A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Harper Collins?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a common name.”

  “How’d she get an agent?” the girl asked.

  Peter saw where this was going. “Are you writing a novel?” he asked.

  The girl shrugged. “Maybe.”

  You might want to learn how to use a comma first,Peter thought, but he said nothing. Tall Robin would write a runaway best seller, and an editor would put in the commas, and he didn’t want to be the anecdote about how skeptical her teachers had been.

  “Will you read it if I do?” Robin asked.

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said, realizing that he had already given her the interview anecdote: My teachers never took me seriously, because I was young, and a woman. They wouldn’t even read my novel, which went on to sell eight billion copies. So I had to trust my heart and find my own way as an artist.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Kerner?” Debbie asked.

  “Fine.”

  55

  CLARISSA BOUGHT A used video camera for her film class and spent two weekends putting together a loose outline of a script. She asked Del to come along and operate the camera when Clarissa needed to be the subject.

  They drove in Del’s truck, which had a camper top, down through Oakland, south through the desert, and over the mountains to Hermosa Beach. Del had never been to Los Angeles and seemed happy to be invited. They had burgers for lunch at the old diner in the bowling alley.

  Outside St. Anne’s, her first school, Clarissa unpacked the camera and then showed Del how to use it. A white vinyl banner hung out front that said,JOIN US AFTER SCHOOL! WINDSURFING SAILING SWIMMING HORSEBACK RIDING VOLLEYBALL.

  “I was fascinated by the nuns,” Clarissa told the camera, “and I wondered what was underneath their habits. I remember seeing the outline of some foundation garments—a girdle or garters—and being fixated on it. I was probably six.”

  Del lowered the camera. “Isn’t that in Abby’s book?”

  “It happened to me .”

  “Okay,” Del said.

  Next they went to the public pool.

  “This,” Clarissa said, with the diving tank in the background, “is where I had swim practice. One of the nuns saw a bikini tan line on my back, and I was punished.”

  Del stopped the tape again. “That’s in the book, too,” she said. “What is this, a showcase of the real things from the novel?”

  “No,” Clarissa said.

  “Because I don’t want to be part of that.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I thought this was your own thing.”

  “It was my life, not hers!”

  “Are we going to your parents’ house?”

  “Eventually.”

  “How are you going to introduce me?”

  “As my friend,” Clarissa said. “And producer.”

  Del looked out across the pool beyond the chain-link fence. Kids were run-walking across the concrete deck and jumping off the diving board, doing cannonballs that smacked the surface and sent water flying. “You know I always support you,” she said. “But—I don’t know.”

  “About what?”

  “This whole project,” Del said, and she laughed a hopeless laugh. “Coming out to your parents when you’re not even in a relationship with a woman. It’s hard for me to admit that you’re not in a relationship with a woman, because I love you, but you aren’t. So I’m not sure why we’re here.”

  “I need them to accept me the way I am.”

  “Which is how, exactly?”

  Clarissa looked at Del, her big ex-lover, who knew herself perfectly, and had known all her life.

  “I don’t know,” Clarissa said. “I just want them to see me. If they see me, then maybe I’ll know.”

  56

  JAMIE HAD HIS OLD job at the guitar store—it wasn’t a great job, but they had enough money from Josephine, and it was a place to go while T.J. was in school. The owner of the store was a real musician, and Jamie could talk to the kids who came in to gaze longingly at the electric guitars, and to the old guys with stories of life on the road with some forgotten band. When no one was in, Jamie could play the pretty new guitars before someone bought them and took them away.

  Abby never called him anymore, and he wished he had remained the good uncle; he wished he hadn’t fucked things up. He called from the guitar store and left a message on her machine. “You used to answer the phone sometimes, at least,” he said. “Now you never pick up, and you never call. What’s the deal? Where are you living? Is this a real phone or just a voice mail? Call me back, I’m at work.”

  He took three business calls on the phone behind the glass counter before it was Abby calling.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “At school.”

  “In the dorms?”

  “An apartment.”

  He took a fresh-faced kid’s dollar for a guitar pick. “Did you hear Saffron is marrying Martin Russell?”

  “Are you the best man?” she asked.

  “No,” Jamie said. “Don’t you think she’ll cheat on him, too? Tell me you think she’ll cheat on him, too.”

  “She’ll cheat on him, too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is that why you called?”

  “Also to talk. I read your book again, and I was thinking that in the second half you got timid. I mean it wasn’t about us as much. And you killed yourself off.”

  She said nothing.

  “And your dad lives.”

  “It’s my novel,” she said. “I can have him live if I want.”

  “I still liked it,” he said. “Did anyone ask you if you slept with me?”

  “No. Did they ask you?”

  “They danced around it, was there anything I wanted to talk about. I stick to the plan. Mostly they talk about their own characters. Katya was reading it the other day. She hasn’t said anything, but I don’t know how well she reads English.”

  “How is she?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, rubbing some adhesive off the glass counter. “She has this kid she never knew, and she’s in a strange city in a strange country. It’s a lot to process.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should see T.J., though,” he said. “Kids are amazing. When he’s my age he’ll have a nervous breakdown, but you should see how cool he is now. Sometimes I think we should go on the road in an Airstream, like in the book.”

  “With Katya, too?”

  “Okay, maybe not.” The idea of Katya in close quarters made him want to think about something else. “Can you believe Saffron’s marrying that guy?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You can?”

  “You knew he was her boyfriend.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “You can’t take a boyfriend seriously. It’s like someone saying, ‘Hey, you know that mountain you want to climb? It sometimes has snow on it.’ But what’s a little snow to a mountain climber?”

  Abby laughed. He liked making her laugh. He rang up some guitar strings for a bearded guy in a bandanna.

  “So what about you?” Jamie asked. “Is there snow on your mountain?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you in this apartment alone?”

  “At the moment.”

  “And who are you expecting? Some lovely coeds for a pillow fight, or a mustached gent, doffing his hat?”

  “Neither,” she said.

  “Come on, Ab, give me something.”

  “I should go.”

  “You could come up and see us.”

  “Sure.”

  “I love you, babe.”

  “Mm.”

  In the background Jamie heard a door close, and a man’s voice saying something friendly. He imagined her in the long-lost summer sublet, near the bathroom with the rattling shower rings. Abby said a muffled “Hey,” away from the phone, and Jamie felt suddenly cold.
r />   “Is that him?” he asked.

  “Bye,” she said. “We’ll talk soon.”

  “Abby, wait,” he said.

  “Bye.”

  Part Three

  57

  ABBY SAT ON DR. TIRRETT’S couch, staring out the big window, the box of Kleenex resting against her thigh. “One of Peter’s students said there wasn’t enough of the patriarch’s family in my novel,” she said. “She thought that was missing from it.”

  Leila waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, she asked, “Do you care what Peter’s students say?”

  “Well, they’re readers.”

  “Aren’t they the ones who call short stories ‘articles’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So are they the best readers to listen to?”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “Do you think there should have been more about that character’s family?”

  “No,” Abby said. “He had a brother once, but I cut the scene, the story didn’t need it. His feeling about his wife was more important. I think I told what was necessary.”

  “So then you don’t care what the students say.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Leila said, “This wanting to please everyone—it isn’t fair to give other people so much power. You tempt the greediest part of them.”

  Abby looked at her tiredly and then said, “Jamie sounded sort of desperate when he called. I don’t think it’s working out with Katya.”

  “And what if it doesn’t?”

  “It will be so hard for the kid. What if she takes him away? You think I’m damaged, but she’s really damaged.”

  Leila hesitated. “You spend a lot of time talking about people you can’t fix.”

  “I don’t think I can be fixed, either. I think I’m hardwired this way, and kind of unhelpable.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s your job not to think so. But I know what it’s like inside my head.”

  “Are you saying you want to stop coming here?”

  Abby looked out the window. “No.”

  “Have you told your uncle about Peter?”

  “No.”

  “Because he would be jealous.”

  “He’s already jealous. But it’s not his business. It’s my private life.”

  “And it’s taboo, like the relationship with Jamie,” Leila said.

  Abby gave an impatient little shake of her head. “Students are going to sleep with teachers. That taboo doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “You never talk about it, so I just want to make sure you’ve thought about the similarities.”

  Abby paused. “I think I’m trying to protect Peter.”

  “From me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not against him.”

  “I know.”

  “The only thing that worries me,” Leila said, “is that the moment you carved out some ground from your family’s needs and wants—and stabilized yourself mentally after a relationship with one of them—you ceded that ground to another person.”

  Abby sighed. “I did not, ” she said. “He read the book, that’s all.”

  “But the book was the thing you were using to claim your territory, make your stand.”

  “Everyone needs an editor.”

  “Not everyone sleeps with them.”

  Abby looked at her watch. “I think it’s time to stop.”

  “How do you feel right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Leila waited.

  Abby said, “If this is some transference game to get me to be angry at you, that’s going to make me really annoyed.”

  “It isn’t a game.”

  Abby rolled her Kleenex into a ball and looked at her hands. “I know I don’t talk much about Peter,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not thinking about it. It’s that I’m happy, when I’m with him. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been actually happy, and it’s hard to talk convincingly about it, because it sounds—ridiculous, and I’m afraid to talk about it because I’m afraid it will go away.”

  Leila was surprised. “Okay,” she said.

  “I hate being made to say it, because I know I sound defensive, but he’s not some cliché about teachers and power.”

  “I believe you,” Leila said.

  Abby picked up her bag to leave.

  Leila said, “Before you go—it isn’t a game, but I do think it’s good for you to argue with me. Maybe think this week about not doing what people want you to do. And not caring what Peter’s students think.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Just try it,” Leila said.

  58

  TEDDY HADN’T READ Abby’s novel, but he knew there were some disturbing things in it. When Clarissa showed up unexpectedly with her mannish friend and a video camera, she told him more than once that he didn’t have to read it.

  He had seen, that day, what he thought was a news team out on the sidewalk in front of the house. It was still amazing to him how much he could see since the surgery, and he watched them through the window. The man had a camera on his shoulder and was filming what looked like a reporter, who had her back to the house. Then the reporter turned and gestured, and Teddy had a disorienting start, because the gesture was Yvette’s. A second later, he recognized his daughter and went outside. When he had hugged Clarissa and realized her friend was a woman, he invited them in for a drink.

  “So you raised an author,” he said in the kitchen, filling glasses with ice.

  “It isn’t your kind of book, Dad,” Clarissa said.

  He guessed that was true. He liked adventure stories and historical novels, and books like one he’d just read about an Englishman who inherited some land after World War I and nurtured the land and the people who lived and farmed around it. He kept the land from being subdivided, though they didn’t call it subdividing then. He got to know the people. There were no crises in the book, and no negativism. There was enough of that on the evening news. When he read a novel—which wasn’t often—he didn’t want to feel like he was watching the news.

  They took the drinks to the living room, and Clarissa asked if she could film him a little. She was taking a class.

  “I don’t have anything to say,” he said.

  “Sure you do, Dad,” Clarissa said, setting the camera up on her shoulder. “Tell me about your first love.”

  Teddy felt his face heat up, remembering his pretty cousin Gabrielle, with her black braids. “That was your mother,” he said.

  “Oh, come on, Dad, really?” Clarissa said, behind the lens.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, tell me about your childhood.”

  He thought. “Well, my father had a lot of brothers,” he said. “We used to go visiting on Sundays. You know, no one had any money then, and it was something to do. And it was important to my father, to see his brothers.”

  “You don’t sound like you enjoyed it.”

  “Not much.”

  His uncles had lived in small frame houses and two-family flats in Detroit, kept scrubbed to varying degrees of spotlessness by their wives. The older uncles, adults when the family moved down from Canada, said “tree” for “three,” and slapped him too hard on the back. They never hit him in anger, like his father did, but he was proud that his father sounded American. They all worked in the automobile plants. The youngest, Frankie, was still a bachelor and lived glamorously in a small room in a big Georgian house divided up for boarders.

  And then there was Gabrielle—Teddy didn’t tell Clarissa about her. Gabrielle’s father was his father’s least favorite brother, so their visits there were short and perfunctory, and for a long time Teddy couldn’t say more than hello. But slowly he built up his courage, and there was an impossibly sweet time when he would meet her under the back windows, where no one could see them, and kiss her there, and finally touch her ironed Sunday blouse with the tiny breasts underneath.

 
He had never been caught with his cousin; there had been no traumatic end. Instead, he and Gabrielle had just grown up, and taken an interest in people outside their family, and maintained for each other an abashed kind of affection. When he first saw Yvette, years later, she had reminded him of black-haired Gabrielle and those Sundays behind the house.

  The war was on in Europe by that time—this he told Clarissa—and people in Detroit were saying America would stay out of it. But Teddy’s European history professor was a Prussian named Hecht who had been a German officer in the last war. He had a glass eye and a scar over the same eyebrow. When he heard Teddy was taking flying lessons—they were free to college men, great fun—he took him aside and explained that Roosevelt was training his pilots quietly, getting ready to enter the war.

  “We didn’t know, you see,” Teddy told Clarissa. “It was just a thing to do, like the football team.”

  He went home to his parents’ house—he couldn’t afford a boardinghouse like Uncle Frank’s—and thought it through. If America was going to the war, then Teddy wanted to be a pilot. He had spent too many hours in the air now to want to fight on the ground.

  In the spring he finished his flight training and enlisted in the Marines. He hadn’t known they would dilate his eyes, and he couldn’t see to take his European history exam. The professor told him to come back when he could read again. So Teddy wrote the exam in Hecht’s office the next day, his head full of dates and campaigns. When he finished, the old man kept him there. The glass eye was never quite straight, and it unnerved Teddy.

  “You have a girl,” the Prussian said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She’s beautiful? You love her?”

  Teddy felt his face heat up. “Yes, sir.”

  “When you go,” Hecht said, “if you want to keep her, you marry her. They don’t wait so long, if they don’t marry. And it won’t be short, this war.”

  “I don’t have the money to get married.”

  “No one has the money,” Hecht said, waving his hand as if to brush the objection off his desk. “You made this decision to enlist. Now you make the decision about the girl. Or some other will come for her. This might be a relief to you.”