“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.”
Joe took all of this better than I did, but what else was new? Joe took everything better than I did. Emily seemed able to treat him as her father while at the same time endlessly declaring that someone else was her father. She wanted them both. Two fathers and no mother would have been the dream. To some extent, Joe blamed himself for the whole situation. And to a lesser extent, I blamed him, because it had been Joe who unleashed Duke on our girls. I certainly had no intention of telling them I dated a movie star for a summer in my twenties before he was a movie star.
Had it been before or after we took the kitchen wall out to make a family room that Joe told the girls about Duke? It must have been after. Emily must have been twelve, which would mean that Maisie and Nell were more or less ten and eight. Maybe it was Christmastime. I know it was winter. Maisie had dug The Popcorn King out of what we referred to as the movie basket. They had seen it who knew how many times before and that’s exactly what made the experience appealing to them, the repetition, the pleasure of anticipating what came next. They chimed in on the best lines, No BUTTER? and cracked themselves up. Winters were so long, and we leaned into the movie basket and the books on the low shelves beneath the window to save us. Yes, this was definitely after the expansion because I remember standing at the wide white sink doing dishes while the three girls braided their hair into a single fat rope. Their conversation consisted of one of them telling the other two to hold still, and then another one complaining the others were pulling and would mess everything up. The movie’s soundtrack became their soundtrack, the insistent violins that lagged half a beat behind Duke’s feathery alto. Mostly his voice was lost to the water running in the sink and the girls’ laughing, though every now and then I heard him sing the word Popcorn! quite distinctly. He’d done a lot of family movies after the cop show, after the astronaut movie, before he reinvented himself as a Very Serious Actor, though the popcorn movie was already old on the night of this particular viewing, and he was already a Very Serious Actor. We’d lost the cardboard sleeve to the VHS tape. This was the only one of the family movies in which he’d been made to sing and dance, and while he didn’t do either of those things naturally, the immensity of his charisma provided sufficient cover.
I knew the movie as well as the girls did. I knew that we were at the scene where he was dancing on a floor covered in unpopped kernels, dancing and sliding, arms windmilling wildly, nearly falling and never falling, his perfect physicality overwhelming in its abandon. I used to watch that scene and wonder how many times they’d made him dance on popcorn. How many days did they ask him to do it again so that there would be enough footage to splice the number together? On that night I struggled to scrub a crust of lasagna off the bottom of a pan. Baked--on, burnt--on mess. What was that a commercial for? Some tool meant to free me from labor. I did not turn around to watch him in his bowler hat and pearl--gray suit. I was staring out the window above the sink. I did not turn towards his voice, nor, had I been facing in the direction of the television set, would I have turned away. Duke had been famous for as many years as we had been apart. Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before. We coexisted peacefully, Duke and I, or I coexisted.
Into this scene of braiding and scrubbing and movie and dancing came my husband, stamping the snow from his boots. He stood behind the couch where our three girls were firmly tethered together as one daughter, Nell facing the television and Maisie and Emily each facing out to the side, the backs of their heads touching. They were thrilled by what they had accomplished, the end of the braid secured by a rubber band. Joe stood and watched the screen with them for a minute. The kernels beneath Duke’s feet were just starting to pop and he scooped up handfuls and flung them into the air like snow. That was when Joe said, “You know your mother used to date him.”