At the very least, I was going to ask her why she left.
“I’m eighteen,” I mumbled to myself as I drove on. “Anyway, what does he know about being a woman ... a grown woman? Plus, I’m perfectly capable of driving. Legally, I am a grown woman, right?”
A long, drawn-out string of nonsensical words spun from my mouth as I drove on, even though no one sat in the passenger seat to hear them. But it didn’t seem to bother me.
I was on my own for the first time in my life, and it felt good. Exciting. Freeing.
When I got my driver’s license at sixteen, my dad had been by my side, but there was no party or fun dinner at a restaurant to celebrate. Although, he did buy me a used Toyota to overcompensate for his blundering through my first period and puberty.
It had been just my dad and me for my whole life, so I didn’t really know he was blundering anything until much later, when my friends and I got to talking. I guess I could have gone to one of their moms with my questions, but to be honest, most of my friends were boys.
“Platonic, of course,” I mumbled to myself.
It was no shock that most of my friends were boys. After all, I was raised by a single dad and grew up speaking “male.” That didn’t mean I wasn’t desperate for a woman’s touch, soft murmurings from a mom I never knew, secret chats and pillow talk—some semblance of what I’d seen portrayed on TV and in the movies.
The thing was, my reality was a far cry from the movies. My mom, Paula Dubois, was a real class act—in her own mind. She’d come from some hoity-toity, rich-ass, snobby family, according to my grandpap. She’d never had a hard day in her life except when she went slumming with my dad, and subsequently, nine months later. Also my grandpap’s words.
I stole a quick glance at my jet-black hair in the rearview mirror—compliments of Paula, I was told. My dad was all blond hair and blue eyes. Too bad his recessive genes didn’t duke it out hard enough. My coloring was a constant reminder of Paula for him with my dark hair and green eyes. Except when it came to my facial features ... then I was a female version of him.
When my parents met, my dad was no more than the son of a seaside construction worker. Paula had been vacationing near the beach town where he’d lived his whole life. Sea Isle City, New Jersey, was all my dad had known.
The story went something like this ...
Paula went to Atlantic City for a bachelorette weekend. She’d been sitting in the bar, sipping on a glass of bubbly, when my dad and some buddies made their way into the lounge. They were already half-drunk on cheap beer and high on playing poker when they bellied up to the bar. According to my dad, Billy Bender—or Bend, as his friends liked to call him—my mom eyed him up immediately. He ditched his friends that night, warming the sheets of Paula’s luxury hotel bed. The next morning, she rode back to Sea Isle with him and spent a month shacked up in his run-down beach bungalow.
She’d been twenty-one and he’d been twenty-five. Paula was on the brink of everything. My dad had close to nothing on the horizon,“Other than a ready woman and an ice-cold beer at the end of the day,”according to my dad.
My mom sunbathed, applying a healthy dose of expensive-as-shit oils on her silky skin—at least that’s what I’d always envisioned—while Bend worked. When he got home at the end of the day, they went at it like rabbits, drinking wine on the back deck, and then stronger coffee in the morning. The latter I also knew, compliments of Pap.
“Hey, I’m eighteen. I know where babies come from. That’s how I came to be—the going-at-it-like-rabbits part.”
Embarrassed at talking to myself again, I turned up the radio. Lush green trees and large fields of crops I couldn’t name blurred past the car windows as I sped down the highway. Yet, nothing could distract me from the story in my head ...
When the month was up, Paula was already bored and went back to her uppity college in New York City. Apparently, my grandpap had predicted this.
Abandoned, my lonely dad hunkered down for the fall and winter in his little beach town, picking up the odd construction job and rehabbing houses, and forgot about the fiery city girl who had warmed his bed.
Then, come spring, Paula showed up one afternoon with a snarky, sure-of-herself friend on her left and a baby carrier on her right.
That would have been me.
She’d said, “Here. You left me with a little souvenir of Sea Isle. I wasn’t so fond of this place to begin with ... so, here it is.”
It! Nother. Notshe. No name, nothing. All per my grandpap. My dad tried to sugarcoat the story, but there wasn’t much to work with.
With my mom standing on the porch, baby in tow, my dad apparently went mute. He tried to form words, but he couldn’t.
“I just couldn’t stop staring at you. The most precious baby girl I’d ever seen.”
I’d finally pulled the truth out of him when I was around twelve or thirteen with constant prodding for more information.
Like his dad, he embellished.“I suppose it’s because you were so beautiful, sitting there in your carrier, all pretty in purple.”
I’d tried to tell him over and over again ... “Dad, the expression is pink. Pretty in pink, not purple.”
But he always insisted that’s why he’d gone mute. My prettiness.
I’d believed him until I was around sixteen.
