Friday, November 9, 2012

Daddy's Girl

"Do you want me to powder you?" he'd ask every time I stepped out of the bath or shower, a towel wrapped around me three and a half times, which was half as many times as the number of years I had been alive.  He'd look at me when he asked, but I always felt like it wasn't his eyes that were looking, but his lips peeking out from the dark curls of his beard, his teeth.

I didn't want him to touch me.  Yet denying him the ritual felt treasonous.  I was his daughter, and I loved him.  I was his daughter, and I owed him for that.  "Do you want me to powder you?" he asked, and the water droplets that had been running down my neck and back slowed as the seconds stretched between us like Silly Putty.  The longer I stood there, hesitating under his gaze, the more clearly he could see me for what I was.

I always said yes.  And when I did, his eyes would brighten to a bachelor's button blue and a container of baby powder would appear in his hand like a rabbit pulled from a magician's hat.  He'd pat the carpet and have me spread my towel and lie down.

Then I'd close my eyes and disappear into the same darkness where rabbits in hats quiver in wait for a hand.  

* * * * *

He'd call me baby.  But not the same way other parents would say it.  Not like how a mother caressing her daughter's cheek might whisper: my sweet girl, my precious, my angel, my baby.  I wasn't his baby like a daddy's girl is, like a daughter is--a downy duckling, a pretty princess.

Carol Babe-ah, he'd say, the first A as long as his favorite kind of legs, the second A as short as I was.  Babe-ah, because he thought I was a babe, because according to him my legs, which spread on a towel formed the letter A, were "hot," which was the temperature of his breath on my skin as the powder fell like fairy dust across my shoulder blades.  He called me by the name on my birth certificate, the name he and my mother had picked out, the name that complemented my twin sister's, the name I would respond to, and he gave me a second one that no one else got to take part in, babe-ah, he called me, Carol Babe-ah, because I was still the age he liked best, because I was still small enough to fit in his hand.

* * * * *

"Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Babe-ah Carol Rose," he sings--the refrain to the song he wrote for me when I was a kid--his voice spinning now around the wheels of one of the many cassette tapes he used to make me.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, you keep me on my toes!"  My godfather, Pat, plunks black and white keys on a piano, like everything is that simple.  "When they made your name the national flower," my dad's voice rises, "you knew you were the girl of the hour." The piano sings.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Baby Carol Rose."  He didn't make my sister a song.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah..." He didn't make my brother a song.  "Baby Carol Rose."  And nobody thought this strange.

"Oh babe-ah babe-ah," his voice never leaves my head.  "You water with a hose."  It wasn't like his tapes were private. "When your garden starts sprouting..." The photos he took of me in the bubble bath weren't private either.  "...you begin with your shouting!"  Everyone could see me, but they weren't looking through his lens.  Everyone could hear the song, but they couldn't hear the truth.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Baby Carol Rose!" They never tired of telling me how much my father loved me.

* * * * *

Raspberry: a fruit, a color, a father's lips humming against his three-year-old's belly, his beard a Brillo pad polishing the places he'd wash and powder later when his lips had tired of trilling and his mouth had finished pulsing and the spot of spit he'd left around her center had been wiped away, though what remained--the memory of his hot breath drumming against her navel--could not be so easily erased.

* * * * *

The negatives exist in plastic containers full of glossy black and white scenes.  Held up to the light, they expose the poses he requested.  Little girls jumping.  Little girls laughing.  Little girls twirling their hair with the tips of their tiny fingers.  Little girls in short dresses, in bikinis, in camisoles slipping off their shoulders.  He called himself a photographer, an artist with a camera, and he mixed in some mountains and trees for good measure, and hardly anyone complained.  Certainly not his daughter, straddling a large piece of driftwood or spread across a sandy beach, her tight little body sure and strong as a long A, her eyes sparkling like the sea, his voice pushing her into position, his lens trained on her, always.

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