Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,55
turned sixteen. Debra had mailed them meticulously to everyone at the holidays, letting Eva cut the wallet-sized photos along their white lines by herself (he could see the jagged edges on the early photos). He wanted to display these things again, he thought, to display them where Eva could see them.
From just after the divorce until Eva was a teenager, Debra had dropped her off one Friday afternoon each month, spent the weekend with friends in the city, and come to collect her Sunday morning. William still had seven years’ worth of those Friday-afternoon visits stored up in the box. Fridays must have been art days at school; he had all sorts of odd ceramic and papier-mâché animals, though he suspected he had only the ugly ones, the ones that Debra didn’t want. Dogs without legs and the like. He was more fond of the paper: years’ worth of elaborate abstract drawings Eva made by coloring over interoffice memos in red, black, and blue pen, the scribbled-on pages she had ripped out of coloring books and left with him.
He pulled out one crinkled page from the corner of the box where it had been jammed. It was from the year of the self-esteem books, the year after he’d showed up for Eva’s eighth-birthday party and found that the guests were all eleven-year-olds. Debra swore she’d get to the bottom of it, and indeed she had. Eva, it seemed, had begun spending lunch and recess with the fifth-graders, after the third-grade bully called her a nigger and told her she couldn’t sit at the lunch table. William, we have to do something about this, Debra had said. Her first solution was to take an early lunch hour and accompany Eva to the cafeteria every day, a plan that Eva had promptly vetoed. Next she swore they were moving. Where, William had asked, to another planet?
In the end, Debra had purchased a year’s worth of coloring books with names like I am Beautiful and Why I Love Myself, the idea being that Eva could learn to be her own champion. He had tried to talk to Eva about all of it once, but all she would say was that she wished her mother hadn’t told the lunch monitors what was going on, because she liked the fifth-graders better. She had given him that page, the page she was coloring at the time. It began: I am special because . . . and had lines, presumably for listing the conditions of one’s specialness . Eva had ignored the lines and finished the sentence: I am just special. I am special because I am just special. There was Eva, he thought, not unkindly. There was Eva, and what did you do with a girl like that? William collected himself, sealed the box as best he could, then went downstairs to assure Phil he was uninjured, and hail the first cab going downtown.
Eva heard the door jingle as her father walked into the restaurant. She took a sip of water so that he wouldn’t smell her breath and know that she’d been drinking. She wasn’t sure why she got that way around him, guilty about things she had no reason to be ashamed of, but that was how it was.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said, kissing the top of her head and sitting across from her.
She smiled across the table, then looked curiously at the box he had set down beside them. She had long ceased to be amazed by her father’s lateness, but admired that his reasons were always surprising, involving some unsuspected feat he had undertaken while most of the late people in the world were missing trains or sleeping through alarms.
“What’s in the box, Daddy?”
“In this box,” he said grinning, “are the fruits of a morning’s labor.” He told the story of his morning uptown.
“Poor Phil,” said Eva. “Bad enough his building got condemned, now he’ll have nightmares about ceramic animals living in it.”
“It was me the building almost fell down on,” her father said. “Don’t go feeling too sorry for Phil.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. Is everything OK? Mom said they weren’t going to let you get all of your things back.”
“Your mother knows better than to think I’d give up that easy. Like I was going to leave all this for the city to burn?” He reached into the box and pulled out the first solid object, a framed picture of Eva after a tap recital. Her hair was teased into glossy curls, and