Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(55)

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.