I was not yet thirteen when I gave my ears to Anna Torres’s sewing needle. My mother had decreed fourteen the proper age for the piercing of ears, but I was unable to manage my longing. I tried to sit up straight while Anna pressed chunks of ice against my lobes, then ran a threaded needle through my skin as her long black ponytail swished about my face, making me sneeze.
“Be still,” Anna said as she pressed her large body into me, but it was too late, and my holes were crooked from my sneezing.
My mother had forbidden earrings countless times, but on that night, in my neighbor’s kitchen, I was sick of her rules. So arbitrary, and binding. On that night, with Anna’s needle running through my flesh, I felt practically grown. And so, feeling the rush and swirl of power, I walked home, with lopsided strings looped through my lobes, found my mother, and demanded more.
And like magic, my mother gave.
DesJardin.
George.
She told me my father’s name as though it were a gift, and handed over the one remaining photograph of him.
The setting was 1960s decor, drab olives and dark mustards. Two men and two women stood together in the picture, and I saw immediately that he was mine. My father had a thick red smile and clutched at the woman to his right with corn-silk hair and paper-thin features unlike those of anyone in my family. The woman had the face of a rosebud—sweet, but tight, almost shiny in its eagerness to please. Her eyes were an infant’s, the pupils overtaking the irises entirely. She looked frozen somehow, as though she might have guessed what was to come.
His wedding picture, my mother told me as she handed me the photo, and the tea cookie of a woman, his wife.
My father’s deeply set eyes looked adolescent, his smile forced—so that he seemed more boy than man on his wedding day. The sight of his clumsy arm grabbing at the pink of his stiffened wife was enough to make me stop looking.
That, and the mathematically impossible inscription on the photo’s back side.
George and Lorrie married November 6, 1964,
Separated March 18, 1964.
What an idiot, I thought. Didn’t he know that March came before November of the same year? I imagined him penning out the words while parked in my mother’s driveway, congratulating himself for his quickness and wit.
“Ha!” he must have thought. “This will prove to her that I’m available.”
And maybe my father’s salesman skills were not so great after all; perhaps my mother exaggerated just how convincing he could be, since he seemed to have had no clue about what she wanted. He did not understand his customer. Anyone with sense knew my mother hardly cared about availability. She collected babies, not men.
And though he was my father in only the most distant of ways, I felt shame for him, for his dumb wanting, his miscalculations.
The photograph, the name, and the often repeated facts that he was a liar, a bigamist, and a door-to-door salesman with all the plasticity and charm that men who sell Kirby uprights are capable of having were all I knew of my father.
And that I had his mouth. A certain look sometimes crossed my mother’s face as she took in mine.
“Your smile reminded me of someone,” she’d say when asked, something swollen in her voice.
And I’d know.