I come down to the foyer with sparkly cheeks and thick, dark lash lines. I smell Burberry perfume vaporize from my skin and permeate the air. I think I’m alone. Then I smell him. Bombay Sapphire, a bit of tonic: it’s been a long day. The television blares, as if intoxication induces an inability to hear. As I walk over, I hear Gene Kelly sing and watch my father’s lips move in lagging time with the film. He’s watching our favorite movie. He taught me how to sing as a child, how to make people laugh.
Singing in the Rain, huh Dad?
As he opens his lips to respond, he cannot.
He just lies there and gestures with flailing arms. I sit and watch the men in the film splash around in the rain. I remember emulating this scene with my father as a child. I feel the rain on my face now.
I like that, he slurs.
I look down at my cleavage and wonder what someone else’s father would say. I grab his hands to take him to bed. Once, as we danced to the songs of the film, he grabbed my hands. As we move toward the staircase, he struggles to recall the steps. His feet don’t move like that anymore. I want so badly for him to reach out, to embrace me, but he can’t. I walk out the door.
It’s a Friday night. It’s cold, so I’m wearing tights under a chiffon red dress. Jake tells me I look beautiful, so I feel at peace with my decision to dress like I guessed girls should when they’re in love with a boy.
Beautiful, he says, but don’t you think you should put something over that?
I smile.
Some of the popular kids wanted to see me out, so they invited me to this party. I begged Jake to come with me. I know he’s uncomfortable. He’s too fragile for these people. It’s about 10:30 and Jake and I walk into the party together. Jake pulls a piece of hair that has adhered to my YSL gloss and tells me I look beautiful. I think about him thirsting on the stickiness, eradicating my lips and returning them to their natural, chapped curvature. He pulls the door open for me. He protects me. When he knew I needed someone to be a man, to play games of catch and read stories, he read to me and made sure there was someone who could write my name on a brown paper bag and hand it to me at school. He is beautiful in his olive complexion and his impeccably muscular build.
We walk in the basement of Claire’s house and I get a little nervous. These kids always ask me about college or soccer and listen in admiration. They see how I work in school and they want me to come have a good time for once. Jake only knows the boys from class and I know he doesn’t want to be here. Bass reverberates and Kid Cudi encourages my peers to roll up and pound and shotgun. Chris and Megan come over to ask what’s good. Jake takes a shot. Tonight, I bring Jake to the side of the ping-pong table where the group offers me handshakes and hugs as I’ve made their acquaintance. It’s crowded but Jake makes certain there is somewhere for me to stand. We all watch the game. Jake takes a shot. Sam drains a cup. Then Zach comes over. Jake puts his arm around me. Zach, Jackson, Tyler, and Mitch. They know Jake shouldn’t be here but they like to see me out. I don’t mind being at these potpourris of sexual promiscuity and occasional police appearances. It’s different. This isn’t what I come home to every night. This isn’t what I try to love but constantly fail at. Jake takes a shot. Zach knows me, and he likes to push me sometimes. He’s hot, athletic, and popular but I think he puts me on a pedestal. Sometimes he and his friends feel empty and they need to knock me down.
He comes over and asks why I’m not drinking.
You’re too good? Here, take a beer.
And Mitch stifles a laugh.
And I refuse.
And Jake takes a shot from his fifth.
I’m good, Zach.
Na, you’re not. Here.
And he opens it. And when I won’t drink it, he holds it over my head. I hear anticipatory laughter and I feel Tyler press down my shoulders. The can hisses at me upon its liberation. I helplessly watch the putrid fluid fall. It’s the color of Princess Jasmine’s skin, of baseball diamonds, of my favorite Carson McCullers book, and now it’s all the things that are my father. It feels cold as it wets my hair. And then it hits my shoulders and washes over my dress, staining it like fixer on a black and white photo.
Mitch says, see, it’s not that bad, so don’t be so difficult about it.
Megan turns around. Chris. Claire. Rachel. Laura. They all look. And they laugh, because they’re all my friends and they know I’d laugh too. Tyler laughs, puts his hands in my hair, soaks the beer into my scalp. Jake pushes him off me. I look at Zach when he says,
You know we love you. We’re just giving you a hard time.
I try to believe him, to believe that they love me and admire me but it’s hard when they all laugh at me. They make me feel I am heroic in my intellect and sobriety until they make me a joke drenched in Busch Light. Jake is drunk and he always wants to protect me. Even here, where no one will defend him, where he really doesn’t belong.
He asks Zach what he was thinking.
Zach tells him to back up.
Jake throws a punch and Zach holds his midsection with his right hand and goes at it with the left. They go at it. I pull them apart.
I whisper to Jake not to worry.
Jake takes a shot. Zach leaves. I follow Jake into the bedroom. I listen as everyone asks about the fight but forgets as Mac Miller pours through the speakers. I’m not crying but my cheeks are wet. I’m humiliated. But it’s not that serious to everyone else. They don’t mean it. He’s drunk and so angry. He gets like this, no discretion or control. He’s mad about the fight and he’s bleeding. Here it comes.
Jake, thank you. But it’s okay, Jay, I know they don’t mean it.
But they don’t get it, they don’t get what it means to you.
I love you, Jake.
I leave the party at the end of the night to check on my father. I’m relieved he’s etherized in his gin. I’m relieved he can’t smell me.
This morning at the breakfast table I cannot even look at my father. I am sickened by him. Coffee relieves me of my fatigue and relieves my father of the haze that hangs over him. We move about the kitchen silently, as if we were strangers. I ask him how much he had to drink last night. My dad’s voice becomes loud and discordant. He’s perspiring and his face is disjointed. When he holds me in his arms and illuminates as I tell a story, I think my dad loves me. He is proud of me and calls me smart and beautiful but now he disassembles my very being.
You don’t talk to me that way. I’m a grown man and I don’t need you to patronize me, do you understand?
I think you need to calm down, Dad, I say to him. I am scared of him. I am scared of this reality. The alcohol finds so many ways to make him inhuman.
I hate you, he says to me, and he looks at me when he says it. He is sure of it.
This man is not my father. He is not a man. As I turn to leave, to run, I think of Jake. He teaches me more about being a man than anyone I’ve known. Fathers teach their daughters how to love literature, how to harmonize on the piano, pitch a curveball, revere Superman and Belle and then someday Jerry Lee Lewis. My dad teaches me how to lie to my friends and my teachers about my home when they see me so pristine, so happy and uninhibited, and naïve. I’m a good learner. I call Jake to pick me up and he comes to rescue me. I leave and no one turns to say goodbye. Or I love you. Jake asks me how I’m feeling this morning, hands me a coffee, puts in a CD he thinks I’d like. He calls me beautiful.