get a scholarship to college. But maybe it bothers her.
“If that’s true,” I ask carefully, “does the minority part bother you?”
She clinches the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I’ve never thought about what I am. I have Negro blood, don’t I?”
“Some,” I say.
“Is that a big deal?”
Sarah runs her right hand through her curly ebony hair.
She surprised me by getting it cut short before Governor’s School. Her haircut shows her ears and looks good. For fifty bucks it ought to. I wanted to choke her when she told me how much she had spent. But it was her own money. She got a job in the spring at Brad’s Health Shoppe as a checker bagger.
“Dad, there’s a camp I want to go to as soon as Governor’s School is out. It’s just a week. It’s sponsored by the Arkansas Conference of Christians and Jews. A lot of my friends from Governor’s School are going.”
I study my daughter’s profile. Her light-brown skin makes me wonder how much African blood actually flowed in her mother’s veins. Rosa said she thought her great-grandmother had been brought to Cartagena as a slave. I have never told Sarah, nor, to my knowledge, did Rosa.
“Where do you fit in?” I ask, knowing this is going to lead to religion. We might as well cover the waterfront while we’re on the big questions.
Sarah bites at a fingernail on her left hand. I notice for the first time her nails are not painted. What has happened? Be fore Governor’s School she wouldn’t leave the house unless they practically glowed in the dark.
“Thanks to you,” she says irritably, “I’m not sure.”
Shit. Guilt begins to seep into the car like carbon mon oxide. I look out the window at fields of soybeans and think back to Rosa’s agonizing death. If that was a part of some body’s divine plan, spare me the other details. If I’d been smart, I would have made Sarah attend Mass, and by now she would have been sick of it and quit. Most kids do. I did especially after being made to go off to a Catholic boarding school.
“You can go to Mass any time you like. It’s not like they have it just once a year,” I say defensively.
“They let people who are atheists go to Camp Anytown,” my daughter says.
“You don’t have to be religious.”
An atheist! That sounds so lonely. Sarah has been the sort of kid who hasn’t demanded that kind of clarity from life.
Events have turned on a narrow radius of school, boys, and friends. ” So you don’t believe God even exists?” I say, making certain she knows I’m taking her seriously. One false note from me, and the radio will come on. The radio! The absence of her music is surely a measure of the weightiness of this conversation.
“So you’re a deist?” she asks, turning on the blinker to pass a truck.
I haven’t really thought about this subject for ten minutes since I left Subiaco, but a deist sounds safe enough. God minding His business; humans minding ours. Let Being Be!
“Sort of, I guess. Thomas Jefferson was a deist,” I say, wanting to put myself in good company.
Sarah smiles at my old trick of clothing myself with authority.
“I think deism is a cop-out,” she says finally, taking a wide swing around a mud-caked moving van in front of us.
“What’s the point of believing anything if all you’re going to believe is that God created the world?”
8
That sounds like a good week’s work to me, but I dare not make fun. Her expression is suddenly too grim. The truth is, if I have to put a name to it, deism is probably about all I can manage, and if I can believe what I read, science may be about to debunk that, too. Just because I don’t understand electricity doesn’t mean I’m not an ardent believer in it. And when some night Clan Rather, wearing his most pompous expression, announces that some scientist has discovered how the universe began, I’ll believe that, too.
“After your mother died the way she did,” I say truthfully, ‘religion hasn’t been an easy subject.”
For the first time since she has been driving, Sarah turns and looks at me full in the face. Her eyes are flashing as if she is angry.
“That’s what I thought, but you never talk about her dying.”
I feel irritated by this interrogation. What is there to say?
It was horrible, but tragedy happens to most people sooner or later. That’s the only consolation I know, and it’s not much.
“I thought it would be upsetting to us both, and all the talking in the world won’t bring her back.”
Her face is in profile again.
“I’m really sorry for you,” she says, her voice a whisper.
“I know how much you loved her. I think some of the things you’ve done just means you haven’t gotten over her.”
How patronizing! I feel my jaw tighten as I think of how to put her in her place. What does she know about what I do? I’m not so bad. The arrogance of children is amazing.
She goes off three weeks and comes back Socrates. If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then, all I’ve got to say is, sometimes the examined life isn’t so hot either. What does she know about life? Yet, I know what this is about. After Rosa’s death, I went a little crazy and brought to the house some of the godawful est women. Just thinking about some of them makes my face itch. It wasn’t until I met Rainey that I began to calm down.
“It’seasy to be perfect when you’re seventeen,” I tell her, making my voice as snide as I can. “But even you, Sarah, may develop a few warts before your life is done.”
Sarah doesn’t speak, but I can see her lower lip beginning to tremble. Hooray for the old man! He hasn’t seen the best person in his life in nearly a month, and ten minutes later he has humiliated her.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, trying unsuccessfully not to cry. Noisily, she sniffs moisture back into her throat and begins to choke, so intent she is on trying to remain poised.
It is no use; my snottiness has broken a dam.
I find tissues in the glove compartment and hand them to her. Why can’t I keep my mouth shut? Is my self- esteem so low that I need to attack my child? She is crying so hard I’m
afraid we will wreck. I resist grabbing the wheel. I can see the headlines: IRATE FATHER CAUSES CRASH, KILLS TEN.
“I’m such a bastard,” I say loudly over her honking.
“I ought to be put to sleep.” I pat her shoulder. It feels papery thin, as easy to crush as her ego.
She laughs at my hyperbole and chokes again. Fortunately 1-40 is clear as we wobble back and forth across the intersected line like a pair of drunken ice skaters.
“I’m sorry,” I say, needing instant forgiveness.
“It’s okay,” she says, wiping her eyes with her knuckles.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
The truth is that neither of us can stand for the other one to be mad for even a minute. We want to please each other too much. We’d make a great teacher and student but in some ways are a poor father and daughter. We worry about each other’s feelings too much to be honest with each other for longer than fifteen seconds. This mutual protectiveness is presumably a result of Rosa’s death: the rare moment of candor I squelch. Suck it up and be a man for once, I think miserably.
“I tell myself I don’t talk about your mother to protect you,” I say, “but it is me I want to spare. I hate to admit how many good times I had with her, because I can’t imagine even coming close to being that happy again.”
“Oh, Dad,” Sarah says, now crying for me instead of herself.
I feel myself close to tears and wonder if I ‘m romanticizing Rosa. Perhaps, in some ways I am. She had a fiery temper, and occasionally she could be obstinate as a Colombian burro. But when we were in sync, it was bliss. She was pure emotion, alive in a way few people are, even for one minute of the day. Too, there is no way I
