,” he said, getting edgy. “Look, you still have a scoop.”

  “But daddy,” she said, “this is green and green is your favorite color. This is yours. I got this for you.”

  The Father lifted his head. He didn’t want to look at her. The thought of it made him shudder. The same way people got when they imagined, nails being dragged across a black board. The thought of having to see into her blue eyes. The thought of what he might find inside them. The thought of how he might feel.

  “We have to go.”

  “But daddy.”

  “We’re going.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Don’t make a scene. We’re going alright. Now get in the car.”

  “But daddy, you haven’t had your ice-cream,” she said, holding the bowl to him.

  “I don’t want the ice-cream. I don’t want it, ok? I didn’t ask you for it. I don’t want it and I’m not gonna eat it. Green’s not even my favorite color.”

  Korine slowly put the bowl back on the table. Daddy had never been like this before. He was always grumpy and annoying. And he was always shouting a lot, mainly at other people. But he was never like this.

  He was never mean.

  Korine hopped off the table and took her daddy’s hand. She didn’t really feel like running around anymore. She didn’t feel like lifting her arms and pretending they were wings, not like she did before. She didn’t really want to play at all. She wasn’t thinking about what she had don
e like a grownup might do, she was just not thinking about doing anything else. It was like all the other fun things that she wanted to do before were now stupid and boring and she just wanted to hold her daddy’s hand and let him put on her seatbelt, without getting upset.

  The Father felt kind of sick.

  It might have been the ice-cream.

  It might have been Korine.

  He had this urge, the whole time he was driving, to look in the rear mirror, to look into the backseat. It was like she was some kind of cyst in his mouth that he knew, should he give her attention, she would only grow on his nerves and enshroud him in pain. Still, he had this stupid persistent urge, to look and to touch the cyst.

  To make sure it was still there.

  To see if it was getting worse.

  The traffic was heavy again. The traffic was always heavy. He slowed the car to a halt. Then he undid his seatbelt and he opened the door.

  “Where are you going daddy? I want to go too.”

  He said nothing.

  He walked around the car and over to her door. He flicked the alarm twice to open her door and he reached in and undid her seatbelt.

  “Are we going for a walk daddy?”

  He said nothing.

  He undid the straps from around her arms and lifted her out of the seat and put her down on the ground. She was bare foot so he reached down under the front seat and shifted his hands around blindly looking for her shoes. He found them quickly and turned to Korine, tapping each leg like a blind man, the ground before him.

  He put on her shoes.

  He closed her door.

  And when she said “Daddy,” he ignored her.

  He walked around to the driver’s door and he entered and he sat down behind the wheel. He put on his seatbelt and started the ignition. After a couple of seconds, the doors all locked automatically. He put the car in first gear and slowly moved back and forth like a runner, on the tips of their nerves, waiting to burst off the line.

  The car in front moved. The father lifted the clutch and his car moved too. He looked in the rear view. The car behind him also moved. It was slow traffic. But they were moving. He turned on the stereo. The chicken song. He ejected the cd and threw it on the dashboard. It slid off and fell into space between the gearstick and his right foot.

  The traffic moved again and The Father focused on the lights ahead of him.

  He ignored the spitting rain, blotching up his window.

  He ignored the honking horns, somewhere behind him.

  He ignored the pecking in the dirt beside him.

  And he ignored, the little girl tapping at his door.

  Korine stood there, the light rain drizzling upon her head and making her fringe stick to her face. She didn’t try to brush it away. Mummy and daddy always did that for her, because she never did it herself. She stood completely still in the middle of the road, between two lanes, where her daddy left her. She stood still, holding her hand to her mouth and watching the red lights of her daddy’s car going dull every time that he drove away and bright again, every time that he stopped.

  She hoped every time that the lights went red, that he would jump out of the car and pick her up and bring her back to the car. She hoped he would scoop her up like the ice-cream and it didn’t matter if he was mad or even if he was mean, he could be any way he wanted. She just wanted him to get out. Why wouldn’t he get out? Why did the lights go dull again?

  Around him, he could hear more cars honking their horns. He tried to pretend it was for someone else, but he knew it was for him. He tried though to ignore it. People did this to puppies all the time, why couldn’t he just do it to her?

  “Daddy” Korine shouted.

  The Father turned on the stereo. The news was on. They were talking about the weather, and how it seemed that this rain would never let up. And then there was a special report. There had been an accident. On a highway. And lots of people were hurt. The fire brigade was having a hard time getting to the scene because of the rain and the bad traffic.

  “Daddy. Please, I want to come in. I’m sorry daddy. I’m sorry. I won’t be an airplane. I promise. I won’t be an airplane” she pleaded.

  She was below his window. She couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her. Not through the window. He could see the outline of her head, though, in his side mirrors. He could also hear her pleas. They were so loud. Even through the sound of honking horns.

  The traffic lifted a bit.

  Korine tapped on the car door.

  “Daddy” she cried. “Let me in.”

  The red lights dimmed.

  The car moved forward.

  And so did Korine.

  The Father kept his eyes on the car in front.

  Korine kept hers on his hands that she could see, holding the wheel.

  “I’m sorry daddy,” she said.

  The Father screamed.

  He eschewed a fetid black feeling that had been swamping his mind.

  He screamed so loud that Korine shut her eyes.

  She kept them shut until it passed.

  “Daddy,” she said, “I’m scared.”

  “Oh god,” said The Father.

  He opened the door and there she was, saturated, holding her hands to her mouth and shivering, from a mixture of cold wind and being left alone.

  “I’m sorry daddy. I’ll eat the ice-cream next time. I promise.”

  “Come here,” he said, taking her in his arms, sitting her on his lap and holding her tight.

  Korine grappled him. She wrapped her arms around him and if she could, she would sink her nails into his sink and get hold of his nerves, muscles or bones. And if she got hold of them, she’d never let him go. She held him and he held her. He squeezed her just as tight.

  Still, he couldn’t look at her face.

  Not even for a second.

  Not even to apologize.

  For being so mean.