The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop

Who’s Your Daddy?

BOB BLEDSOE [76] Who’s Your Daddy? BOB BLEDSOE Louis liked the paddle more than the man who swung it. He respected the instruction, the ritual, the organization of his thoughts when the paddle struck its target. He enjoyed the stinging clarity, the expedient way the paddle transmitted its message. “You’re a bad boy, aren’t you? You’re Daddy’s little pig,” the man with the paddle said, but Louis—jeans around his ankles—was mute with pain. “Tell Daddy you’re sorry. Tell Daddy you’ll be good from now on.” Daddy didn’t seem to mind Louis’s silence. He raised the paddle higher, brought it down with a judicious slap. At the end of the session, he took Louis in his arms, cradled him like a small child. “Daddy doesn’t like to spank you,” he whispered into Louis’s ear, and Louis smelled peanut butter. “Why do you have to be such a bad boy?” Louis squirmed away and put on his underwear. “Can I write you a check this time?” he asked. “I didn’t stop at the ATM.” “The agreement was cash. This isn’t Nordstrom’s.” “A check’s all I’ve got.” Louis pulled on his jeans, the brush of denim against his underpants like a metal rake across sunburn. He would feel the soreness for days, heat like chili fire on the tongue. “And since I’m the WHO’S YOUR DADDY? [77] one paying,” he said as he wrote the check standing up, “would you mind not eating right before I come over?” Louis’s mother didn’t recognize Armando anymore. Louis and Armando had been together a year and a half, and after the first family dinner, Natasha didn’t acknowledge Armando at all. Alzheimer ’s brought her prejudices to the surface. She had terrible things to say about the gardener, the letter carrier; even her neighbors Dr. and Mrs. Matsuda, Louis’s beloved childhood dentist and his nice wife, were reduced to stereotypes. “They keep bringing me vegetables,” Natasha said about the zucchini and tomatoes from the Matsudas’ garden. “And you know how the Asians are about their vegetables.” “Mother, what do you mean? They’ve always shared their vegetables with us, and we’ve always enjoyed them,” Louis said. “Oh, never mind,” she said. “You have no idea.” At the onset of her Alzheimer’s, before she’d been diagnosed, she’d asked Louis when he thought he might meet the right girl and settle down. “Mother,” Louis said, “I’m thirty-five years old. I’m with Armando . The ‘right girl’ is just not going to happen.” “But you never know. Your own father was older than you are now when he and I got married. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer.” “Mother, I’m gay. I’ve known I was gay since I was fourteen, and you’ve known it just as long. I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up now.” Louis had grown up with his mother’s mood swings and bad behavior—long periods of sulking and miserable silence that he attributed to disappointment over her failed career— but this was something else. Alzheimer’s peeled back layers, revealed a woman he never knew; this peek into her psyche made him long for the silent treatment. Now Natasha mistook Louis for her own dead brother; Louis couldn’t remember the last time she called him by his own name. “Ian, Ian, come over here. Put on that Cole Porter record we like so much.” Louis had researched the disease, been counseled not to BOB BLEDSOE [78] argue. He fought the urge to draw his mother back: “I’m not Uncle Ian. It’s me, Louis.” Instead, he improvised, distracted his mother as he would a young child, played along with whatever whimsical misapprehension occupied her at the time. Natasha had begun singing everywhere—in the yard, at the mall; the world was now her concert hall. She’d once had a beautiful voice, and in her twenties and early thirties had tried to get an acting career off the ground. Alzheimer’s had limited her musical repertoire —she sang the same few songs over and over—and changed her delicate soprano to a bird’s screech, high and shrill. At the supermarket , she was gloriously, magisterially oblivious to the people who stared at her from...