Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,26

dancing, Angel. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I imagined myself dancing for a minute, and then I imagined my belly fat, swollen, with stretch marks, and felt most unspiritual. I told her I had a test to study for.

“OK,” she conceded. “You should go out later, though. Your horoscope says it’s a good day for Pisces to be in the right place at the right time.”

I hung up and thought to myself that the right place was two months ago in Rafael’s bedroom, but I wasn’t sure what my horoscope could do about that.

In the morning I skipped a review session and took the C train to Brooklyn to visit my father. He opened the door to my still-raised fist and seemed pleasantly surprised to see me.

“Angel. To what do I owe the honor, Miss Lady?”

My father had called me Miss Lady since I was four years old, and though I had not been prissy enough to deserve the nickname since then, it stuck. Uncomfortably, dishonestly, but it stuck. I walked in without answering his question. My visits were always like this. I liked to disrupt him. Interrupting people was the only way I could be sure of my presence in their lives.

My father’s apartment had been painted red since the last time I was in it. I could still smell the newness of the paint. It looked as though he had painted it himself; whoever did it had forgotten a drop-cloth, and the furniture was flecked with red.

“Better not let the cops in here, Daddy. They’ll think you killed someone.”

He didn’t hear me. Instead, I heard the pop of two bottle tops and then he walked into the living room and handed me a soda. My father drank only the kind that came in glass bottles; he believed aluminum was unhealthy, and wouldn’t drink or eat anything that came out of a can.

“I want you to hear something,” he said, before I had a chance to open my mouth. I occupied myself by running my tongue around the rim of the bottle. My father had his back to me and was messing with the ancient stereo in the corner of his living room.

My father was into radio then. My father was always into something; he was a collector of hobbies and habits. Sometimes I wondered how my parents could have been in the same room for long enough to conceive me, let alone be married for four years, but my mother had amassed her own fair share of collections over the years. I imagined their marriage was just a phase during which they had collected each other until something more interesting came along. A year ago my father was into the stock market, but then he invested the few hundred dollars he’d made initially in a company that marketed giant tomatoes, and lost it all. Now he planned to get famous doing radio commercials.

The tape started. I watched its wheels spin as my father’s buttery baritone echoed out of the brown speakers, their wood paneling peeling at the edges. In two minutes of tape, my father sounded convincing selling: cars, liquor, a swanky restaurant downtown. He sounded unconvincing selling: study aids, season tickets for the Knicks, diet pills. He sounded downright ridiculous selling: golfing equipment, stain remover, the Daily News.

“What do you think, Miss Lady?” he asked when the tape stopped.

I said, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.”

My father said nothing, finished his soda in a few sips, and rested it on top of the speaker. He left the room and I heard creaking in the kitchen, the squeak of hinges, and then the rustling of cabinet clutter. He emerged triumphantly, smiling, and handed me a sticky, half-gone bottle of molasses.

“Take a spoonful of this every day, it’s good for the baby. Your mother took it when she was pregnant, and look how good you turned out.”

From the looks of the dusty amber thing he had just handed me, the letters on its label faded into nonexistence, my mother had taken her spoonfuls from that very same bottle.

“I might not keep it,” I said.

“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable, as though he wondered why I was telling him this. It was simple. I had screwed up, I wanted to punish somebody. He sat beside me on the couch and held my hand.

“Whatever you think is best, baby. You were always the smart one.”

The smart one. That was my other nickname growing up. It was only recently that I had been able to convince people it