A Father, A Daughter

Jaimy Gordon photo by Robert Kareka Jaimy Gordon was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of a novel, Shamp of the City-Solo (Treacle Press), a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue (Burning Deck Press), and a narrative poem, The Bend, The Lip, The Kid (Sun Press). She presently teaches at Western Michigan University and is completing a second novel, Island Lives. A Father, A Daughter WHEN I WAS six I loved my father passionately; hearts flew, as they say, whenever I saw him, and we were as chaste as teenage lovers in a forties movie. At six p.m. he veered to the curb in his sky-blue Ford roadster: he wore a green bow-tie; he stepped off the running board with a heart-shaped box of chocolate kisses and a bunch of violets in his hand; he gave them to me. When I was seven, my father Philip Turner observed me on the jungle gym with my own hand in my panties, hanging upside-down from my knees on the cross-bar, my head cocooned in my skirt, my bottom inverted and my spidery fingers clambering between my legs for all the world (as he surely thought) to see; and doubt overtook him, Philip Turner, the formerly untroubled lover of his daughter Jane. It is quite different when fathers touch daughters than when mothers do: whatever abstract animal longing it is that fathers sometimes feel, it is something apart from the daily usage of nursing bras and rubber panties and bibs and silverbacked infants' hairbrushes—or my mother spitting on her kleenex when no one was looking and brusquely rubbing my face clean—practical occasions of touch more binding and necessary than any free caress. So I did not quite know why it was, when I was eight years old, that my father still slipped his hand into my underpants and tightened it on my buttock once, twice, three times with oddly nervous affection, since at this age I became just what my father was least able to bear in his domain: an odd child, pointing squarely though inadvertently at some excess or failing or dark secret on the part of my mother and father. In short, at eight I was still in love with my father, but he was no longer in love with me. I embarrassed him. I was attended with difficulty. I could not amuse him. I can tell the fellow traveller something of Philip Turner, since it became necessary, in time, in order not to be entirely unhappy, to see my father as a person separate from me. My father had a great fear of looking foolish. He once told me that his mother, who had no idea that the quality of silliness existed in the world (seeing the world only as an uneven division into the noble, that was her word, and the commonplace) had trained him for a noble adulthood all his early years with protective clothes and other devices that absolutely condemned him to a ridiculous appearance through adolescence. And this adolescence he passed in eastern boarding schools whose social cruelties, though famous, were not allowed for in my grandmother's cosmogony Already set apart as one of a handful of Jewish boys on the 62 · The Missouri Review Jaimy Gordon premises, craving only to be normal, Philip Turner endured these institutions in tightly laced black leather corrective shoes up to mid-shin for some fancied defect in the classical line of his legs. He was banished from muddy playing fields, forbidden to participate in rough sports, and ordered to gargle hot salt water whenever the weather changed ten degrees in any direction. His knickers were of worsted so thick they would scarcely bend at the knees. On his mother's orders he wore rubber galoshes, suspenders, dark wool caps as grotesquely shapeless as the crowns of lichens, huge ear muffs for whatever these caps would not cover. He was proud and intensely self-conscious and did not suffer these indignities lightly. By the time I knew him, therefore, my father would not wear a hat in an era when almost everyone wore hats, for he apprehended from...