*Fiction — May 14, 2018
Recital
Soffie Hicks, 2010
Daddy’s late to recital, your Daddy missed the first act. Daddy had every intention of being on time, but here I am, here’s your Daddy, in the back lot of this dilapidated community theater, crookedly parked, fidgeting. Daddy sitting in the driver’s seat of his Mercury, Daddy waiting for the pills to work. Through the windshield Daddy can see the crowd exit through the doors marked for such purposes, having their intermission cigarettes, the punctual and undaunted Daddies blocking the wind so the Mommies can light up with grace and ease. The song playing on Daddy’s radio is one by Neil Diamond, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore.” Daddy should’ve brought you girls flowers, should’ve brought you strawberry milkshakes, should’ve been on time. But your Daddy gets so nervous. Your pillhead Daddy, your pillhead Daddy isn’t well.
I am late because the third of my six court-ordered Sensitivity seminars ran long. Everyone had a thing to say and it is considered especially rude to exit yourself from the building if someone is still sharing. Today’s chatterbox was Diane, who is full of more shit than she has places to get it out of. She is there by court order, too. What they are are anger management classes, but that phrase has recently fallen out of favor in the community that had once popularized it. It turned out that many who were sent to anger management were in fact managing their anger quite well—they were directing it enthusiastically to the one who had provoked it. So now it is a seminar in capital-S Sensitivity, in which we are meant to learn effective pathways to choosing thoughtful, language-based expression over physical harm. Diane is there because she has a tendency to put cigarettes out on the forearms of bartenders and sometimes she gets arrested when they put ice in her drink. I’m there for five months ago providing a concussion to a pharmacist.
In the seminars, they are big on cognitive restructuring, and talk about it as if it is simply a matter of misconnected wires—red plugged into yellow, yellow plugged into red, the human brain no more complex than stereo equipment. Instead of thinking, I have been wronged and/or provoked and the person who has wronged and/or provoked me deserves swift punishment, they want us to think, What must the person who has wronged and/or provoked me be struggling with in their own life that would cause them to act in such a way? Instead of thinking, The world is really out to get me today, they want us to think, I’m experiencing a particularly challenging afternoon, my frustration is understandable, but in what way will unmitigated anger solve any of this?
It is kind of a crock but they mean well and yet I have missed the first half of the recital, my attendance of it being one of the promises I thought I could keep, and what I feel among other things is, you guessed it, angry.
Janet and Donald wait for me by the main entrance. Janet coughs on behalf of the smokers, swats at smoke that isn’t even blowing in her direction. She says, You missed the first act, which is something I already knew, which is something she knew I knew already. You missed the first act, she says, and here’s your ticket, you’re all the way back in Row W, we’re in the front orchestra, you look terrible, say hi to Donald. Hi Donald, I say. Hi Ed how are you holding up, he says, as if I am a bridge threatening to collapse. I worry about bridges like that, bridges that move several inches in the wind, and do not enjoy driving over them any more than I enjoy being thought of as somehow like them, regardless of the validity of such a comparison. Donald is always greeting me this way and sometimes when he says it, there’s a little emphasis on the how that makes it sound as though he’s asking from a place of genuine astonishment, like he’s in awe of my not having succumbed to something yet.
Donald is the new Daddy. Donald doesn’t get nervous, doesn’t agonize, doesn’t pull out his eyelashes at red lights, doesn’t break down sobbing in grocery stores or banks or bars, though he should, he ought to. In his dreams, the world is not underwater and there is no threat of nuclear annihilation, which seems to me the height of luxury—to watch the news, see the world for the spectacularly insufficient place that it is, and not dream every night of its impending and humbling destruction. If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention read a bumper sticker on a vehicle in front of me on the way over, and I say right on to that.
Donald cured cancer, or else he came very close to doing so and was celebrated for his contributions to that field of research, I can’t remember and don’t care to. Donald is a thoracic surgeon with a passion for diction and Dostoyevsky. He loves Russian literature and he wants to take my girls and Janet to Moscow for a vacation. He uses seasons as verbs. I can’t remember the details of our custody agreement and I didn’t understand them when I signed on the dotted line. It’s true that I’ll sign any document you put in front of me out of fear that my hesitation to do so will be interpreted as unwarranted paranoia. So I have no idea how entitled I am or am not to time with my daughters, I have no idea if Janet can just withdraw them from the country for three months without my permission, but she has made clear that their Russian summer is happening whether or not I like it. Donald has already booked the airfare, and if there’s one thing Donald hates it is apparently cancellation fees. Apparently he finds them to be humanity’s greatest indignity. Oh Donald. If I had Donald’s perspective I’d spin the globe on my fucking finger, have every tiger by the tail.
I ask Janet so what did I miss during the first act and she says, About fifty-five minutes of dancing, because she has an unrelenting disdain for the person I have become that manifests itself in heartless and curt responses, not to mention the aerating of our daughters with tales of my various deficiencies and failures. She inflates them like helium balloons until they’re so high above me, out of reach of my love, mingling with all the other daughters of divorce in the tropopause.
How were the girls, I ask, and she says that the daughter that likes me swayed around the stage in a sequined blue dress and tap shoes that I did not pay for, backed by Louis Armstrong singing “I’ve Put A Spell On You,” and the daughter who doesn’t was in a piece with two other dancers which ended in an elaborate triangulation of their bodies upon prop scaffolding. If you want to see it so badly, Janet says, you can preorder a DVD recording of the program for forty-five dollars in the lobby. Of course, it’s not as good as being here, she adds, stupidly, ferociously. Donald has already signed up for his preorder and says he’s really looking forward to watching it again on his big screen TV, and I want to tell him that my TV has a big screen too when I push my recliner closer to it. I learn later that one of the younger members of the company paused in the middle of a number to vomit center stage and the other dancers were forced to sashay around the puddle, essentially ruining the routine due to pulled focus. Watch that on your big screen TV, Donald. Watch the young girl heave in high definition surround sound, you fucking excrement elitist.
Inside, they are dimming the lights to signify that the intermission has come to a close and that the second act is about to begin. The girls will be at the stage door in the back after the recital has finished, Janet says, if you have an interest in meeting with them. As if they are potential investors! Then she and Donald enter the theater and walk down the center aisle toward their seats. They love walking down aisles, Janet and Donald do. Probably they are buoyed by the feeling that they are parting a sea with their presence. They walked down an aisle here in Philadelphia six months ago, three weeks after the finalization of our divorce, and then down another aisle soon after in the California wine country, where, unsurprisingly and uninterestingly, Donald was born and well-bred and raised mostly by a Jamaican nanny. You wouldn’t believe their estate, the girls said upon their return from Napa. They have like a million miles of grapevines and these gigantic willow trees they let us climb, and eleven bathrooms in the house, in case eleven people need to pee at the same time or something. But we like your apartment, too, Daddy, my youngest, who likes me, offered. And probably it’s much easier to clean.
The usher escorts me to the twenty-third row, dotted with the occasional divorced and disappointing father. They are all checking their programs for when their kid is next to appear on the stage, in order that they know when to pay attention, when to break out the cell phones and take grainy and distant pictures they’ll never look at again. The pictures taken by their ex-wives in the front row, capturing the daughters frozen mid-air like elegant thoroughbreds, those will be the ones that get printed and framed and distributed to relatives.
Some view, is what the man next to me says. Anyone says they know which kid is theirs from this far back, you know what they’re full of.
By the infection of his voice, I know he does not mean that they are full of love.
The pills start working and after a few minutes I don’t mind my seat. I have always been afraid of front rows anyway, afraid that I will be asked to participate in some capacity that is far beyond my comfort level. Janet and I once went to a comedy club not far from this theater, where we were seated at a table no more than six inches from the stage. The comic, fresh out of one-liners, opted for crowd work. How about you sir, what do you do, he asked, pointing the microphone in my face. I was so iced over with fear in the moment that I had truly forgotten what it was that I did for a living. Finishes in three pumps, that’s what he does, Janet said, referencing the comic’s earlier joke about premature ejaculation, and the room became half-swollen with laughter and the comic high-fived Janet and not a solitary remark was exchanged between us during the cab ride home.
Janet timelines this anecdote as the middle of the end, the birth of our oldest daughter being the beginning, the birth of our youngest the end of the middle. The end itself, as I understand it, was mostly the product of continuation and increase. She could no longer suffer—an astonishing word selection on her part—she could no longer suffer sharing a bed with someone who was scared of what might be underneath it. That this was not actually a fear of mine seemed less germane than the sentiment itself. Another way she might have said it would have been, I am now through with being married to a scaredy-cat.
It’s true: I am afraid of more things than I am comforted by. A cognitive behavioralist once asked me to write down my fears, and I told her I’d deforest the Amazon with just the new things I’d thought to be afraid of in the waiting room. Tell me some, she said, and so I did. Deforestation and waiting rooms, to start. Left turns without green arrows. Strokes. Aneurysms. Situations wherein escape is difficult. Cataclysmic weather, as well as the threat of it. Dogs of aggressive breed. Public restrooms. Aches and pains that may portend grave afflictions. Domestic terrorism. Motorcycles. Driving behind, in front, or to the left or right of motorcycles. Driving in general: car wrecks, fender-benders, plucky jaywalkers, parallel parking, yellow lights that demand quick decision making, flat tires on shoulderless highways, one-way streets that are not clearly marked as such. The disappearance of vital bee populations. Bees. Flying, heights, depths, spiders. Dying, not being dead. Bacteria. Blood. Fire. Loud noises. Spectral or extraterrestrial visitations. Vomiting in public. Permanent vertigo. Sex with the lights on; dimmed, even. Communicating with the developmentally challenged, amputees, and those of exceptionally short stature. Low-flying birds. Rodents. Being burglarized. Being mugged. Being kidnapped. Being lost. Being mistakenly identified as the perpetrator of a crime I did not commit. The foreign policy of the United States. Stolen elections. That unprovable theory which claims an individual swallows several insects in their sleep over the course of a lifetime. That I am being watched, that my every bowel movement and self-inflicted orgasm has been witnessed by someone other than myself. That I will cough or sneeze during my hypothetical laser eye-correction surgery, rendering myself sightless. That my life could be far more livable if I rid myself of a certain simple variable that is and will always be unbeknownst to me. That I will get the hiccups and they will never end. That I’m an inadequate father. That my daughters will inherit my eternal unease. That I will be in an accident that makes a vegetable’s cousin of me and I will be unable to communicate my wish to please be unplugged. That I will forever feel like a held hostage in the confines of this skin, these bones. That my funeral will be poorly-attended, that the sky will spill rain heavily and unexpectedly during the burial and everyone will have forgotten their umbrellas.
And that’s just the ground floor of a building so tall that, looking out from the top floor, you’d think you could walk on the clouds like carpet.
Here’s a story.
There was a woman who saved my life when I was a child. I was visiting my paraplegic grandmother in Southern Florida and I had swallowed a crouton incorrectly in the community center during weekly bingo. I was choking, and then I wasn’t. The woman had dislodged the crouton from my throat by following the steps on the informational poster tacked to the wall. My grandmother, legless as she was, felt indebted to the woman for saving my life when she could not, and so offered her a wallet photo of myself taken upon the completion of the second grade. The woman was religious. She said she’d keep the picture in the back of her bible, where she kept photos of her grandchildren and perished pets and souls with layovers in purgatory. I would be prayed for by proxy.
Two weeks later, the woman found herself in receipt of a bullet to the temple, caught in gang crossfire that had opened up in the parking lot of her Episcopalian church. She had been holding her bible, the papers were sure to include.
Why I bring this up is because Maxine, the woman who runs this dance company, looks a lot like that woman who saved my life. She’s on stage talking about fundraising and enrollment and summer technique courses, and the whole time she’s talking I’m thinking about that crouton stuck in my throat and how it shot from my mouth like a seasoned cannonball.
All they ever do is ask you for money, the man next to me says. Never fuckin’ stops.
She looks a lot like a woman who saved my life once when I was a child, I say, and he sort of makes this funny face and pretends he didn’t hear what I said even though he did.
Whatever.
Janet told me which numbers my girls were in, but now I can’t remember, and the man next to me was right about the view. You really can’t make out one dancer from another. They’re all white and thin and flat-chested and doing the same thing in the same out t. I begin to get sleepy, but remind myself that to fall asleep here is to be a caricature realized, is to prove Janet right, so I make myself less comfortable in my seat by sitting awkwardly on my knee.
Want a swig, the man next to me asks, and he’s holding a flask.
I thought you thought I was weird, I say.
What, he says.
I’m not supposed to drink on my medications, I say. It’s discouraged.
OK, pal, he says.
The second he rescinds the offer, I decide I really would like a swig, a swig would be nice right about now, but it’s too late, I’ve missed my window. I have pity for whomever is so unfortunate as to be seated behind Donald up there in the front. He’s freakishly tall and has this big gigantic head on him. He’s the kind of tall where when he enters a room or a supermarket or a church, people tap the person they’re with and say, Check out how tall that guy is, Get a load of Frankenstein’s monster. What a nightmare it must be to be behind him. May as well be sitting in the twenty-third row. May as well pre-order the DVD in the lobby for forty-five dollars. If the person seated behind Donald is anything like me, they must be wielding an imaginary axe in their hands and chopping away at Donald’s big head like a rotten tree, felling him for obstructing their view.
I spot a girl center stage who I swear is my youngest, my Tash, but I can’t be sure. Anyway, she isn’t very good. She seems to be a beat behind all the other girls. Or else she’s a beat ahead and everyone else is behind. Who’s to say. I’d be able to tell if it was Tash if her hair wasn’t pulled tight into a bun. Tash has this crazy curly hair, who knows where she gets that from, not from me and not from her mother. It’s huge, her hair. The nights she’s at my house and she can’t fall asleep, I sit at the edge of her bed and we go through a list of things she’d like to keep in her hair if she could keep anything in there. It’s always the same short list: her older sister, Lily; her mother; their golden retriever, Julius; her bicycle; every pair of shoes, even the ones that don’t fit anymore. What about me, I always ask. Do I get to live in your hair? Sure, she’ll say. You and Mommy and Lily and Donald can always live in there together and make me french toast when I want you to.
Which one’s your kid, the man next to me asks.
I can’t tell, I say.
What’s her name, he asks.
Tash.
TASH, he yells. He’s so drunk and people are staring at us and I shrink in my seat. Sure enough, the girl in the center I thought was Tash stops, tilts her head toward the crowd, looks. She folds herself back into the music a second later, and now she’s in time with everyone else, or everyone else has caught up to her.
Yep, the man next to me says. Yep, I bet that’s her.
Because I don’t know what else to say, I ask about his daughter.
She ain’t here, he says. She fractured her tailbone last week at the park. Fell off a swing and fractured her tailbone. On my watch, of course. The ex-wife is outraged. Doctor says no dancing. Like Footloose but it’s just my Emily and her fractured tailbone.
And you came anyway? I ask.
I’m supposed to be taking notes, he says. She’s with the ex, so I’m here supposed to be taking notes about all the dances she was meant to be in. She wants to know if they’re any good without her. He takes the flask back to his lips, burps.
More routines go by and soon I can feel that the pills are wearing off. I can feel myself sliding out from under their grip, their glow.
I manage to make it to the final number, which includes the entire company. Through the speakers, “Celebration.” The girls jump off the stage, snake their way through the aisles waving streamers and tossing confetti. The house lights brighten and I look for my girls, but the whole number is overwhelming me and I’m convinced they’re going to bring me on stage, though I can’t imagine under what circumstances that’d be called for, and I’m a little dizzy and hyperaware of my heartbeat in that way I hate, and my head feels so, so heavy.
I make for the exit. I don’t say goodbye to the man next to me, though he has been for the most part very decent company.
Instead of, It’s cruel that things did not go the way I intended them to in this situation and somebody must pay for this unsatisfying outcome, they want us to think, That thing I wanted and didn’t get—what can I learn from not having gotten it?
Daddy wanted to see you girls at the stage door, Daddy wanted to say congrats, but Daddy had to run. Daddy wanted you two to hug him tight like reticulated pythons, tight like you’re dangling from a cliff’s edge, he did. Your Daddy sometimes worries about you girls dangling from a cliff’s edge, and on those nights he takes pills of every color and falls asleep in a half-empty bathtub. Daddy loved your costumes, Daddy loved the songs. Daddy’s so proud of you two, and he’s excited for you both about Moscow, about what you’ll see there. He thinks maybe Tash will bring the Kremlin back in her hair.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 4. View full issue & more.