Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(2)

My father visits our apartment sometimes, at night, so late that my visions of him are smudged. There’s the smell of him: Merit cigarettes, orange juice and vodka, money. The grind of his voice. The word: father. This here is your father and Hello, I’m your father. He slips up often and calls me Son. Mostly, when I conjure him then and remember him now, I think of gold. Gold horse bits on the buckles of his shoes; gold buttons on sailor jackets; a gold pinky ring; the gold chain necklace my grandfather gave him from the fanciest case at J. C. Penney. A trade, he said, for my father to wise up and make a commitment—a Jew chain for the only Jewish man I’ve ever met—to turn my mother into something honorable.

Before my father arrives at our apartment, my mother sits Uncle Nuke in a rocking chair near the front window. My mother likes him like this, in profile, the edges of his regal face chiseled out like a dream. Sometimes his legs lie in the corner of our living room, the trousers pressed, his knees locked into place. My mother and I like to change his socks at least once a week. We pull the bright patterns over his club feet, delicately roll the bands up his calves.

This man doesn’t look like he belongs in our home. He looks like he belongs to a different era, someplace far away from here, a life with white dinner gloves, niceties, an engraved cigarette case—U.N.—that quietly clicks closed. My father knows all about the mannequin, his practical functions, the way he wards off intruders, but I wonder, still, what his shadow did to my father’s heart when he drove up in his white Cadillac—if it stoked something fierce enough inside him to make his temples quake, to whet his desire for my mother and me; if it was Uncle Nuke, not even a real man, who eventually made him unpack and stay.

When my father moves in, I begin crawling out of my bedroom at night to visit Uncle Nuke. We meet at his rocking chair. I coil up at his feet.

Where did you come from? I ask. I grip behind the joints of his ankles, breathing in. I’m the one who loves you now.

I press my cheek into the patent leather of his shoes. My mother has my father and I have Uncle Nuke. In the morning, I wear the red indents of his shoelaces across my face like a map.

I can’t bear the thought of leaving Uncle Nuke. Not for school, or for walks to Biscayne Bay; I don’t even like to leave whichever room he’s in. I, too, learn to work his joints. Before school, I twist off one of his hands, hiding it in my lunch box. I hold the hand as much as I can throughout my day, a horseshoe grip around the bulk of fingers.

What’s wrong with the kid? I’ve heard my father ask. She doesn’t get her weird from me.

She likes to hold him is all, says my mother. You know kids—you have two others. They like to hold on to things, don’t they?

Here is a memory that still comes to me: I am small, too small, thimble legs in a yellow dress. My parents are getting married tonight. There are steep steps in the lobby of the Omni Hotel, and I am expected to walk down these steps with grace, to flick flowers. My mother wears a Chinese wedding gown, a beaded headpiece like a bird of paradise. She says, You can do this. She smiles the biggest smile of her life. My grandfather is wearing his best cuff links, veiny green jade, proud at last. He walks me through the steps I will take, Count. You can count, right? Everyone will love you.

They do. I make my way down the stairs with Ohs and Ahs of delight, the pop of flashbulbs. The bastard child.

My parents seem very much in love. I am old enough to know that. They dance little steps, around in a square. They smear cake and lick it. My father’s lips part as he squeezes my mother by her waist, their slow song tickling the water in my glass, and I am jealous of the both of them.

At home, in the half-dark, I tell Uncle Nuke all about it.

I say, I guess we can keep him. If we have to.



PENCIL

A diary entry, age nine: If I were a pencil sharpener, I would be miserable and lonely. I would be a small blue pencil sharpener. My only friend would be the scissors, which are black. Sometimes, people put a yellow stick in my mouth and I have to bite until it gets sharp.



WHY YOU LIKE IT

I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive. What I wanted was my freckled cheeks printed on cheap paper, stapled at the ears, the flyers torn from telephone poles and the scales of palm trees, a sliver of my face left flapping in the wind. I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone. I wanted limbs dangling from the lip of a trash compactor, found by a lone jogger who would cry at the sight of my ankles, my beaten blue knees with their warm fuzz of kiddie hair.

Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don’t show up dead. So long as they stay missing.



I am nine years old in 1997, and I read magazines. I clip out so many images and faces that the remaining paper looks skeletal, like the threads of a crumbling leaf. My favorite magazine is called TigerBeat, with lips so glossed on the cover the paper looks wet. The clippings line the perimeter of my room, scotch-taped around the edges, gleaming.

The magazines have girl parts inside and boys with shining chests and words that tell me how I should or should not act, how to make lifelong friends. This is how to make him wait; this is how to get crushed; this is how to line your panties.

Are you lonely?

Sure, I’m lonely, I write to myself, on the electric IBM Wheelwriter my Grandma Yukling gave to me. Grandma goes by Rose now, because her American co-workers at the bank told her it was easier to say. Rosebud—more memorable—they saw it in a movie once, and so she used it.