“Sure,” I said, feeling a pang for Sam’s Morning Glory. There was no place like it out here. “That would be great.” I heard Maxi’s car in the garage. “Hey, I’ve kind of got to run…”
“No problem,” he said. “Call me any time.”
I hung up the phone smiling. I wondered how old he was, really. I wondered if he liked me as more than a patient, as more than just another one of the big girls shuttling in and out of his office, each with her own tale of heartache. And I decided that I’d like to see him again.
The next morning Maxi proposed another trip.
“I still can’t believe that you have a plastic surgeon,” I grumbled, heaving myself into the low-slung little car, thinking that only in this city, at this moment in time, would a twenty-seven-year-old actress with perfect features keep a plastic surgeon on retainer.
“Necessary evil,” Maxi said crisply, powering past several lesser vehicles and zooming into the fast lane.
The surgeon’s office was a study in gray and mauve, all cool marble floors and glossy walls and even glossier receptionists. Maxi pulled off her oversized sunglasses and had a quiet talk with the woman behind the desk while I strolled, examining the poster-sized photographs of the doctors that lined the wall, wondering which one would have the pleasure of plumping up Maxi’s lips and erasing the invisible lines around her eyes. Dr. Fisher was a Ken doll-looking blond. Dr. Rhodes was a brunette with arched eyebrows who looked about my age, but probably wasn’t. Dr. Tasker was the jovial Santa Claus of the bunch— minus, of course, the roly-poly cheeks and double chin. And Dr. Shapiro…
I stood there, frozen, staring up at the larger-than-life picture of my father. He was thinner, and he’d shaved off his beard, but it was unquestionably him.
Maxi strolled over, her heels clicking on the floor. When she saw the look on my face, she grabbed my elbow and led me to a chair. “Cannie, what is it? Is it the baby?”
I tottered back to the wall on legs that felt like lengths of ossified wood, and pointed. “That’s my dad.”
Maxi stared at the picture, then at me. “You didn’t know he was out here?” she asked. I shook my head.
“What should we do?”
I nodded toward the door and started walking as fast as I could. “Leave.”
“So that’s what’s become of him,” I said. Maxi and Nifkin and I were out on the deck, drinking raspberry iced tea. “Liposuction in L.A.” I worked my tongue around it, trying the concept on for size. “Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, doesn’t it?”
Maxi looked away. I felt sorry for her. She’d never seen me this upset, and she didn’t have any idea of how to help me. And I didn’t know what to tell her.
“Sit tight,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m going to go for a walk.”
I walked down by the water, passed the rollerbladers in bikinis, the volleyball games, the screaming, Popsicle-sticky kids. I passed the vendors on stilts, the piercing parlors, and the four-pairs-for-ten-dollars sock vendors, and the dreadlocked teenagers sitting on park benches, playing their guitars, and homeless people in layers and layers of clothes, splayed like corpses underneath the palm trees.
As I walked I tried to lay things out in front of me, to organize them, like they were pictures at an exhibition, framed and hung on a gallery wall.
I pictured my family as it had once been— the five of us on the lawn at Rosh Hashanah, posing in our best clothes: my father with his beard neatly trimmed and his hands on my shoulder; me with my hair twisted back in barrettes, the barest buds of breasts pushing at the front of my sweater, both of us smiling.
I pictured us all five years later: my father gone; me, fat and sullen and scared; my mother, frantic; my brother, miserable; and Lucy with her Mohawk and her piercings and late-night telephone callers.
More pictures: my college graduation. My mother and Tanya, their arms around each other’s shoulders, at their softball league championship game. Josh, six feet tall and thin and solemn, carving a turkey at Thanksgiving. Years of holidays, the four of us arrayed around the dining room table, my mother at the head and my brother opposite her, various boyfriends and girlfriends showing up, fading out, all of us trying hard to look like there was nothing missing there.
I moved on. There I was, standing proudly in front of my first apartment, holding a copy of my first newspaper story, pointing at the headline “Budget Debate Postponed.” Me and my first boyfriend. Me and my college sweetheart. Me and Bruce in the ocean, laughing at the camera, squinting in the sun. Bruce at a Grateful Dead concert, in a hackey-sack circle, one foot extending in mid-kick, a beer in his hand and his hair flowing loose over his shoulders. Then I made myself step back and move on.
I stood and let the ocean cool my feet and felt… nothing. Or maybe it was the end of love that I was feeling, the cool empty place that’s left inside you where all that heat and pain and passion used to be, the slick of wet sand after the tide finally rolls back out.
Okay, I thought. Here you are. You Are Here. And you move forward because that’s the way it works; that’s the only place you can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that’s the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn’t give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.
Maxi was sitting on the deck where I’d left her, waiting.
“We need to go shopping,” I said.
She rose quickly to her feet. “Where?” she asked. “For what?”
I laughed, and heard the tears inside of it, and wondered if she could hear them, too. “I need to buy myself a wedding ring.”
SEVENTEEN
The receptionist at my father’s office didn’t seem at all perturbed at the long pause before I told her why I was calling.
I had a scar, I finally explained, and I wanted Dr. Shapiro to have a look at it. I gave Maxi’s cell phone number as my own and gave Lois Lane as my name, and the receptionist didn’t sound the least bit curious. She just gave me a ten A.M. appointment for Friday and warned me that the traffic could be brutal.
So on Friday morning I started out early. My hair was freshly trimmed (Garth had obliged, even though it had only been four weeks, not six). And on my left hand I wore not only the plain gold band I’d imagined but a diamond of such breathtaking enormity, such improbable size, that I could barely keep my eyes on the road.
Maxi had brought it home from the set, promising that no one would miss it, and that it would be just the thing to announce to my father in general and the world at large that I’d arrived.
“But let me ask you,” she began that morning, over buttermilk waffles and peach and ginger tea. “Why do you want your father to think you’re married?”
I stood up and opened the curtains, looking out at the water. “I don’t know, really. I don’t even know if I’ll wear the rings when I go see him.”
“You must have thought about it,” said Maxi. “You think about everything.”
I looked at the rings on my fingers. “I guess it’s that he said nobody would ever love me, that nobody would ever want me. And I feel like if I see him, and I’m pregnant and I’m not married… it’ll be like he was right.”
Maxi looked at me as if this were the saddest thing she’d ever heard. “But you know that’s not true, right?” she asked. “You know how many people love you.”
I drew a shaky breath. “Oh, sure,” I said. “It’s just… with this… it’s hard to be reasonable.” I looked at her. “It’s family, you know? Who was ever reasonable about family? I just… I want to know why he did what he did. I want to at least be able to ask the question.”
“He might not have answers,” Maxi told me. “Or, if he does, they might not be the ones you want to hear.”
“I just want to hear something,” I said raggedly. “I just feel like… I mean, you only get two parents, and my mom’s…” I gave a vague, general wave of my hand to indicate lesbianism and an inappropriate life partner. My finger flashed in the sunlight. “I just feel like I have to try.”
The nurse who led me into the cubicle had breasts as symmetrical and rounded as twin halved cantaloupes. She handed me a plush terrycloth robe and a clipboard full of forms to fill out. “Doctor will be with you shortly,” she said, clicking on a high-powered light and shining it on my face, where I’d invented a scar. “Huh,” she said, scrutinizing the scar. “That hardly looks like anything.”
“It’s deep, though,” I said. “I can see it in pictures. It shows up there.”
She nodded as if this made perfect sense to her and backed out of the room.
I sat on a beige armchair, making up lies to put on the forms and wishing that I had a scar— some physical sign to show the world— to show him— what I’d been through, and what I’d survived. Twenty minutes later, there was a brisk knock at the door, and my father walked in.
“So what brings you here today, Ms. Lane?” he asked, his eyes on my chart. I sat quietly, saying nothing. After a moment, he looked up. There was an irritated expression on his face, a stop-wasting-my-time look that I recognized from my childhood. He stared at me for a minute with nothing registering on his face but more annoyance. Then he saw.
“Cannie?”
I nodded. “Hello.”
“My God, what…” My father, a man with an insult for every occasion, was for once gratifyingly speechless. “What are you doing here?”
“I made an appointment,” I said.
He winced, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose— another pose I’d remembered well. It usually presaged a temper tantrum, anger of some sort.
“You just disappeared,” I said. He started shaking his head and opened his mouth, but I wasn’t about to let him start without saying my piece. “None of us knew where you were. How could you do that? How could you just walk out on all of us like that?” He said nothing… just stared at me— through me— as if I were any hysterical patient, shrieking that her thighs still felt lumpy or her left nipple was higher than her right one. “Don’t you care about us? Don’t you have a heart? Or is that a stupid question to ask someone who sucks cellulite out of thighs for a living?”
My father glared at me. “You don’t need to be condescending.”
“No, what I needed was a father,” I said. I hadn’t realized how angry, how furious at him I was until I’d seen him, standing there in his crisp white doctor’s coat, his manicured fingernails, his tan, and his heavy gold watch.
He sighed, as if the conversation bored him; as if I bored him, too. “Why are you here?”
“I didn’t come here looking for you, if that’s what you’re asking. A friend of mine had an appointment, and I came with her. I saw your picture,” I continued. “Not very smart, you know? For someone trying to stay undercover”
“I’m not trying to stay undercover,” he said irascibly. “That’s nonsense. Did your mother tell you that?”
“Then how come none of us know where you are?”
“You wouldn’t have cared if you did,” he muttered, picking up the clipboard he’d come in with.
I was so flabbergasted, he actually had his hand on the doorknob before I could think of what to say. “Are you crazy? Of course we would have cared. You’re our father”
He put his glasses back on. I could see his eyes behind them, a weak, watery brown. “And you’re all grown up now. All of you are.”
“You think just because we’re older it doesn’t matter what you did to us? You think needing your parents in your life is something you outgrow, like training wheels or a high chair?”
He raised himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, and gathered the cloak of authority, of Doctor-ness, around him as palpably as if he’d been pulling on a heavy winter coat. “I think,” he said, speaking slowly and precisely, “that lots of people are disappointed by the lives that they wind up with.”
“And that’s what you want to be to us? A disappointment?”
He sighed. “I can’t help you, Cannie. I don’t know what you want, but I can tell you this— I’ve got nothing to give you. Any of you.”
“We don’t want your money”
He looked at me almost kindly. “I’m not talking about money.”
“Why?” I asked him. My voice was cracking. “Why have kids and leave them? That’s the part I don’t understand. What did we do…” I gulped. “What did any of us do that was so awful that you never wanted to see us again?” I knew, even as I was saying the words, even as I was thinking them, that it was ridiculous. I knew that no child could be that bad, that wrong, that ugly, could be anything to cause a parent to leave. I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren’t to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.
Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is different than feeling it in your heart. And I knew at that moment that Maxi had been right. Whatever my father could say, whatever answer he could provide, whatever excuse he could muster, it wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t ever be enough.
I stared at him. I waited for him to ask me something, to ask what had become of me: Where did I live, and what did I do, and whom had I decided to spend my life with? Instead he looked at me again, shook his head once, and turned toward the door.
“Hey!” I said.
He turned to look at me, and my throat closed up. What did I want to tell him? Nothing. I wanted him to ask me things: how are you, who are you, what’s happened to you, who have you become. I stared at him, and he said nothing— just walked away.
I couldn’t help myself. I reached for him, for some sign, for something, as he was walking out the door. I felt my fingertips graze the back of that crisp white coat. He never stopped walking. He never even slowed down.
When I came back, I put the rings in their little velvet box. I washed the makeup off my face and the gel out of my hair. Then I called Samantha.
“You won’t believe it,” I began.
“Probably not,” she said. “So tell me.”
And I did. “He didn’t ask me a single question,” I told her at the end. “He didn’t want to know what I was doing out here, or what I was doing with my life. I don’t even think he noticed I was pregnant. He just didn’t care.”