I am my father's daughter. It is an accusation on my mother's lips and a mockery on my father's; it is also true. Because I cannot touch him as I can my mother, because we have walls and the silences that mark not speechlessness but overflowing speech repressed by some imagined instinct, restraint a second nature between us, so unlike the love I hold for my mother, which is petulant and rash: because of our distance, self-imposed, not the gift or curse of any unrepentant god - I am my father's daughter; I mimic him, I reach for him, I tread clumsily where he has trod, my footprints so much smaller than his, so much the sooner washed away. Imprints in the sand, perhaps. Even so.
And where I have grown away from him by inches, tendrils of my expanding mind recoiling from whatever straight and narrow path he represents, there the silences breed, delineated by our irresolute conclusions and laughter too late or laughter too early.
The ballot on the tablecloth, stark and white against the grubby fabric. He is not voting, in this year that everyone says is the year that matters, when something teeters on the precipice of Change and Inertia, when no one is willing to say which is the abyss and which the sky, brother firmament so rudely split from brother by some dividing line and two hundred-odd electoral votes. I think to myself that I know where gravity's pull ought to fall, I think to myself that I could give a name to the deeps if I would, but he is not voting, so in this house I say nothing.
"Who should I fill in for your President elect, then? You can't just leave it blank, have you no patriotic spirit?"
"It got flattened."
"Roadkill patriotic spirit?"
"Are you discriminating against the roadkill potential of patriotic spirits?"
"Who, me? Never."
"Right then. Put something down in the 'OTHER' box."
"Sure you don't want to vote for those nice ladies in the green party? Wossname and wossname, you know."
"Ah no."
"If you insist. I've put you down for Havelock Vetinari, vice president Rufus Drumknott," I say, naming fictions for our choice-not-choice, imagined names and words.
He laughs at me. He is washing dishes, his back to me, framed in brilliance against the window and the afternoon sun. I have already read the rest of the ballot, and I am aware already that in a few minutes I am going to, on something I will tell myself is an impulse, ask him a question of a different sort.
"I wonder if they bother looking the names up in their Social Security files, even."
"If they do, I'm going to pin it all on you."
"Thanks, Dad. Thanks a lot."
"You're welcome, dear."
It's like a game, or a dance, except my partner is an enigma; he might not know that he's playing, or he might know it a hell of a lot better than I do.
"Proposition one. Look, a train!"
"Oh dear."
"I say yes."
"You were always a little unhealthily fond of them."
"Choo-choo, choo-choo! Only this one is fancy and modern-like, so, you know, not."
"Well done."
I go through them, he listens with half an ear, arms elbow-deep in soap suds. There is no gravity to it, a girl and her father in the kitchen together, playing at politics, at being good citizens, though he is by nature a cynic and I am by nature loyal, in my lazy, arrogant, unkind way. Loyal indeed.
"Number huit!"
"Is that what they teach you in French these days? Because I don't think the spittle is supposed to fly across the room."
"Shut up, you."
"Yes? Well?"
Even the linoleum is laughing at me. Of course he knew the game, the waltz all the while, and now he stands there and pretends, because he is gentler than I, and better at this not-quite-deceit.
"Amendment to the constitution banning gay marriage."
"Mm."
"Is it just me, or were the ads for this really stupid?"
"Remember, they were targeting people like Aunt Julie."
"That's not a very nice thing to say about your own sister."
"Emotional reactions, I meant." He waves a hand as if it is nothing, that first, visceral response. And he is right, but sometimes I wish I do not believe him as I do. "People who make their judgments based on gut feelings."
"Yeah."
"And you have to admit that the 'they'll teach it in schools' was a clever tactic."
"I guess."
The desire to speak, to ask, is in my throat, fluttering in my mouth like a trapped bird. I imagine choking on feathers, I imagine tiny clawed feet scraping my tongue, and I want more than anything to say it. Such a petty matter, someone else's problem, but here I am.
"What are you going to put?"
It comes out misshapen, of course. I knew it would, and if my metaphor were alive I would spit out blood right now, where my voice has been shredded by talons. But the metaphor is dead and the question hanging deformed in the air. So I wait. The water is still running, the incessant scrub of wire on plate goes on.
"Yes." He says it without inflection. I don't move, I don't slump or even exhale much. I put a little tick-mark in the box for him. I have never been so exquisitely and entirely a coward before, it seems, drawing a slow, agonizing X with the prosaic ballpoint pen, its grip sweatier in my hand then it was. And I say nothing more for thirty unremarkable seconds, and then I go on reading aloud, not as if nothing has happened but as if something has happened and it is right and good and proper. The words come out perfectly, just as the question did not, and I wonder whether that steadiness that is the sigil of courage in stories will damn me when the time comes, mark me as low, base, treacherous.
Maybe it should have ended there. But I dreamed of causes that were not mine, that I had acquired like dog hair sticking to wool.
I could have asked then, and I could have asked any moment after. My father is not a forbidding man. He likes questions. And he needs only a little pressing to give insidious answers that by some strange osmosis radiate up through my bones and twist whatever corner of my thought hangs loose, unravels until how can I but see it his way? He is brilliant, after all, and the most thoughtful person I have ever known; if there were others to compare I did not care enough to discover it, and it is a doubtful prospect. I did not ask because I believed that he would answer, honest and careful and precise, his rhetoric neither showy nor overwrought but as stark as the ballot against an equally dim backdrop, white as bone, crisp and terrifying.
One can't live like that. There is a reason they have years like this one, for balancing, where tension shivers along the endless timeline and we all walk the tightrope for a little while (except for the man who didn't vote, who smiles and speaks softly in my ears); the reason is the end, the ultimatum, the relief of drawing boundaries, telling ourselves that the moment to Make History is over now or now.
I slept uneasily. I waited.
*
11:49 by his car's too-fast clock, 11:06 by mine. I am tired, the car lights barely pierce the fog, and we have passed the half-hour drive in a hush of lethargy. The radio would be on, but it was crackling ominously, and so there is nothing to listen to but my own borrowed thoughts.
"So."
"So?"
"Why did you vote yes? On proposition eight?”
No metaphors scraping my palate this time, no poetry, not even a taste of coppery blood. He has his own.
“A rose by any other name,” he says softly, “would smell as sweet. But why betray the word? What's in that name, marriage, that we must make it other than it's been for millennia?”
“You'd take away their rights to keep the word the same?” I say.
“What rights are these? The right to love? The right to tax breaks?”
“The right to have your love recognized by everybody else.”
“What kind of love should it be?”
I fumble at that. “Romantic.”
“Any romantic love? A one-night stand, is that a kind of marriage? A love shared by four people rather than two? We could just turn marriage into a vague huge pool of relationships. And sure the kids would be confused and it'd be like starting out from scratch, but it's equality."
I'm telling it wrong. He does not say these things as I present it, there is no sardonicness about him, he is too subtle for that, his voice too calm, assured. He is not disparaging anyone, he is reasonable, rational, a fortress, and fortresses do not bother with assaults. But I know no other way. The answers escape me, my mouth is empty and sore, lips dry, tongue swollen.
"What do you mean, the kids would be confused? I didn't understand that in the ads, either. What, you really think that kids are going to come home and say 'Princesses kiss princesses, mummy!'?"
I, on the other hand, speak exactly as I record it, shrill, too desperate too soon.
"It must become a part of the culture as much as the laws. You said it yourself. The right to acceptance is the right on the line, nothing more, nothing less. And there'd be other additions. Keep pushing that line, right? Until the black and white standards are diluted to solid grey. Until marriage is just 'human intimacy'."
"Yes! Is there anything wrong with that?"
But the idea makes me sick inside. I love words, and I can see now, a future, one of many, that would kill this word, kill this concept that it took us so many millenia to craft.
"I don't know. Is there?"
There is more to it than that, more soft-spoken disquieting probably-truths. I don't want to write it. There is no resolution, only uncertainty, the terrifying emptiness, my righteous indignant stance at his blindness, his prejudice, ruined with the words. The car rolls into our driveway, we are home and I am scared out of my mind, not by the silly phantoms I am accustomed to but by worse. I stumble out, stumble up, close the door quietly behind me when I duck under the lintel. I feel like crying: not for however many nice, unjustly oppressed people he is supposed to be slandering, the ones he hasn't mentioned at all, but for myself, for the fact that I am beaten hollow, even though there are surely arguments clamoring still to be employed. Probably I am crying, a little, undignified, childish and red and strangled with it. He doesn't mention it, being kind, when he comes in after me.
“There isn't anything wrong with it,” I say at last, and in saying it I succumb: I choose to lie my way free.
“With what?”
“Changing the word. Changing the language for civil rights.”
Lying. Better than the alternative, and at least the suspense is done with. In a way. He doesn't smile, his clean-shaven oval face so gleaming and immaculate a mask, even where it is lined with ephemeral emotion. He gazes at me, perfectly serious, and so old, so knowing, so aware of the lie.
“Fair enough,” he says. “Are you going to bed?”
“Yes. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Our little joke. So much unsaid. And perhaps I should cherish this divergence from him, this reclamation of some self-respect and confidence in my own words, not mere parroting of what I have read. Even if his ideas, his wrong wrong right, have permeated my bones. At least they have not permeated my eyes.
But what I cherish is the dreamless sleep that follows in short order. I cherish oblivion. It is, after all, an easy thing to love.
(The next morning we act like people in a story, as if it never happened, and that is a relief, too. Resolution in the old, old silence.)
Taking into consideration the length of the piece, I’m just going to do a simple line by line to point out any mistakes. I’ll warn you, I’m not the greatest spotter of grammar problems, but as far as sentence style and structure go, I should be able to help and advise.
