My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ father blinks his Little Orphan Annie eyes and crawls over to dig through her bag. I stand between his folded knees and he brushes me from the top, pulling the bristles through my long, fine hair until it snaps in tiny knots at the end. I yelp.

      “Jesus Dan, brush her from the bottom, not the top you idiot.” She grabs the brush from my father and pulls it hard through my hair, “Like this,” then slaps the handle back in his hand.

      And my father blinks empty, starts over, follows orders, tries to please.

      I didn’t meet another child until I was five years old and Mom finally ventured out of the house to find the neighbours. Marty is the Mexican boy from next door who is a year younger and bangs on our door at the crack of dawn; Jill is the girl across the street who is a year older and cheats openly at Hungry Hippos.

      At my house we drape the blankets from the bed over the dining room table to make a fort beneath. Mom sits in the kitchen, filing her nails.

      And that’s when Marty takes me into the bedroom and Jill makes me lay on my bedspread face down.

      “We’re going to play doctor now,” she says in her bossy voice, “I’m the nurse and you need a shot.” She pulls my shorts down and my Tuesday underwear to the tops of my legs and Marty makes his papery fingernails into a C and pinches them closed on the skin of my bottom.

      A dizzying electric current shoots down my legs and out the top of my head from the single vortex of one pinch. I lay there breathing into the pillow.

      “That’s it.” Jill play-slaps my butt. “You were a good patient.”

      In afternoons of deathly quiet, Mom draws the curtains to shut out the blazing Arizona sun and I play the game of Matching Pairs. I slap the cards down on the carpet and I’m good. I only have to turn them over a couple times before I remember where the exact match is. Apple to apple, orange to orange, flower to flower, I stack the matched sets one on top of the other until everything is paired. Then I shuffle them fancy like I see Mom do at solitaire and do it all over again.

      An endless stream of unemployed days comes to an end and my father rushes in to grab me, cupping his big hands over my face and leading me out the door into the drive.

      “Lookie, baby, lookie what Daddy got! I saw it and said ‘I have got to get that for my baby.’”

      In the drive sits a tiny car, a 1972 Datsun painted green, the precise colour of split pea soup.

      My father has landed a job as a plumber at the local Air Force base—a position he is almost guaranteed never to lose. Military bases are full of sinks and toilets and drains. In his excitement on the way home, he saw the car and bought it with the money we had left.

      “It looks like a peanut, Daddy.”

      Dad claps his hands, “That’s it! That’s what we’ll call it, my baby’s peanut mobile.”

      My mother simmers at the door as Dad snaps me into the bucket seat. We take off around the block, my hand clinging to the armrest, my head barely high enough to see out the window. My father smiles down to me and I scrunch my shoulders and smile back. The car zips down the road like a Tylenol capsule on wheels, bounding inches above the pavement; racing along with all the punch of a rip cord toy car.

      I’m curled in my father’s lap for Saturday morning cartoons when he gives me the signal to follow. He silently trips the latch on the screen and pushes me out the door.

      “Sandy,” he leans back over the threshold, “Me and Julie’s going out in the peanut mobile.”

      I can hear her No! from the kitchen but we’re already gone; my father exaggerating a tiptoe in fast motion across the pavement while I plaster my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling out loud. He squeals out the drive.

      “Just like the Keystone Cops!” he shouts.

      “Yeah!”

      There is a feeling of exhilaration to be with my father, to escape from the house and have it be just us. Forever bonded; me and my dad. We don’t even have to talk. We drive out of our middle class suburb and through tidy neighborhood streets with Monopoly houses and green lawns, the jitter of sprinklers rapid firing across wet grass. We drive into foreign streets with dirt lots by the buildings, where neon signs light Martini glasses with a bikini-clad girl dipping over the side in an illusion of bright lights. Tall, lithe dogs shoot across the road without looking; their big, boney skulls slung low on the prowl.

      Dad is taking me for the first time to his favourite Chinese restaurant.

      The parking lot is empty. He opens the front door and a brilliant slice of light cuts into the dark. The carpet is sticky under the soles of my white sandals. There are no other people and not even tables set. He lifts me to the black high back of a barstool that is one in a row lining a long bar.

      “Be right back, Daddy’s gotta go potty.”

      My father slips through a set of swinging red shutters that hinge in a naked doorway at the end of the bar. Hushed whispers float from behind the shutters and I see a pair of woman’s legs rise from sitting under the frame. Minutes tick by with only the occasional rustle—the clamour of a falling pan, a single thud against a wall, another wave of frenzied whispers—that lets me know my father is still back there.

      A long mirror runs behind the bar. If I kneel on the stool, my head crests into reflection and my face emerges in the dim light. Over the door behind me, I can see in the mirror a red exit marquee, and to the left a barely lit bathroom sign emitting the low sick buzz of electricity.

      The bell on the door tinkles, a wedge of light slashes across the carpet.

      Where is my dad?

      A man stands just inside the door, adjusting to the dark.

      I watch him in the glass, frozen in place.

      He squints his eyes and slowly makes out my face in the mirror. He bolts to the men’s room just as my father swings the red lacquered doors open.

      “Daddy!”

      A woman follows, dressed in pink satin.

      “Hi, Baby. Can you say, Sawatdee Cup? That means ‘Hello, how are you’ in Taiwanese.”

      The girl smiles and slips behind the bar. Her long black hair runs cool down her back. My dad gives the doorknob of my knee a honk honk. He orders us wonton soup and egg rolls with duck sauce.

      Behind the bar, our waitress turns to give us our drinks. I glare at her.

      She smiles.

      My father winks.

      He is jovial, relaxed, blowing on my wonton soup to cool it, giving me feathery tickles under my chin, making up for leaving his baby in a way only a dad can do. And in the flicker of a moment, the space between us closes and it’s once again a Saturday with just me and my dad.

      That first summer in Phoenix was so hot you couldn’t touch your bare feet to the sidewalk past morning light. Our reasons for moving close to Grandma Madge were fading as Mom bickered with her over everything from whether a red bell pepper was called a “mango” to the boxes of floor-length СКАЧАТЬ