Lee, my mother’s mentally slow brother, standing on the one end, pelvis tilted forward, shoulders slack, arms stiff at his sides. Grandma Madge, my mother’s mother, is next to him, oozing eternal Christian goodness out her every pore. She has a pulsating cluster of fabric orchids fingering out over her lapel and there is something almost sinister to them, like an accessory The Joker might wear. Mom is next to Grandma Madge in a long blond and black peppered wig that kind of makes her look like an early cone head, from where the seam sewn at the top points into a little ^ that runs down her scalp. She wears a purple mini with one panty-hosed knee cocked like a model’s.
Then there’s Dad on the end. Standing cockeyed, throwing the camera his pissed-off, I-could-just-kill-you glare, having hoisted me up to his chest with one mighty palm and pointing his leg out away from the rest of us, like he was about to get off the exit ramp of this family any minute now. His clip-on tie hangs limp and is tucked into a wrinkled suit coat with a buckling waist button, too small to span his protruding belly, even though his pant legs hang ghostly empty.
As Dad points away from the other three, looking disgusted, Lee, on the other end, bears down into the heels of his shoes, looking constipated. I sit on the shelf of my father’s arm and beam brightness in my funeral dress, lacy bonnet and white ribbed leggings. And it is after this funeral that we do what most thinning, dysfunctional families do: move cross country to be closer to one another.
I have no other photo of my father and me until the age of nine and by then my brother Danny will have joined us, amping our total extended family count up to six. But until then, there are seven delicious years of just me and my dad.
It is 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am four years old. I have a Fisher-Price Castle and Weebles “wobble but they don’t fall down”. The plastic horses are thick and smooth and their legs move at the joints, and the castle has a dungeon where the innocent await rescue. They just don’t make toys like that anymore.
On the first day after our arrival, my father and I are dropped off in a public park while our mother drives around to scout for a place to live. Six years his senior, her 31 to his green 25 entitled her to make every choice that affected us, from where we lived to when we moved. Dad lounged in the lush grass, not a care in the world and peeled off a mound of marshmallow snowball from its wrapper to hand over to me. It was the most delicious thing I had eaten in all of my four years and we lazed in the grass, licking coconut marshmallow off our fingers; every moment stolen with my father one of pure contentment knowing he was safe with me.
In our rented crackerjack house, my days are spent parked in front of the television set in a sunken den of the Seventies, covered in wall-to-wall wine-coloured shag. Dad looks for work and Mom slumps at the dinette in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and pushing the cuticles back on her nails.
“Look, Julie, you’re father’s an ass, alright?” she’d startle when I’d catch her talking to herself. “So what if he does find work?” She blew smoke over my head from one of the emergency fags she kept stashed in the silverware drawer, “He couldn’t keep a job if his ass was on fire.”
It was a bad disposition and sheer idiocy, Mom insisted, that caused Dad to get fired. And the more he shied from her verbal assaults, the more I spread my wings to shelter him. If I could temper his mood and happiness, it seemed a small price to pay to have my father by my side. The details were never quite clear but, if there is one thing I can attest to with consistency about my father, it is that whatever misfortune happened along the way, it was never, ever his fault. Bound to see him through his own eyes, it would take me twenty odd years to trace the wreckage back to its source.
My father has the deepest dimples: craters carved into the sides of his face that when activated, all joy sprang forth and radiated outward. My father might not smile for the camera, but he lights up when he sees me. He bounds through the door at the end of the day and scoops me up and I wrap my arms around his neck, squeezing tight. He flips me upside down and swings me by my ankles, my long blond hair tumbling down. He draws my back to his chest with one arm, with me still upside down and pretends to stumble like a blind man into the living room, jutting his other hand out to feel the way. I giggle wildly as he steadies a faux fall down to the carpet, digging his fingers into my armpits until I laugh so hard I nearly wet my pants.
“Ah, baby, I love you.”
“I love you too, Daddy,” I say breathless.
He kisses my forehead. I fold his arms around me and brush the soft warm of his palms down over my eyes. I love these moments with my father more than anything.
“Sit on my feet so I can do my sit-ups, baby.”
My father calls me baby, a dizzying siren song to my ears. He lay down on his back, bends his knees. I plunk upon my father’s toes, leveraging my hands on his ankles. He curls into a sit-up and raises his feet too, lifting me like a see-saw.
“Daddddddd!” I cling to his shins for balance while he tries to buck me off.
“C’mon Baby,” he says, as he shakes me from his legs like a lemon from the tree, “You got to hold daddy’s feet down!”
I am all gums and teeth with laughter. I bear my weight on the tops of his feet, he crosses his arms on his chest and groans his first sit-up. One, two, three…four…fivvvve…sixsss…he falls back to the floor, winded.
“Six is enough for today, baby.” He wheezes and curses under his breath, “Fuckin’ Agent Orange.”
My mother slices through the corner of the living room, carrying stacks of sorted laundry. My father lies on the carpet, clutching his chest—still burning from a faraway place called ‘Nam.
“Dan, would you brush your daughter’s hair? God, it’s a rat’s nest. The brush is in my purse.”
My father blinks his Little Orphan Annie eyes and crawls over to dig through her bag. I stand between his folded knees and he brushes me from the top, pulling the bristles through my long, fine hair until it snaps in tiny knots at the end. I yelp.
“Jesus Dan, brush her from the bottom, not the top you idiot.” She grabs the brush from my father and pulls it hard through my hair, “Like this,” then slaps the handle back in his hand.
And my father blinks empty, starts over, follows orders, tries to please.
I didn’t meet another child until I was five years old and Mom finally ventured out of the house to find the neighbours. Marty is the Mexican boy from next door who is a year younger and bangs on our door at the crack of dawn; Jill is the girl across the street who is a year older and cheats openly at Hungry Hippos.
At my house we drape the blankets from the bed over the dining room table to make a fort beneath. Mom sits in the kitchen, filing her nails.
And that’s when Marty takes me into the bedroom and Jill makes me lay on my bedspread face down.
“We’re going to play doctor now,” she says in her bossy voice, “I’m the nurse and you need a shot.” She pulls my shorts down and my Tuesday underwear to the tops of my legs and Marty makes his papery fingernails into a C and pinches them closed on the skin of my bottom.
A dizzying electric current shoots down my legs and out the top of my head from the single vortex of one pinch. I lay there breathing into the pillow.
“That’s it.” Jill play-slaps my butt. “You were a good patient.”
In afternoons of deathly quiet, Mom draws the curtains to shut out the blazing Arizona sun and I play the game of Matching Pairs. I slap the cards down on the carpet and I’m good. I only have to turn them over a couple times before I remember where the exact match is. Apple to apple, orange to orange, flower to flower, I stack the matched sets one on top of the other until everything is paired. Then I shuffle them fancy like I see Mom do at solitaire and do it all over again.
An endless stream of unemployed days comes to an end and my father rushes in to grab me, cupping his big hands over my face and leading me out the door into the drive.
“Lookie,