A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (21 page)

Our father came back a week before Thanksgiving. His face had always been strong-featured, not particularly angular but radically defined. Now he looked like an American Indian with his high, flat cheekbones jutting out above the dark caves of his cheeks. His large, square chin seemed larger than ever without any fat to fill out the upper part of his face. He looks great, I thought, strong as a bull. He could still scare anybody with that face, he could still beat the shit out of anybody.

It was a quiet time in the house. Our father was working ten-hour days, trying to finish the book he told us he was afraid he would not have time to finish. We told him he shouldn’t talk like that; he was going to go on for another twenty years. Two elevator chairs were installed in the stairwells that led up to the third floor so that he could make it up to his office to write every day. No one but him seemed to take this as an ominous sign. When a thing degenerates slowly, people tend not to notice. Each little decline is only compared to the previous decline and not to the relative whole.

The long Thanksgiving weekend gave me too much time to think about the boys I’d had sex with who would no longer even say hello to me in the school’s halls. This preoccupied me so much that I hardly thought about anything else.

On Sunday morning, after a sleep filled with nightmares, I climbed the stairs to my father’s office and knocked lightly on the door. As always, he did not like to be disturbed while he was working but this seemed important enough to me to interrupt him.

My father was sitting in his leather office chair on wheels, glasses on and paper in the typewriter. The large, white room felt cold to me and the sweat on the back of my neck seemed to turn to ice.

“Daddy, I have to talk to you.”

“What is it, baby?”

He did not look up from the sheet of paper stuck in the typewriter.

“I don’t want to go back to school here, Daddy.”

“What happened? What’s the matter?”

“They hate me.”

“They don’t hate you,” he said evenly. “They don’t know what to make of you because you’ve come from somewhere else.”

“I did some bad things, Daddy,” I said in a desperate voice. “I feel so guilty. These guys, they’re really nice before and stuff but then they won’t talk to me anymore. And now I have to go back to school with them and I’m so scared.”

He thought about this awhile, rubbing his temples and mussing up his thin curly hair.

“How was it, I mean, did you enjoy it?”

At the time this question seemed absurd to me; later on, in college, I thought about that day and believed that I understood what he’d been aiming at. In college I made friends with a girl who kept a notebook with a scoresheet on the boys she slept with, who told me that she had never reached orgasm with a man. Sex to her was as inconsequential and impersonal as shaking hands. I decided after talking to my friend that my father had probably been wondering if he’d been too free, if I’d misconstrued his liberal attitude toward sex.

I looked around at his office, at the papers shoved into precarious piles everywhere, at the photographs of the roses on the wall behind the typewriter, and said uncomfortably, “There was only one, you know. It was good with him. He was older.”

“How much older?”

“Much older.”

“My
age?” I saw that my father was getting red around the ears, and I became frightened that his heart would act up again. My father angry was a terror to be reckoned with.

“No, younger.”

“Who?”

“This guy from the Playhouse.”

“Which one?”

“Dave. The guy who built the sets.” I figured it was all right to tell him since Dave was now living in a trailer somewhere down in Florida.

“Goddamn it,” my father said. “I sat with that guy more than once down at the pub. He’s the one who was in ‘Nam. No wonder he was looking at me with that shit-eating grin. He probably thinks I’m an idiot. Jesus Christ. I knew there was somebody but I thought it was one of the kids. If I’d known I would have threatened to throw his ass in jail.” And after a moment he asked, “And it was all right with him though, with Dave?”

“Yes. But he left.” Now I started to cry; it was as though three months’ worth of tears had finally built up enough pressure to collapse my internal dam.

My father patted the arm of his chair and I went around the desk to him. I sat on the floor by his skinny legs and put my head down on his lap. He ran his fingers through my hair as he had when I’d been little. The only difference was that now he could not take me on his lap.

“Sex is like tennis,” he said.

“Like
tuh-tennis
?” I said, sobbing against his bony knees.

“Yes, just like tennis. You have to learn to play. You just don’t walk out on a court with a racket and play like Chris Evert. And of course, you can practice against a wall but that’s not playing with somebody else. Boys your age don’t know fuck-all about sex. You think you’re doing them a favor by sleeping with them and that they’ll be grateful to you, but not at all. They think you’re bad afterward. And that’s just ridiculous, but that’s the way it is.”

“You weren’t like that, were you?”

“Sure I was. It took me years to figure it out.”

“They’re going to call me a slut in school now,” I said dismally.

“Well, the hell with them,” he said. He thought for a while and then added, “This move has been hard on you kids, I know. And since I’ve been sick I haven’t been there for you much. This book is driving me crazy. I’ve got to finish it. Your brother sits in front of that goddamn TV like a glom and nothing I say will make him move his ass. What am I supposed to do? Lock him in his room? Throw a football with him? I can’t even climb the stairs. He’s at that awkward age. You passed it pretty quickly. With boys it takes longer. You’ve got to try to be nice to him.”

“He won’t talk to me.”

“I know…The school’s not a bad school, I suppose, as far as public schools go. I guess I’ve got to be there for you kids more. See, I’m selfish too. I don’t care so much about dying, it’s leaving my book that worries me.”

His dying was the farthest thing from my mind. It was simply not a possibility. I had never heard him use that word before and fear, like two clawed hands, gripped at my stomach and throat.

“Don’t say things like that, not even as a joke.”

“I’m not joking. What am I supposed to do, lie to you? I’m sick. I don’t know how long I can last.”

“But they said twenty years.”

“Or five years,” he said simply. There was no fear in his voice, just the acceptance of a plain and simple fact. We listened to the humming of the heating pipes and the electric typewriter for a while.

“I’m so glad you came up to talk to me,” he said. “I figured if you wanted to, you would. Backseats and drive-ins and beaches are no place to have sex, baby. Especially the beach. Ugh, I hate that sand. I’m glad I’m such an old man because if you’d been fifteen ten years ago, I might have blown a gasket over this. But now I understand things I didn’t back then. There’s so much I wish I could tell you but I don’t know how. Listen, be smart about this now. They’ll figure you’re easy and keep on trying with you. Just say no till you find someone you really like. When you find someone you really like, come talk to me. All right?”

“All right.”

“Listen, since I really can’t take you driving anymore, how about let’s start reading books together?”

“What kind of books?”

“Novels. So you’ll be a little ahead of the game when you get to college. Not the short stories they give you to read in the high school, you know. Books
I
like.”

He started me off with
A Farewell to Arms,
which made me cry so much at the end that I stayed in bed for an entire day. Then we read
The Great Gatsby
and then
Light in August
.
Light in August
was by far the most difficult thing I’d ever tried to read in my life. We would sit in the living room by the crackling fireplace in the late afternoons. My father told me about the souls of books, how they came out of the writer whole, like babies with their own separate souls. “But with books,” he told me, “once they’re finished you don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to them when you’re gone.”

Two weeks before Christmas vacation began, Keith Carter from my high-school drama class asked me if I needed a ride home after a rehearsal of
Animal Farm
. Keith was reading the part of Napoleon the pig. He had a deep voice and put
a’
s on the end of
er
words, and
er’
s on words that ended in
a’
s. His legs were thin as sticks but his back was shaped like a V from lifting weights. Janet, the girl from homeroom, told me that Keith had quit football after a fight with the coach and had been in trouble with the police for breaking and entering a friend’s house on a lark. People in school respected him because the cops had tried to make a deal with him: You tell us who’s the biggest dealer in the school and we won’t press charges. Go to hell, Keith had said, and they pressed charges. He was only seventeen so they put him on probation. He lived in a shack “on the wrong side of the tracks” and his father was an alcoholic who’d gotten himself kicked out of the ambulance corps. Janet told me Keith had “been around,” slept with older women. I thought we had tons in common and was crazy about him long before he asked me if I needed a ride.

“I don’t usually have the car,” he said as he pulled up our driveway at ten-thirty that night. “I told my motha I’d do the lawn for her if she’d let me take it just one night. I been meaning to ask you if you needed a ride for weeks.

“Jesus,” he said, and whistled as he peered out at the amber light that came from every window of the house from the ground floor to the attic, making it look like a Mississippi steamboat.

“I didn’t know your folks were loaded.”

“They’re not that loaded,” I said defensively. I thought for a second and then invited him in.

“Na,” he said. “I’m not good with parents.”

“Are you just giving a ride this one time or are you going to ask me out?”

“You wanna go out sometime?”

“You have to come in and ask my father.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I heard different about you.” He got out and slammed the door.

My father was sitting in front of the TV in the kitchen. There was a serene expression on his face and he did not turn immediately as we came in. Keith changed suddenly—he stood up straighter, became almost respectful, and the expression of constant contempt he wore disappeared. My daddy’ll still scare the shit out of anybody, I thought proudly.

“Hi, Mr. Willis. Keith Carta,” Keith said, putting out his hand. We sat down at the table on both sides of my father.

A car chase was proceeding, raising dust on the screen.

“I saw this movie,” Keith said.

“It’s kind of fun,” my father said. “What’s it called—
Thunderbolt and Motherfuck
—something like that.”

Keith almost fell out of the chair. He leaned back and let out a howl of laughter that shook his whole body.

“Watch the chair,” my father said. “It’s Louis Treize.”

“Louie who?” Keith said, still laughing. “Sorry.” He righted himself.

My father asked him what he did with his free time. Keith told him he’d quit football after a fight with the coach and that now he was working for the highway commission after school.

“What was the fight about?” my father asked.

“Smoking cigarettes,” Keith said evenly. “I told him he couldn’t run my life.”

“I used to be that way too,” my father said, and chuckled.

“I want to save so I can buy a car,” Keith said. “These people down the street, they have a ‘63 Mercedes that they want three hundred dollars for. It needs a new transmission, but it’s still a steal.” After a moment, he added simply, “I wanna take Channe out sometime.”

“How’re you going to take her out without a car?” my father asked.

“Borrow my motha’s.”

“Are you a good driver?”

“A very good driva. I figure you got to drive defensive, like in football. Everyone else is a danger coming straight at ya. I’ll tell ya, Mr. Willis, the nuns are the worst drivas I ever saw.”