Loving Day by Mat Johnson

explained.”
    “I can’t dance, sorry.”
    “Maybe it skips a generation. God, school. He told you to tell me to go back to school, didn’t he? He told you to tell me to get back in high school, finish up and go to a good college. That’s why he’s doing this to me, because it’s easy to get into college for blacks. Don’t they get scholarships or something? That’s what this is about.”
    My daughter is a racist, I think. I adjust that to, My daughter is mildly racist. My daughter is casually racist, I settle on. She’s casually racist. “You dropped out of high school?”
    “I’m an artist too. I’m a dancer. I’m going to dance school anyway, so I just need my GED and an audition piece. Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m going nuts in his apartment. You’ve met Irv; you have to see what he’s like. I’m going to graduate, like, any minute. I’m almost eighteen. I want to get out of the house now. Tell him to let me go, and I’ll leave you alone. You can go back to not being a dad.” I want to protest this, but my mind doesn’t have the words my mouth needs, so I choke on nothing for a bit till I raise my water glass.
    “I’ll take the year off, backpack in Europe, take some classes, just build my repertoire,” she keeps going. “That’s what matters. Ol’ Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m sure as hell not going back to Kadima Hebrew Academy. Look at you. Look at me. I don’t even know if I’m even Jewish anymore.”
    “You’re definitely still Jewish.” Where is her old man? I ask myself, then realize this is the same question Irving Karp has been asking himself of me for seventeen years.
    “Oh right. The whole Jewish Vagina Clause. I guess that fact hasn’t changed.” When she says “Jewish vagina” I think of her mother’s literal one before I can catch myself. I’m so damn light, my blushing looks like the igniting of a funeral pyre. She sees this, and then her face goes red as well.
    “I didn’t know about you until a week ago, okay? Irv saw that you were coming to town, finally decided to tell me. I didn’t know you were a black till today.”
    “Okay, look, it’s not ‘a black.’ It’s never ‘a black,’ okay? Just ‘black.’ Or African American.”
    “You don’t look very African, but whatever.” My newfound daughter rolls her eyes at me, twirls her straw. “God, I guess I’m going to have to start using hot sauce on all my food now.”
    “No, you don’t. You can’t possibly believe that,” I say, kind of laughing, hoping she’ll start laughing with me. She doesn’t. “Hey, I didn’t know you existed at all. But I’m glad, okay? I’m really glad,” I tell her. I just say it. I don’t say it because I mean it. But when I hear it out there I can tell it’s true. Hey look, Becks, I’m finally a father. My own father’s gone, Becks is so gone, but here is new family. Seventeen, but new to me.
    “I saw your illustration, online. Some of it’s okay.” Tal shrugs. I want to tell her about her other grandfather, about my father, about how she just missed him, but don’t. I want to tell her that my mother died when I was young, too, but it’s morbid. Instead, I find myself saying, “You should go back to school. Your grandfather is right about that.” It’s a safe thing, an easy thing to latch onto, probably the only fatherly advice I’m qualified to give.
    “I am so not going back to Kadima. I don’t fit in there. I never fit in there. I never fit in anywhere. Especially not now.”
    “Then you’ll go somewhere you do. It’s important. I’ll help you. Let me do that for you. For your future. Whatever you decide to doonce you get your diploma, that’s up to you. But you need to have the choices available to make—”
    “You want to help me, want me to go back to school? Want us to be daughter and daddy? Fine. Just get me the hell out of here, and you got a deal. Take me back to Wales with you, that would be awesome. I could go to