The week before I moved, while I was going through books and records, my landlady called up the stairs to tell me that there was someone standing in the driveway wanting to see me.
It was David’s oldest daughter, looking almost exactly like the picture taken of her mother in the canyon: expectant eyes, checked radiance. Long brown, nearly black hair, long white arms downy with dark hair. Long legs. Her mother’s coloring. She wore a peasant dress, from the early eighties it seemed, purple and beige, faded and flowered. A tote bag on her shoulder.
Elinor, I said. She stood in my driveway, arms crossed, her right index finger scratching, perhaps absentmindedly, perhaps anxiously, her left forearm.
Yes. She appeared to be startled that I knew her name.
I noticed my neighbor peeking over into the driveway from where he stood on his porch, holding his toddler son and craning his neck to watch. Mind your own business, please, I shouted over to him. He turned and went back into his house, making sure to shut the door behind him quietly.
Your father and I aren’t seeing each other anymore, I said.
Her eyes widened for a second. Then she looked relieved. I came here to tell you to leave him alone, she said.
We looked at each other.
May I come in? she said.
Why?
Please. I need someone to treat me like a fucking adult.
We can have a conversation out here, I said. It’s going to be short.
To be brutally honest, she said, I don’t know why, exactly, I’m here.
We looked at each other again.
How old are you? she said.
Younger than your mother but older than you.
How much older?
If you really don’t think you’re here to start a fight, you can come up, I said, and opened the door wider.
She walked in and we headed up the stairs. As we entered my apartment I told her that she could have a seat at the table, but she asked to use the bathroom first. When I came out of the kitchen with two glasses of iced tea, she was standing in front of my bookcases scanning the shelves.
Where does your mother think you are? I said, as we sat down.
On a trip to New York with a summer course I’m taking.
Is there actually a trip to New York with a summer course?
Yes, she said, offended.
Where do your professors think you are?
I told them I wasn’t feeling well.
They believed you? I said, before realizing that I probably would have believed her, too.
I’m a very good girl, she said. Archly. As if she was very aware of both the value and the cost of that identity.
How do you know about me?
Because he thinks he’s invincible, she said, my father can be careless.
Yes, I said, and laughed. She gave me a look. She might not have known exactly why she was here but she didn’t want to collude, either.
She was looking for a financial aid form on his desk, she said. Her father kept all his active correspondence in a paper-clipped, staggered-in-order-of-importance pile to the right of his monitor. Flipping through this stack of emails two words caught her eye: My wife.
Jesus, I said, then recovered. This was in his office at home?
Yes, she said. In a tone that meant: Aren’t you lucky that so far I’m the one only one who’s read it?
She said she didn’t know what made her keep reading, but she very carefully pulled this email out and saw this sentence: My wife refused to make love to me. She scanned the page to find out who her father was writing this to. Some woman. She wrote the woman’s name and email down on a Post-it and carefully arranged the stack of papers to look the way they had before she touched them. She knew then, she told me, that her mother was not blameless for what was happening to them, and wondered if she might even be entirely to blame for it.
Well, I began, about to suggest she might think twice about using the word entirely—but then stopped.
She said she didn’t know what she wanted to do with the name and the email. She knew only that she was tired of not being told the truth.
Soon after, when her father was in Starbucks getting them drinks after picking her up from the library and she was sitting waiting in the car, she opened the glove compartment to look for some tissues and found an envelope with the woman’s name—my name—and a return address on it. She skimmed it, she said, because she could not watch as, line after line, a woman turned her father into an object of lust—the bronze statue Elinor had turned her father into had already broken apart but to read these words would be to pulverize it. When she came to the end she saw the woman calling him single-minded, saw the woman saying that his single-mindedness could make him simple-minded, was telling him that his single-mindedness, coupled with his largeness and tendency toward loudness, could create in him a heedless ball of rambunction that made the woman feel that she was dealing with a boy in his teens rather than a man in his fifties who had raised four girls. It made Elinor laugh. That was exactly what he was like, she said. And there was a kindness toward him and a forbearance toward him in those last few lines, she thought, that softened her heart. When her father came back into the car she could not speak. Her father, who had busied himself with complaining about the incompetence of teenage baristas, did not notice.
It was very strange, she said. The letter showed me—does this make any sense?—that he was the same person even though he’d done this terrible thing. If you saw what we’d all seen, all his faults, and knew he could be infuriating but still loved him anyway, then he was still our father, and we hadn’t lost him.
I’d thought I was a master compartmentalizer, but I didn’t think I could have pulled off that sweeping an act of interpretive reclamation, especially if we were talking about my father.
My mother would never write a letter like that, she said. But why do I want to blame her for it, and not my father? She looked up at my shelves. My mother would never read books like this. Then back at me. You bought him those jeans, didn’t you? The really dark ones.
He bought them, I said. But they were my idea.
My sister thought so. I mean she thought some woman did.
Elizabeth?
Yes. Elinor looked at me. How much do you know about us?
I don’t mean to alarm you, but quite a bit.
I think you do want to alarm me, she said.
And why would that be?
She looked away.
Does your mother know about me? I said.
I don’t think so.
You can talk if you need to, I said. Because of every student whose eyes were full of pain they could not find a confessor for, or so blank because they had learned to not confess it, and because my mother would never read books like that either.
The two of us sat in silence. A lawn mower started up across the street.
I sometimes wish that she would die, said Elinor, because then I would never have to spend the rest of my life in this war with myself and with her. She won’t let me go. But it’s not like that with fathers. They’re like lighthouses, and you circle around them in your little leaky boat, they’re something you look over your shoulder at as you paddle, always there, not minding you and your confused whirling around, not even noticing all the splashing you’re doing, although maybe they should be, but it’s fine, because they’re looking out beyond all the whirling, scanning for the real trouble.
Yes, that’s exactly what they are, I said. What I wanted to say was that her father was right about her—he had nothing to worry about, if she could keep herself afloat with words in this way.
She told me that she knew she was a feminist when, at the age of ten, she saw her mother spanking her youngest sister too hard after a routine spurt of mouthiness. She knew the violence had an origin older than that moment of rebellion, and she couldn’t think of a time her father had snapped like that or would snap like that. She was aware, too, that her father did not ever have to snap like that because her mother made his life run smoothly, and because she knew how hard her mother worked while her father reaped so much glory, she knew that she should take her mother’s side, but really what she wanted was to never be in that position—a position in which she could not see clearly because of resentment, while anyone watching could see very clearly that she had given too much of herself away. Her mother wanted her close to home, so she went to Ohio State. Before she gave in, she tried to bargain with her mother, reminding her that she’d still have her three sisters at home and would be too busy with their schedules to miss her, but her mother said, It’s not the same. When one of you is gone, there’s a hole, but she knew that her mother really meant that when Elinor was gone she felt the hole, and what she really felt wasn’t a hole but fear of losing her for good, because she’d almost lost her for good at birth.
I told her this story about my mother: When the boy I’d asked to the senior prom stood me up, left me waiting for him in a black strapless dress I bought with money I’d earned from working at the Ocean City boardwalk, I went out to our back steps and sobbed so hard the German shepherd next door ran up to the chain-link fence and started barking at me. My mother came out back, pulled me up off the steps by one arm, and with one slap to my face chased the hysteria out of me.
God! she said. What is the point of perpetuating this cycle of female-on-female violence?
I laughed.
I mean it! she said.
I know you do. I laughed because those are my thoughts exactly.
She stared again at my books. An impulse arose and I did not fight it. I got out of my chair and took one off the shelf. The Dialectic of Sex—the copy I’d bought to replace the one I’d thrown into a trash can on Fourteenth Street, years ago, to prove something to Tracy, who never was watching.
Nearly every line is true, but I couldn’t live up to it, I said, and set it down in front of her.
Like the words of Jesus, she said, picking it up, examining the back, examining the cover. Chapter six might change my life, this says.
I’d forgotten about that line of red text running across the top of the cover. Bantam paperback, revised edition, 1971, with a puzzling portrait, by Degas, of a somberly dressed young woman on the front, and I always wondered how angry or wounded Shulamith Firestone might have become at the sight of her work being so grossly, almost punitively, misunderstood. Forgotten: Rose and I intoning that line to each other whenever we wanted to crack ourselves up. Chapter six might change your life!
She looked up. I came prepared to feel sorry for you, she said.
You should get back to the city, I said, tired of having to play the gracious and indulgent host.
She did not get up. I did, and picked up the glasses we’d been drinking from off the table, hoping she would take the hint.
She said she would take her leave—take her leave!—and we walked downstairs and to the bottom of the driveway. I asked her if she remembered which direction the subway was in, and she said yes, but she didn’t make a move. Cars floated past us on my street, one, two, three, four, broadcasting the sounds of salsa, gospel, merengue, and the Koran.
We are both very intense women, she said. Tote bag held in front of her in both hands, looking out across the street.
Yes, I said. I stood there loving her as much as I wished her gone.