The Fish on Daddy's Red Swim Trunks

By Sherry Shahan

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squirm when he walks, plus he wears a wife-beater t-shirt, the worst ever name for clothing, and I pinch his arm hair when he picks up a deck of playing cards, thinking he could at least pretend to have a job—like shave and carry a lunch-pail, and he’s in such a damn hurry to leave he forgets to kiss me goodbye, so I press my nose to the window and flip him the bird; when he slows to wave, my nine-year-old fists freeze to the glass, then I attack a pair of his socks with scissors, making a spiffy skirt for my doll, Carol Sue, and I stretch the curly cord on our Bakelite phone, which has a skinny pullout drawer with a skinny pad inside with the number of Mom’s work, but I’m afraid to call the store because the mean manager always sounds like he wants to smack me, so I trace a hole in the dial with my finger, and wonder if Bonnie can come over and practice smoking, because we’ll never be grownup until we inhale without choking, but the wall clock says it’s five-fifteen, so she’ll be at her dining room table with cloth napkins her mother ironed while wearing red bareback pumps, and her father will be passing a platter of pork chops with crispy fat—and sometimes it’s really hard to be Bonnie’s friend; Roger would ditch his family dinner to come over, he loves me that much, and I start to call him, then chicken out, because there’s this birdbrained rule against girls calling boys—so I wind a paper napkin around a steak knife, then skip to the tree in the front yard, hoisting myself onto the lowest limb; from there it’s an easy climb to the branch near the top under the streetlight, not that I’m afraid of the dark; I like places where no one can see me—and I peel a strip of bark, loving the glistening flesh underneath, loving the Green Apple Kool-Aid smell—I know I should feel bad for carving a lazy S in the tree, but I don’t because there’s love in what I’m doing, and I sing Sherry and Roger sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g . . . and look! our station wagon pulls into the driveway, and Mom floats out, her kitten heels clicking, and she strolls like she doesn’t want to get to where she’s going, and once inside the house, the porch light flicks on, and I cross-my-fingers-and-hope-to-die that she’ll come outside and look for me, and if I fake-cough after my bath maybe she’ll smear Vicks on an old t-shirt, wave it over flames on the stove, rub it on my chest—and I’m wondering all this when she steps out, a slender shadow of herself, Sherry, are you up in that tree? and I almost fall, because she hasn’t forgotten about me, and she asks, Where’s your father? and I tell the same old lie, He’s at the Piggly Wiggly, because Daddy gets in enough trouble by himself; as soon as I hit the sidewalk she takes my hand and asks if I’d like a fried Spam sandwich for supper, and to make it even better, she says she’ll let me open the can, and while nothing is better than twisting the key over the thin sliver of metal, and hearing the sucking noise of salty pink jelly, I love my mom more than anything, because she never forgets I love these things; in the morning I slip from the top-bunk, hoping to catch her in the bathroom before work, drawing on cat eyes with a liquid pencil—she spends hours painting her naturally plump lips with Pink Minx lipstick in a hairspray fog, and I don’t know why Daddy doesn’t appreciate her glamorous movie star qualities—but the house is quiet, so I stand in the bathroom where her smells are the strongest, and inhale sprays and creams, knowing my parents want to kill each other, and then I climb onto the kitchen counter for a box of Cocoa Puffs, seeing Daddy in the backyard, dead asleep in the hammock in a weird position, like a rubber bath toy—and son-of-a-biscuit he never looks like this, not even on his worst hangover days, pale and grinning too hard, like that awful picture in my head—and I get that fizzy feeling in my stomach, open the backdoor and inch closer, and he jerks awake; when he pulls me in I press my cheek to his t-shirt, because stinky beer sweat is better than nothing, and that night voices bleed through the wallpaper—the most horrible word in Funk & Wagnalls, Divorce, and I stroke Carol Sue’s stiff hair, Don’t cry. They don’t mean it, and open my 3-ring binder, and use my ruler to draw a straight line down the middle of a piece of paper, then I draw a stick figure of Daddy on one side and Mommy on the other, and I fold the page in half, and crease it until my thumb hurts, and tear the paper, starting at the top, working hard to give them equal halves, because I want to be fair, but a tiny scrap flutters to the floor, and I know the scrap is me, and I can’t help it, I stick a bobby pin in Carol Sue’s skull, Dumb doll!