This Is My Daughter

by Robinson, Roxana;

  Peter smiled at her. “We love it,” he said, charmed.

  “I hope so,” said Susan. “I love it. I love those pillars on the porch, and the archways. I love the whole thing. And tell me about Amanda. How is she liking Marten’s? Is it a success?”

  Peter nodded. “I think she likes it,” he said. “I think she does. She doesn’t thank us every morning for being here—but you know what teenagers are like.”

  “And what is she doing every day?” Susan asked. “It’s hard when they don’t have a gang to go around with.”

  “Well, the clinic is the main thing,” Emma said.

  “Clinic?” Susan said. She reached out to a passing tray and took a water chestnut wrapped in bacon. “Aren’t these great?” She looked around conspiratorially. “Last week I told Christian that the food at Edwina’s had been really sensational this year. I think it worked. Anyway, I’m taking credit for it. Wait, wait,” she called to the waitress, who was turning away. “One more.” Susan smiled at her and reached.

  “The tennis clinic,” Peter said. “She has that three days a week. I don’t know what she’s been doing the other days.”

  Susan squinted her long narrow eyes and cocked her head. In one hand she held her margarita glass, in the other she had three toothpicks. “Hold on,” she said. “I have to get rid of the evidence.” She looked around and set the toothpicks on a passing tray. She turn back to them. “What tennis clinic?”

  Emma and Peter stared at her. “The one at the Little Club,” Emma said. “The one Talley’s in.”

  Susan shook her head. “Amanda isn’t in the clinic at the Little Club.”

  There was a pause.

  “Amanda isn’t in the clinic?” Peter said. “Yes, she is.”

  “No,” Susan said. “I know she’s not. I take Talley over every morning. Amanda came a few times in the beginning, but after that she stopped. I asked Talley. Then I asked the pro. The pro said the same thing. She came a few times and then stopped. I thought she didn’t like it and you’d found something else for her to do.”

  The waitress swam into view nearby. Susan craned over a navy-blazered shoulder to see the tray.

  “Phooey,” she said, “it’s that dry cheese on toasts. I should have told Christy that Edwina only has caviar.” She looked more closely at Peter and Emma. “Is this a surprise? Did you not know this? I’m sorry if I’ve been indiscreet.”

  Peter shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’re glad to know.” He turned to Emma and said briskly, “Now, we have to go.”

  Emma nodded. They moved through the crowd together, smiling and saying good-bye. Taking her to the clinic, Emma was thinking as she smiled. Introducing her to everyone. Asking her every day how it went. Getting her up in the morning. Making her breakfast.

  Smiling, they thanked Christian, saying extravagant things. Out on the lawn they stopped smiling. They did not speak until they were in the car.

  “Damn her,” Peter said, his voice devout. He closed his eyes. “Damn her.” He sounded close to tears.

  Emma said nothing.

  Peter opened his eyes and started the car. “What do you suppose she’s been doing?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “Does she have any friends here? Does she go off with someone?”

  “No one I know of,” said Emma. She remembered Amanda’s response: “A party?”

  They rounded a curve, passing another car with friends in it, on their way to Christian’s. Everyone waved, smiling. When the other car had passed, Emma’s and Peter’s smiles faded.

  “Do you suppose it’s drugs?” Peter asked.

  “How do you mean?” asked Emma.

  “I don’t know what I mean,” said Peter. He drove on in silence. “I could strangle her,” he said. His tone was deadly.

  “Peter, wait,” said Emma. “This isn’t the worst thing. How bad is this? It’s not really that bad. It’s just skipping some tennis lessons.”

  “It’s everything!” Peter said furiously. “It’s lying to us, it’s the attitude. It’s this on top of everything else!” He pounded the steering wheel.

  Emma thought of Amanda’s contemptuous stares, her eight-year silence, her sullen face. She didn’t answer.

  He pulled into the driveway and got out of the car, slamming the door. He went first up the steps.

  They could hear the girls in the kitchen, chasing each other, rough-housing. Furniture moving, a small shriek. Peter walked rapidly down the hall, Emma hurrying behind him, their footsteps ominous, like policemen. The girls were dodging around the table, throwing something back and forth, their voices high, full of laughter.

  As Peter and Emma came into the room, Amanda, her back to them, shouted, “No! No!” She grabbed one of the chairs and ducked down, behind it.

  “Yes!” Tess shouted. From across the table she threw something—a thick paperback book—at Amanda, just as her head went down. The book went over Amanda and straight at Peter, who grabbed at it in midair, missed it, grabbed again, and dropped it. The book hit the floot and skidded in front of Emma. Tess shouted, inarticulate.

  Emma picked up the book. It was one of Amanda’s. On the cover was a savage St. Bernard, his mouth open and snarling, saliva dripping from his jaws. Rabid dog, she thought.

  At the sight of Peter’s face, Tess froze. She saw Emma behind him and stood up straight. Amanda turned around. Bare legged, barefoot, in their rumpled tennis clothes, the girls drew themselves into positions of decorum. Their faces became cautious and solemn.

  “Amanda,” Peter said, in a tone of awful commencement.

  “What?” she said. Amanda stood next to the table. She leaned one elbow on it.

  “Why did you tell me you’d been going to the tennis clinic?”

  Amanda looked sullenly at the floor.

  “Why did you lie to me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t lie to you—” Amanda began.

  “Yes you did too lie to me,” Peter shouted.

  “I didn’t lie,” Amanda repeated.

  “What do you mean you didn’t lie?”

  “I just said the pro was okay. I didn’t say I was going,” Amanda said angrily.

  “How dare you pretend you weren’t lying!” shouted Peter. “You were living a lie. Every day you lied to us. Every day Emma sent you off to the tennis clinic. Do you think you were behaving truthfully?”

  Amanda rubbed one finger back and forth on the top of the table. She did not look up.

  “Answer me, Amanda,” Peter said.

  Amanda said nothing, her head bent stubbornly.

  “How dare you do this?” Peter said. He was leaning toward Amanda from the waist. His face was red, furious. “How dare you act like this?”

  Amanda had frozen. Her hand stopped moving, her shoulders hunched. She was gone, she was nowhere. Peter took a step closer.

  “Answer me!” he shouted. “Answer me! How dare you do this to me! You do this all the time! This is all you do! You reject everything we do for you, everything! You make my life a misery!” Peter’s hair was in his eyes. His throat was corded, crimson with rage. He leaned closer to her. He waited.

  She said nothing.

  “All you do to me is this! How dare you! How can you do this, Amanda! Answer me!” His voice was wild with distress. Amanda looked stonily at the floor, and did not answer.

  “Answer me, answer me, Amanda,” Peter repeated. His hands were clenched, close to his body. Amanda stared at the table. She said nothing.

  “Damn you, Amanda,” he said, and turned from her, weeping.

  23

  Amanda sat alone on the back deck. It was more peaceful on the deck than in her room: it was four o’clock in the morning, and around her the night was very quiet. She felt safe in the silence. Below her floated the pale glimmer of the driveway, and the vague gleam of the car. Beyond that was the deep black of the trees, high and dense and murmuring. Beyond the black trees was the road, though she couldn’
t see it. She imagined it, hard and shining in the moonlight.

  In the dark, Amanda held up her last joint, its jeweled tip glowing secretly. It was the only one her father had not found; Amanda herself had forgotten she’d had it. It had been in a plastic bag, rolled small and stuffed in an empty tape case. On the label Amanda had written DREAMS. She had hidden the joint there months ago, at school, and had only found it that afternoon, when she was going through her tapes. She had spread them all out on her bed. She’d picked each one up and looked at it, remembering the music. She couldn’t play any of them, because her father had taken away her Walkman.

  Peter had taken away her Walkman, her cigarettes and, of course, her dope. It had been a real scene, her father looming over her, his fists clenched, shouting. His knotted red face, his body sending out waves of fury. He was huge and hot: Amanda had felt as though she stood before an open furnace, the heat blasting against her own face, as though at any moment she might be devoured by that ravenous flame.

  She tried not to think of it, but flickers of it kept recurring, playing in her mind like scenes from a horrible movie. Her father had been all dressed up for his cocktail party, in his striped tie and beautiful shirt, he’d looked so handsome, it made it worse, somehow. He had shouted at her, and his voice had been terrible, loud and flat and terrible.

  Amanda had stood still, her jaw clenched, all her muscles locked, as though she had braced herself before a big wind. He had gone on and on, once he found her things. Dishonesty and betrayal and shame: he had shouted those at her. Amanda had said nothing. It was something she had learned. You just stood and waited, and let them yell at you. There was nothing they could do to you in the end. She did it with her mother, she did it at school. You said as little as you could get away with, and let them talk as long as they wanted. You waited for them to finish, and then it was over.

  When he had said that since he could no longer trust her he was going to search her room, Amanda had wanted to scream at him. Her skin had burned at the thought of him pawing through her things, his big clumsy hands touching her private things—her cosmetics, her jewelry, her underwear, her things that were hers, set out in her own private order. She had wanted to run upstairs before him, stand in front of her door and stop him, her arms stretched out across it. But he would only have pushed her aside. There was nothing she could have done but wait. She’d stood with her arms crossed, watching him walk out of the kitchen. He had turned and looked back at her.

  “You come too, Amanda,” he said, and so she had to.

  When he found the plastic bag under the mattress, she thought he would hit her. “Damn you,” he said, for the second time, his voice thick as leather. It was a terrible thing to say, and Amanda felt her throat tighten, and tears start behind her eyelids, though she kept them back. She blinked. She was ready for him to hit her, in a weird way she wanted him to. It would be almost a relief, an end to this farce. She had always known how he really felt about her, and this would be proof. It would show that everything else was false, as she had always known. This pretense of affection. This insistence on her coming here, this pretending that they were, the four of them, a family, that he loved her. A farce, Amanda would whisper to herself. A total farce.

  Her father did not hit her, in fact he stopped yelling. He had come to the end of his anger. He had gone as far as he could. He held the dope in his hand and said, “What have you done, what have you ever done in your whole life, Amanda, to make me proud of you? What have you ever done but disappoint me?”

  The silence in the room was crystalline, revelatory. Tess, in the doorway, was frozen. Emma stood mute and still behind her, her eyes fixed on Amanda.

  Then Amanda drew her breath and answered him. She wanted to rise proudly to her father’s level. She meant to use his weapons—power and accusation. She wanted to speak as his equal, to challenge him and reveal his hypocrisy. She wanted to point out that the word betrayal was not one he could use any longer, that a man who had abandoned his wife could not talk about betrayal and shame and disappointing others. She meant to accuse him now, out loud, of all that he had done. She meant to list his unforgivable acts, so that no one here would forget, so that here in his own little circle he would stand condemned, forever.

  But when Amanda opened her mouth, none of that was possible. As she tried to speak, her throat closed, and panic rose inside it. Her eyes stung. All she could do was cry out, in a strangled voice, “Fuck you, Dad.” Her throat closed up entirely after that, and of course she began to cry. He was too much for her.

  But Amanda had since closed this off from her mind. She did not want to think about her father. It was so clear to both of them that she was not the daughter he wanted. He wanted someone else, someone like Tess—someone with perfect grades, who was so cute and charming, someone who was not Amanda. All Amanda could do was wait until she was old enough never to see her father again. That was what she longed for.

  She had been sitting on the porch for some time. She had read up in her room until quite late, when she was sure everyone else was asleep. It was hot, and Peter had turned on the big attic fan. The cool steady hum drowned out the noise of Amanda’s footsteps, but it also meant that the bedroom doors were wide open. She had to tiptoe past the dark unreadable space of her father’s bedroom, the open doorway full of threat, his and Emma’s invisible, imminent presence. She had done it, walked past, her gaze fixed ahead of her, holding her breath. Her pulse surged and she imagined her father’s stern voice, coming suddenly through the sound of the fan.

  But once she was down the stairs she was out of danger, and out here it was calm. Amanda listened to the small wind shifting the leaves and thought of the night air, rising into the brilliant spaciousness of the sky. She felt peaceful now. After smoking half a joint she was beginning to see a deep comforting connection between herself and everything around her: the murmuring trees, the grainy texture of the wooden steps, even the empty road beyond the trees, shining silently in her mind.

  She looked up at the darkness, as it rose and expanded. She liked the way the sky at night came right down to the ground, right down to where she sat. In the daytime, the sky and the air were different: the sky was blue and the air transparent. But at night they were the same. The same luminous darkness was the sky and also the air you walked through. Right now Amanda was sitting in the night sky. All around her might be stars, drifting airily nearby, just out of sight. This made her smile. Alone in the dark, Amanda felt peaceful and free, as though she had no body at all, as though she had dissolved into the breathing darkness.

  A car went slowly past, down the hill. She wondered who it was, so late. There was no restaurant on the island, no nightclub, nowhere to go but someone else’s house. It must be kids, she thought, and wondered who. She wondered if she were to meet them now, out on the road, at this secret time of night, the car door opening and the interior light creating a private world just for themselves and her, if they would now recognize each other as kin, creatures of the night.

  The other kids here were alien creatures. There was no one here whose eyes Amanda would meet. She lifted the joint and set her mouth to it. It was funny how you held joints differently from cigarettes. Cigarettes you held carelessly, dangling between two knuckles; joints you held tightly, pinched between your thumb and forefinger. There was something mean-spirited about that tight pinch; Amanda preferred the negligent knuckle clasp. She tried it; the joint felt lumpy and unbalanced between her knuckles, and she took it again in her thumb and forefinger. She took in a long slow breath, hot, harsh, exalting. She squinted against the smoke, holding it deep inside her chest, feeling it rise mysteriously into her head. She closed her eyes.

  An image came slowly into her mind. She saw the dark road up the spine of the island, as though she were driving it. The long flat stretch, the pavement shining in the moonlight. On the ocean side, long grass bending in the sea wind. Silence. The image was stationary, like a photograph. In the headlights everything
was bold and sudden in black and white.

  Amanda opened her eyes and thought of driving. She could, actually, drive a car. She knew how. Earlier that summer she had stayed with a friend in Stonington, Alison Ferguson. Alison’s father had taken them both out and taught them to drive. He had them start and stop, start and stop, all over an empty parking lot.

  When it was Amanda’s turn, she gripped the steering wheel tightly, as though she could control the car through the strength of her fingers. She put her foot down carefully on the gas, further, then further, then further still. Nothing happened. She turned and looked anxiously at Alison’s father, and the car jerked and shot forward.

  “Lift your foot up, lift it up,” Mr. Ferguson said.

  It seemed for a moment that Amanda had done something wrong, as she always did, something terrible, and that the car was rushing forward, roaring, unstoppable, carrying the three of them toward extinction.

  But Mr. Ferguson’s voice was calm. “Lift your foot,” he said again, patient.

  Amanda lifted her foot, and magically the car slowed to a purposeless roll. Amanda put her foot on the brake, and stopped the car completely. Her heart was pounding, and she looked at Mr. Ferguson, expecting him to frown.

  But he said mildly, “Amanda wants to be a race car driver.” He looked into the backseat at Alison, who was giggling, and said, “Your friend is a wild woman.”

  Then he taught her to press the pedal and move the car forward docilely. She had learned to start, to stop; she had even learned, unevenly, to back up, the car yawing artlessly across the parking lot.

  Now Amanda lifted her head and squinted across the pale gravel at the Volvo. It glinted in the dark.

  Inside Amanda’s head was a song, and she laid her head down on her folded arms. With her eyes shut she sang quietly. “You, only see what-you-want-to-see,” she sang. She heard the words, not in her voice, but in the voice she heard singing the words on the radio. The grass was now doing calm fogging things inside her head, and she felt peaceful. “You, only see, what-you-want-to-see,” she sang to herself again. Her voice was high and gentle, a narrow ribbon of sound.