My mother refused to reveal our fathers’ names. It must have struck her as personal information, too personal for us; indeed, it smacked of treachery even to request such details. Their names were like eggs in a basket, my mother sitting upon them while arranging and rearranging her feathers. She’d tell us their names when we were older.
“When you’re fourteen,” she said.
For my mother, fourteen was a golden year, the appropriate age for eye shadow, pierced ears, and apparently, the naming of fathers.
No matter how I begged and cried, she’d fold her arms and look away. No makeup. No earrings. No father. Not until I was older.
I learned not to ask.
Only she was allowed to bring them up. She spoke of our fathers rarely, and when they were mentioned, it was only to share their various ethnicities and eccentricities. Our fathers were her stories. Hers alone. And she delighted in her handling of them.
Steph’s father was an Italian so crazy with grief for his dead momma that he kept a slice of cake from the last event they’d attended together (a wedding or a funeral) when she was still alive. I grew up imagining a slice of frosted cake under his pillow, its buttercream stuck to the inside of Stephanie’s father’s ear as he slept.
Mal’s father was a Stanley Kowalski of sorts—Polish, blond and tall—a fine specimen really. He was hardworking and kind, but had some sort of meningitis, which had ruined his brain—a brain, my mother said, that had never been at peak performance to begin with.
Rachel’s daddy was from the reservation, and sadly, everyone except Rachel remembered him. To her, he was simply a dark man who wore feathers and banged on drums in a faraway land.
My father was a sweet-talking liar. A salesman and opportunist, who preyed on women and was married to more than one of them. A bigamist of French extraction, but with a good pair of hands and a soft heart underneath it all.
Those were the stories she gave us.
That much, we could know.