There were days when my father was fine, days when none of us had to think of slamming screen doors and rum and coke. Those days he was my "Daddy-O-Rockin’-On-A-Patio." He and I would get together and wreak havoc on the family, torturing my mother and brother.

One day when I was about four or five, my mom was trying to take an annual family portrait in the front of our little house on Harris Street. I was wearing a white flowered dress out of sweatshirt material, my mousy brown hair pulled back with a headband. Perched atop a splintered, wooden fence, my father stood behind me so I wouldn’t lose my balance. He sensed that I was growing impatient, squirming and wriggling while my mom adjusted the light meter and fiddled with the camera’s aperture.

To entertain me as I turned to him, face buried in his scruffy beard, he began contorting his face into strange masks, goofy and frightening. I emulated him, joining in the fun. We would taunt the camera, our fat pink tongues lolling out of twisted lips as my mother snapped each picture. Growing irritated, she tried time and again to get a clean picture of daddy and daughter--but to no avail.

Frustrated, she quietly replaced the lens cap and put away her equipment, leaving us on the fence to our game. When she returned, she took dad aside and spoke to him angrily. And then she punished her troublesome monkeys: in one hand, my mother held a knife and a jar of Grey Poupon, my most hated condiment. I playfully stuck my tongue out at her one last time. She captured it adeptly between her fingers. Carefully, she coated both our tongues in the rancid mustard.

 * * * * *

On my eighth birthday, one week after Halloween, I awoke early as I did every year. My parents left the house around 8 AM , and we would celebrate special occasions in the wee hours of the day. I padded to the kitchen timidly, nervous that I wouldn’t get the life-size "walking" doll that I hoped for. She was almost four feet tall, all plastic eyes and plastic hair and plastic skin, but she would be my new best friend. My dad had promised he would get her for me; I'd wanted to name her Stacey, like my favorite character in The Babysitter’s Club.

Turning the corner into our kitchen, my mom sat smiling as she sipped her third cup of coffee. The familiar, nutty aroma always brings me back to this scene; rather than making her nervous or keyed-up, coffee was simply a part of my mom’s culture. "The Oregonian" was splayed in front of her as it always was. The only thing that distinguished today from any other day was the modest pile of cards, wrapping paper and a solitary balloon. It floated and clung to the partition between our kitchen and the dining room, as if it was afraid of the day ahead.

There was no doll in sight. Panic gripped my young heart. Stacey! Where was Stacey? My dad had a practice of wrapping presents in newsprint; I searched in vain for his signature mark. There was nothing covered in comics, nothing hiding behind Garfield and Ziggy and For Better or For Worse. My heart plummeted. This wasn’t the first time something of this sort had happened.  

I opened my presents half-heartedly, saving cards for last. I couldn’t stand the temptation of boxes, of things that were material and tangible. Hugging my mom, thanking her for the porcelain dolls and my umpteenth pair of stretch pants, I settled in a pile of ribbons and tattered paper to get through the last few greetings. A card from my grandparents, $100. Straight to the bank account; I couldn’t touch it. Congratulations from an aunt and uncle--almost in the double digits, I was. A big achievement. But the entire time, one questioned lingered in my mind: I still hadn’t gotten a present from my father. Had he really forgotten about me? Where, what? Wasn’t there some explanation?

The last card I opened was a piece of computer paper. Obviously homemade, a picture of a goat on the front section invited me to read further. Inside, my father’s familiar chicken scratch appeared. "Go outside onto the deck," it commanded me. This seemed strange. My birthday is in November, during a notoriously rainy season in Oregon. Anything I was receiving must, therefore, have been capable of surviving inclement weather. Strange, indeed. As an eternally optimistic child of eight, I never realized that people do cruel things when they’re drunk. I stepped out onto the deck, through the door my father had shattered during a fit of rage. The sky was gray, and it was drizzling on the porch--a glorified ledge that boasted more peeling white paint than structural stability. And on it sat a bale of hay and a rotten pumpkin, remnants from Halloween harvest celebrations.  

* * * * *

My parents split when I was ten. I remember the day we had a family meeting--our first ever, an unmistakable sign that things would never be the same. That morning, my mother ushered my brother and me into our rumbly tan Volvo and drove us down to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. It was one of the few things that both my brother and I enjoyed; he could engineer a building to survive an earthquake, and I could marvel at the exhibits, cramming the knowledge of a frog’s gestation into my head. We spent hours at OMSI each run, touring submarines and asking inane questions to poor high school students who would try desperately to look busy when we appeared.

This visit was a little different. For some reason, after running the gamut of the building and viewing exhibits, we went into the gift shop, a paradise of gadgets and natural wonders to enthrall any little pair of hands. Money was very tight and generally, mom would not allow us frivolous expenditures. Today, instead of endlessly lecturing us on the value of money, reminding us that she "worked for two hours to make money to buy you this shirt," mom softened and said we could choose one item, less than five dollars, to remember our fun day by. Jeff chose a kit to make his own wind-up balsa car. I, on the other hand, found something a little more macabre: I chose a tiny, plastic, gargoyle-like hand puppet. Made of a purple, swirled rubber it was an impish caricature of drama. His pointed ears, angular chin, demon-slit eyes caught my gaze and wouldn’t let me go. He was at once menacing and delightful; I had to have him.  

When we got home, I was still caressing my new find, absorbed in its intricacies. Fingers jammed into his head, I sat slumped in front of our dining room table, dusty and spattered with last night’s dinner. Mom talked, and I moved the rubber jaw in time, deflecting the words--it wasn’t my mother telling me dad was leaving, dad wasn’t screaming that it was all "that bitch’s" fault. I remained at the table a long time after they were gone, blinking tears out of my eyes. The acrid scent of the gargoyle’s rubber face lingered on my fingers; when I think of that day, it comes back to me, wafting gently. It’s an odor that corresponds with his sardonic countenance--slightly appealing and repugnant at the same time. The smell was with me when my father walked out the door; it was with me when I ran after his new little silver flash of a sports car, insisting that he would need a jar of Jif peanut butter as he started his new life. It’s with me when I think of my father; it is with me always.

 * * * * *  

I only visited my father for about a year before our time together became unbearable. Jeff and I would trek biweekly to his apartment building, for what usually became a weekend of macaroni, pizza pockets, the Weekly World News and forty-eight straight hours of television. Dad refused to smoke outside; when he was drunk (now a continual state of being) he would blow the treacle smells of cheap 7-11 cigars in my eyes, disregarding my allergies. From here it only worsened; I would have to plead with my father to clothe himself. I begged him to discard the torn jeans with a three-inch inseam and I reminded him, time and time again, that reason dictates one must wear underwear when donning the aforementioned short shorts. He no longer called me Erin; my name became "Melanie," after my mother.

One weekend, he brought a Playboy magazine to his frigid, boxy apartment, threw it on the table and pointed to a certain page. His stubby arthritic finger poked at a graphic; it was a chart comparing the measurements of various celebrities. He picked it up, brought it over and shoved it into my face. Rum and coke breath heavy on my neck, I grasped the glossy pages and examined the chart, wishing I could escape into the fine lines, become an insignificant little letter among the sea of words on the spread.

Before I realized what he was doing, my father grabbed a coiled measuring tape. Petrified, I tried to stop breathing as he wrapped it, cold and slithering, around my chest, my waist, my hips and my thighs. The plastic snaked around my body as he called out numbers, triumphant--thirty, twenty-eight, thirty, twenty-two inches. "Your fucking thigh is the size of Cindy Fucking Crawford’s waist," he gruffly slurred, leering over me as I measured myself against slick images of perfection. My chest was exploding, breath caught somewhere in thirty inches of cavernous flesh. The sensual pictures of models--naked, porcelain women on my father’s computer--swirled in my head, tormenting my puckered, dimpled skin.

Pizza pockets with oozing mozzarella, packages of raw cookie dough, croissants slathered in full-fat butter all lost meaning to me. I felt him measuring me up, his hands trespassing on my shame. I was inches, a package of a human, quantified into four feet, ten inches, 130 pounds of sausage skin. No longer could I relish the taste of pancakes swimming in a pool of Aunt Jemima’s; even the thought of wrapping hungry lips around a fresh cling peach, succulent juice rolling down my skin, disgusted me. I was fat, not so much unlike my father, and with every taste of my former love, the stale reminders of claustrophobic nights spent waving away thick gray clouds of smoke and Bacardi, fear and sadness, were the only flavors that tickled my palette. I never went back.

Author's Biography

I am a freshman at Northwestern University, but I originally hail from Oregon. 

I am studying print journalism and hope one day to travel the world, writing about my experiences. 

I am the youngest of seven in a blended family, and I love my life.

E-mail Erin at QuotationsOfABody@hotmail.com

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