My father is taking me to my first baseball game. I am seven years old and ready for it, with new Keds sneakers, a Hawaiian-print fanny pack buckled around my hips, a real grown-up baseball cap. My mother takes our picture before we leave the house. We stand against a palm tree in the front yard, beaming. My father’s hand rests on top of my cap.
In the car, my father sips from a glass in the center console. He finishes it quick, makes clucking sounds with his lips at the taste. He tries to explain baseball to me—the plates, the diamonds, the way the dirt will spray majestic and red. He waves his hands around with each description, his gold rings glittering, a Merit hanging from his lips. I right the steering wheel.
Lately, when my parents’ voices sound garbled and tired, when their eyes get sticky and small, I call them Sleepy Girl and Sleepy Boy. I open the driver’s door of Sleepy Boy’s Mercedes and pull him out by the pinky. We walk a funny walk to the big bleachers, wave hello to the people he knows. I am so proud to have Sleepy Boy as my date, to be at a real baseball game with real teams. The mosquitos curdle black around the stadium lights as I chew, open-mouthed, on a hotdog without the bun. Sleepy Boy screams, growls some, his arms golden and pumping when the right man runs. Two trophies on fire.
Our team wins. My father is my father again, awake, standing. He runs down to meet his friends at the bottom of the bleachers, screams, Wait right there, son! in his rasp. The tin bleachers thunder under me.
I watch my father with his friends for a long while. They smack each other on the backs, clap their meaty hands. They down drinks from plastic cups, crush them on their foreheads and beneath their sneakers. From here, they’re the size of a postcard. If I sent this postcard to my mother, I would caption it Happy Men.
I kick my feet up and on the bleachers, press my cheek into the metallic cold. I feel safe here, watching him.
When the father knocks on the front door (he’s lost his key), the mother asks, Where is the daughter? The father asks, Who?
The daughter is sitting on the bleachers, watching each and every light wink off. The daughter zips and unzips her fanny pack, crunches on the Cheerios kept inside. A woman named Heather finds the daughter in the dark, offers her a ride, pulls up a car. The daughter does not know her way home.
III.
I am four, and it’s about time for me to begin school. This means the doctor’s office. This means shots. My mother cannot calm me down for days. I know what’s coming: the needles, the rubber ball, the snap of a band, the blood. I’ve seen it in movies; I’ve heard about it. I know it all before the knowing, and I am inconsolable. My father volunteers to take me to the doctor, gives my mother a break.
Pretend this is fun, he says, like we’re going on a date!
In the waiting room, I scratch a blue flower from the wallpaper. I flip through magazines I cannot read. I move colored beads around on a wire—stack the beads, unstack them, click click. My nose begins to gush, because it is always doing that. My father pulls me onto his lap, rips the permanent stash of tissues from his pocket, presses hard into my face. You know what to do, he says. Calm down, squeeze the spot. You know it’s a nervous thing.
Will life always be this nervous? I ask, beneath the tissues. My head is rocked back, and I stare at the ceiling until my eyes cross. The blood gurgles in my throat.
Yes, my father says. Abso-fucking-lutely.
In the doctor’s office, a nurse sits me down on a thin sheet of paper. My father rolls two tissues into slug-sized wads, stuffs one into each of my nostrils. The nurse gives me a chalky-looking lollipop, and I begin to kick my legs, cry. She snaps her gloves into the garbage can, closes the door.
Listen, says my father. When I was in the army, we had to get hundreds and hundreds of shots. Imagine? This is jack shit next to that.
I cry harder. Nobody understands my pain.
Okay, okay, here’s what I did, he says. I had the docs stand in rows, facing one another, with their needles, the medicines. I walked down the line in between them, shimmied my shoulders, left, right, left, right, left, let them poke me all they wanted as I did this stupid dance.
My father does the dance for me. He shimmies his shoulders, pretending to be pricked. He says, Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!, walking toward me with exaggerated wobbles.
When the needles come, I’m still laughing. My father and I make the sound effects, the warped faces. The first two needles aren’t so bad, but then they begin to pop through my biceps. They hurt. When I stop laughing, my father takes my baby toe and pinches it.
Ouch! Why! I scream.
Focus, he says. Move it. Put the hurt somewhere else.
IV.
Billy Joel is my favorite singer. I’m eleven, and my father is driving us to his concert. He’s been Sleepy Boy all night, sipping juice from little cobalt glasses, driving the rumble strip all the way down to Plantation.
At the stadium, my father speeds past the parking spaces and pulls up on the sidewalk. He drives right over it, honks his horn at a chain of Snowbirds in our way. An attendant in a glow-in-the-dark vest motions for my father to roll down his window. He does.
You can’t park here, sir, says the attendant. His face in the sliver of window seems so small compared to my father’s. His nose is crooked, his cheeks are pimpled and rosy, and I decide that he is kind.
My daughter, she’s retarded, says my father. I forgot our handi-pass, but she can’t walk right.
My father pats my knee with his hand, looks into his lap with his head shaking.
There’s nothing I can do about that, sir, says the kind attendant.
Give her this night, says my father. Billy’s her man. My father palms him a small wad of cash. The attendant looks at me with his eyes all squinty, as if to check. I smile at him—the metal braces, clamps, rubber lip bumper, turquoise bands connecting my buck teeth to the bottom. I am ugly-cute, I know, like a too-deep sea creature, but I embrace it. I work it. My father is so handsome that everybody thinks I was adopted—a charity case—a mutt from China, or Cuba, or Mexico, or Samoa. Nobody can be sure.
The kind boy closes his eyes for a few seconds. I feel sorry for him—nobody can ever look at me for long. He says, Fine. Go ’head.
Outside the car, my father wraps his arms around me. He whispers, Limp, you’ve got to limp. Hang your mouth all dumb. He rubs my shoulders as if I’m cold, like he’s protecting me. I do what he says. I want to be a good daughter. I drag my feet across the sparkling sidewalk and tuck my elbows into my waist. I let my tongue roll out of my mouth as I stare up and into the ashy, polluted sky.
In the stadium, my father passes out in his seat. His bottom lip gleams wet, and I wipe it for him with the bell sleeve of my shirt. Billy sings about love, and I swear he’s singing directly to me. My father wakes up to “Piano Man,” says, We have to go, let’s skip the traffic out of here.
But “Piano Man” is my favorite song in the whole world.
We leave anyway. I listen to Billy sing about bread in his jar over the speakers that line the parking lot. In the car, my father begins to cry. Hard, hiccuping sobs.
What’s wrong, Daddy? I rub his back.
The song, he says. It’s just so true.
V.
I’m five, and my father is taking me to see Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. I’ve been practicing my own magic tricks at home with balloons and straws, blowing on my fists, squeezing foamy trick bunnies.
Tonight, I wear a big fluffy coat with a Dalmatian pattern on it. My front tooth is loose, and I can’t stop tonguing the sharp edges, the dangling thread of flesh. My father is dressed beautifully, a pressed jacket and pants that smell like big city. He holds my hand as I watch the show, my eyebrows tight and high as the Siberian tigers jump through hoops, appear and get gone.
I decide, I want to marry my father. I want us to go on these dates for as long as I live.
When the show ends, we take a walk on the Las Vegas strip. We walk to the monorail, so we can shoot back down to the Luxor. The whole sky coruscates with lights, a real city, like nothing I’ve seen.