Darling? by Heidi Jon Schmidt

Author:Heidi Jon Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466886094
Publisher: Picador

Blood Poison

“You probably don’t believe this is my daughter,” my father said to the cabdriver. “You’re wondering: Where did a broken-down old guy like him come up with a gal like that?”

It was only an hour since I’d gotten off the train and already my father had explained to two strangers that we weren’t having an affair. The first was the bartender at the Oyster Bar, where Pop had pulled out my stool as if New York were his overcoat and he was spreading it over a puddle for me. The bartender looked as if he had long since stopped seeing individual faces or thinking of anything except whatever he himself was obsessed with—money or football or his prostate or maybe some kind of love or ideal. He nodded without listening, dealing out some packets of crackers like cards. The place was full—of men and women who looked busier and more purposeful than I’d ever been—and the chalkboard listed oysters named for all the places I’d have felt more at home: Cotuit, Wellfleet, Chincoteague—low-tide towns where the few people left behind through the winter huddle in the souvenir shop doorways, stamping their feet and swearing under the clouds of their breath.

To the bartender I’d given an apologetic smile, which went, of course, unnoticed. The cab driver, Ahmed Sineduy, license number 0017533, cried “Yes!” with wonderful enthusiasm, as if he had indeed been trying to imagine what would attract me to my father.

“In fact,” Pop crowed, “I created her!”

I’d convinced him to have a drink at lunch—a mistake, but I wanted one myself. He makes me nervous—I don’t know him very well. He and my mother married young, and after I was born he drifted away, taking long and longer visits to his mother in the city until finally we noticed that he was living with her and visiting us. I’d study the New York news every night, first thinking I might see him, later that if I came to understand the city, I’d get a sense of my father, too. Phrases like “truck rollover in the Midtown Tunnel” were invested with incalculable glamour for me, and when people spoke of the Queensboro Bridge or the East River they might as well have been talking about the Great Obelisk of Shalmanezar and the Red Sea.

Twice a year my mother put me on the train to the city so I could spend the weekend with him. In my grandmother’s apartment it was still 1945, and I pushed the mother-of-pearl buttons on the radio set, expecting to hear FDR, while Pop made supper and Grammy offered me hoarded bits of chocolate and cake. We tried to act familiar, which meant we couldn’t ask the kind of questions that might have helped us figure each other out, and year after year the distance grew. If Pop was doing well in the market he talked a mile a minute, spreading out maps and showing me pictures of the houses—sometimes whole islands—he meant to buy. When

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