My father, with new wife and kids in tow, arrived during the English Department’s reception. I’d won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Christine was a petite little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral Laura Ashley dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.
“Cannie,” said my father, looking me up and down. “I see college cuisine’s agreed with you.”
I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. “Thanks so much,” I said. My father rolled his eyes at his new wife as if to say, Can you believe how touchy she is?
“I was just teasing you,” he said, as his new adorable children stared at me, as if I were an animal in a zoo for the oversized.
“I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony.” I didn’t mention that I’d had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I couldn’t spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of four. The administration at Princeton hadn’t yet made accomodations for those of us struggling with reconstructed families that included stepmothers, stepfathers, new half-siblings, and the like.
My father shook his head. “Won’t be necessary. We’re leaving in the morning.”
“Leaving?” I repeated. “But you’ll miss graduation!”
“We’ve got tickets to Sesame Place,” chirped his little wife, Christine.
“ Sesame Place!” repeated the little girl for emphasis.
“So Princeton was sort of on our way.”
“That’s… um… well.” And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. “Thanks for stopping by.”
My father nodded, and moved as if he was going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes – a “buck up, camper” kind of shake. “Congratulations,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.” But when he kissed me his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.
Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I’d do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I’d worked, all those drooly pieces of bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn’t see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I’d bought with some of my food-service dollars. When I loaded up the car to head out for my job interviews, I made myself a promise – I wasn’t going to be my father’s rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn’t need more unhappiness in my life.
I heard from my brother that our father had moved out West, but I didn’t ask for specifics, and nobody offered them. Ten years after the divorce he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgment that we even existed. Lucy’s graduation came and went, and when Josh sent a card announcing his, it came back returned to sender. Our father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.
“We could find him on the Internet or something,” I offered. Josh glared at me.
“Why?”
And I couldn’t think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed, the three of us, to let it be. If our father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.
And we struggled into our twenties without him. Josh overcame his fear of the slopes and spent a year and a half drifting from one ski-resort town to another, and Lucy ran off briefly to Arizona with a guy she claimed was a former professional hockey player. As evidence, she’d had him remove his bridge in the middle of dinner and show that he was missing all his teeth.
And that was that, pretty much.
I know that what had happened with my father – his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed – had hurt me. I’d encountered enough of those self-help articles in women’s magazines to know that you don’t go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met I’d watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I’d wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I’d ask myself, or do I just think he’d never leave me, the way my father did?
And where had all the care I’d taken gotten me, I wondered? I was alone. A man who’d liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn’t even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible – now that it was likely, even – that Bruce had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I’d been through because of what he’d gone through – he wouldn’t even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me – in other words, like the way my father made me feel, all over again.
SEVEN
The scales at the University of Philadelphia ’s Weight and Eating Disorders Center looked like meat carts. The platforms were about four times the size of normal scales, with railings all around them. It was hard not to feel like livestock when you climbed aboard, as I had every other week since September.
“That’s very unusual,” said Dr. K, gazing down at the red digital printout on the scale. “You lost eight pounds.”
“I can’t eat,” I said numbly.
“You mean you’re eating less,” he said.
“No, I mean every time I put something in my mouth I puke.”
He looked at me sharply, then back at the scale. The numbers were the same. “Let’s step into my office,” he suggested.
And there we were again: me in the chair, him at his desk, my ever- thickening folder spread in front of him. He was tanner than when I’d seen him last, and possibly even thinner, floating in his white laboratory coat. It had been six weeks since I’d last seen Bruce, and things were not proceeding as I’d hoped.
“Most patients gain weight before we start them on the sibu-tramine,” he said. “They have a kind of last hurrah. So, as I said, this is unusual.”
“Something happened,” I said.
He looked at me sharply. “Another article?”
“Bruce’s father died,” I said. “Bruce, my boyfriend… ex-boyfriend. His dad died last month.”
He looked down at his hands, at his folder, then, finally, up at me.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And he called me… and told me… and asked me to go to the funeral… but he wouldn’t let me stay. Wouldn’t let me stay with him. He was so awful… and it was so sad… and the rabbi said how he used to go to toy stores, and I feel so terrible…”
I blinked hard against the tears. Wordlessly, Dr. K. handed me a box of
