If someone had taken a snapshot
of that evening it would look something like this: You standing in
your father’s eat-in kitchen, your hair an angry snarl. A bottle of
Johnny Walker Black Label tilted up in to your mouth. Your eyes half
closed, your body leaning too far to the left. In the darkness behind
you, your father’s distorted face looming like a disembodied entity,
wearing contempt like a tribal mask.
You don’t enter into an
evening like that wanting to alienate the father you haven’t seen
in four years, yet somehow you do.
You follow him into his apartment
that night as simple as he does when he unlocks the door for you.
Both of you blushing with good intentions, your hearts convulsing
with hope. He introduces you to his new wife, who embraces you and
pulls you in to her yellow tinted hair although you’ve never met.
She smiles at you with her eyes and the three of you are thinking
the evening could work.
Dinner is uneventful; all of you eating
chicken and rice, smiling across the table at each other, talking
less than you want to. They’re asking you about school and your new
weekend job, about what you want to do when you graduate. All you
can do is grin and nod, shrug and chew, because school sucks, you
hate your job, and you don’t know what you’ll do when you graduate.
Sitting at the table with your father and his wife smiling at
you, wanting to like you but not knowing how, you want to cry.
The
first sip of whiskey comes just after the meal, like a 50 proof dessert.
Dad pulls the bottle from his brass mini bar, pouring himself and
the wife a couple of finger-fulls over ice, “just to loosen up a bit.”
And you wrinkle your nose at it, like you doubt relaxation can be
poured into a blue tumbler. Then maybe to justify it, they say, “really,
it’s good, have a sip.” So you do. It scalds going down like something
flammable, and when you exhale you’re certain you’re spitting flames.
You all have a good laugh then at the way your face contorted when
you swallowed, at the way you shivered in your seat, and everyone
feels light. Still that taste lingers like an old betrayal.
Since
you’re spending the night, they announce they’re taking you to a friend’s
Christmas Party across town. Your dad’s known this guy for decades.
Although his name is unfamiliar to you, he convinces you this guy
was there at your birth. “Would have been your godfather too, if I
had my way.”
So you go to this house overflowing with people,
salsa music rebounding from the cloud cover, the booming rhythm coming
from inside your navel somewhere. You don’t know anyone and the potential
godfather you’re finally introduced to loses interest in the novelty
of your father having an almost grown daughter as soon as your name
leaves his lips. So they walk off together, mingle, toss back a few
beers and you’re left to flounder in the crowds, to try and stay above
the tangled elbows and swaying bodies pressed together in the sunken
living room.
At some point your stepmother finds you sitting
alone on the back patio. She brings you a Coke and sits down next
to you in one of the padded rattan chairs.
“Kind of boring when
you don’t know anyone,” she offers.
You nod, take your Coke from
her and shrug. Even though you look like you’re drinking your soda,
you’re really just eyeing her drink, watching the way she sips it
through her teeth, the way her jaw tightens when she swallows. She
seems looser already than when you arrived. When she returns a greeting
to a party-goer every movement is fluid, every word and nod natural.
“Can
I have one of those?” you ask her, smiling crookedly like you don’t
expect her to agree.
Except she looks around, then leans toward
you, whispering loud enough to be heard over the music.
“I’ll
tell you what, I’ll slip just a little into your soda, OK, but you’ve
got to promise not to tell your dad.”
You nod your head and draw
a cross over where your heart should be, then pretend you’re zipping
your lips closed and throwing out the key like you used to do in the
third grade. She wants to be your friend, wants to be the cool step-mom.
Who are you to deny her that privilege?
Five minutes later she’s
back on the patio, another plastic cup in her fist, filled with a
more caustic version of your earlier Coke. That first taste you take
is horrible, like lighter fluid laced with sugar to make it go down
easier. So you chug it, swallow it down fast like refrigerated cough
medicine and wait for the burn afterward. Your step-mother is watching
you with her eyes wide, her own drink frozen mid way between the table
and her lips.
“Another, please.”
She starts to say no
but something in your stare convinces her otherwise. She brings you
two more spiked cokes before she realizes you are not going to be
walking out of this party. You don’t know why she does it. Maybe the
cocktails she’s drinking cloud her own judgment, maybe she believes
you when you say you feel fine, maybe she just doesn’t know any better.
They decide to drive you back to your dad’s only after someone
anonymously tips him off that you’re shit-faced. This only after you
fall over on your way to the toilet, where your stepmother has to
help you off with your button fly jeans so you don’t pee yourself.
Within just a few hours of your first visit with your father
in four years you are more drunk than you’ve ever been in your life,
swaying and stumbling, pulling off your knit sweater and tee shirt
as you collapse on his sofa on your way in the door. The furniture
in their living room is Pepto-Bismol-pink imitation leather and you
start to laugh. Even though your father is bellowing loud enough to
make the walls tremble, even though his new wife is wailing in the
kitchen, you can’t seem to grasp the severity of what’s happened because
you’re too focused on the sofa being the color of diarrhea medicine.
More whiskey, you think, that’ll help. So you crawl your way
to the mini-bar because your proximity to the floor keeps the room
from spinning, then you scale the dinner table just to get on the
same height as the whiskey bottle that you’re thinking will be your
new best friend. You grab for it and miss it, then grab it again,
and put your mouth over the pour spout wedged into the neck. You take
several large gulps before it’s wrenched from your hands by the scowling
man who is your dad.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
And
you say, “Drinking some whiskey,” because you are.
His face is
getting red, darkening like an eclipsed moon, and he starts talking,
“I don’t know how your mother is raising you, but I’m not putting
up with this crap from a fifteen-year-old little shit.”
The poor
sap. He was never much for self examination, never one for insights.
He busied himself instead with the work of his hands, focusing his
energy on the physical; the callusing of fingers, the sharp sting
of sunburned skin, the beading of sweat accumulating beneath the brim
of his cap. When you come along, drunk and shouting, hurtling accusations
like deadly punctures, injuring deeper than nerve endings, inevitably
bloodying yourself in the process, he just can’t protect himself.
He never understood his mistake until it was too late. Suddenly everything
you’d ever wanted to say to your father and a few things that never
actually occurred to you come tumbling out in a toxic slur.
“You
can’t even say anything about it because you’re never there. EVER.
I know you don’t even give her money for child support or anything.
And you don’t even know how my mom is raising me because you don’t
know me not even a little bit, you just remember some stupid little
girl that’s not even real anymore. I don’t even know why I’m here
tonight, you just show up whenever you feel like it and then think
I’m just going to listen to you because you’re my father except you
never even act like it.”
It comes out something like that, a
long indecipherable string between your step-mother’s sobbing “stop-it”-s
and your father’s roaring “shut-up”-s.
Still you continue.
“Mom
told me you never even wanted to have a girl. I know all about that.
I didn’t forget you never call me on my birthday and you never even
get me a Christmas present. You can’t even get mad at me ‘cause you
gave me the first drink and she gave me the rest of them and I didn’t
know any of those stupid people at that stupid house and you just
left me there by myself. I don’t even know you a little bit, you’re
just some man, not even a dad and I…”
Then suddenly the room
isn’t just spinning, it’s pitching and tilting like it’s trying to
buck you. Even when you close your eyes the motion doesn’t stop. It’s
like an invisible riptide tugging and pulling at your legs, drawing
you under the surface, stealing you out to sea. Then you throw up
on your dad’s linoleum floor.
That’s where the evening ends for
you, where the curtains are drawn and the act closes. They put you
to bed later, after you’ve emptied your stomach in to your stepmother’s
mop bucket.
When you wake up at
You won’t see your dad for another four years. Even
then it will be your stepmother that calls you, to invite you to their
house to introduce you to your half-sister, to attend the third birthday
party of a child you’ve never met.
When you finally look into
his eyes again, you know he will always see you as that fifteen-year-old
girl. Dizzy with whiskey, bubbling over with fury, fingering that
old rejection like a ragged wound. He’ll think you will always be
that volatile, that full to the brim with anger. He’ll think there’s
no repairing you, and rather than examine the roots of your damage,
he’ll choose to abandon you to the past, daughter or not.
Author’s Bio: Ms. Alonso is a stay-at-home mother of three and a native of Miami. She strives to find time to write between loads of laundry and her children's pleas for attention. Her work has appeared online at susurrusmagazine.com, verbsap.com, and upcoming on Word Riot.
