pillow, shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I want to talk about this shrink.”
It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.
When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.
This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”
I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.
Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.
When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.
First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”
I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”
“Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.
He shakes his head no.
He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.
Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing
Flashdance
clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”
“I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.
But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.
He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”
He took picture after picture.
But the film came back from the camera store blank.
“I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos
It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.
When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.
This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”
I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.
Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.
When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.
First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”
I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”
“Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.
He shakes his head no.
He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.
Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing
Flashdance
clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”
“I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.
But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.
He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”
He took picture after picture.
But the film came back from the camera store blank.
“I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos
Similar Books
