Authors Bio

"Do you love your father?"

I could never see his teeth when he asked me that question. Was it the beard and neatly trimmed mustache that looked as if he’d had gray hairs deliberately positioned here and there for a wiser look, or was it that he didn’t have teeth big enough to reach down below that know-it-all lip?

But standing, waiting for a table during the lunchtime rush, I was still trying to figure out what Dr. Jack’s question had to do with my problem.

"Smoking or non?"

"Non. Very non," I told the hostess. "Totally non. I carry a squirt gun and start fights." She gave me a queer look, but she clutched the tall menus in her arms and turned to lead the way. The tight skirt made her hips sway as she ground her steps into the dull carpet. What a waste. I’m a woman, for Pete’s sake. Who cares whether she has a behind that fills out her skirt while my pancake-flat ass was being led to a corner table? Very corner. Totally away from everybody. Great! Service will be just great here.

"Is this okay?" she asked me, but her eyes had already fixed on somebody else across the room. She held out her hand just so. So, so. Like Vanna White turning letters when she did turn letters and not just press her magic finger. Boink!

"No," I said.

It took her a minute--well, actually four and a half seconds--to turn back. Then the light bulb flashed inside her head. "I’m sorry, did you say ‘no’?"

"Yes."

Her eyes skirted my skinny body, as if she hadn’t already checked out my baggy Kmart khaki pants and wrinkled T-shirt. My navy blue one. The one with Notre Dame and the funny looking little leprechaun with his fist poised high in the air. Mr. Fightin’ Irish.

But she looked anyway.

Did I look like I liked tables where cobwebs probably formed easily and no waitress would pass by for minutes, and even if I got to order, something would be wrong, but I’d never be able to make it right because this was like a dream where nobody could hear you and everybody was really far away like in a desert?

"Kassie! Kassie!"

Hearing Delia call my name out loud in a nice restaurant distracted me from my expected verbal fray with the pert-butt hostess.

"Kassie! Over here. I already have a booth."

Miss Pert-butt glanced at Delia then looked back at me as if I could help her make sense of the connection of somebody looking so businesslike in a navy businesswomen’s suit with white camisole underneath, and chestnut brown hair that flipped perfectly like Jennifer Aniston’s. What was this normal person doing knowing me and wanting to share a table with me and bringing it to the public’s attention?

"Go figure." I shrugged.

She wouldn’t have understood the answer anyway. I might have used words that were too big. And I’m still not sure she was really even able to form that exact question. She was blonde. She might have been busy thinking about... nothing.

Delia carried her disregard for what the other diners were thinking even further as she threw her welcoming arms around me and squeezed hard. "God, you look great!"

I looked like shit warmed over, but Delia’s warm grin revealed her perfect teeth. Of course, she’d had the braces. I didn’t really want them anyway. Lou didn’t want them either, and now it wouldn’t do him any good even if he had gotten them.

She pushed me down in the booth and kept beaming at me, and I felt as though I’d done something wicked and gotten away with it. "What?" I asked.

"You just look so good."

"You said that already."

"I mean it!" She sat just like she used to when she was little with her arms spread wing-like, then bent at the elbow with her hands coming together and her fingers entwined in a dainty way. Somehow it seemed strange for her not to have "dang-de-lions" in her hands. With the way she used to bounce her chin on her fists, the yellow color would have reflected on her neck, and I could have told her that she liked butter, and she would have giggled.

"I’m Tara, and I’m going to be your waitress." This new young woman had a tightly drawn ponytail and a mole just above her lip. She was thinly disguising a snarl behind some stupid smile, but I could see the twisted edge of her mouth.

"Is that your real name, or do you just use ‘Tara’ for your day job?" I asked.

She shifted the smile affably at Delia, but shot me an Eskimo icicle. Cold, very cold. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Yeah, why beg my pardon? I don’t usually give my pardon even to people who beg." I offered out my best Irish Blarney grin, which meant there should have been a twinkle in my eye, but the joke was lost on her. The punch line had no sexual innuendo. Maybe I should have told her how I had tried to grow a dick once.

"She’s just pulling your leg," Delia told her. "We both want tea. Extra lemon."

On the outside, I smiled at Tara. Cheshire cat smile, not a full-toothed Goldie-Hawn-with-stardust-eyeballs’ smile. She could be a lesbian, and I didn’t want to give her false hope.

Inside I was Dr. Kathleen Caisson, psychiatrist. "Dr. K. Caisson" the tag would read on my white jacket, only doctors didn’t wear white jackets normally. Dr. Dave at the hospital never even wore a jacket. And the night we all watched the dirty movies and placed our hands on the naked and hairy-fuzzy knees of total strangers, he didn’t even wear a shirt. The hairs on his chest were brown with some graying ones blending in--was this a male mental health fashion statement?

"I’ll be back," the waitress warned. She made a hr-umphing sound that rose from her chest and thundered and rattled in her throat. Like I couldn’t hear it if she kept her mouth shut. Kinda like the internal belches Lou and Delia and I used to do on the back porch of Uncle Dill’s farmhouse.

"What brings you downtown?" Delia eyes did the smiling this time.

I wondered if she was just testing me, seeing if I’d remembered this time. "You called and invited me to lunch," I said, enunciating each word carefully.

She laughed and looked toward the window. "That’s right. How forgetful of me."

I nuzzled back against the cushioned seat. Better restaurants always gave better places for your ass to rest. Good thing. The service was usually so slow and snooty that sitting lasted longer than at Denny’s. And the portions were smaller. And they always gave me an uppity look when I asked for syrup for my fried potatoes. And they didn’t like coins left for tips.

A young man in a crisp, white jacket brought two long-stemmed glasses, each clanking with ice cubes. His eyes told me that Pert-butt and Mole-face had clued him in.

"Thank you, sir," I said and smiled graciously, thankfully, sanely. I wanted to give them all more to talk about later as they spread their whispers in a tip bowl.

"Be careful of that one," Pert-butt would hocker right smack dab in the middle of the odd change some idiot housewife left. "I could feel her watching my ass as I walked."

"She wants my mole," the waitress would spew. "After she eats the piece of raisin bread, I’ll go back and say, ‘Is there anything else?’ And the black dot just above my lip will be gone, and she’ll wonder if it fell off and is resting in the dungeon of her acidic stomach."

"Hey, she was decent," Mr. White-jacket would offer. He was a man of few words; I could see that right off. He was cute, and I wondered if he could walk across the room in front of me and let me watch his ass move. I’d like to put my hand on his bare leg and watch Bo Derrick wrestle with the chimp at the end of that Tarzan film. In the dark.

Delia cleared her throat. "Lou’s coming in on Thursday, and I thought we could get together. You know... to talk. We could make a party of it with everybody staying over at my place. What do you say, Kassie?"

My heart stopped dead cold. "Lou?"

"Yeah, he’s between assignments, and he called. He wants to see you." But she didn’t say those words with a smile. I saw the caution in her eyes. It dripped like the honey from the comb that Uncle Dill would lift from the huge container where he collected the puke from his bees. He’d drizzle it in little glass jars while he chewed Mail Pouch or Red Man. Then he’d screw on the lids and slap on some paper labels that said simply "Honey." "Caution," her look spoke.

Lou.

She leaned over the table and touched my fingers. The ones with the nails I’ve bitten for thirty-four years, even when Mama slathered them with a bitter paint. "He wants to see you, Kassie. It’s time."

I wished I could begin breathing again.

"Do you love your father?"

Jack Miller seemed too ordinary a name for a doctor; so I imagined his real name was Dr. Jakob Sigmund Shimmueller. He’d been a Jew who’d escaped the Nazi terror, but the atrocities he’d witnessed never left his embattled soul, ghastly things too horrible to ever speak out loud. Never mind that he had been born two years after the war ended. That was all part of the dread the Germans had foisted upon the world as they left their tattooed survivors to tell the tales.

"Kassie."

Some days I couldn’t tell who was calling my name, or why, but I dressed anyway. Each day was the same. Had to be the same. Alarm goes off at five-fifteen. Stumble in to take my pills. One white Mellaril and the B₂ with milk. Can’t wait for breakfast. Need to be sure.

"Kassie?"

Then I shower. Water, water, everywhere. Not a drop to drink.

"He’s brought Olivia with him." Delia’s eyes had passed the caution zone and blinked with large red lights hurling them and me into danger. I started to stand as I felt all the air being sucked out of room, but Delia held onto my hand tightly, squeezing it. "Remember where you are, Kassie. A restaurant. ‘The Ivy Post.’ Get a grip."

I sat back down. My legs had died, and my frenetic stomach was melting down them. Dripping, like Uncle Dill’s thick honey.

"She wants to see you. They both want to see you." Delia’s eyebrows were nearly touching in the middle. When had her face grown lines that crossed her forehead? She was just a child. Just a little girl. My little sister. Yellow chin. Likes butter.

"Lou’s dead," I exhaled. There, I said it. All public. I admitted my sin, so where was the absolution?

"Kassie." Delia laughed. She laughed. The corners of her mouth bent up, and she looked at me with a sweet look, kind, like she was. Not bitchy, like me. Not hard. Not unfeeling. "Lou’s not dead. Your daughter’s not dead either. It’s time. It’s time to see them. Olivia’s a young girl now. She wants to see her mother."

"I can’t."

I watched my sister pick at the perfect nail polish at the ends of her perfectly thin fingers. "Can’t or won’t?"

The words darted around the room as though they were bees about to alert their brethren to the location of aromatic blossoms with breasts bursting with sweet nectar. Milk. The white pill four times a day with milk. I nursed her. Baby lips on my nipples sucking life from me, and I was happy and tender.

"You were sick." I felt Delia’s soft hand pat my dry and flaky one. Her nails were slender, pointed, shiny and red. Danger.

"I’m still sick."

"You’re better." Pat. Pat. "So much better." Pat. Pat. "Dr. Jack said you could handle this." Pat. Pat. Pat.

Dr. Jack? She’d talked with Shimmueller?

"Olivia needs you back in her life. And you need her."

Sweet baby hair dangled loosely in soft, blonde curls that beckoned to be touched. To be wrapped around a finger and then dropped so they bounced. It made her giggle. Little girl giggles.

Little girls turn blue.

* * *

"My husband wants to see me again. He’s brought our daughter with him, and she wants to see me, too."

"I know."

I looked for Dr. Jack’s teeth, but he kept stroking his hand down his face, down his sideburns, beard, barely touching the hair above his lip. I looked but saw nothing white or yellow or even green. Maybe he never brushed his teeth. Used his hairy face to hide his sin. Or maybe the Nazis had torn them from his gums, and left him to either bleed or starve to death.

"Lou was here this morning. He wants you get better, that’s why he’s stayed away. But your sister wrote him a letter telling him how much you’ve improved."

"No, I haven't."

Now, he who had survived horrible, unspeakable torture was touching the arm of my chair. "Yes, you have."

"I'm sick."

"No, Kassie. You face your demons now, remember? Nobody hates you."

Then he let the silence hang in the room. Dangle and spin. Round and round like the spoon Aunt Lily swirled in the glass jar just before she drizzled the honey over her steamy pancakes. And we’d eat the pancakes. Me and Delia and Lou. Lou, the neighbor boy. Skinny, like me. People would point at us and say we were sticks. Bones. "Turn sideways, and we can’t see ya’. " But Lou would stand defiant, flicking them his wet tongue or flipping them his longest finger.

I knocked him down a hill once, in the snow, and the next summer I hit him with my bicycle when I turned my head to gawk at a boy with muscles. His nose bled both of those times. And I was sorry that I’d hurt him. But it was an accident. I didn’t mean to.

I didn’t mean to.

I remember jamming the soiled rags along the bottom of the garage door before I nestled myself behind the wheel of the Mercury. Fingers that weren’t really mine turned the key, and the radio came on, blaring.

Lou had stopped loving me. He was tired of my insecurities. Exhausted with having to bolster my ego. "You’re a woman, Kass," he’d said, yelled, swore. "For Chrissakes, act like it. Olivia needs a mother."

The engine hummed as Paul Simon whammed the nail on the head and sang of still being "crazy after all these years." But he didn’t really know.

I don’t remember anything past that line as the vapor surrounded me. I just knew I was killing Lou. I was steaming him from the fibers of my soul. If he didn’t love me, and I was just some burden, what was there?

As much as I looked at the butts of bus boys, I never wanted them. I never wanted to touch the hairy legs of the stranger who sat beside me while naked men and women did things I’d only done in private. Nazis must have made those filthy films.

"I didn’t think the fumes would get into the house."

What did you think would happen?

"I thought Lou would find me and wrap me in his arms when he saw how much he meant to me."

Bullshit.

"I thought the pain would end."

What pain?

"The pain of just being alive and not being able to really live."

Go away, you’re just pretending. You have a layer you haven't peeled away.

I looked at Dr. Jack. He still hadn’t said anything. But he smiled. It was odd. He’d never smiled at me before, but he was doing it now. And he had teeth. White, straight teeth that no crazy Nazi terror tool had touched.

"I loved my father," I said.

But it was a lie.

* * *

Olivia’s baby curls were gone. Her hair was darker and clipped short. She’d called me Mommy and was all hugs. Like Delia. Free hugs and warm smiles. Nothing held back.

Lou looked older, heavier. He’d tried to kiss my mouth, but I turned away. We were outside, for Pete’s sake. What would Delia’s neighbors say? What had they said already?

At first, the visit was stiff, very stiff. I felt as if I were some kind of bomb all loaded--cocked, engaged--ready to blow. One false move, and they knew I would mushroom everybody to kingdom come.

Then for one brief moment, one odd burst of sunlight second, we all became children again, playing pretend games, and it was almost fun. Seated around the carefully decorated table, we were family--the Brady Bunch maybe or the Waltons. We did this a long time ago, pretending we were the people we saw on TV or at the movies: Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, Double-oh-seven and Pussy Galore. I’m Scarlett O’Hara and fiddle-dee-dee.

That’s when the fracture closed. "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn." Lou hadn’t ever said those exact words, but they radiated off him like heat off desert sand. Now he was pretending he did give a damn, and somehow he’d sucked Delia--my sweet little sister--into the game. Just like old times. Just like the time we dug a hole in the side of the hill near the creek under the shady cover of towering birch trees and sweet gums. We were going to dig clear to China and trade the prickly gumballs for firecrackers that we could light on the Fourth of July. We were Little Marco Polos balancing the nation’s world trade deficit. Though we never made it all the way, our steady afternoons finally netted us a great place to play. It was really cool there and dark and safe.

Or so we thought.

A gully-washer of a rainstorm collapsed the whole side of the hill and our playhouse was reclaimed by the black earth. Delia had never liked it anyway, but Lou had convinced her. He was persuasive like that. That was his game: pretending and convincing people. He was a writer, for Pete’s sake. That’s what they do: suck you in.

What he was still doing.

Delia and I never saw the real China, but Lou had. He and Olivia had together. He’d been doing some freelance stuff for several magazines, and he told me some of the places they’d been. Olivia chimed in with anecdotes almost as good as the color reporting of Harry Caray with the Cubs. Ten years old and she could not only maintain a decent conversation but generate one.

She said the Japanese people were too polite. After two weeks there, she found herself appreciating the indifferent customs agents in New York. "Daddy thought they were rude, but I liked them. They didn’t make my face hurt."

"Make your face hurt?" I asked.

"I didn’t have to smile all the time and keep bowing," she explained.

Lou said she was a lot like me, but then he said it one time too many, and I realized he was just blowing smoke up my ass. Olivia was the spitting image of her father. Same long nose, same shape of face. She had my hair, poor baby, and the cleft of my chin. I hoped that was all I had given her, but there was that glint in the corners of her eyes that I wanted to read as Blarney.

After dinner, Lou sat down by me twice on the couch, but I moved. Then once, in the kitchen, he’d put his hand on mine, but I slid it away.

I told myself if I didn’t blow up the balloon then I wouldn’t have to feel the loss of it when the string slipped from my fingers; when it touched the flame and burst; when it sagged all wrinkled in a corner, looking like a spent rubber.

Sure. Sure. Nothing ventured; nothing gained.

Nothing lost either.

As I stretched out beside my little girl as she lay in the sleeping bag Delia had set up in the sewing room, I remembered how scared I was the night she was born. While I fingered back a stray hair--hair the color of mine when I was this age--I remembered feeling so unreal as this living creature was pulled free from my body. Everybody smiled at me that night.

Lou cried. Big tears. He talked to her, calling her the special name he’d made up before we knew she was a she. And Olivia had stopped crying when she heard it. "Wiggles." That’s what it was. She wiggled a lot in the "pokey."

Now Olivia slept like some angel. Little bubbles at her mouth. Her tiny fingers laced together. Dainty, like Delia, not me. I was the gangly pony. All bony limbs. Limp hair. A face only a mother could love. Only she loved Delia’s face more.

I kissed my sweet baby just where her forehead met her hair so I could smell her girl-nectar at the same time. What rich honey Uncle Dill’s bees could have retched up if they’d tapped her sweetness. Then I opened the window wide and shut the door.

The house was dark and quiet. Delia was in the master suite, and Lou was resting in the bedroom where I’d spent so many nights after Dr. Jack said I could. I wondered if Delia had let him use the yellow sheets. They were softer than the blue flowered ones. Better thread count, I think. I couldn’t really see in the shadows as I eased up his window. Or even when I draped the wedding ring quilt over him.

But it didn’t matter.

The light went on when I opened the door to Delia’s Toyota. Her car always smelled like pine. Hey, I used to buy those little scented trees at Kmart and hang them from the rearview mirror. Nothing. Oh, a quick burst at first. Then second day. Nothing.

When I turned on the radio, some very busy violin screeching filled the car. It sounded like an invasion of killer bees. Squeak. Squawk. Buzzzzzz. There was no rock and roll to be found pushing her magic buttons. No country. Just talk. And finally, the Blues.

The guitar edged its sharp blade into my soul. Back. Way back. Way in, and it felt so right there. Like digging that hole to China. Dark and safe. Sweet and thick. Honey.

I turned the key and started the motor while I listened to the paradiddling in the background. Sticks on skins. Heartbeats while the blues band crooned their soft lullaby.

The engine purred like a hedging cat, mindful it could slash its claws and bring me my peace. So I rested my head back and closed my eyes. No one would have to pretend anymore. Or try. Or worry. Or hope.

"Mommy."

I hadn’t heard the car door open and close or seen the overhead light blink on and off, but Olivia was suddenly beside me in the front seat.

"Take me with you, Mommy." Her eyes were saucers of affection and supplication. And the fumes from the exhaust were now mixed with Olivia nectar. "Pretty please with sugar on it?"

When I looked into her face I didn’t see the innocence a ten-year-old should have. I also didn’t see the feigned caring of Lou or the desperate worry of Delia.

I saw him. Daddy.

I pressed the button on the black box that hung securely on the visor overhead, and the garage door rumbled open. Rich, clean air rushed into the windows as I backed out, thumping over the speedbump of rags.

"Where are we going, Mommy?"

I drove down MacDonald Street past my old school. "Hey, sticks!" I heard Ten Ton Tim yell from long ago. He was still as round as the hippo at the zoo, even had his picture taken with the damned thing when he ran for mayor last year. How could he just laugh it all off?

The car rounded Liberty Park where Delia and I flew our kites. I’d stepped on a bee there, and Daddy had carried me all the way back home.

"Let’s be bees," I said to Olivia. "Let’s look for flowers and collect their nectar."

I turned off the radio and listened to her honeyed voice tell me about her best friend, Gretel, and a boy name Dan. I could tell she liked Dan.

"Dan gave me a red ball the other day that could bounce really high," she told me. The blue glow from the dashboard lights couldn’t disguise the pleasure of acceptance in her face. "But I lost it."

"I’m sorry, baby." I would crawl under a car or dig another hole--this time all the way to China--to find her treasure.

But she patted my hand. Like Delia. Like Lou tried. "It’s okay. He’ll give me another one."

"He will?"

"Yes, Mommy. Dan’s like that."

"Like what?"

My little girl stared down at her shoes for a moment, though they were nearly invisible in the dim light; then her eyes glinted. "Like Daddy."

Daddy. My own father was a tall man, thin like me. My Mom used to call him "the rail." I remember I fell off my bicycle once, and he carried me, a crying me, back to our house. The same house where he locked himself in the basement and French kissed a gun barrel.

"You have your father’s eyes," my Mom once told me, and now I was looking at the next generation.

"Are we going to make honey, Mommy? You know, after we collect the flowers?"

"Yes, baby. Honey."

"Can we eat it then, Mommy?"

I looked at my baby. The child who grew inside me. The child who giggled and had only begun seeing the whole world with eyes that could damn her to hell. Lou was right; she was just like me. And just like him--my Daddy.

He left such a big hole--a hole deeper than could reach to China. I loved him so much, his crooked smile and wavy hair. The way he sucked on a cigarette and held it in his hand as though he could hide the burning end because he was afraid I would accidentally get burned.

"Do you love your father?"

"I don’t understand why he left me."

"Is that what he did?"

"Yes."

"And that’s why you want to run away from Olivia?"

I looked at her. This time her lips were blue, but she wasn’t dying.

"Look again. Look at her eyes."

That glimmer. It was death’s gleam. The same siren that beckoned my daddy away from me. Cajoling. The end of pain. The end of my pain.

The beginning of hers.

Why had it taken so long to learn the lesson of the hole we dug to China? It didn’t go there. And it wasn’t safe.

No place would ever be safe.

It only took a few minutes to get back to Delia’s.

I laughed as I looked at Olivia, giving her my best Irish twinkle. Playful beam. I gave it to her. Fully. Forever. Just as my father had given me mine.

We snuggled together in the front seat and pushed the buttons on the radio, but we couldn’t find Paul Simon. We couldn’t find the blues. There were only people talking, sounding like bees searching for nectar. Buzzing a benediction.

And the sound of the car’s engine...