My Father, the Mercenary
I learned that I didn’t know everything, when, late into my twelfth-grade year, an unpleasantness manifested in my underwear. I hurt in a place reserved for adult and adulterated mystery.
Crossing my legs and subtle groin-grinding in Math class didn’t stop it. Holding still created an atmosphere of calm jolted by explosions. Twice I left the Heart of Darkness unit for the bathroom, but once there, rubbing morphed the itch into a burn, a burn that still itched. Something horrible invaded me.
I went home to tell my parents.
They knew I was dating my first serious boyfriend, a guy who graduated from my high school the year before and went to college a few hours away. Had my parents met him, they would’ve been disappointed. They anticipated a rebellious boy paired with their rebellious daughter, a role that I’d unwittingly earned by being moody and contrarian but also private and social in ways that my sisters weren’t. My boyfriend was a skinny psychology major who drove an old Corolla; I’d met him the year before in Algebra 2 where he was our teacher’s favorite. As for my bad girl habits, my substance of choice was sleeplessness accrued from the late-night card games played with boys I believed to be gay.
I turned to my parents for help not because I trusted them. I was desperate. During a natural disaster, families come together, grievances forgiven. If I could overlook our family feuding, I knew my parents would. This was my earthquake, an army was destroying the hospitals and bridges of my hometown. I needed the help of a mercenary.
“There’s something wrong with me,” I told my mother. “It’s like a urinary infection except it itches horribly. I don’t know how to make it stop. It’s been two days, and it’s getting worse.”
Having spent my teenage years rebuffing her, I was now surrendering the authority I’d obtained, and she seized it. Her mouth collected itself into a pout.
“I need help,” I said.
“That sounds awful,” she said, subtle as glitter, her expression miming primness. As a life-long sufferer of yeast infections, she must have recognized the ailment immediately and assumed that I’d acquired mine in the way she explained to me years later that she usually did: from sex. In her mind, I was not the virgin she’d raised. “Does it hurt any place else?” she asked. “Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
“I’ll get you a doctor,” she said. “But first you have to talk with your father about this.”
Later that night, my malady reduced all of us. Where in the past my mom had talked up herself as sexually provocative, and my dad had backed her up gamely, tonight they gave up the ruse, believing that I mistook their attempts at being hip for permission to be promiscuous. I had gotten their message and guarded my virginity still, only now, seated on the living room sofa as three heretics in a line, it appeared I didn’t. Our personae collapsed. We were trying to figure out who to be when all our bluffs had been called.
“Your mother tells me that you’re not feeling well,” my dad said.
I tried to look nowhere. I wanted no decorative pillow or souvenir from a family vacation encumbered with the memory of that conversation. Certainly I couldn’t look at a person.
“Is this something having to do with your boyfriend?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It could be”
It seems impossible that days before questions about curfew and homework assignments felt so intrusive as to prompt fierce shouting, skipped meals, and the ambition to escape their house for as many hours as I could, but in response my father’s questions, I was subservient, cleansed of pride and privacy.
“But I’m not having sex with him, if that’s what you mean.”
With his hands as a steeple, my dad gazed down into his fingers. He took in the information I gave, his face, a gathering place of dilated pores, lengthening as though from the accumulated seriousness of raising girls, three of them. Beside him, my mother, silent and attentive, wore an expression of composed distaste.
“Maybe he touched you down there?”
Without responding, I left.
No one hollered after me, as they would have if I’d ignored an inquiry about my car or dirty dishes in the sink. By leaving, I absolved all of us from witnessing my answer, erroneous as it would have been. What we were doing together that day was forming a tableau of family, where my affliction became our shared discomfort. We were an opportunistic father trying to know his daughter’s life as he tried to fix it, redirect it, perhaps, he felt, take a last stab at saving it before he lost her to adulthood, and we were a daughter in the final stages of childhood, wanting her parents to solve the problems she didn’t know how to understand.
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