Wide Awake

WIDE AWAKE/DeW/fí Henry "Young women in America will continue to look for love and excitement in places that are as dangerous as hell. I salute them for their optimism and their nerve." —Kurt Vonnegut, from "There's a Maniac Loose Out There," Life, 7/25/69 "Unfortunately, in a father's overzealous desire to protect his little girl from risk and the discomfort of anxiety-provoking situations, he tells her that she is incapable, incompetent, and in need of help. His behavior sends a message that that is what he thinks of her, so she comes to beUeve it herself." —Mickey Marone, How To Father A Successful Daughter, 1992 NEITHER MY MOTHER, nor my sister, nor possibly, my wife, felt that their fathers prayed for them. Nor have most of the important women friends in my life. What is a father's prayer? And why is it different for a daughter than for a son? Or is it? My daughter, Ruth, is now a remarkable young woman of the millennium . I love her. I fear for her well being and pray for her future. But I have had to struggle with deep-seated instincts from my background in my regard for her. I was a WASP manchild in the 1950s, a sexist bachelor in the 1970s, and a husband confronted with a wife's awaken-ing during the women's movement in the 1980s, a time when divorce seemed epidemic in my generation. I have rallied, personally and culturaUy, to social progress in many ways and grown as a person in the process; but I have also, to be honest, often retreated to irony. The civil rights movement, resistance to the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution: all certainly bettered our world, but that was then. What quality of thinking now, I wonder, is involved in my personal efforts at recycling? Does returning empties amount to more than a gesture of morale, like my mother's saving bacon grease during World War II? Thanks to my wife, Connie, my daughter's upbringing has been progressive. Connie has supported and advocated Ruth's full flowering as a woman and a person. Since 1983, Connie has taught at an independent elementary school devoted to progressive principles, and The Missouri Review · 166 my daughter was one of the first graduates. For years, in cranky silence, I saw my wife's school as the Academy of Aunty Mame, whimsical and Utopian in endeavor. I was preoccupied with my struggles as a writer and a college teacher. I couldn't help patronizing my wife and her career, which seemed so different from mine. Perhaps predictably the area of my greatest uncertainty and discomfort as Ruth has matured, and as the cultural mores of America have changed utterly, has been that of her sexuality. In reading recent feminist Uterature about fathering, I have been receptive to and perhaps overly credulous about charges that fathers remain too emotionaUy distant from their daughters. Patricia Reis, for instance, has writtert that "A father's inability to speak about certain things, especiaUy his emotional realities, can later become a woman's silence." And Victoria Secunda says, "Fathers—not being female—compute a daughter's womanly body, not her immature emotions . . . when a father gives his daughter an emotional visa to strike out on her own, he is always with her. Such a daughter has her encouraging , understanding daddy in her head, cheering her on—not simply as a woman, but as a whole, unique human being with unlimited possibilities." There I am, the fifty-five-year-old father, wide-eyed, heart racing at 5:02 a.m. on the Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend. Outside, song birds twitter and chirp. I am in bed, beside my wife, safe in our three-bedroom cape house in Watertown, Massachusetts, ten mUes west of Boston. A noise has awakened me. A familiar click. At 4:36 a.m. I have heard the tell-tale whump of the back door downstairs. After a moment, I hear the scrape of steps. This is no thief , no intruder. This is my nineteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, and her Hampshire College sidekick, Cassy, back from...