Unforgiving Uglies, Tending To

By Kennedy Burke

Jesse likes it when I call him daddy. I had tried it in a text and he reacted positively. “You can call me that anytime you want, just so you know.” He knows to reassure me. He knows that the texture of the word rubbed against my tongue creates friction, like a sickle probe on a tooth, scrape, scrape, scraping away plaque. The sight of it on the phone screen feels less frightening; it requires less autonomy. I try to imagine him imagining me saying it, saying it at him, saying it to him, and I can’t. I can’t picture my face when the word spews out, can’t picture my intention.

            “Daddy, can you lick my pussy, please?”

            “Can you please lick my pussy, Daddy?”

There is no longer space for the word—no space within me. There is no space for the word nor for what it represents. What does it represent? Was there ever a space for it? There must have been, for when it was drained, emptied, left barren, I felt it. I feel it still—the space within me. The space you created, placed there, carved out of me. The space for daddy.

“Words do not look like the things they designate,” says Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

I ask myself now what “daddy” represents. I wonder what it looks like. 

You know.

I named you.

I do not wish to reclaim the representation of you. Daddy. I do not wish to reassert my right to use the word, to attach its meaning elsewhere. If I reclaim your name, your role, your existence as it relates to me, you will disappear; Daddy will disappear. You will die; Daddy will die.

I do not want Daddy to die.

If words do not look like the things they designate, if “daddy” does not look like you, then what is the point in reclaiming the word? It is a misdirected allotment of power. A coping mechanism. I do not wish to cope—to reclaim a term. I wish to reclaim you. I wish to reassert my right to be fathered by you.

~

You had to be high to be a husband to my mother and a father to me, that’s what you told me at the coffee shop on the corner. My finger outlined the tabletop’s engraved chess board. My move, I thought to myself. I nodded assuringly. “I understand,” I said. But I didn’t understand. You had started using the day Clodagh was born, you explained, insisting on overseeing Mom’s Percocet intake after an unanticipated c-section. You had given her enough to ease the pain, you assured me. Then you moved on to Granny’s hospice patients, reading to them on Thursday evenings, making a deal with morality as you raided their medicine cabinets. They died and Granny retired and you mourned.

            Then, you got yourself a Vicodin prescription. You had told them you were having severe back pain. You got yourself a Ritalin prescription. You had told them you could not focus. You took Mom’s Vicodin after she had her tummy tuck surgery. “She knew about that one,” you explained. It was for your back. You took my prescribed Oxy after I had my wisdom teeth removed. We hung out watching movies all day, do you remember?

We each had a morning chore. Mine was to pack the lunches, Mom’s was to vacuum and tidy, Rylee’s was to get herself out the door, and yours was to wake up the chickens and put Rylee’s fat capsule into the egg cup on the counter. Since the age of five, she had been medicated for ADHD due to uncontrollable temper tantrums. She would rip out her hair if told to sit at the dinner table. Or slice her skin with a plastic clothespin if asked to get out of the cupboard under the sink. Mom was big on solving things with a pill—and it worked, until it didn’t. Rylee would wash it down with juice before walking out the door and to the bus stop. She was eight years old when you moved on to her medication, watching her swallow an empty capsule morning after morning, year after year after year. Her grades suffered and her behavior worsened. She sat at the front of the school bus, strapped to a car seat. Her rabid face was the first each child would see upon boarding. She squirmed, she screamed, on the ride to school and on the ride home. She bit me, she wept into me, standing at the clothesline and snuggling on the bottom bunk.

It’s been eight years, and still, I struggle to let you go. You released me within two months. As time goes on and I revisit this tale, I have come to wonder if I have spent more time trying to understand your perspective than you have. Your ease in justifying your actions and adopting a new, polished life leads me to believe that this is so. You’ve found a new god, a new wife, and a new set of children, all the while adopting a self-assured apathy towards me. And I am tired of pretending that the narrative is fresh and I am tired of pretending that it bears fruit, when in fact, it is rotting inside of me. It has been rotting since you left—festering and refusing to die. I am tired of reframing the narrative, of reframing you, to show that you are a monster and to show that I love you.

~

We had never known a man who commanded the kitchen like you. As a child, you came to know the kitchen as a place of tradition, and you were eager to share it with us. Homemade guacamole, batches of chex-mix, loaves of sourdough, broccoli cheddar soup: your mind was a book of recipes, and we marveled at it. The numerous tiny tasks were thrilling. Cracking the egg, pinching the salt, kneading the dough. Suddenly, we had a bag of flour in the cupboard and checkered tea-towels over our shoulders. A loaf of sourdough on the scratched-up cutting board signified a completed home, a settled family. We had become a part of the tradition.

You were put on this earth to meet my mother and to be a father to me and my sister, you had explained when introduced to us in the church foyer. This, I did not question. We were no longer a family of girls. The Little Women had welcomed their Laurie into the attic. You might not have wanted to dress-up as a pirate or drag us through the rooms in a laundry basket, you might not have made farting noises with your armpit, and you might not have made farting noises with your mouth, but you were made to save us, to be Mom’s husband, and to be our daddy.

~

The white bulbs hanging thirty feet above me distract from the stained glass windows and I am all too aware of their projected spotlights. The place and its inhabitants mirror one another. Well-curated, decorated, perfectly Southern, perfectly Baptist. Their reflections are constantly under scrutiny, examined for the pimple that distracts from a much-desired beauty. Outfits are complimented with words and criticized with looks and the panic felt in my chest after the screaming match in the truck-ride into town metamorphosizes into manic politeness and now I am a ray of sunshine, aren’t I, such a good girl, such a good girl, did such a wonderful job in the Christmas play last month, American Idol’s next best itellyouwhat, good girl, such a sweet young lady.

            I follow Mom who follows you to the front pew and dread when the congregation grows quiet and the lights grow louder. We fill half of the pew, largest to smallest, nuclear and tamed, and I, the oldest child, am wedged between the adults and the children. I have a woman’s body and a child’s age, stuck and sealed with a smile. Your arm is around Mom who crosses her legs and looks ahead, dressed in black as per usual, preemptively mourning, always at a funeral. The panic that had hidden behind handshakes and natter returns to my chest, only now it’s more urgent, more angry, angry at me for concealing it, for not giving it its moment, its movement, its breath, two, three, four, out, two, three, four. I try it, try breathing, and wonder if Mom can feel me struggle.

            I had met you just outside of that very room, in the foyer that led into the sanctuary. You were tall, handsome, had an inviting way about yourself, a way that was different.

            “This is Seth,” Mom said. “Seth and I are dating and he knows that dating me means dating all of us, so he wanted to meet you girls.”

            I don’t remember you stooping down to shake my hand or looking at me in particular. My younger sister and I came as a pair, and she warranted more attention, running around in circles and communicating with her expressive brown eyes. I made myself known by inviting you to my ninth birthday party: “a sleepover at our house. On Vine Street. We share the house with Jason. He’s on the right side and we’re on the left. He’s deaf but he lets me hang out with him sometimes. He won’t be at the party though. Only my friends from school who are all girls, so you’ll be the only boy there.”

You came to the party. I caught you kissing my mother’s neck when we snuck downstairs, hours after bedtime. I don’t remember if you saw us and I don’t remember if you stopped, but I dreamt the other night that you held eye contact with me while sinking your teeth into her neck. Your eyes were bulging and were far from kind.

My friends and I quietly made tuna fish sandwiches, giggling with disgust at the grown-up romance in the air. I couldn’t stop smiling, equating your affection for Mom with a promise of commitment to the three of us. 

~

Mom was twenty-one when she had me, and didn’t pretend otherwise. When she dropped me off at my first day of Kindergarten, she wore a black leather jacket and low-rise skinny jeans. Her thick black hair was untamed, styled into a shag, and her sunglasses were so large they covered half of her cheeks. I cried of embarrassment when I returned home from school. “Why do you have to dress like a rockstar?” I pleaded. “Why can’t you just wear an alphabet dress like Beverley’s mom?” I remember noticing that people looked at her more than they looked at me, and I was supposed to be fucking adorable.

She has always been hot. Her petite face accentuates her berry-blue eyes, just as her slim waist highlights her curvaceous hips. Despite being raised between Birmingham and the west of Ireland, her accent is chirpy and elegant, molded by years of elocution lessons. She is filled with contradictions in a way that is endearing, and I believe many find this about her. With a crude sense of humor, she will brazenly humble a father who might ask her out after taking his kid to see her puppet show. She will smoke a pack of American spirits after teaching an aerobics class, and she will insist on getting matching tattoos, but refuse to offer comfort while the needle pulls the skin.

~

In her memoir The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes about being a stepparent, reflecting on how her understanding of the term has shifted now that she identifies with it. “When you are a stepparent,” she states, “no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there's precious little you can do about it…” You had no need to worry about such ambivalence. It wasn’t that you were so wonderful that I couldn’t help but welcome you into the family, but that you were there, willing, asking to be. You were not replacing anyone but rather creating a role for yourself, creating a space, a space within the home, a space within me, one that I hadn’t realized could exist but was happy to know, to know as a mended, filled, protected part of myself. You were not stepparent. You were parent. Daddy. A word I hadn’t felt on my lips before. A word that tasted foreign, flashy, faux. Any notion of discomfort that I felt about this, I pushed aside. Sitting in the back of the car, gaining the courage to utter the word, mulling over whether I should lead with it or end with it, wondering which would hide the hesitation best.

 “Daddy, can you turn up the radio, please?” 

“Can you please turn up the radio, Daddy?”

Eventually, it stuck. And eventually, I took your last name: Eakin. My previous identity was forgotten, and any notion of a “daddy” before you was obliterated. The sperm-donor, as we would come to call him.

We were no longer a single-parent household. We were no longer a food-stamps family. We were the Eakins, rhymes with bacon.

I had a chance encounter with my high school physics teacher last summer, seven years since I bore your name. “Kennedy Eakin! Rhymes with bacon!” he shouted. I didn’t bother to correct him.

~

Waking up to Jesse washing the dishes from dinner the night before:

“Thank you, Daddy,” I say weakly, hungover, through the film of southern twang. Dah-dee. The forcing of a spondee. He chuckles twice. One chuckle means he’s agitated. Two means something arbitrary.

“What?” I protest. “What?” I smile.

“You sound like a child when you say that.”

We laugh.

~

Kevin Quiashie, in his monograph introducing his concept of “Quiet” writes that “the notion of Quiet is neither motionless nor without sound. Quiet, instead, is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.” A few years ago, my dear friend Dani and I committed ourselves to seeking this Quiet. We were often overwhelmed by the loudness of society, by the immediacy of external forces, by the dense nature of our lives. So, sitting in my hodgepodge apartment of vintage furniture and shitty appliances, we created what would become our way of accessing this Quiet: pockets.

            It was a rainy day in September. The humidity lingered from a brutal summer and a keen yearning for autumn was among us. Sitting criss-cross applesauce on the living room floor, we conjured an assemblage of objects, songs, feelings, and experiences, and placed them, as it were, in a pocket. We called this particular one the indigo pocket.

~

I was your best man in your wedding and Rylee was Mom’s maid of honor. We stood on the stage of the church. Mom wore a hot pink dress, the top half beaded with brown and teal spheres of wood. Her hair was styled under the influence of a viking, her long black locks falling at her hips. Her feet were too swollen for heels, so a shitty pair of sandals carried her down the aisle. A bump led the way. Clodagh would join us in five months' time.

“When I asked Clare to marry me, I knew that I was marrying her girls, too. They have welcomed me into their family, and I promise,” you choked on tears, “I promise to honor that.” You placed the ring I had chosen on Mom’s finger and fastened a necklace around my neck and then Rylee’s, cross pendants dangling from the silver chains. At that moment, I felt proud. Proud of the role I was playing and proud of the family in which the role existed. I was strong, standing by your side. Your best man. I was beautiful, feeling your calloused fingertips touch the back of my neck as you dressed me in a promise.

~

We have been living on Vine Street for two years and have made it our own. A fortress made of tickle fights and costume parades. The nook in the kitchen is for arts and crafts, a round plastic table littered with construction paper scraps and uncapped markers. The walls are painted yellow, the cupboards gooseberry, and a calendar from the local Chinese restaurant hangs above the sink. Amy Winehouse and Patsy Cline play from the boombox and Mom’s friend paints a giant tiger lily on the dining room table which we sit around for dinners of fish sticks and canned peas, boxed mac-n-cheese and Friday-night-cereal.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen …Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!). I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen 

~

I think Daddy died.

I think I might have killed him.

Though it might have been suicide.

Susie’s mother killed herself when we were in the seventh grade.

She blew her brains out in the Blue Ridge Mountains, sitting

in her lime green punch buggy.

Wanted to see something pretty before she left, I suppose.

I don’t know. There was no letter.

Punch buggy. No punch backs.

Susie couldn’t punch her mom back.

Is that a bad joke? Probably.

Is it a joke at all? Shouldn’t be.

Her brains were splattered across the back seat.

Susie and I went walking along the river last month.

I told her I was writing about you.

“We’ve been friends for eleven years,” she said, “and I hadn’t realized until now,

That we both had a parent who didn’t love us enough.”

We could have cried at that moment, but instead

We shrugged and said I love you.

I didn’t kill Daddy.

Daddy killed me.

~

In the indigo pocket, there is Mazzy Star, Peter Pan, stained glass lamp shades, the A minor chord, Amélie, Amélie’s hair, wearing a snug beanie. There is red velvet, red wine, and glow in the dark stars. There is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, sparkly nail polish, and greasy pizza.

Fundamentally, a pocket is an aesthetic concept. It is a physical manifestation of a feeling, like dirty feet fluttering under the bed sheets after a gratifying day of hard work. It is a struggle to conjure this manifestation merely within oneself, and so it is contingent upon one’s environment. It is making the abstract—the Quiet—tangible, concrete, accessible. One perceives an object, a song, a moment in time, and so on, which instills a feeling within them—a potentiality. In noticing this internal experience, accepting it, and attaching it to an external element, the existence of the feeling is legitimized.

Kevin Quashie asserts: “In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple, beautiful part of what it means to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand it…to notice and understand [the quiet] requires a shift in how we read, what we look for, and what we expect, even what we remain open to. It requires paying attention in a different way.”

~

Last November I had sex with a fifty-one year old Irish man, six years older than you. I approached him at a club in Dublin. He wore a suit with a little pride flag fastened to the front because he’s an ally. He showed me a photo of his daughter in the back of the taxi on the way to my hotel room. Her name is Isabelle, eight years old. She is holding an ice-cream cone with the tip of her tongue barely touching the vanilla swirl. I think about her sometimes.  “I never do this,” he said as we undressed. I laughed as if the same weren’t true for me and caught a glimpse of my naked body in the full-length mirror. I mindlessly attached a story to the girl’s reflection before climbing on top of him. He didn’t get hard until I asked him to fuck me like a whore. “Like, you want me to belittle you?” he asked. “Sure,” I shrugged. He flipped me over and fucked me in the ass and it hurt so bad that I asked him to pull out just as he started to cum.

I apologized and we slept and a

couple hours later he rose with the sun.

Long after my asshole recovered, I

did not. I think about her sometimes.

~

It was a rainy night and Jesse and I were sharing a plate of carne asada. We sat upstairs by the window in a small, local restaurant in Porto, looking down at the umbrella canopies gliding up and down the narrow street. I was wearing his Brooks Brothers sweater, my favorite thing of his. It’s blue, big, and shapeless, and being inside it makes me feel held—cradled.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned from this trip, it’s that I fucking love you,” he said. I wiped steak-juice from my chin.

He spoke slowly, as if to match the scene outside. “If I were to commit myself to you,” he said, “I would spend the rest of my life ensuring that you feel safe and loved and happy.” 

~

People traveled by foot or bicycle in a smooth, regular motion. Men rode with their knees splayed and trouser cuffs cinched with clips, women with their bottoms encased in taut skirts, drawing fluid lines in the tranquility of the streets. The background was silence and the bicycle measured the speed of life. We lived in close proximity to shit. It made us laugh.

Annie Ernaux, The Years

~

You married us on a November afternoon. It was cooler in the church than it was outside, I remember. Red and brown leaves littered the ground, waiting to be returned to the soil. Later that afternoon, my sister and I would run up and down our one acre in our sparkly pink dresses, spaghetti straps falling off our shoulders. A photographer would take our photo which would later hang above your desk. Rylee and I lay on the grass with our heads leaning against one another, Coca-Cola Lip Smacker smiles and squinty, sun-ached eyes. I was wed that day and my younger face says so. My cheeks are plump and rosy, tinted by the prospect of prospect itself. Colored by the delight of childhood, stained with naivety.

~

I’m far from being the only one to fuck my way through the heartbreak of losing a father. It’s a trite endeavor, I know that. It’s also pathetic. And weak.

            Fuck you.

~

Yellow couch pocket: hibiscus flowers, bell bottoms, Under the Tuscan Sun, tangerines, pine trees, Nashville, Nina Simone, the month of April, shrimp and grits, knitted cardigans, Fleetwood Mac.

~

Six years ago, I flew to Wales to meet my biological father, the “sperm-donor,” as you called him. He’s a handsome guy. His hair is curly and black, his skin is tanned, and his physique strong. He has a grubby type of vigor, one that is only obtained through long days as a laborer, often accompanied by grass-stained knees and soiled fingernails. When he picked me up from the airport, he hid in his hoodie and avoided eye contact with me until he had an appropriate amount of cans of Strongbows. Max is what his friends call him, though his name is Henry. My mother has told me about the size of his dick a couple of times, typically when she’s two bottles of wine in. “None of the other girls could take it. That’s why he picked me,” she said. I assume this is where the nickname stems from. My initial reaction upon learning that my father is hung was pride. I was proud to come from a man with a big dick and a woman who could take it. Looking back on it now, I suppose I felt emotionally distanced from the two of them and strictly aligned myself to them biologically. Genetically, I’m stacked, I had thought. Bred to be fucked.

Sitting at the bottom of Jesse’s bed, I told him about my dad’s dick. He wiped the cum off my back with a fluffy towel. Other guys had used a dirty t-shirt. Jesse was impressed, as I had hoped he would be. “My mom was the only girl in the town who could take his dick, apparently,” I said. “Like mother like daughter,” he said,  kissing me on the forehead.

“I’m worried I’m not big enough,” Jesse said, months later. “I’m probably not even close to your dad.”

Max insisted on having me stay at his flat. I had been staying at his mother’s bungalow, in a room with my photo hanging above the dresser. I felt comfortable at his mother’s, and he only had the one bed, so I kept putting him off.

 “Please stay with me, Ken-O,” he said. “I haven’t had my little girl in twelve years. Please.” He pushed and pushed, and my excuse of wanting to stay at the bungalow eventually fell short, and I wanted to be a good girl, I wanted to be a good girl. I didn’t want him to disappear, I didn’t want him to disappear, I didn’t want him to kill me.

He was the big spoon. I refused to think about how my body was fitting into his. His arms wrapped around me. I took a deep breath when he started snoring into my hair and laid awake, wishing I weren’t.

~

For a few weeks, I carried a book called Daddy Issues around in my purse. It laid face down on the kitchen table for days at a time. Like Ernaux, I lived in close proximity to shit. It made me laugh.

~

Yesterday I came across a scribbly poem in my journal. I wrote it seven months ago, though I have no recollection of doing so. I was probably drunk.

I once wore a Pittsburgh jersey every Sunday afternoon

and to school on Monday when we won.

Now I wear a Jet’s hoodie—Jesse’s.

Always willingly on a team I don’t pick out.

Did you hear I go to Oxford?

For writing, and I’m doing quite well.

You would hate England. You never went,

Did you? What kind of a marriage was that?

Do you miss our house in the county? That one

Acre you tended to so well? Purple tomatoes

And raspberry bush stings. I was never

Patient enough to dodge the thorns.

I wonder if I would have made it here without

Meeting you, or if I would have tried had you

Stayed. I bet you’re jealous of me, full

Of resentment. I never wanted to win or

Be good. It was easier that way.

~

A Girl’s Assemblage (2024), by Kennedy Burke

What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. Magicians are well aware of this.

Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II

~

Mom, as a puppeteer, will read her scripts to me and Rylee over the bathtub, Hedgy the Hedgehog on her left hand and Fionnuala the Female Rooster on her right. After bathtime, the three of us will snuggle up on the couch in our mix-matched pajamas, watching a Masterpiece Classic and sharing a grapefruit. We will spit the seeds into a ceramic bowl. I’ll wipe my sticky chin with my sleeve and try to avoid scrunching my face into itself, hiding that I detest the tartness. And then up to bed, where Mom will read a story, and then I will read a story, and Rylee will somersault around us until lights out, please crack the door, and it is up to me to dream sweetly.

~

You insisted on being in charge of our medications. “You work longer hours,” you had explained to Mom. “I’ll take the girls to their appointments.” Rylee could not be tamed. “Up the dose,” you told her doctor, again and again and again, hoisting her off the examination table and holding her hand as you led her through the parking lot. For six and a half years, she medicated you. Nonconsensually feeding your addiction. Numbing you. Numbing you from her. I am so angry that you got to be numbed. By her squirming and screaming and biting and weeping. I am so angry that you left us behind so long ago and that I loved you through it with such resolve.

~

The color indigo, as described by Maggie Nelson in her book Bluets in which she details her deep love for the color blue, used to be known as “the devil’s dye,” being that it was a “cheap, slave-labor crop” unwanted by the Western market. “The story of indigo,” she writes, “is, at least in part, the story of slavery, riots, and misery.” Reading this disturbed me. Indigo represents such tranquility to me—it is the host of my Quiet, the first of its kind. Dani consoled me. “Ugly feelings belong in pockets too,” she said. “Ugly feelings. Ugly things.” She described a short story by Sherman Alexie in which he details a man trudging through a hot, sticky day in the desert. The man is overheated, thirsty, and isolated in the midst of a heat wave, when he comes across a gas station. He goes inside, and buys a cold, pink popsicle, delighting in its refreshing taste. “It’s the aesthetic of capitalism,” Dani said. “Icky capitalism. But the treasure of the popsicle offers the character magic in the mundane. He loved that popsicle,” she explained. “And that emotional attachment is what gives it aesthetic value.”

In my favorite novel, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, the narrator asks the reader: What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

~

Yesterday I received my results from a psychological evaluation I had done last month.

Fears of abandonment may compel her to be overly compliant and obliging in most relationships. When fearing the loss of approval and affection Kennedy may display frenetic cheerfulness, capricious anger, and self-dramatizing gregariousness.

In order to secure her dependency needs, Kennedy is likely to accommodate the needs of others. Having learned to play the submissive role quite well, she may allow others to feel more useful, more sympathetic, stronger, and more competent than she is.

Kennedy’s anxieties may have been triggered by the fear of losing someone on whom she once depended and finding herself stranded with no one to lean on or nothing to anticipate.

~

            “In a glass house,” writes Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, “you cannot conceal anything without giving yourself away, except by hiding it under the ground.”

Play Shadow (1977), by Leonora Carrington

For my nineteenth birthday, Max took me to Amsterdam. He’d take me anywhere in Europe I wanted to go, he said. Whimsical buildings lined beside one another as if presenting for the sake of comparison, varying in height, window arrangement, color: blues and browns, reds and yellows, towering above canals that glittered with their kaleidoscopic reflections.

            I loved the city. I wish I could remember more of the details of what I loved exactly. I remember a café with a great white shark’s set of teeth on a wall. I remember a life-size chess board in the street, surrounded by old men gripping their chins. I remember a day at the Hard Rock Café, thinking it was the only one in the world, and I remember a pink moped with a Virgin Mary bumper sticker. I remember a market with bunches of pink and orange and cream colored flowers hanging from the ceiling. Beyond this, I remember little of the good from the trip to Amsterdam. We went to the Red Light District. He insisted. We watched a dancer with hair the same color as mine through a wall made of glass.

            “Look at her,” he instructed. He was hammered and high, his voice vehement despite his state of euphoria. “Look at her.”

The dancer wore fishnets and a bra made of patent leather. Max pointed to me and shouted through the glass This is my daughter!

               This is my daughter!

                                         This is my daughter!

A few months after this experience, I wrote in my journal: “I understood that he was not showing her to me necessarily, but me to her. I was being flaunted, in my baby pink dress and tortoiseshell glasses. I was on the other side of the glass, being watched, being perceived, shaping a reality that I could hardly understand. I don’t know what my face said during these moments. I hadn’t taken the time to notice. Only she could see it. I wonder now if I was smiling, if I was crying. At the time, it didn’t matter to me. What mattered was how the dancer perceived my reality: the man beside me is my father and he is beaming.”

She wiggled her fingers in my direction as she lowered to a squat. She touched the floor, her legs still spread, and shook her ass, looking up at me as if to confirm that the show was for me, that she was for me. She slapped her hands onto her thighs and I can’t remember if I could hear it through the glass as she rose slowly, giggling. I grew hot. My body suffered a red, a red as potent as the neon light illuminating her skin and my pussy pulsed, pulsed, pulsed. She clutched her titty with one hand and flattened the other against her pussy, showing me where to look. I noticed that Max had his arm around me when he squeezed me into his side. “Oh, Ken-O,” he said.

            The journal entry ends with a description of the evening it was written on: “ I put on a “real bra,” as opposed to the sports bra I’d worn most every day since the sixth grade. I pinned my hair in a bun, pulling strands out to frame my blotchy face. I applied black eyeliner and mascara and stood before the mirror which hung on the back of the door. I circled my hips and twirled my hair, noticing how uncomfortable and stiff I was compared to the dutch dancer. Crying, I stepped closer to the mirror, then closer, then closer, until the face I saw was another’s. I was being studied, once again, only this time, I had the power to shape my reality. I was the girl on either side of the glass. I could decide which one the world saw.”

            Reading this now, I recognize that the autonomy I had discovered that night was based upon the contingency that I put myself  on display. I desired to be looked at—to be in Miller’s glass house. I would give myself away freely and assert power in my vulnerabilities. No part of me would be concealed without “hiding it under the ground” so that I “[could not] see it [myself].”

You were in that glass box with me, hidden below the ground. I buried you that night, but you kept breathing.

The next journal entry details the loss of my virginity. “Please take it,” I asked him as we lay in a tent surrounded by the Grand Tetons. “Take it so it’s over.”

I wish I could tell her that there is power in shattering the glass.

~

We met at the coffee shop on the corner twice more after that initial meeting. I told myself I was taking care of you. That no one else would, that no one else could, and that it was my duty, as your daughter, to do so. “The script of fathers and daughters has often looked like a contract, an agreement to mutually idolize,” writes Katherine Angel. We had an agreement, you and I, and I would do my part. Mom told me that you were using me to get to her, that this was between the two of you, and that I was just a child. She didn’t understand, I would say. She didn’t understand what I meant to you. She didn’t know of our contract. She had forgotten that you had married all three of us on that November morning.

Then you met Carla and stopped answering my calls.          

“He’s moved on,” Mom told me. She cried into her hands and asked if I could be her friend. “I need a friend. I’m so sorry, but I need a friend,” she said. We shook on it: no longer mother and daughter, but friends.

I was left orphaned.   

~

I know a lady who really loves game shows. All she wants to do is fly to California to be on The Price is Right. She practices when going out to dinner, hiding the check from her family and forcing them to guess the total: “Higher? Or lower?”

Her late grandmother always had it on the television, she explained to me. Watching it every afternoon from four to five o’clock is her way of paying homage to her grandmother. It is their time together, a body and a ghost sitting side by side in recliners from the nineties. 

If ugly things like The Price is Right and a gas station popsicle belong in a pocket, then which pocket do you fit into? Where exactly can I manifest my love?

~

The evening after Jesse and I first fucked, he told me he thought he was asexual.

“Me too,” I confessed, lying in hopes of strengthening the bond between us. A week later he fucked me on the living room floor to Billie Holiday. I mistook her billowing trills for his affection and decided that he would be mine, that he would be mine, that he would be mine.

            We started fucking regularly and with this, shared a Parliament out of his kitchen window in the middle of and after each session. Our naked bodies leaned against the cold counter as we discussed what felt right, what sounded right (what would keep him around): “Baby” is too intimate,  I like it when you use both hands on my dick, be as loud as you want—tell me you want me. We approached the sex clinically, hoping to determine, at some point, whether we were, in fact, asexual. I came to understand my body as it related to his. I came to know my desire as it revolved around him. I came. I came. I came. I came.

            I came to love him.

~

I no longer reside in a glass house, but rather in an assemblage. It is an assemblage of Quiet, of magic, of wind. There, the sky is indigo, the couches yellow, and the monotony sweet. I invite you to visit. You can stay, if you so please.

            There are ugly things in this assemblage, in this epidemic of Me. Max is there, along with the dancer. It would be a shame to refuse them entry. The three of us created an experience so weird—yes, exploitative—but so particularly and strangely human. The two of them represent how unattractive desperation for human connection can be, while simultaneously emphasizing that it is a connection worth loving. The fifty-one year old who fucked me in the ass is there too. He is holding out his phone, showing me the photo of his daughter, who will, for the rest of my life, be eight years old and holding an ice-cream cone.

            There is also Jesse and Dani, who I think you’d really like.

Amy Winehouse’s Frank is carried with the wind, and puppet shows over the tub occur just before bed. There is Mom, with her beautiful black hair, reading stories of an Irish pirate queen, and Clodagh, in the townhouse on Vine Street, where she fits perfectly into the Little Women hideaway—a world of girlhood that existed before you. Also found there, is Rylee, leaping through tall grass, feeling, feeling, feeling, freely feeling.

            There may not be a space within me for “daddy,” but there is a space within me for you, separate from the term and what it represents: a space carved out by me, for you. It exists within the Quiet, in a pocket, in the assemblage of me.