Tom Lake(11)

But we are in the full glory of summer now—-the windows open, the room bright, and still these daughters, twenty--four and twenty--two, sleep on.

“You promised your father,” I say, because that’s what gets them.

“Take Hazel out, please,” Maisie says into her pillow.

When I go to lift the little dog from under her arm, Hazel shows me her teeth, even though she doesn’t mean it. She, too, yearns for a day in bed. I carry her because her front leg doesn’t work on stairs. I put her out the kitchen door and she squats beside my pot of geraniums then trots away.

Emily had been fourteen when she first informed me Peter Duke was her father. She’d been slamming around the house for weeks, her head bent beneath the weight of her interior darkness. When I asked what was wrong she said nothing in the same voice one would say go fuck yourself.

Where was everyone? It was early March and the snow was blowing sideways while I sat next to the fireplace with a pile of mending. Sometimes I wondered if the girls bit the buttons off their shirts just to give me something to do. I put my hands in my lap. “Where did you get that idea?”

Her eyes opened up as if she were finally fully awake. “You don’t even deny it.”

“Of course I deny it. I just wonder what could have made you think it.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Emily, it’s not true.”

“How would you even know?”

I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair. Emily was genuinely frightening, and at the same time I wanted to laugh for the sheer lunacy of it all. Fear and laughter: the two worst reactions in the absence of logic. “I would know because I would have been there.”

“But you’d lie about it. You lie about everything.”

A pause for reflection read as guilt, but the accusation was so strange I was having a hard time being nimble. “What did I lie about?”

“Knowing. Him.” Plunge--plunge, like an ice pick.

“I never lied about that.”

“Well, you never talk about it.”

“That isn’t the same thing as lying.”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because there’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Emily, I’m not lying to you.”

“Just give me his phone number.”

“I don’t have Duke’s phone number.”

“Of course you do! You just want to keep me from him. He has the right to know he has a daughter.”

How many daughters must Duke have out there in the world? One wondered. “Your father has a daughter,” I said. “Your father has three daughters. With me. Your mother.” I went on to say that she should consider the feelings of her father who had conceived her, loved her and raised her, before setting out to construct a new origin story.

“Don’t say conceived.” She put her hands over her ears to block my voice retroactively. “That’s disgusting.”

“Think about this for a minute.”

“I can find him myself.” She was crying now and trying hard to stop.

I stood to go to her, my daughter who was losing her mind.

“Sit down!” She was screaming.

“Just tell me what’s happened.”

“I don’t belong here! Maisie and Nell belong here, you and Daddy belong here, but I do not belong in northern fucking Michigan. I’m supposed to be with Duke.”

Fire leapt off her, like the fire in the fireplace spitting and cracking behind me. The snow came down and covered the fields. I wanted to take my sweater off, wrap her up. I wanted to roll her around until the fire was out. “Honey, I knew Duke for one summer, years and years before you were born. I didn’t know him very well then, and now I don’t know him at all. He’s not your father.”

“Then what about my hair? How can you explain that?” Screaming.

Joe must have driven Nell to dance class. That’s where they were. Maybe Maisie had gone along for the ride. The girls loved to be in the car when it was snowing. “Your hair?”

“Tell me I don’t have Duke’s hair.” She held a hank of it up for me to see, dark and heavy and straight. I’d never had the thought before but her magnificent head of hair was not wholly dissimilar to Duke’s.

“Your hair is beautiful and it’s yours, not Duke’s. Nothing in our lives belongs to Duke.”

This scene goes on forever but I’ll stop it here, the details best forgotten. Emily’s belief that she should be living in Malibu with the movie star she deemed to be her father came over her like a fever. For days and even weeks it would recede, only to flare again at the times we were most vulnerable. She was telling me how sick she was of us, that she hated being a teenager, hated her body, didn’t want to be stuck on a cherry orchard, that she had bigger ideas of the world. But she didn’t have words for any of that, not even words she could say to herself. She could only experience the wracking pain of her circumstances, inflict it on us, and then demand that Duke was that pain’s only solution. We all became so sick of it I considered tracking down Duke’s brother Sebastian so that Duke could send her some sort of document of liberation, a headshot signed, “To Emily, I am not your father. Love, Peter Duke.”