CHAPTER 37

My father and Johnny Dolan became close friends in such a short period of time they reminded me of my own friends then—thirteen-year-old girls—always whispering together, sharing private jokes and secrets. I’d watch them standing at the bottom of the driveway, my father with an arm draped around his buddy, his wrist a fulcrum on Johnny’s shoulder, his other hand busy with all kinds of gestures and punctuation. Both smoking, laughing at intervals. My father couldn’t be like that with Shep Levine. Shep was too tall, for one thing, and too good a person. Johnny was damaged. He ran away from home when he was sixteen after his alcoholic father beat him up for the last time. They were lost boys, Johnny and my father, robbed of childhood. In time, they would rob me of mine.

Johnny was twenty-seven when he and his wife Linda first came to Cedar Drive, a tantalizing age in those days. Young enough to trust and old enough for experience. He took Susan out to practice driving. When my mother was washing dishes, he came up behind her and kissed her neck. I was the only one who told him to get lost. I said I wasn’t going to be his pretend little girlfriend like Susan. In the beginning, I told him to take his hands off me. We were on the sofa. Linda was helping my mother in the kitchen. I slapped him and twisted out of his grasp. Johnny was patient and things were changing so fast. He was interested in what I thought about everything. At my parents’ cocktail parties he was at my side, choosing my company over the adults. What was my favorite flavor of ice cream, had I read Narcissus and Goldmund, why did I prefer the woods to the beach? No one had ever asked me questions like that. I complained about family life and he wanted to know every detail. I told him I was tired of sharing. I couldn’t take the last slice of cantaloupe because God forbid somebody else might want some. I didn’t have my own bicycle. It belonged to Susan, although I rode it so much, the bike was like an extension of my body. It would be a waste of money to buy another bicycle since Susan never used hers. The next day, Johnny came to the house with a cantaloupe. We hid it in the milk box in the carport, and when he left and I was alone, I took the melon down to the curb with a knife and sat there and ate the whole thing, minus the rind, of course. I punctured the globe with the point of the knife and sat there hacking off pieces, gobbling up the sweet orange flesh, juice running down my hands, my arms, dripping from my elbows into the gutter.

The world was black and white, and then the sixties happened, the Beatles arrived, the world exploded into living color, and Johnny pulled up to the curb in his red Triumph. He entered the house and all four of us came alive.

For two weeks after the camping trip, I didn’t speak to my father. Two weeks—nothing in a lifetime—but try it for a while, not speaking. I still emptied his ashtrays when I came home from school—the ashtray on the end table next to the sofa, the ashtray on the elephant leg table from Delhi, the one on his night stand, on the dining room table, the kitchen table, all heaped with disgusting butts. I scraped the yellow crust of sunny-side-up egg from his breakfast plate and loaded his dishes into the dishwasher. When necessary to avoid confrontation, I grunted yes or no to a question, but nothing more. It wasn’t long before my mother knew about Nola, just as Johnny predicted. It was hard not to know. My father was in love. He could barely keep from grinning when he wasn’t storming the house in a fury. My mother approached me cautiously. She touched my shoulder. When I didn’t flinch, she put her arms around me. “That was a difficult trip for you,” she said. I nodded in the warm curve of her neck. She pulled away to look at me.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she said.

“No,” I whispered, and she left me alone. That was all.

“What happened?” Susan said, but she didn’t stop walking down the hall.

“Ask him,” I snapped.

All week he raged. “Why isn’t the kitchen cleaned up? What’s that bag doing on the table? Get that shrieking off the stereo!” He was in love and the rest of the world could go to hell. He went to see her on the weekend.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked.

“Out,” he said. He didn’t come back until Monday.

I despised the sight of the green Torino nosing into the driveway after an absence. My sister was angry, but not at him. She was mad at my mother—why had she let her man get away? Why didn’t she do something? Scream, cry, bake his favorite cake? I couldn’t accept my mother’s role in this even a little, and I gave Susan no credit for understanding some things better than I did. She was Daddy’s girl, though. All I had was my mother.

On Labor Day, the last day of the season at the swimming club, my father approached me. He loved the club, though he didn’t swim. He’d sit on a chaise and trade recipes with the women. When it was really hot, he’d dunk himself up to his shoulders in the five feet end. He shuffled over to where I was sitting. I kept my eyes down and stared at his untied desert boots. Eventually, I lifted my gaze to his wrinkled swimming trunks, his round but strangely hard belly, his ridiculous straw gondolier’s hat. I was eating a chocolate snowball. I drew the cold paper cup to my chest. He wasn’t getting even a chip of ice. The red ribbon on the gondolier’s hat was feminine, but he was able to carry it off, he said, because like a real gondolier, he had machismo. At that moment, though, the limp ribbon was pathetically girlish. He stuck out his lower lip in a pout. “Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked.

I didn’t want to say yes and I didn’t want to say no, so I got up, left the cup with the melting snowball on the chaise, and walked past the folding table where a kid sat and punched membership cards. My father followed, but the metal gate clanked shut against him. Outside of the chain-link fence, I broke into a run. I was wearing the purple bikini Johnny had given me for my birthday. Inside the gate with everyone else wearing skimpy bathing suits I was fine, but now outside the gate, I felt undressed. The swimming club was on the border between county and city, and as I ran through the neighborhood, split-levels gave way to narrow row houses from another era, left standing like Roman ruins. I saw a man in a suit getting into a car. My chest was bouncing and so I did not run as fast as my legs could take me. I was ashamed of my body, and I was also ashamed of not running faster and I didn’t know what to do, where to hide, whether to go fast or slow. A woman in a party dress corralled her children inside, holding her hand over her little boy’s eyes. I wasn’t naked, but I felt naked. The woman acted like I was naked. I ducked behind a hydrangea bush on her next-door neighbor’s lawn just as the Torino came cruising down the block. He saw me and stopped the car. I stepped out covering the tops of my breasts with one arm, and the tops of my thighs with the other arm, trying to hide the pubic hair curling out of my bikini bottoms. He leaned across the seat to open the passenger door and handed me a striped beach towel. I wrapped myself in it and sat beside him. He made a U-turn and we drove down Milford Mill Road and over the railroad tracks. I felt better wrapped in the towel. I had been thinking, if having a father was so important to him that the fact that he didn’t have a father defined his whole life, then why wasn’t his being a father to me just as important? But I couldn’t organize my thoughts to form a spoken question. Other people my age had it all figured out. They seemed to know who to hate and why, how to rebel, but I remained stuck in my father’s story. He drove past the clearing in the woods I liked where the county kept yellow school buses crammed together in a little dell and he cleared his throat and blinked several times behind his glasses.

“I’m sorry,” he said. That was all he could think of.

“It’s hard having a father,” I said.

Possibly, I forgave him too soon. One evening, he insisted I come home from Liz’s house because he was making a special dinner. When I got back I saw that we were having spaghetti. I mocked him for calling it special. No one liked being mocked, but for him, it was intolerable. He turned into Bluto from a Popeye cartoon. Steam came out of his ears. He chased me down the hall and caught up to me and whacked my back with the flat of his hand making a hollow sound— clop, clop, clop. “I work hard to put food on the table, you snotty kid.” Clop, whack. I landed in my room, slammed the door and locked it. A few minutes later there was a knock. He was sorry again. Would I forgive him?

He decided to make it up to me by inviting Johnny over for dinner the following night. He and my mother were going out, Susan had a date, and I was going to be home alone. Johnny would keep me company, and we would eat the leftover spaghetti. I liked spaghetti reheated in a frying pan with bits of sauce clinging to the strands and the bottom burned until it was crispy. When we finished dinner, it was still light out. Johnny told me to lie on the sofa. The drapes were open. Kids were playing in the street. I knew them. I could have been outside kicking a ball around with those kids. I lay down and he kneeled on the floor beside the sofa and kissed random places—my ears, my neck, my hair. He took off my glasses and laid them on the coffee table and he kissed my cheekbones and forehead and my mouth. Children called to each other between spurts of breathless laughter. I worried about the drapes being open, and then I stopped thinking about it. I was wearing red flowered shorts I had sewn in Home Ec. The shorts had an elastic waistband—we hadn’t learned zippers yet—and Johnny looped a finger inside the elastic and took the shorts down over my tanned legs. He did the same with my pink and white striped bikini underpants, and then he moved my tanned knees apart and kissed the top of each thigh. He came in closer and kissed me where I peed. It felt good, very good, but not as good as it would feel every time from then on, because the night of the spaghetti dinner I was astonished it was happening at all.