Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  The next day there are pictures of her, partying in Fort Lauderdale with her old friends. In the days after that, more pictures of her appear on the Internet, with the comedian. She posted the photos herself, the two of them in a white, linen bed with Koko the cat. Happy holidays! We love you!

  She does love him, I think. The look of her—she does. Whatever comes before or after men is a footnote; my life has taught me this by now. I nod my head at the computer, understanding, forcing a smile, as if this were our final conversation. Lennox Price went back to the boyfriend who would love her, need her, the simpler life, of course she did.

  By spring, I do, too.

  FOOTNOTE

  This is how it goes for a while:

  Jane’s fingers are long and her knuckles are smooth and white as beach stones. She’s a painter with a shaved head and a lip ring, and I don’t know anything else about Jane except for the way she looks at me across the bar. Her hands when she pours a drink. The exact distance between the blue of her jeans when she walks. We scoot orange pills across the surface of her bar that keep us up all night, sipping bourbon, smoking when the lights dim, talking. I always come here alone.

  Jane pulls down the bar shutters with an aluminum thwack. There’s a blizzard outside. We share a cab—we do this sometimes—but tonight, her hand squeezes my knee.

  Need a place to stay? she asks. It’s nasty out there, she says, as we cross the Queensboro Bridge. This is no longer in the direction of my home.

  I don’t answer Jane’s question, but I follow her out of the cab, I shut the cab door, I steady myself against her—Careful now—I don’t want to slip. The snow is coming down in great creamsicle smears beneath the street lamps, and then I’m following Jane inside her apartment, into Jane’s room, where I nudge off the lights and crawl on top of Jane and unbuckle the teeth of Jane’s belt.

  Easy, she says.

  I pull her pants down to her knees and push my face into her and taste what I want to taste. I fuck her with my hand. Relax, she says. I’m the one who tops here.

  Jane tries to flip me over, but I don’t want her to touch me. As if by reaching inside me she will find the very pith of my fraudulence. I have a UTI, I lie, crushing my hips into her leg.

  Sometimes I jerk off thinking of you, she says.

  I come when she says this.

  The next morning, Jane breathes on her window and traces my name in the steam. We do not kiss good-bye. I wash my face in her chipped sink, pull my hair back into a bun. I call a cab and travel back over the bridge, where I buzz open the door to David’s apartment, crawl into our bed, and tell him it was bad out there, too dangerous to go so far.

  COLLECTED DATES WITH MY FATHER

  I.

  Every night, my father bends one arm under the crook behind my knees, the other around my waist, and carries my body to bed. He tucks my mermaid covers up to my chin, squeezes my feet over the sheets. Darkness is heavier when alone in it. My father moves the pads of his fingers down my nose, across my forehead, so slow and gentle, like he’s offering me holy water. He calls this “fingertips” and tells me not to be so frightened, there is nothing that can hurt me, not as long as he lives.

  I close my eyes and the stories come: There once was a little girl with a flying horse. Everybody loved her. The fact that the horse could fly was a secret only the little girl knew. The girl wanted to live far, far away. Paris, maybe, or Kentucky. Somewhere with grass blue as twilight, where the wind would comb it flat and sweet. But the horse told her, No, no. You must stay where you are, in Boca Raton! The horse could speak, you see.

  But I hate Boca Raton! said the little girl. The Rat’s Mouth is gross!

  The horse says, Let’s make a deal. You stay in the Rat’s Mouth during the day, with your parents who love you, and at night I promise to take you away. I’ll fly you to the moon and back, to every country in the world, I’ll get you the hell away from here, as long as you’re not so afraid.

  The girl says, I’ll take that deal.

  The horse says, Hold on.

  II.

  My father is taking me to my first baseball game. I am seven years old and ready for it, with new Keds sneakers, a Hawaiian-print fanny pack buckled around my hips, a real grown-up baseball cap. My mother takes our picture before we leave the house. We stand against a palm tree in the front yard, beaming. My father’s hand rests on top of my cap.

  In the car, my father sips from a glass in the center console. He finishes it quick, makes clucking sounds with his lips at the taste. He tries to explain baseball to me—the plates, the diamonds, the way the dirt will spray majestic and red. He waves his hands around with each description, his gold rings glittering, a Merit hanging from his lips. I right the steering wheel.

  Lately, when my parents’ voices sound garbled and tired, when their eyes get sticky and small, I call them Sleepy Girl and Sleepy Boy. I open the driver’s door of Sleepy Boy’s Mercedes and pull him out by the pinky. We walk a funny walk to the big bleachers, wave hello to the people he knows. I am so proud to have Sleepy Boy as my date, to be at a real baseball game with real teams. The mosquitos curdle black around the stadium lights as I chew, open-mouthed, on a hotdog without the bun. Sleepy Boy screams, growls some, his arms golden and pumping when the right man runs. Two trophies on fire.

  Our team wins. My father is my father again, awake, standing. He runs down to meet his friends at the bottom of the bleachers, screams, Wait right there, son! in his rasp. The tin bleachers thunder under me.

  I watch my father with his friends for a long while. They smack each other on the backs, clap their meaty hands. They down drinks from plastic cups, crush them on their foreheads and beneath their sneakers. From here, they’re the size of a postcard. If I sent this postcard to my mother, I would caption it Happy Men.

  I kick my feet up and on the bleachers, press my cheek into the metallic cold. I feel safe here, watching him.

  When the father knocks on the front door (he’s lost his key), the mother asks, Where is the daughter? The father asks, Who?

  The daughter is sitting on the bleachers, watching each and every light wink off. The daughter zips and unzips her fanny pack, crunches on the Cheerios kept inside. A woman named Heather finds the daughter in the dark, offers her a ride, pulls up a car. The daughter does not know her way home.

  III.

  I am four, and it’s about time for me to begin school. This means the doctor’s office. This means shots. My mother cannot calm me down for days. I know what’s coming: the needles, the rubber ball, the snap of a band, the blood. I’ve seen it in movies; I’ve heard about it. I know it all before the knowing, and I am inconsolable. My father volunteers to take me to the doctor, gives my mother a break.

  Pretend this is fun, he says, like we’re going on a date!

  In the waiting room, I scratch a blue flower from the wallpaper. I flip through magazines I cannot read. I move colored beads around on a wire—stack the beads, unstack them, click click. My nose begins to gush, because it is always doing that. My father pulls me onto his lap, rips the permanent stash of tissues from his pocket, presses hard into my face. You know what to do, he says. Calm down, squeeze the spot. You know it’s a nervous thing.

  Will life always be this nervous? I ask, beneath the tissues. My head is rocked back, and I stare at the ceiling until my eyes cross. The blood gurgles in my throat.

  Yes, my father says. Abso-fucking-lutely.

  In the doctor’s office, a nurse sits me down on a thin sheet of paper. My father rolls two tissues into slug-sized wads, stuffs one into each of my nostrils. The nurse gives me a chalky-looking lollipop, and I begin to kick my legs, cry. She snaps her gloves into the garbage can, closes the door.

  Listen, says my father. When I was in the army, we had to get hundreds and hundreds of shots. Imagine? This is jack shit next to that.

  I cry harder. Nobody understands my pain.

  Okay, okay, here’s what I did, he says. I had the docs stand in ro
ws, facing one another, with their needles, the medicines. I walked down the line in between them, shimmied my shoulders, left, right, left, right, left, let them poke me all they wanted as I did this stupid dance.

  My father does the dance for me. He shimmies his shoulders, pretending to be pricked. He says, Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!, walking toward me with exaggerated wobbles.

  When the needles come, I’m still laughing. My father and I make the sound effects, the warped faces. The first two needles aren’t so bad, but then they begin to pop through my biceps. They hurt. When I stop laughing, my father takes my baby toe and pinches it.

  Ouch! Why! I scream.

  Focus, he says. Move it. Put the hurt somewhere else.

  IV.

  Billy Joel is my favorite singer. I’m eleven, and my father is driving us to his concert. He’s been Sleepy Boy all night, sipping juice from little cobalt glasses, driving the rumble strip all the way down to Plantation.

  At the stadium, my father speeds past the parking spaces and pulls up on the sidewalk. He drives right over it, honks his horn at a chain of Snowbirds in our way. An attendant in a glow-in-the-dark vest motions for my father to roll down his window. He does.

  You can’t park here, sir, says the attendant. His face in the sliver of window seems so small compared to my father’s. His nose is crooked, his cheeks are pimpled and rosy, and I decide that he is kind.

  My daughter, she’s retarded, says my father. I forgot our handi-pass, but she can’t walk right.

  My father pats my knee with his hand, looks into his lap with his head shaking.

  There’s nothing I can do about that, sir, says the kind attendant.

  Give her this night, says my father. Billy’s her man. My father palms him a small wad of cash. The attendant looks at me with his eyes all squinty, as if to check. I smile at him—the metal braces, clamps, rubber lip bumper, turquoise bands connecting my buck teeth to the bottom. I am ugly-cute, I know, like a too-deep sea creature, but I embrace it. I work it. My father is so handsome that everybody thinks I was adopted—a charity case—a mutt from China, or Cuba, or Mexico, or Samoa. Nobody can be sure.

  The kind boy closes his eyes for a few seconds. I feel sorry for him—nobody can ever look at me for long. He says, Fine. Go ’head.

  Outside the car, my father wraps his arms around me. He whispers, Limp, you’ve got to limp. Hang your mouth all dumb. He rubs my shoulders as if I’m cold, like he’s protecting me. I do what he says. I want to be a good daughter. I drag my feet across the sparkling sidewalk and tuck my elbows into my waist. I let my tongue roll out of my mouth as I stare up and into the ashy, polluted sky.

  In the stadium, my father passes out in his seat. His bottom lip gleams wet, and I wipe it for him with the bell sleeve of my shirt. Billy sings about love, and I swear he’s singing directly to me. My father wakes up to “Piano Man,” says, We have to go, let’s skip the traffic out of here.

  But “Piano Man” is my favorite song in the whole world.

  We leave anyway. I listen to Billy sing about bread in his jar over the speakers that line the parking lot. In the car, my father begins to cry. Hard, hiccuping sobs.

  What’s wrong, Daddy? I rub his back.

  The song, he says. It’s just so true.

  V.

  I’m five, and my father is taking me to see Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. I’ve been practicing my own magic tricks at home with balloons and straws, blowing on my fists, squeezing foamy trick bunnies.

  Tonight, I wear a big fluffy coat with a Dalmatian pattern on it. My front tooth is loose, and I can’t stop tonguing the sharp edges, the dangling thread of flesh. My father is dressed beautifully, a pressed jacket and pants that smell like big city. He holds my hand as I watch the show, my eyebrows tight and high as the Siberian tigers jump through hoops, appear and get gone.

  I decide, I want to marry my father. I want us to go on these dates for as long as I live.

  When the show ends, we take a walk on the Las Vegas strip. We walk to the monorail, so we can shoot back down to the Luxor. The whole sky coruscates with lights, a real city, like nothing I’ve seen.

  One more thing before we go back, he says.

  My father swings his arms in a wild, big way. He makes a Froot Loop with his mouth, his eyes wide, rimmed white. From behind his back, he pulls out a stuffed tiger—just like Siegfried’s. I am so amazed I scream.

  I sit on his shoulders for the rest of the walk home. I squeeze the tiger to my chest. I bob and sway with his steps and turns, forget to be afraid.

  If my mother gave me language, my father gave me magic.

  VI.

  I’m twenty-seven, and my mother has the flu. We’ll spend the day together! says my father. I’m bored with your mom in bed, come over, let’s have a date.

  I drive to their house in Atlantic Beach, New York.

  It’s Sunday morning, and we watch television in the living room. My father rocks his knobby knees back and forth on the couch, smiling at Charles Osgood, his favorite anchor. He says, This ought to be good. It’s a special on Houdini. On the show, a voice-over explains Houdini’s escape methods. A man holds up the straitjackets between his fingers, shows us some of Houdini’s old water tanks. The voice-over explains that when Houdini’s mother died, he went around debunking mystics and mediums all over the world.

  Why’d he do that? says my father. Nothing better to do?

  I think he just missed her, I say. I think he wanted somebody to prove him wrong.

  Before I die, he says, should I give you a code word? So you can test it with the mystics?

  We decide it might be Fuck.

  I’ll definitely know it’s you then, I laugh.

  After the show, my father and I take a drive. We cruise along the pale beach, and he shows me the Sands Club, where he had his senior prom, where he saw the Ronettes, the Shirelles. But that was once upon a time, he says, early days. A few blocks away, he waits in the car with the top down as I pick up his dry cleaning, piled above my eyes, the plastic wrap sticking to my arms.

  This is not a very good date! I scream.

  He drives me to the groomers so we can pick up our dogs. In the car, he talks about love. He likes my new girlfriend, Hannah, warns me not to get too drunk and sloppy at a wedding we will attend. They don’t like lesbos in Mexico, he says, winking. No tongue kissing. This is the first time he brings up my girlfriend on his own. I squeeze his hand. The conversation circles back to Houdini.

  You don’t believe in life after death? Not even a little? I ask.

  No, he says. But I do know this: I’ll know when I’m going to die. I’ll feel it. The doctors say I’m not doing so hot but I’ll know it, I swear.

  He pats me on the back.

  I’ll know it, okay?

  I nod.

  At home, my father eats a bean stew I slow-cooked for him. He says it tastes too healthy, but he’ll take the health. The recipe is ancient, Mayan; legend says that eating a bowl of it every day will make you immortal.

  You saved me today, he says. You cooked, you cleaned, you kept me company. So good, he says, you’re always so good to me.

  Stay over, he says. Call into work. I need you longer.

  Please, stay, he says.

  I tell him I can’t, I have a date tonight. I tell him to call me if he feels worse, to call whenever he wants. I promise to come back if he needs me.

  You know you can call anytime, you know that.

  You fixed for dough? he asks. He hands me a wad of cash. Be good, Kukes.

  I kiss him on the forehead. I say, I love you, Dad. I say, I’ll come by next weekend.

  This is the last day I ever spend with my father.

  VII.

  I am eight, and my mother has decided that enough is enough, that Sundays will now be Father-Daughter Sundays and we must have fun, we must have laughs, we must have quality time, no bullshit, no drinking, no drugging, enough.

  This week, my father has quit drinking again. On Sunday, he
drove another man’s car home from a bar because the valet gave him the wrong key. The cops surrounded our home at four in the morning, and my father answered the door with his fists in the air, naked, screaming, I want to see MY car in MY driveway before I let you take this one.

  My father promises my mother that we will have a nice, sober day. He’s going to take me to Sam Ash Music Store, he says. Let me bang the snares off the Pearl drum set I want so badly. Then he’ll take me to La Bamba, he says, the little Mexican restaurant nearby. We’ll share arroz con pollo and Cherry Cokes. If we have time, we’ll even take a drive to the beach.

  My mother hugs us both good-bye, smiles with watery eyes. She says, I am proud of you, to my father, as if he is her other child.

  My father keeps his word. He drives me to Sam Ash in the strip mall, pulls up right in front of it. He says, First, can we check out the scores? Then we’ll play those toms.

  Next door to Sam Ash is a sports bar called Gatsby’s. It’s a horseshoe-shaped bar, with fly tape twirling from the ceiling. A jukebox pulsates with rainbow lights in the corner of the room like a giant jellyfish. My father helps me onto a stool at the bar. He sits next to me, gazes up at the football game, lights a smoke. He’s placed his bets, he tells me, enough money to pay my college tuition. This is another thing he was supposed to quit. He taps his gold pinky ring against the bar in triplets.

  A woman named Irene brings my father a glass of orange juice, but I know there’s more to it than that. Irene doesn’t even need his order, she just says, Hi, Boss, I got you, Mad Man. She squeezes my cheeks between her long, sharp nails. What is she, boss? A Oriental?

  I ask her for a Shirley Temple, please.

  My father takes down his juice. He makes a sound of relief, the same one he makes sometimes when he takes a leak on the side of the road. A second glass arrives before he even asks for it. You’re not supposed to be doing that anymore, I say.

  Doing what? says my father. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t shift his eyes from the game. The little men running.