No, I never thought about leaving during that hour I lay in Simon’s office, and I definitely didn’t nap. I only waited for him to return. I reclined on the sofa in a state of fluish arousal, cuddly and clammy and coughing carefully into pillows lest any other professors hear me behind his closed door. I imagined him dismissing his class early and rushing back to me, lean legs striding inside his funny black-and-white-checkered trousers, wondering, hoping I would still be there, assuring himself that I must be eighteen because everyone in college is at least that, unless they’re a genius or academically advanced, which, as my Latin scores of late evinced, I most likely was not, and then telling himself that whether I was eighteen wasn’t any concern of his anyway, as what sort of guidance could an eighteen-year-old offer a motherless seven-year-old daughter? I lay, and I waited, dreaming of all these things, and of the things he had said and might say, and I shut my eyes tight, curled in my toes, and clung to pillows, swoony from the memory of having been declared rosy and beautiful, of having been seen, and wakeful with the possibility of being seen again.
When I finally heard his key turn in the lock, I shut my eyes and arranged my features in a tableau of dreamy unconsciousness, lips parted, forehead dewy. “Oh my,” I heard him whisper. I was unaccustomed to attention from men, or even boys, and unsure of how to act. When he settled himself quietly into the chair behind his desk, I stirred and stretched and looked around as if uncertain of my surroundings. I gave him a slow glance. He stared at me with his hands resting palms down on his desk. “How was your nap?”
I stood, and he appraised me. My sundress was one of the many I had made after a course in Strategies for Simplified Sewing at the Crafts Complex. The fabric was printed all over with windblown stalks of wheat. The straps were slim and tied at my shoulders, and the bows they formed hung limply, skimming the bones of my back. I wondered if he was an Audrey man or a Marilyn man. I perused the books on his shelves while he watched me, statue-like, from his chair, palms still pressed into the desk. That was when I learned that Simon Mellinkoff had interests beyond Latin and the love poems of Catullus. His library included such titles as:
Animals Nobody Loves
Mammals and Morality
Tortoises, Today and Tomorrow
A Sand County Almanac
The Cookbook for People Who Love Animals
Elephants, Entertainment, and Exploitation: A History
Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals
Research, Rabbits and Reform: An Animal Rights Reader
Our Ancestor the Ape
Animal Rights in the New Millennium
Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Hymn of the Dolphin, Ballad of the Whale: Saving the Sea’s Cleverest Creatures
Cruel Science, Burdened Beasts
And these were just some of the books he kept in his office at school, a small portion of the vast collection, I would soon learn, that filled his study at home.
“You like animals?” I said, sniffing.
“ ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man,’ ” he said, not taking his hands off the desk or his eyes off my shoulders, my neck, my face, my hair so electrified by that long, soft sofa. “Mahatma Gandhi.”
I knelt down to examine the books on the lower shelves. There, I found a misfit, a lone work of fiction. I read the spine aloud in a scruffy voice hemmed in by mucus and nerves. “An Armful of Warm Girl,” I murmured. I lifted my eyes to see Simon, finally, pull his hands off his desk. “That’s a nice name for a book,” I said. And then came the moment that led me to where I am today. The title of the book came true right in that room, and he had the armful, and I was the girl.
* The duties of a teacher are many and great.
† bedroom
‡ desire
2 LADYBUG (Coccinella septempunctata)
HOW —WHEN —DID I BECOME A DEVOTED DEFENDER of animal rights, a “domestic terrorist,” as the San Diego Sun so dramatically put it? It happened sometime between the moment I first became a warm armful in Simon Mellinkoff’s office and the afternoon he told me one daughter was more than enough, and I left his house with all of my belongings in the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase I borrowed from little Annette.
Before any of that, there had been only one man in my life: Dad, with whom I spent the winter break of that first semester at college, during which I became susceptible, I suppose, to Simon.
I had only been away from home for three months, but our stucco house in the Tierra de Flores tract seemed to have grown more grizzled in my absence. When I returned, I saw the peeling brown paint, the shutters missing slats, the jiggly doorknobs, and the torn window screens as if introduced to them for the first time, with eyes sharpened during the last semester by all of my Intros: Intro to Latin, Intro to Japanese Poetry, Intro to the Russian Novel, Intro to Romanticism. Intro to your home, Margie. Grade: F.
What did Dad think, I wondered, after showing and selling all those painstakingly cleaned, repainted, and remodeled houses every day, when he came home to ours? Was he blind to the Havisham-esque decay? Or did he find the evidence of time’s passage comforting, a reminder that there would be an end to the sadness he endured just as there would be an end to the house, to all the sad things people lived in and lived through?
He seemed embarrassed by my efforts to tidy up. I vacuumed pebbly crumbs out of the serene blue carpet that Rasha, my mother, had selected nineteen years earlier. I pulled the teetering stacks of dirty dishes out of the oven and loaded them like dominos into the dishwasher. I emptied ashtrays overflowing with the stubby remnants of greedily sucked smokes. I threw away Old Peep’s empty birdcage. Dad told me, eyes averted, that he had let our parakeet “go wild,” but I suspected he was afraid to confess that the bird had died from neglect. I noticed there was no seed in Peep’s dish or anywhere in the house.
“Don’t do all that stuff, honey,” Dad said, Doral dangling, pulling his hands pleadingly out of his pockets and then putting them back in, shuffling—with his head down and his cheeks flushing—out of whatever room I cleaned. He drove to the Christmas tree farm and returned with a Douglas fir fastened to the top of his Skylark, but I didn’t dare decorate it due to my fear that Dad would leave it up indefinitely. I hated the thought of a trimmed and tinseled tree rotting in the family room in April.
I WAS TWELVE WHEN I FIRST FELT the twinge in my left ovary. It was growing up with Dad, I guess, that had made it so sensitive. When he came home from work, I noticed that his hands shook. After his five fifteen p.m. Maker’s Mark with a splash of water and the usual string of Dorals, they stopped. He stayed up sipping and smoking at least until I went to bed at midnight, possibly after. Still, Dad made it to work at Sunshine Realty every morning.
And he added his florid autograph to all of my progress reports and school field trip permission slips, and paid for my annual physicals and my trips to the dentist, and brought home groceries (even making special trips to the pet supply store for parakeet treats and, once, a tiny mirror so Old Peep could admire his own pointy yellow visage), and dropped me off for CCD at Holy Rosary Catholic Church on Saturday afternoons, and remembered to take me out to dinner on my September birthday, and marveled over the handmade cards I presented to him on his March one, and gave me cash so I could go to the mall with Violet Holmquist, a girl from school, and Violet’s mom to pick out my first bra, and subscribed me to magazines for teen girls, wherein I might discover the information about womanhood that he was too shy to explain. And he daydreamed, and never asked me any questions, and looked at me sometimes with a surprised expression, as if seeing me for the first time or trying to place me because I reminded him imprecisely of someone he had met before.
On weekends, when he was done mowing the lawn (his forehead burned by the relentless Orang
e County sunshine) and finished fiddling ineffectually with the increasingly plentiful broken things around our house, Dad disappeared upstairs into his den, where he kept the stash of old leather-bound photo albums featuring Rasha. She posed in front of ancient California missions, their adobe walls flaming with pink and orange bougainvillea. At the beach, she stood half submerged in the foamy waves, her long Beirut-brown hair black at the tips where it caressed the water like gorgeous Galilean seaweed. She shouldered a backpack beneath the Half Dome in Yosemite, her dusky cheeks dented with dimples and shining with excitement. She reclined on the grass in our front yard, eyes at half mast, smiling sleepily and sweetly at the man behind the camera, who held it so very close to her face, and, in doing so, made it a forever face.
I socialized with Violet Holmquist at her house, never mine. Her mother fed us floppy slices of processed cheese that came wrapped in plastic slips and miniature chocolate bars left over from Halloween and Easter. Violet and I studied our still-forming faces side by side in the mirror of her princess-themed bedroom (canopy bed, faux-crystal chandelier) and trolled the sidewalks scanning the look-alike lawns for other kids from school. They all knew Dad was a realtor, and their mothers commented to me with darkening eyes (as if the mere mention of Dad made their pupils dilate with desire for a handsome man so obviously in need of a hand) whenever they spotted his name on a “For Sale” sign in town.
He was nervous the night he escorted me to the eighth-grade Father-Daughter Dance. I wore a dress I had sewn especially for the occasion on Rasha’s old Singer. (I had been a self-taught girl-seamstress of sorts until my more formal studies at the Crafts Complex.) It was fashioned from satin of a faded pink hue that the clerk at the fabric store had referred to as “antique rose.” I trimmed the dress with several rows of flapper-inspired fringe because the dance had a Roaring Twenties theme. Dad, dapper in his dove gray suit, was careful not to shut the fringe in the Skylark’s heavy door. On the way to school, though, he began to look panicked. I stared straight ahead and prayed that he would be okay, pressing my Mary medal into my chest. But his agitation worsened, and streams of sweat snaked down his high forehead toward his hooded Irish eyes. My left ovary throbbed, and I finally whispered a worried little “What?”
“It’s … just … that I’m so …” I saw a look of self-hatred flicker across Dad’s face that frightened me—eyes mournful, mouth drawn down, teeth clenched. “I … forgot!” he said.
Dad veered into the parking lot of a flower shop just as its purple neon “Yes, We’re Open” sign clicked off. He hurried out of the car. I watched him gesture to an annoyed adolescent employee on the other side of the locked shop’s window. She pointed to her wristwatch and shook her head. Dad persisted. He said something to her through the glass, and from inside the car I thought I could make out the word “daughter,” but it sounded as if it had been spoken underwater. She let him inside.
I turned on the radio, and since it was a song I liked, I sang along. Chances ar-r-re, ’cause I wear a silly grin, the moment you co-ome into view … Singing helped me to breathe. Chances are you think that I’m in love with you … I fingered the silky fringe on my dress and thought about whether I might make Dad laugh if I did the Charleston at the dance.
Soon he emerged from the shop using both hands to carry a clear plastic box out in front of him, like a birthday cake. I switched the radio off. He slammed the car door shut and turned to me with a smile that split his face into two faces: the top half, where his eyes were, belonged to a despondent man; the bottom half, where his mouth was, belonged to an overjoyed one.
“Margie,” he said. “This is for you, Sweet.” He proffered a big pin-on corsage of roses, embellished with ribbon that exactly matched my frock, freckled with an explosion of baby’s breath, and shimmering with sprays of tiny plastic pearls and rhinestones.
Now, sometimes, in quiet moments, I think about Dad talking his way into that locked flower shop and pleading for a corsage. He looks at all the flowers, unsure of their names and their mysterious meanings—the spidery chrysanthemums, the obscene orchids, the sunny gerbera daisies, the voracious stargazer lilies. He feels frightened and rushed, but then sees the roses and grows calm, and chooses them, because they are what he knows, they are the smell of the Virgin Mary, they are the totem of Saint Thérèse, and they tell him all will be well, at least for a while.
I think of him watching that fledgling florist create the corsage, watching in that close way of his, with his long mouth compressed into a horizontal line. She scowls and wants to rush, but because Dad is hovering she has to do a good job and stick all the pieces together tightly with stem-green floral tape, and make a corsage that won’t fall apart, not that night at the dance, and not after, not even after it is all dried up and laid in a shoebox where, fifteen years later, it will slumber alongside a few seashells, a red resin bracelet, a buffalo-shaped belt buckle of brass, a penny minted the year I was born, a recipe for invisible beauty, and four beaded amulets shaped like turtles, not ever.
I think of him watching her reach for a black or a white goes-with-everything ribbon, and I hear him say, “No, wait,” and see him run his finger across the rack of ribbons, landing on the one that echoes my dress, because Dad has a talent for remembering the exact nuances and moods of colors, even after seeing them only briefly. “Use this one,” he says. The girl asks in an impatient tone, eyes rolling, hot glue gun aimed skyward, “Rhinestones or pearls?” And he, unable to choose between the two, tells her, “Both.”
I think of him paying, and tipping the girl an exorbitant amount for her trouble. He turns and sees me waiting for him, with my mouth moving to the words of a song he cannot hear, and he feels a little better, a little glad. This is what I think about, sometimes, when I think about Dad—these few minutes out of our lives.
In the car, I offered a sprawling smile to keep his uplifted mood afloat. He pinned the flowers to me, frowning at his shivery hands. “I don’t want to make a hole in your dress,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
A ladybug emerged from the dense ruffled petals of a rose. She crawled out, paused, and appeared to survey her unfamiliar surroundings.
“Well, look at that!” Dad exclaimed in amazement, as if the bug had nudged him out of the constant fog in which he lived, lifted the veil that hung between him and the rest of the world. “There’s a lady with us,” he said.
“Yeah.” I bent my neck to study her.
“Should I take her off, put her out the window?”
“No, no,” I told him. “She can stay.” She crawled back into her bed of petals. Dad hummed as he drove.
The signature song of the dance was “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” a hit from 1925, and the school gym was decorated speakeasy style. We had our picture taken in front of a big paper mural featuring an assortment of jazzy horns surrounded by music notes. The photographer arranged us, coming so close I could hear the faint whistle of his nose when he breathed. He steered Dad into a glossy, high-backed leather chair and then stood me beside him with my hands resting elegantly, one atop the other, on his shoulder. I wondered if we had ever ended up similarly configured at home. “I blinked,” Dad said when the camera flashed.
We danced a lot, and he even dipped and twirled me, which inspired the other dads to do the same with their daughters. When my arms got tired from reaching up, and his back got sore from bending down, we sat on the bleachers. We drank punch that stained our lips an unnatural red and ate cloying cookies that made me sleepy but had a revivifying effect on Dad.
He was abstracted under the swirling hues of the rented light machine. His magnetism, which was the pull of something beautiful but broken and in need of fixing, changed the air around us the same way it changed the pupils in the eyes of the neighborhood wives. His hair was coal black, and it contrasted with his light green eyes, the lids of which swooped down dreamily over the outside corners. His skin was translucent, the blood easily visible beneath his fine cheeks. His
body was long, and his head was aristocratic, like one of the nineteenth-century sculptures our class had seen on a trip to the art museum. Some of the female faculty, who had initially dreaded their duties as dance chaperones, held themselves in strange, self-conscious ways whenever Dad and I danced past them. They abandoned the crusty cardiganed slouch of teachers’ lounge lunches and Citizen of the Week certificate ceremonies, arched their backs to emphasize their matronly breasts, and sucked in their cheeks to resemble feminine fish.
Dad was oblivious to the women. He was as focused on me as he could ever be, joking, solicitous, smiling, until the last hour of the dance. Then he lost his equilibrium, not on the dance floor, but on the inside.
Maybe the music made him maudlin. The DJ had been punctuating poppy contemporary hits with occasional 1920s tunes, and one of those old-timey songs came on while we danced. I widened my eyes at him because it was called “Margie.”
My little Maaarrgie, I’m always thinking of you, Maaarrgie, I’ll tell the world I love you …
Or maybe it was the Beirut-brown color that my hair appeared to be under the golden glow of the slowly turning mirror ball.
A few other people might have noticed the tears before I did because I had my face tucked into Dad’s chest. A movement there jostled my cheek, and that’s when I looked up. He wasn’t making any sounds, but his mouth was twisted down and his wet face looked like one face again, not two.
We left. By the time we reached the car, he had composed himself. He asked me if I’d had fun. He couldn’t bear to mention what had happened. I said I had. At home, I went upstairs, took off my dress, put my corsage in the porcelain figurine shaped like a woman’s palm that had always been on my nightstand, the same one that held my rose-scented rosary made of real rose petals, and tried to sleep.
The Lovebird Page 2