by Jean Hegland
“I could swing some debt, of course. But one hundred thousand dollars just sounds insane. I’ve looked into scholarships,” she plows on, “but there’s not a lot out there for game designers—and especially not returning students who barely even managed to graduate high school. I found one, and I’ve been working on it, but frankly, I don’t see how I could possibly win it. They want you to come up with an entire proposal for a game, an outline that covers everything from the story and artwork to gameplay and mechanics and technical interfaces.”
She sags her head wearily from side to side. “It’s a huge, huge project, like building a whole house or writing a novel or a symphony or something. And I’m just a beginner. I don’t know nearly enough yet to design an entire game. It’s like you need to have a degree already before you’d even have a chance.”
She takes a quick breath, holds it for a second, and then blurts in a rush, “Dad, before, when I was here the last time, you said there was some money set aside for my education, and I’ve been thinking. I have no idea how much there is—or if it even still exists—but I was wondering, maybe, I mean, do you think maybe I could use some of it? I wouldn’t ask,” she pushes on, “but I really don’t see how I can go to college without it. There’s just no way. I found out online that some people have been working on their designs for that scholarship for years.”
“That education … money’s for my … daughter. To educate my, daughter,” he says, frowning as the man with the barrow wheels his load offstage.
“I know,” she nods happily. “That’s me, Dad—I’m your daughter. It would be just so great if I could use some of it.”
“Daughter.” He gives her a long steady look, and the recognition in his expression seems firm and warm. “If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.”
“Yes, yes—that’s right. I’m your daughter.”
“Sweet daughter,” he muses out the window where a few final leaves are drifting from the tree like lost chances, “short daughter … dow’rless … peddler’s daughter … ‘I have a daughter that I love passing well— ’”
“Passing?” she gives an awkward little laugh.
“Exceedingly,” he explains promptly. “Polonius means, he loves … her … exceedingly. Though with that … rat, it’s always hard to tell. Daughter,” he continues contentedly, as if inviting other allusions to come. “Gentle … fair … sole … ‘I have another daughter, Who I am sure is kind and comfortable.’”
“That’s me,” the woman beside him answers, her voice fond and teasing. “That’s me, Dad—your sole, fair, kind and comfortable daughter.”
“Kind and comfortable?” His eyes widen and he shakes his head violently. “You?”
“You bet,” she laughs. “Your kind and comfortable daughter.”
“Kind and comfortable?” he glares at her. “Never. Not … you.”
“Dad—” she begins.
“Unnatural hag,” he announces indignantly, “is what, that … daughter, is. She’ll die,” he continues fiercely. “Before she ever … gets a penny. Kind and comfortable,” he scoffs. “That’s the daughter, who … cursed … she’s, the one, who … ruined everything.”
“I was raped.” She speaks softly, but something strong has entered her voice, not anger, not anguish, but something clear and unflinching. “That time in London, when I didn’t come back to the hotel? I was raped.”
When he does not respond, she goes on, “You thought I was being defiant when I wouldn’t tell you more about where I’d been, but I was so scared and ashamed. It was all so confusing that for a long time I wasn’t even sure myself exactly what happened. For years I couldn’t bring myself to talk—or even really think—about it, partly because I believed it was all my fault, and partly because I was trying to pretend it didn’t matter.”
She turns to look him full in the face. “They were college boys, I think—from Belgium or Poland or somewhere. I met them in Trafalgar Square, and they took me to a pub. After the pub, we ended up in some kind of hostel, or maybe a dorm room. I should have left, but I could hardly walk by that point, and I had no idea where I was.
“I didn’t like what was happening, how they kissed me, and … passed me around. But I was such a kid. I was too dumb and drunk and embarrassed and scared to escape. Besides, I was so dizzy I couldn’t even keep my eyes open, and I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to the hotel.”
She pauses to look to him. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
For an interminable time he does not appear to have heard her question, and when he finally answers, “Enough,” his voice is so harsh and ragged that at first it seems he’s commanding her to stop talking. But when she glances over at him, his face is drawn, his expression ravaged.
“It was horrible,” she continues. “I was—is there a word for beyond embarrassed, or ashamed? I felt responsible for what happened to you, too, with your speech and all. I felt so awful, Dad.” Her voice is thin and ragged. “I thought I’d ruined everything.”
“Calchas,” he croaks, shutting his eyes, “traitor, I never … Woeful, Cressida.”
She waits for him to open his eyes or maybe to say something more, and when he doesn’t, she shakes her head as if to clear it of his gibberish, “After I got back to California my period was way late. When I finally realized I was pregnant, I called you, and talked to Freya. I waited for you to call back,” She breaks off to take a shuddering breath, but her words sound strong when she continues. “But you never did. And before I could gather up my courage to call you again, I had a miscarriage.”
He sits with his eyes closed, still as stone, while his daughter says, “For a long time after that, it seemed easier for us to just go our separate ways, though I never stopped hoping that someday we’d find a way to get past all that crap, to forgive each other, and start again.” Her words fade into her thoughts, and when she finally speaks again, her voice has a stabbing edge. “But that was another stupid fantasy. You’re right, Dad. It’s all a hoax. That story—it’s nothing but a lie.”
“Go,” he whispers behind shut eyelids. “Leave,” he says more urgently. “It’s too, late. Now. Get you … gone.”
For a moment she hesitates, looking down into his closed face, even reaching a tentative hand toward his shoulder. But before her fingers can make contact with the fabric of his shirt, he barks, “Who is’t that hinders you?”
Randi is trembling by the time she bursts through the front doors, so sickened and shaken and ashamed, it is as if she’d never left that shoddy London room at all, as if she was still as numb and dumb and naked as ever, still unable to even try to stop those leering boys.
She yearns to have a cigarette before she starts the long drive home, but she can’t bear the thought of running into anyone in the smoking area. She fears that Tony, with his dorky jokes and corny encouragement, might be the worst. Instead, she races down the white sidewalk, buzzes herself through the locked gate, then stumbles across the asphalt to her car.
When she reaches it, she unlocks the door and throws herself into the driver’s seat. Leaning forward, she rests her forehead on the steering wheel, tries to get the seethe to settle in her chest. She feels raw—both skin and soul—suddenly utterly overcome by who she is and what she’s hoped for.
She should have never told him about London. She hadn’t meant to, though there had been a time when she’d longed for him to know her side of that gruesome tale. She’d hoped that someday they could sort out the causes and the consequences of that trip together. She had even imagined they might come to an understanding, that they might forgive each other at last, safe inside the mobius of their mutual love.
But she’d given up trying to fix the past—or at least she thought she had. She’d come today in hopes of finding a future instead. Her forehead still pressed against the steering wheel, she sighs and shakes her head. She should never have asked him for that money. She’d known from the beginning it was wrong. But she had been
so desperate to go to ArtTech, and that education fund had been her last real chance.
Two weeks ago, after she finished reading the message from ArtTech outlining her financial obligations, she’d stared at the smoke undulating from her cigarette, and it had been like watching her entire destiny fade with it into the empty air. Ever since then she’d felt the familiar tug of numbness, that yearning to return to being careful, small and dull. It was that feeling she was trying to fight when she resolved to ask her father for help.
“He misses you,” Sally said when she’d called again last week.
“How do you know?” Randi asked.
“The stories he keeps telling about when you were little, for one thing.”
“I’m not little anymore.” She had been taking extra shifts to save more money, and then racing home to work on her scholarship. She’d decided to design a game based on the world she’d described in her admissions application, and for the first few weeks it had been more lark than work as she dreamed up characters and imagined features and developed narrative elements. But the longer she spent on it, the more gaps and contradictions began to pop up, and every idea she found to try to fix them seemed immature and uninspired, every workaround she devised only revealed further problems, only highlighted how little she really knew.
The deadline was still ten weeks away, but it was already obvious she couldn’t possibly win. It was like trying to build a castle out of jello, like trying to paint the wind or sail across an ocean on a raft made of flower petals. Every night it took more courage for her to get back to work on it, and she knew the night was coming when she wouldn’t be able to force herself to work on it at all.
“Can I tell you a story?” Sally asked suddenly.
“A story?” she echoed cautiously. On her computer screen, the list of game elements she still needed to design seemed like an enumeration of all her failures yet to come.
“Have you ever heard of the Freedom Riders?”
A vague memory from high school history class stirred in Randi’s head. She said, “I guess so, but I don’t really—”
“Back in the early sixties, those busloads of students who rode through the South, trying to enforce desegregation. I was one of them.”
“Wow,” Randi said politely, waiting for the gap that would let her end the conversation and try to get back to work.
“It was quite a trip,” Sally answered drily, “much harder than I’d ever imagined anything could be before I got on that bus. We were cursed, threatened, spat on. We’d pledged to practice nonviolence, so we couldn’t react to any of the threats or even the abuse. I never actually got beaten, but most of the men did. We ended up in the prison, in Jackson. They gave me a body cavity search it took years to recover from.” Although Sally’s voice was even and calm, her words jolted Randi’s gaze from the screen.
“But that’s a different story for another time,” Sally ended lightly.
In the pause that followed, there were things Randi wanted to ask Sally, things she suddenly felt like saying, but they came crowding in all at once and, before she could offer anything, Sally went on, “When I told my parents I was going south that summer, they said if I was going to be a part of that, I could no longer be their daughter. I was an only child, so you can imagine it was quite an ultimatum.
“My parents were good people in many ways. I understand that now. They were limited, and uneducated, and shaped by their culture, but they were also hardworking and determined, and—” Sally gave an ironic laugh “—committed to their values. But I was so disturbed by their racism and by how they were trying to rule my life that I couldn’t see anything else. I told them if that was the way they wanted it, it was fine with me. I was twenty, and before I left I said that I would make sure they always had my address, but until they were willing to accept me for who I was, I wouldn’t have anything more to do with them.
“So for the next fifteen years, every time I moved I sent them a postcard with my new address on it. And that whole time I never heard a single word from them. I kept telling myself I was doing the right thing, that we had irreconcilable differences, that it was better for all three of us if we didn’t see each other until they realized how wrong they’d been.”
Despite what Sally was saying, there was something almost soothing about her quiet voice, the way her story seemed to turn that painful past into a place as tidy and precise as a landscape seen from a plane. “But one day,” she continued, “almost on a whim, I decided we weren’t any of us getting any younger, so I called them. I used the same number we’d had when I was a kid. A distant cousin of my mom’s answered. She said she’d been trying to find me. My folks had been in a car wreck the week before, and both of them were dead.”
Randi made an inadvertent gasp. She was groping for something to say when Sally continued, “I have to admit there were times when I might have said it would be for the best, for my parents to just pass on without our ever having to see each other again, much less having to try to work things out. And—who knows?—even if I’d made that call before they died, it might still have been a losing battle. There are parts of ourselves I believe we should never give up—not even for love.”
Sally gave a soft little laugh. “I had to learn that lesson the hard way, too. I think my first husband and I stayed together much longer than we should have because I was so traumatized by losing my parents like that.
“Though it worked out in the end, didn’t it?” she added, the sheen returning to her voice, “since I can’t imagine your father and I would have been ready for each other a whole lot sooner.”
And so, prodded by Sally’s story and driven by her own rash needs, she attempted one last visit to her father. “Third time’s the charm,” she’d quipped to Mink that morning as she was starting out, and she’d been grateful when he desisted from observing what he’d warned her of before—that one definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Well, she did get different results, she thinks grimly, as she straightens up and jams her key into the ignition. This time, she not only lost her father but her chance at ArtTech, too.
“ Who is ’t that hinders you?” is what her father asked when he was goading her to leave. As she pulls out of the parking lot, she is much too morose to entertain that question. But later, on the freeway, halfway through the long drone home, after she has finished sobbing and swearing, and her eyes itch from crying and her throat aches from screaming and her palms sting from slapping the steering wheel, an answer comes to her anyway, an answer with an emotional twang like a country-western song, a line whose provenance she cannot trace although its meaning suddenly seems excruciatingly exact: A foolish heart, that I leave here behind.
Something bad has happened, something has gone badly wrong. Something that hurts and irks in equal measure.
Despite his aching hip, John circles his room like a wrathful dragon, stalks his same cramped round past window, dresser, door, and door. His daughter has come. And gone. Again. At first he’d thought she’d come to see him, that she wanted to be his friend, that things might still come right between them. But instead she’d come bearing tales it tortured him to hear, and when he tried to let her know how wronged she’d been—like woeful Cressida passed from man to man among the merry Greeks while her traitorous blundering father seals poor Cressid’s doom—she’d scorned his concern, raced off, left him to anguish still in this damn’d green gaol.
Window, dresser, door, and door. His hip hurts hard. He limps and moans. She’s gone forever. She’ll come no more. Traitors all. There is a photo on the dresser. He notes it in passing—Sally smiling at the camera from the orchestra of an ancient theater, John standing beside her, a smile pasted on his face, too. The more fool he, he snarls in his mind as he marches past.
There is a book on the dresser. It catches his eye on his next round. He’s noticed it before, though he can’t say where or why. It is a gaudy thing, he sees w
hen he pauses to glare at it. With its gold lettering and its cover blazoned with the Chandos portrait, it’s the kind of volume he has always scorned for the way it implies the plays must be pranked up to prove their worth. He wonders how it got there, that foolish garish tome, marvels at what strange route it must have taken to reach him in that bootless, bookless room.
The image of a woman wafts into his thoughts. An eager, drifting woman. Not Sally, but someone else. He sees her brimming smile as she urges the book on him. Even now, the afterimage of that smile lingers in his mind like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in a story he once read to some young child. He sees her rumpled hair, too, and hears her voice—soft, gentle and low.
Remembering, he is suffused with a pleasure satisfying as the taste of salt on steak. He longs to have that woman with him now, though along with his longing, he feels a grating of indignation. It is not fair for her to have cursed him as she did, not fair for her to have left and not taken him.
He wonders who could have raised such a thoughtless, thankless child.
Still clutching the foppish book, he stumbles back to the small haven of his chair, sinks dully down. Taking up a chunk of pages, he lets them spill across his fingertips, catching words and random phrases bastard sack chafed incarnadine nothing either good or bad My mistress with a monster fools into a circle
Words, he thinks contemptuously as they pour past—words, words, words empty words foul words mere words He gave his life to them, and what did they give him back? He should have sold used cars instead.
alms for oblivion how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world there rust, and let me die
I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. When those words snag his eyes, John lets the page fall flat, the seeming-simple line that begins King Lear lying quietly beneath his gaze.
