On day 13 of the detox, my father called.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked.
I was standing in my bathroom with wet hair, having just finished Breakfast One in the shower.
“Rachel, I don’t know what this is about a ‘detox,’ but you better call your mother immediately.”
If she was bringing my father into this, she had to be desperate.
“Tell her I’m fine,” I said.
“I’m glad you’re fine. That’s not the point. The point is that now she’s calling me every day and I have to hear about it.”
Displeasing my father was painful. He rarely expressed disapproval about anything. When my parents were together, he never confronted my mother about the way she policed my food. Instead, he would sneak me out for all-you-can-eat junk food benders to compensate. When they divorced, he remarried a ceramicist named Christina (not a Jew) and moved to the Berkshires. I only saw him a few times a year, but I had no real daddy issues to speak of. Even in his absence, I at least knew where I stood.
When he’d come to town on my birthday or for Chanukah, we would gorge all day. We’d do lunch and dinner out: the diner and the Chinese restaurant, or a farm place in a real barn where they served plate after plate of creamed spinach, creamed corn, waffles. Then we’d go to the candy store and the 7-Eleven to load me up with bags of junk food. My mother gave me 24 hours to keep my stash before it all got thrown out. I wished I could hide my riches, but she took an inventory of all of it when I walked in the door.
The only time I remember feeling sad about my father’s absence was on my tenth birthday. After he dropped me off back at home, I changed into my pajamas and went down to the kitchen for a round of junk food. I had 23 hours left to eat, and I was determined to get in as much as I could.
Rifling through the 7-Eleven bag, I found a box I hadn’t seen him buy. It was one of those packages that contains all different little bags of chips: Cheetos, Doritos, pretzels. On the box, in big red and yellow letters was printed: VARIETY PACK.
What was this? It seemed he’d chosen a special, secret box just for me. While I’d been busy with the Slurpee machine, he must have been inspecting the shelves, his glasses falling down his nose, ruminating on the question: What’s something Rachel would really like?
Suddenly, his Dad eyes had spotted it: Variety Pack. With his Dad hand, he reached out and touched it. Variety Pack! Maybe he’d even whispered out loud, “The Variety Pack—yes, she might really enjoy that.”
“Variety Pack, Variety Pack,” I said, as I stood in the kitchen, eating and crying.
The words were beautiful to me. Also devastating.
“Rachel, am I on speaker? Can you hear me?” asked my father.
“Sorry,” I said.
Water was dripping from my hair onto the screen, and I knew it would fuck up my swiping for days.
“Please talk to her,” he said. “As a favor to me. For my sake.”
“I can’t,” I said. “No more hardware store.”
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
I looked at my wet face in the mirror. Was my face getting more annoying? My neck looked like it had somehow gotten thicker.
“This isn’t easy for me either,” I said.
“So then—”
“But listen. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Huh,” said my father. “Who said that? Benjamin Franklin?”