How to Cook Your Daughter (17 page)

In fact, my mom wasn't sleeping with the doctor. But something else even more surprising had happened. Mom was pregnant.

If my mother had managed to produce a son, my parents' marriage might have lasted. Dad always had a Henry VIII-type obsession with having a boy, presumably to carry on the sacred Hendra name. I knew he was deeply disappointed when I turned out to be a girl. But my mother wasn't destined to give birth to a boy. Her pregnancy, which might have been an accident or a plan to try to save their failing marriage, ended in a life-threatening miscarriage. She was forty by this time and had an ectopic pregnancy, and she was hospitalized and treated by the glorious Dr. L. My father called her room. He said he was sorry for what had happened, but it was simply too much for him to have to visit. She understood, didn't she? After all, she knew he hated hospitals. Instead, he went to a bar.

In the months that followed, my father embarked on a new venture, a satire of the
Wall Street Journal
that followed the formula of his successful 1978 project
Not the New York Times
. He had been around even less than usual and was back to disappearing overnight or for a day or two at a time. Then one night, he appeared at my bed. It was 12:28
A.M
. At least that's the time my clock showed when I heard him. The smell of his favorite cigars mixed with a bottle or two of red wine wafted over me. Mom had long since gone to sleep. Her mood had
neither gotten worse nor better since the miscarriage. She just continued to maintain the same façade that she'd built before I was born—emotionless, contained, the antithesis of Dad.

“Jessie,” he said in a voice a bit louder than a whisper. “Get up. I need to have a chat.”

“A chat?” Part of me was relieved. He hadn't touched me in years, but I could never be sure what he was thinking.
A chat? What was this about?
“Daddy, it's the middle of the night. I have to go to school in the morning.”

“Oh screw that bunch of fascists. Come across the street to Phebe's. Have a drink with your old dad.”

It was pointless to argue. It was
always
pointless to argue with my father. He had an amazing ability to make even the most bizarre proposition sound completely normal, to turn things around so that it seemed like
you
were the one with problem. Phebe's was the local hang out on the corner of Fourth and the Bowery, and it was open late. I pulled on the jeans that were lying by my bed and smoothed out the bright red T-shirt I'd worn to sleep. Then I followed my father through the silent heat of the loft to the stairwell door. My mother didn't stir.

Dad and I went down the five flights of dusty stairs and out the front door. The streets were still humming. Club O, the S and M place downstairs, remained open, and we could still hear the ear-piercing shrieks as we passed. Kathy and I missed the primal screamers who used to use the space. They were a timid-looking crowd compared to the S-and-Mers, who wore head-to-toe black leather outfits and toted bags that were no doubt filled with whips and other sex toys.

Dad and I walked briskly toward Phebe's, my father deftly whistling Mozart's “Jupiter Symphony.” He took my hand as we crossed the Bowery and smiled as he opened the bar's door for me.

Phebe's had that sleazy dive smell—like someone had poured beer over the entire place and left it to rot. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, and large, thick men hunched over drinks at the bar. At least it was air conditioned. My father grabbed a place to sit, and as we waited for a waitress, I picked nervously at the vinyl-covered cushion. Someone had passed a weary night—perhaps waiting for a lover or a drug dealer—by burning cigarette holes all over the seat. Little patches of white foam poked through the black vinyl. I poked the foam back in as I waited to see what it was exactly that my father wanted to “chat” about. A tough-looking waitress in a Phebe's shirt finally came by.

“Hey Tony,” she said. “What you drinkin'?”

My father smiled. “Two gin and tonics.”

The waitress never hesitated. I'm not even sure she glanced at me. She just headed off to get our drinks. Dad looked across the table at me as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin cigar. He lit it and puffed, as if savoring my suspense.

“Well, Jessie,” he began, slowly. “This isn't so bad, eh? It's not so bad to be out here having a drink?”
Compared to what?
I thought.

“No, Dad, it's nice,” I said, not really meaning it. I would much rather have stayed in bed, though the air-conditioned rot at Phebe's wasn't all that bad.

“You want a puff?” He held out his cigar.

“No, thanks,” I said, avoiding his gaze and still poking at my seat.

“You want a cigarette, don't you. Disgusting things. Fucking kill you, those will.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, treasure,” he said, “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

I looked up. “What, Daddy?”

The waitress came and plunked the drinks down on the table.

“Enjoy, Tony,” she said as if I wasn't there.

My father picked up his gin and tonic and tossed out the tiny straw.

“Why do Americans put straws in everything?”

“I don't know, Daddy.” Now I was nervous.

“Fucking everything. Straws in fucking everything.”

Tell me, Dad!
I felt like screaming.

“Anyway, treasure, I wanted to tell you first.”

What? Tell me. Just tell me already
.

He took a swig of his drink.

“I've met someone, a really lovely woman, and I am going to live with her.” There…. there it was. I couldn't believe it. “I think everyone will be much happier if I move out of the loft.” I barely heard the last part.

“What about Ma?”

“Jessie, listen, your mother and I have not been happy together for years.”

Your mother!
So she had already stopped being his wife, already stopped being Judy. Now she was
Your Mother
—my responsibility.

“We were never happy. A big mistake, the whole thing.” He could've been talking about a bad first date, he seemed so casual. “We never should have gotten married in the first place.”

No wonder he never went to see her in the hospital. He really
had
stopped caring for her
. I sat there silently, head bowed, picking at the vinyl, harder, faster.

“Well?” I looked up. Part of me felt like crying, but I didn't. “Come on, Jessie. I wanted to tell you because I want you to understand why
I'm doing this. I thought a long time about this. About telling you. And now you're just going to pull this silent teenage bullshit?”

My father took a deep pull on his cigar and turned away.

“I just…it's just that I don't know what to say.” I poked at the cushion some more. “I guess I'm just surprised. I mean…I guess I'm just surprised.”

“Well I was hoping you'd be
happy
for me. I thought if anyone could understand why I'm doing this, it would be you. I can't talk to your sister. No one can. She's too busy becoming a Republican.”

He wants me to give this my endorsement? That's what he wants. He wants to not feel guilty.

“Dad, I'm just surprised. I mean….”
I need to get out of here, to get away from him, from this conversation.
“Maybe you're right, but I don't know…maybe it is better this way but….”

“Absolutely it is.” As always, he seized on the part of the conversation that suited his agenda. “And believe me, it's better for your mother too.”

He drank again and drew on his cigar. I looked around the room.

“I want you to meet my friend, Jessie.”

His friend
? I dropped my head and winced.

“I really want you to meet her,” he went on, oblivious. “She knows how special you are to me, and she wants to meet you too.”
Special?
“Maybe Saturday night. You could meet her then. There's a party Saturday night. Meet her then.”

Not a question. More like a command. I sat there silently, sensing his eyes as I stared down at the carved-up table in front of me. I felt my seat for the cigarette holes and poked at them. “Jessica,” he said finally, “
say
something.”

I thought of what this woman might look like. Dark? Blonde? Tall? Short? Then I imagined talking to her: “Nice to meet you.”
Would I say that? Would I really say that? Or maybe I'd say,
“I understand from my father that you guys are lovers.”
Then I'd have to come home to my mother. How could I face her?
I saw her as she had been only hours ago, reading on the brown sectional, unaware of what was about to happen. All the nineteenth-century novels in the world could not protect her from the reality that was about to hit.

“Daddy, I can't,” I said finally. “I have some stuff planned for this weekend.” It was the best I could come up with. I should've known better than to try to fool Tony Hendra.

“Don't tell me you have some fucking band you have to see.” He launched into me without a moment's hesitation. “Some bunch of out-of-work morons.”

“No, but I promised some friends…” I kept on.

“Jesus Christ, Jessie. This is a little more important than spending the night smoking cigarettes with a bunch of screaming idiots.”

I looked down at my father's hand as it lay on the table. He was drumming his fingers on the fake wood. I remembered how much I had loved my father's hands. How much I had admired the way his fingers tapped and rolled. When I was little, his hands had seemed so big, with long fingers, bulky knuckles, and round finger nails that caught tiny pieces of dirt beneath them if my father had been out digging in the garden. If he had been writing in his office all day, his fingers smelled of cigars.

As I watched my father drum on the grimy table of Phebe's, I did what I had always done with Daddy. I gave in. “Okay, Daddy. Okay,” I said quietly. “I'll come Saturday night.”

“Good, great. It's all set then. Great.”

He reached over the table and took my hand in his. I held it weakly, uncertainly.

“Come sit over here, love. Come sit next to your old dad.”

Slowly I moved around the table and sat down next to him.

“I have some coke,” he told me. “Do you want some?” My father reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny tinfoil square. “Go on. Go into the bathroom and have a little snort. It'll do you good.”

“No thanks, Dad.”

“Just a little snort won't do you any harm.” He looked me in the eyes. “Just stay away from heroin. Don't
ever
do heroin. And listen, if you want drugs, get them from me. It's not the drugs that kill you; it's what they mix them with. I know where to get pure stuff. Keep this. You might want it some time.” He put the coke in my hand. It was my father's version of Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” speech.

“Okay, Dad.” I stuffed the tinfoil in my pocket, and we sat there silently for a moment, me defeated and confused, him puffing his cigar, sipping his drink, and thinking no doubt of his new life ahead. Then he turned to me. “I love you, Jessie. Trust me. Things are going to work out just fine.” I didn't answer, but I wondered:
For whom?

When we got back to the loft, I said goodnight to my father and crept up to my bed. I sobbed into my pillow until I fell asleep. Women's faces filled my dreams. The next morning I avoided my mother and left to get on the subway to school before my father was awake. I never made it to school that day. In fact, I never left the subway until well past three. I rode it from Astor Place to the Bronx and back again, lurching and swaying as the subway hurled itself up and down Manhattan. When I finally got off the No. 6 train around 3:30
P.M
., I left the untouched tinfoil packet of coke on a seat.

I still didn't want to go home. I couldn't face my mother, knowing
what I knew. The thought made me want to scream. So I found a pay phone and tried calling Krisztina. No answer. Then Jessica. Her mother told me she was over at our friend Marla's house and gave me the number. I asked Marla if I could come over. I didn't need to say more than “I don't want to go home right now.” All of us understood not wanting to see our parents.

Marla and her mother lived in the meat-packing district on Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue. In open doorways on the way there, I could see cow carcasses hanging on hooks. The entire neighborhood smelled of steer blood or at least it seemed that way, considering that pools of it rested in the gutters.

When I walked up to Marla's loft, her mom was out, and she and Jessica were rolling a long Jamaican-style hash spliff. It was a delicate process that I found therapeutic, the sort of distraction that seemed better than any high. Besides, I only pretended to smoke it. I didn't want to appear uncool in front of two girls who I admired so much. I had been at Marla's an hour or two, chatting, rolling spliffs, and listening to Prince Buster when the phone rang. It was my father. How he tracked me down I don't know, considering no one was ever able to find him.

“Why aren't you home, Jessie? I told you, you were
not
to go out tonight.”

“I'm sorry. I forgot.” I didn't feel like telling him the truth.

“You need to come home. This is unacceptable. You cannot abuse all of us like this. You are so incredibly self-involved that you never think about how you are abandoning our family!” This from the man who told me the night before he was leaving my mother for another woman?

For a moment I considered shouting that I would
not
be coming
home, then or ever! That even if he stood outside Marla's door, I would tell my friends to bolt it. Or I'd hide in Marla's loft bed and stay there until I was ready to go, which would be never! He would have to tear me kicking and screaming from my safe haven of the blood-filled meat-packing district. But as usual, I said nothing of the sort.