The Shyster's Daughter, page 11
“For some of you the final next Friday is your final chance at passing my class.”
My limbs branch out across the entire couch, the television blaring as my father rigs up the slide projector perched on the kitchen table. All I can see is his burnt forehead and his curly hair greased back with Bryl Creem. The slide projector covers up the rest. He’s seated at the table. His arm curls protectively around a tumbler of ouzo as if somebody might take it away. If he’s drunk, he’s a well-focused one. Next to him is a pad of yellow legal paper.
He is not jotting down notes. In between checking out family slides, he’s writing my mother a letter, a love letter, the first he’s ever written her, so far as I know.
“Look at this one,” he says.
This is the third time I’ve had to turn down Die Hard.
I hear the hum of the projector and secretly wish the bulb inside would pop and burn out. Bruce Willis has just launched a terrorist through the window of a skyscraper, the body descending on a squad car, wrecking the hood. This part I’ve seen before. Over his shoulder, Bruce says, “Welcome to the party, pal.”
Reluctantly I get up off the couch. When he gets this way he either laments the loss of my mother or regrets never having cheated on her. “There was that trip to Syracuse,” he likes to always bring up. When I think of hot cities in which to have an affair, Syracuse, with its wind chill factor and Canadian cold fronts, isn’t the first city that comes to mind. He had been away on business with his client, the late restaurant owner from Bel Air. Women were forever plentiful around that man.
Tonight, however, it’s a melancholic slide show down memory lane, Fernwood Street in Lynwood where my parents owned their first home, to be precise.
“Your mother just doesn’t get it,” my father says. “What man is going to love her when she loses her arms and legs?”
During her pregnancy with my younger brother, my mother developed type II diabetes.
“Dad,” I say, rattled by his grim prognosis of my mother’s disease. “She takes medication for it.”
My father shakes his head and furiously writes as if I’ve sparked a new line of thought, a new argument the attorney in him hasn’t tried out on her yet.
“You’re wrong about that, Paula Girl. Pills won’t be enough. She’ll have to start shooting herself with insulin. Even then, the way she eats sweets, it’s only a matter of time before it goes after her limbs.”
“You’re not telling her that in the letter, are you?”
My father is too busy crossing lines out and writing above them to answer. Part of me is afraid to look. I imagine the horror on her face upon opening his letter at the mailbox. Amputated limbs. Needles and insulin shots. It will probably prove too shocking and she’ll rip it up, convinced he’s out to hurt her. She won’t understand how hard it was for him to write, how hard it is for him to stop loving her.
He shifts to the side so I can look through the lenses at my mother standing on a patch of lawn. Her black hair is pulled into a high ponytail and her hands are folded underneath the swell of her belly that is me. She wears red lipstick and smiles so that the gap in her front teeth shows.
I pull back. My mother is beautiful.
“This was taken in front of my mom’s house,” my father says. “Before the city forced us out to build the freeway.”
When my parents first married, they bought a two bedroom house on the border between Lynwood and Compton. What proved far more dangerous to a young couple just starting out than a neighborhood rampant with late night shootings and stabbings was their proximity to my father’s mother. My father loved being so close to his mother and demented Uncle Gil who still lived at home, having dropped out of college after a professor in the psychology department reportedly wanted to float his brain for research. None of the family ever deflated Yia Yia’s belief that it was her youngest son’s high IQ, not his troubled mind, which made him the perfect subject for such a barbaric sounding test. Yia Yia was a lonely widow living in a bad neighborhood and needed a live-in companion, a protector of sorts. Uncle Gil with his ever growing arsenal of guns and knives and deadly self-defense moves worked better at thwarting off neighbors and criminals alike than any Beware of Dog sign at the side gate or an expensive burglar alarm system.
For obvious reasons, my mother didn’t like going over to the house. For one, she wasn’t Greek. My mother is a mutt—German, English, Irish, and some Native American, the Kikapu Tribe from her father’s side. The Indian part made her especially unpopular in a family full of European immigrants. My late pappou even blamed my other grandfather’s alcoholism on living on a reservation with nothing to do but collect welfare checks and get drunk with the cash. He’d ignore my mother’s polite reminders that her father was born and raised in a boarding house the family ran in Slaten, Texas.
The other reason my mother hated coming over for Sunday dinner was that she’d find herself being sexually grilled in the kitchen by Yia Yia. Slipping her daughter-in-law an index card with the recipe for Spanakopitas rolled in pastry phyllo or Souvlaki, barbecued skewers of roasted lamb, the occasional sexual position would be discreetly written down on the back—from behind, from the side, from the foot of the bed, as if these acts were as practical to learn for a young wife as how to sauté an onion or make your own salad dressing with olive oil and oregano.
“You want to be a whore in the bedroom and a chef in the kitchen, honey.”
My mother soon learned it was easier to just thank the woman, then rip up the explicit directions later once my mother was home. During the meal Uncle Gil stared too much and complimented my mother on everything from the dainty way she chewed her food to the shade of her lipstick.
“Did you get a good look?” my father asks. He sounds impatient, like he wants to move on.
I nod. The slides seem to energize him, and I’d rather see him this way, obsessed with how things used to be, than despondent over how they are now. It occurs to me that this might be a good time to ask him about something I know he doesn’t want to discuss.
“Have you talked to that man?”
“What man?”
“Jesus, Dad,” I say. “The one who gets off on taking pictures of underage girls.” This gets my father’s attention, this gets him to actually hear me.
“When did he fucking do that?”
“The other morning on my way to school.”
My father appears pulled between our nasty situation and the tunnel of memories seen only through the lenses right before his eyes. He clicks the button and makes me see what he does. It’s a picture of me as a little girl, maybe four, with a ribbon of pink yarn in my curly dark hair. Pink seems like such an obvious feminine color and I resent my mother for dressing me like my older sister, the little girl’s girl she hoped I’d become. I’m on a tricycle and pushing the pedals with patent leather shoes. One of my feet is blurry from slipping off the pedal and my face is red and a size too big, my mouth held in mid-cry. Clearly, I’m miserable.
“Don’t worry about that poutsos,” my father finally says. “He’s just a former client. I’ll take care of it.”
But I don’t believe him.
“How?”
“That isn’t for you to goddamn know.” My father is defensive, fighting the only person who is on his side, and when he looks up at me I’m expecting him to scold and curse at me more. Instead he leans back a little, and points to the projector. “Your mother took this picture. It’s when you first learned how to ride a bike. No training wheels. No nothing. Do you remember?”
I shake my head and glance over at the TV. Barefoot and bloodied, Bruce is running across broken glass. The death toll is up to three.
“You can’t see me,” my father says. “I’m running alongside you on the grass.”
I bend down and pair my eyes to the lenses, though I see something different, and it’s hard not to pity him for being so blind as to how things changed between them after my sister and I were born. In my mother’s eyes her children came first. Slowly or quickly, at some point my father faded into the background of her life. Even thirteen years before she walked out on him, I see how easily it was for her to eliminate him from the picture.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS
As luck would have it my father meant what he said about getting the ex-husband to back off because for the next week and a half there are no midnight games of horseshoe, no early morning drive by’s. During this time I cram for the Chemistry final. Flashcards with the term on one side and the definition on the back are strewn about the house. At every opportunity, I quiz myself—while drying my hair in the bathroom or toasting a pair of frozen waffles in the kitchen.
I recite the definitions for ions, electrons, and ionic compounds until I know them cold. Atoms with an electric charge. Negative electricity in an atom. A chemical compound held together by ionic bonds in a lattice structure. I even draw a little ladder as an illustration.
On the morning of the final, I don’t wait by my car for Trevor to find me and walk me to class the way he’s been doing now for the past few days. Instead I’m nearly five minutes early to class, a sharpened number two pencil and a Scantron in hand. Mr. Duvane doesn’t notice because he isn’t even in the room. So I take this last chance to flash through my cards and go over the terms.
It isn’t until well after the tardy bell that he arrives, looking disheveled, looking more grave than drunk. In his arms are a messy stack of papers fresh from the Xerox machine because they still carry that copy smell.
“Yesterday, someone broke into my desk and stole the answer key for the final.”
Lucia stretches off to the side, my side.
“He probably just got wasted and misplaced it,” she whispers.
Mr. Duvane drops a pile of tests on the front desk of each row. He won’t look at any of us, not even Kimberly Foley who quickly takes one of the tests and passes the rest over her shoulder.
When I receive my test copy, I recognize nothing on it. There are no scientific terms, only formulas.
I throw up my hand and call out before he calls on me.
“This is the pretest for Physics.”
Mr. Duvane casts a suspicious glance like I’m the one who stole his answer key since my entire class grade rides on passing this test.
“Yes, Paula. That’s exactly what it is.”
“But you haven’t covered any of this.”
“Whoever stole my final has penalized the entire class, including you.”
Panic rises up in me with nowhere to put it, nowhere to hide from the certainty that the one hundred terms from the study guide I know back to front are now meaningless. Before I even pick up my pencil and fill in the first bubble on the Scantron, I already know I’ve failed.
Right after lunch I head thankfully to the attendance office to check out. At this point even a shrink’s office with month old Newsweek magazines and a fish tank filled with exotic carp are a reprieve from obsessing over blowing Mr. Duvane’s pretest/final. My father’s secretary is supposed to have called the school, pretending to be my mother.
On my way, I spot Trevor breaking away from his crowd of friends. Becky is with him, and he’s taking it nice and slow after the bell, the way he’s walked with me a couple mornings now, making me late to Chemistry. His fingers loosely hook into hers with the kind of ease that suggests they’ve been hooking up in even closer ways.
I hope I’m around the corner in time before he sees that I see, before I see him kiss her.
The woman working at the attendance window is chomping on a celery stick smothered in peanut butter. Her mouth full, she points with the stringy part toward the nearby bench. She wants me to take a seat while she processes my pass.
But when I turn around, I find Trevor waiting for me.
“What are you doing out here, ditcher.”
He’s in a good mood, which, because of who I just saw him with, automatically puts me in a bad one.
Telling him I have an appointment with a psychiatrist will make me sound like the head trip that I am—the sad girl who sits in the back, with the failing grades who has to leave school early because her mother has left her with abandonment issues. I may as well paint my fingernails black and wear hard rock t-shirts.
I walk clear around Trevor on my way to the bench, hoping to avoid her smell on him. All the cheerleaders wear the same pink colored scent designed for girl’s half their age—Love’s Baby Soft.
“I have to go to the dentist.”
“Sure you do.” Trevor sits too close, leaning forward to catch a side glance of my leg.
This is Southern California and even in late fall, after the morning fog burns off, it’s warm enough for shorts and flip flops. I worry if I shaved.
“Who’d you get to call for you,” he asks, “your college boyfriend?”
It seems like he’s only half-joking.
Now that I see he’s full on jealous, I decide to play along. “He’s a little older,” I say. “Probably around your dad’s age.”
This gets him laughing. Instead of slapping his own knee, he slips his hand on mine. A move so fast, I have no time to stop it.
“He’d like you. My dad loves his young brunettes.”
The way he says this tells me his parents are either divorced or should be.
Slowly, Trevor’s hand makes its way up my thigh.
It’s his throwing hand he’s touching me with and although I like feeling the rough places on his palm where he’s pitched and held things the hardest, I start to pull away. I’m afraid how far he’s willing to take this.
“It’s okay,” he says. He stops at the fabric and fingers the hem of my shorts.
Just then the partition slides all the way up.
“Your pass is ready.”
Trevor winks at the woman.
“Give us a second. She’s telling me a secret.”
She isn’t sure how to respond and leaves my pass outside the window, held down by a stapler so it won’t fly away.
Trevor turns back to me. “I like you, but everybody wants me to be with Becky.”
In a way the words are expected, which somehow takes me even more by surprise. I let myself be misled. Just five minutes before, he was making out with her. I saw him kissing her. As I try and get up Trevor takes a firmer hold of my leg. I imagine his red prints on my skin.
“Let me finish.” He leans closer, and I smell the corn chips he had for lunch, his spicy hot Fritos breath. “You interest me,” he says again as if I missed the best part. “So I want to see you on the side.”
At seventeen I know what he says isn’t right. As I write this, though, being a woman who has heard her share of come on lines, what I remember most about what he said is that it sounded at once, too straightforward, too deceitful. They were the words of a man, not a boy.
I park on the street in front of my father’s office because I don’t plan to stay long. All I need is twenty bucks for gas and a drive-thru dinner at Jack-in-the-Box.
From outside I hear shouting, the kind that brings men to blows. As I open the door, I recognize it’s my father and another man—the ex-husband is back. Nora is nowhere to be found and must still be at lunch.
Uncomfortably, I take a seat on the couch. I don’t need to eavesdrop since I can hear everything loud and clear from the reception area. I think about waiting in the car. I think about calling the cops.
“You won’t get away with robbing her blind,” the man says. “I’ll have you disbarred.”
“You’re the fucking thief,” my father fires back.
His voice is thunderous, yet controlled. “This is about my finding all that property you tried hiding from her.” Like a good defense attorney, he counts a calculated beat for effect. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know where to look?”
In a strange way, I’m proud. Even if my father is as guilty as her ex-husband of stealing her money, it’s been months since I’ve seen him take a swing at anything, let alone the ex who’s been harassing us for weeks.
My father isn’t finished with him yet. I hear an ominous rustling sound, like he might have the man by the shirt, maybe by the throat. Whatever my father says next he can’t risk another person hearing, and I think of the red eye home from Hawaii, how he said he’d never let anyone come near me or Rhea. He’s making up for more than somebody’s camera happy ex-husband who snapped my picture. He’s making up for having ignored in his younger brother what he’d so obviously seen in the pedophiles he’s defended. Their excuses as flimsy as a groin pull in the backseat of a car or steadfast in the denial like the local congressman who passed a lie detector test with flying colors after having been caught literally red handed, jerking off behind a dumpster at a local park.
Maybe what happened to my sister and me was payback for their sentences being reduced or thrown out altogether because she was seventeen, not sixteen, because the children out playing didn’t really see the man all that clearly and the woman who did was well into her sixties, wore prescription sunglasses, and clearly needed to have her eyes checked again. The politician, in his suit and tie, could’ve been rooting through garbage as he claims, looking for cans to recycle. He campaigned on cleaning up the environment, after all.
I’m contemplating heading into the room and breaking it up before my father needs a lawyer himself, when the decision is made for me. By fear or by rage, in the ex-husband’s haste to leave, he flashes past without even a glance at me seated picture perfect on the couch.
Minutes later we’re on the 60 freeway in my father’s Mercedes. He cancels the rest of his afternoon and insists on driving me to Studio City, to see the shrink. Afterward he promises we’ll wait out the traffic at Jerry’s Famous Deli and split a foot long hoagie.
The air conditioning blows hard and cold, and somewhere between Pasadena and Burbank, I tell my father about flunking Mr. Duvane’s final.
He smiles and shakes his head as if I’ve told him a joke that isn’t all that funny.
