But by now, her hostility has become my addiction, a magnetic field that pulls me in. No amount of meditation can protect me from its lure. She holds out the poisoned apple of rage and I take it, I eat because it’s her sole offering and I am so hungry. I climb onto my elliptical machine and trace circles in the air, panting, weeping in a futile effort to exorcise her demons.
“Don’t we have any Tylenol?” she stomps into the bathroom, keys jangling, pushing her arm into the sleeves of a puffy silver metallic jacket. I can almost see my warped reflection in its bright veneer.
We? I wonder silently. Last night was the first time she’d slept at our house in nearly a year. I am knitting. I mute the T.V.
“Check the top drawer,” I say. “I think there’s Motrin.”
“I can’t take Motrin,” she growls, disgusted. Am I supposed to know this? I wonder, searching my memory.
Scott walks in and hands her a plastic bottle and a glass of water.
“Thank you dad,” she flounces onto a chair, shaking two pills out of the bottle. “I hate taking pills.”
“Are you sick?” he asks.
Our quiet morning has become inexplicably chaotic, and I can see from the confusion on his face that he doesn’t understand what’s happening any better than I do. The light was glowing under her bedroom door at 3 a.m., when I went to the bathroom. She snapped it off at 8, when she emerged in a fluster to announce that she had a doctor’s appointment in an hour. A therapy appointment? Scott had asked her gently. She shook her head no as she poured the coffee, and offered no other explanation.
She swallows the pills, makes a face of pained disgust, and exhales loudly.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m just nervous about this procedure. She said it’s gonna hurt and I have a low threshold for pain.”
“Sweetie,” Scott says, sitting beside me and leaning forward towards her. “What is it? What’s going on?”
Her first semester at college has been a series of dramatic reversals, and we’ve learned to play shortstop, trying to anticipate the freak bounces. She facetimed us on a Friday night, giddy with happiness, effusive about her new friends, her classes, her job. She was so psyched to have parents who were professors, she said, and she was fighting with her mom, and she was so glad that we could really understand what she was going through. But then the texts: she broke up with Andrew; her roommate turned out to be a bitch; the food is terrible so all she can eat is apples. A long, dark phone call: earlier that afternoon, she’d stood on the curb of a busy street waiting for a bus she could step in front of, and a stranger saw what was happening and stopped her. Campus police escorted her back to her room.
Could she come spend Thanksgiving with us? Of course, we answered in unison. It was the first time she had ever asked to spend a holiday with us. This was what we had always longed for – she was choosing us for once. On the drive home, she talked nonstop – about Bernie Sanders, about Send Silence Packing, about how Andrew had said something terrible and she couldn’t ever forgive him. What do you think he said? We asked each other later, perplexed. He’d been a solid boyfriend for more than a year, always polite to us, always kind and respectful to her, a churchgoing kid, one of triplets. What did he say? Scott had asked her kindly. She wouldn’t tell.
“Well, if you must know,” she announces now, looking him straight in the eye, “I’m getting an IUD.”
I pause, smooth my forehead into practiced neutrality, and continue knitting. Her tone is a pitch. Do I swing or let it go?
“An IUD?” Scott asks. He is stalling for time.
“Yeah, dad,” she laughs. “An IUD. You know, like birth control?”
Oh, that sneering tone of voice. I count my stitches.
“And you need this right now?” Scott asks. “The day before Thanksgiving?”
“Well this was her first available appointment,” she replies. That tone again.
I think about how fragile she is, how needy, and how beautiful. I remember when she was four, three years before we had Owen, when she and I traveled together to meet Scott in Wyoming, where he’d been in residence at a month-long conference. I watched in the airport how men looked at her, her soft blonde curls and her pale blue cotton dress printed with wildflowers. Back then, she loved me. Back then, she held my hand and I looked them all straight in the eye. Not this one, you bastards.
This morning, there is no hand to hold. There is only her anger, and now it turns to glare at me.
“But I thought you and Andrew broke up,” I say, genuinely confused.
“We did,” she jangles her keys. “What does that have anything to do with it?”
“So why do you need birth control?”
“Well,” she laughed, “I am sexually active, you know.” She doesn’t say, you idiots, but it’s in there.
“OK, but why do you need birth control right now if you’re not in a relationship?”
“What do you mean?” Her question is a challenge, a gunshot. She combs her fingers through her hair, and pauses with the strands in her fingertips, scrutinizing her split ends. I remember girls like her from when I was in school, girls who acted as if their beauty was something they deserved.
“I’m just worried about you,” I say. “This has been a tough semester, and you’ve been really vulnerable. I worry that you’ll be putting yourself at risk for getting hurt in a sexual encounter that’s not part of, you know, a relationship. What’s the rush?”
The keys stop jangling. Her jacket rustles as she stands up abruptly, jamming her bag’s strap across her shoulder.
“I can’t believe you,” she glowers at me. “So, what, are you, like, saying I’m a slut? I can’t believe you’re calling me a slut.”
“Sweetie….” Scott pleads, but she is already at the door, and then she pauses, opening the door, looking back at me, shaking her head. And then she is gone.
***
It is in the summer of 2010 and she is 14, and Owen is seven, that she’s becoming disenchanted with all three of us. For several years now, she’s been choosing her own clothes. When we take a summer trip together, she brings clothes that she keeps at her mom’s house, the sort of outfits we would neither buy for her nor encourage her to buy for herself. Scott advertises this as a family vacation, but it’s not: she, Owen and I are keeping him company on a trip to St. Louis, where he’s directing in a fairly intensive academic conference. He’s staying at the Four Seasons, however, and it’s swank, so he’s invited us to join him and enjoy the room’s luxuries in his absence. In theory, it’s great; in reality, the room becomes claustrophobic. She is bored, angry, unhappy.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say. “We can explore the neighborhood.”
She changes into super short white cutoffs, so tight the front seam presses into the folds of her vulva. A cutoff t-shirt, baring her midriff and stretched across her precocious breasts.
“I’m not sure that’s a good outfit to wear here,” I say as neutrally as possible. “This is a city, things here are different.” I am remembering my own experiences with catcalls when I lived in Chicago, the unexpected ass grabs from strangers on the subway, and the realization that if I played my Walkman too loud as I walked along certain streets, I might be in danger.
She purses her lips, flings the strap of her bag across her shoulder, and huffs, wordless, to the door. Outside, she stays two steps ahead of us, so I see everything: I see the teenaged boys, who jostle and guffaw as they pass her, and I see her shoulders clip up a tick as she tightens her posture. I see the twitching around her hips as she tries to adjust her shorts as she walks, see her flip her long hair behind her in the studied gesture we know so well. And I see her hesitate, and then stiffen as the grimy pickup passes by her, raucous workmen reaching out from every window, grabbing at her, sneering, howling. Mamacita, Mamacita, Marry me, baby! Owen reaches for my hand, grips it tightly. We watch as the truck swerves through an intersection and circles around so it can pass by us again.
Heart pounding, I speed up my pace and claim the outer edge of the sidewalk, positioning myself and then Owen between her and the road.
She looks at me with disdain and walks ahead.
Kathleen Pfeiffer was named 2012 Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts. She has dedicated herself to writing and teaching narrative nonfiction and memoir. Her creative work has appeared in the The Sun Magazine (Readers Write), Bateau, and The Bear River Review. In 2018, she won the Michigan Writers Chapbook contest for her memoir Ink.
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