With My Father

My father heard it through the gossip mill and not from me, and he wasn’t happy about it. When asked, I told the truth. He was silent, and I forgot about it … until the day that I was driving home from school and saw my father driving away with Daniel in his front seat. The boy was white-faced and obviously terrified. My father, always a joker with other people, wore a strange mask of cold rage. My first feeling was terror, then common sense took over and I had the presence of mind to let my adolescent self-centeredness take over. I was embarrassed by my dad. The next day at school, I walked in, expecting the torment to begin. I mean really, whose dad fights her battles for her when she’s seventeen? And yet, everyone was strangely silent. Daniel kept his distance.

For weeks I tiptoed through the halls of my school and waited for the backlash. Nothing. I later heard, through tense reenactments done in Dirty Harry whispers that my father said this to Daniel, “You pull a trick like that again and I’ll make you disappear. I was a cop for twenty years and I know exactly what to do and where to hide a body. You so much as drive on the same road as her … I’ll make it happen. We clear?”

I’m certain that most people would gasp in horror at my father’s switch to the dark side, but I was secretly thrilled. The idea that my dad would kill somebody to protect me was the first time that I realized he cared enough to bring danger upon himself. From all of this, one might gain some insight into my peccadilloes with men. First off, I’m a commitment-phobe, and not just a minor one. I can’t wear my wedding ring; it gives me a rash, and I’m not speaking in metaphor. Marriage is the hardest work I’ve known. It’s not just the effort of restraining my wandering eyes, but the endless drudgery of trying to define myself in a relationship. Commitment makes me feel ugly, bored, and ultimately … unloved. And in my past, I sabotaged relationship after relationship because I really didn’t know how to just “be” with a man. I knew how to exist amongst women, and how to live on my own. But men … they were very, very tricky for me.

I know that for years I found myself crazy over men who were almost entirely incapable of loving me.