on the adventure playground, the taste of metal on her fingers. She pressed her palm down on the basin’s shining button, the distorted spray of water splitting the air.
On the walk home, Michael had told her that Daniel’s father lived in the halfway house down the road. This hadn’t occurred to Dorothy, that the neighbourhood men they held their breath about would have families. She’d rubbed her shoulder, still feeling Daniel’s touch. A clump of gum in her bangs batted her forehead with each step.
Their mother slowly sobered as the haircut progressed. In the small bathroom, Evelyn, still wheezing, watched with solemn interest. When it was done Dot looked like a windblown pixie, and without stopping to study the effect Lee gathered the clippings in a sheet of newspaper and went to make dinner. Eve picked up the scissors from the windowsill, turning their flashing points in the afternoon sun. She bumped Dorothy out of the way of the mirror, lifted a strand of her own hair and began to snip, pausing every now and then to cough. When she’d gone round the front she handed the scissors to Dorothy. ‘Do the back?’ The amount of hair felt alarming in Dot’s hands, but she did it. Eve covered her smile with her palm, and looked at Dot in the mirror, her eyes glazed with croup and anarchy. The room orbited slowly around the scissors. When Eve was well they would go to school together, and then look out.
Dot and Eve agreed that they hated their father. ‘There’s truth in jokes,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’re funny,’ and Dot would spend days willing herself not to laugh, even when Michael burped at the table, or their father used that phrase ‘. . . and it’s a rather large but’, or their mother said, ‘I don’t have a sense of humour. My family never laughed. Ours was a house without laughter.’ Or, ‘Frank, you’re brilliant. They’ll regret this.’ Somebody else always wanted to keep their father down, or out, or to suppress his critical view. Lee was his cheerleader. She did star-jumps around him, high-kicked down the alopecic hallway carpet, give me an F!
Why did they hate their father? For more than his views on comedy, for more than the way he viewed other people as a series of hostile gatekeepers, keeping him from the gold of life. Because their mother loved him more than she loved the kids? Write it in the sky. OK, another question. Why, for decades, would he still appear in Dorothy’s dreams? And why wouldn’t he speak! In life he’d say things like, ‘Ninety per cent of success is showing up,’ and that’s what he did long after his death, a bad joke.
1970, the year Dorothy was ten, their mother managed to save up and at last Frank went, in his large navy winter coat and carrying a briefcase full of black-and-whites from The Good Person of Szechuan and Ubu Roi, his blond hair combed down carefully with water, which Dot knew would dry before he got there. This worried her greatly, that her father would walk the streets of Manhattan with boofy hair completely unaware of the whispers and laughs, and in his absence she forgot to hate him, and maybe knew on some core level that all this rage was love that had nowhere to go. What did Manhattan mean? She could only remember living here, now, though she and Eve at night in bed told stories of that alternative family, the ones who never left, living out their days in a sparkle of fairy lights and pine boughs, glittering ice powder spraying from their skates as they twirled and twirled around that legendary rink.
The first morning Frank was gone, their mother woke early to hear someone in the house, moving around downstairs. She tied her thin floral robe around her and followed the noises, floating on the helium of fear. The kitchen door was open. That boy, Daniel, sat at the table with his back to her. She took in his slim shoulders, the newspaper in front of him, steam rising from the kettle. He was writing on the paper and when she said, ‘Good morning,’ and walked around the side of the table he smiled and said, ‘Hi, Lee. Hope you don’t mind me doing the crossword.’ He twiddled the ballpoint between his fingers and thumb so it became a plastic blur.