“Ican’t marry you.” That’s what my father told you on the first day of his affair with you. You were so surprised all you could say was, “Oh.” My father went on, with what seemed to be genuine regret, that he had a wife and child. “Oh,” you replied again. You didn’t really care one way or the other. At just that moment, a fleck of mascara had dislodged from your eyelash, slipped into your right eye and got under your contact lens. You squeezed your eyes shut, then opened them wide, then bent forward, blinking repeatedly. But it still stung, so there was nothing to do but remove the contact lens from your eye. You had worn hard lenses since junior high. During the time it took you to hold the lens up to the light, give it a quick lick and get it back into your eye—all with a practised hand—my father kept on talking. “I have a child,” he repeated. “She’s still a little girl.”
“OK, I understand,” you said. You said it to let him off the hook, because my father clearly wanted to stop talking about it. But what you really wanted to say was, It’s none of my business whether you have a child or not.
But a year and a half later, after everything had changed and my father broached the subject of marriage, you warmed to the fact that he had a little girl, because you had kind of started to want one. You were in your mid-twenties at this point, and your friends had started to have babies. But pregnancy seemed like a total burden to you. One of your friends was deemed to be high risk for a miscarriage and spent three months confined to a hospital bed. When you went to visit her, she was lying flat on the bed. She wasn’t allowed even to sit up, apparently. You looked down at her face stripped of its make-up, her scraggly eyebrows. Her arm with the IV drip was so puffy it looked like it would burst.
“It’s so itchy I can hardly stand it,” your friend said, laughing through her ordeal.
You stood there and imagined how you were going to suffer when you got pregnant. You didn’t know when your turn would come, but this is the way pregnancy has ravaged women since the dawn of time. And still does. And always will. And unless you made up your mind to refuse all of this, your body would be ravaged, too. But you didn’t actually think this, of course. It was so plainly obvious that there was really no need for anyone to consciously think it. What you really thought was how uninterested you were in getting pregnant at this point, and how convenient it was that someone else had given birth to the child. Meaning me. I was three years old. Which pleased you, bringing back memories of when you were little and how you had wanted a dog, or a cat, or a bird. Your parents had no interest in animals and held firm, but they weakened when you begged for a hamster. “Hamsters don’t make too much noise,” your parents had reasoned.
You were small at the time, but the hamster was smaller. So small it was hard for you to believe a pet could be that small. You would pinch its twitchy hind feet together, and lift them up to see if those little pink pads really did belong to a living creature and the whole thing wasn’t just some mechanical wind-up toy. The hamster died after four months. You had never cleaned its cage. Your parents offered to buy you a new hamster.
“Naw, that’s all right,” you said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
One of your parents, you can’t remember which, placed a hand on your head and said that you should just let them know if you change your mind. Lying on your stomach on the floor, you peered into the cage. The hamster wasn’t there any more, so the exercise wheel and tunnel and water bottle all belonged to you. When you tired of imagining yourself having shrunk down to hamster size and playing on all the fun things and curling up to sleep in the hamster hideaway, the cage became just a place to stack your notebooks and textbooks. It took a full year for your mother to realize that you hadn’t kept the cage out of fondness for the hamster, but simply because no one had bothered to throw it out. After she got rid of it, you were pleased. “Oh, my room is so much bigger now,” you said, letting your backpack slide from your shoulders to the floor.
When my father said to you, “She’s really a sweet-tempered, quiet girl,” your fingertips were tracing the stem of the teacup. It reminded you of the supple
curve of the hamster’s twiggy legs. “Hina’s not fussy—she’ll eat anything—and she doesn’t have any allergies,” my father went on, referring to me, his only child, and in that brief flicker of time, all your memories of the hamster disappeared.
“I sound like a father, I know, but, honestly, she has very good manners for her age. She’s just such a good girl. She’s a little confused about everything right now, all that’s happened. But, you know, give it a little time and…”
My father wanted you to just move in, take it day by day—no need to overthink anything. Of course he was thinking he wanted to marry you somewhere along the line, but for now you could just move in, and then you could decide whether or not it was working out. True, if you waited too long to figure it out, he said, that might be a problem, “If you consider how tough it would be for a little girl.”
My father was in his late thirties at the time, so there was an age gap between the two of you, but nothing that anyone would gawk at. And he had a good job at a company that was quite well known to people who knew the industry. What he wanted was someone to take care of things at home and to take charge of his little girl. Meaning, if you moved in, you wouldn’t need to work.
You were a temp at this point. You didn’t love your job, but you didn’t hate it, either. The ups and downs of the job weren’t big enough to make you love it or hate it. You went to work every day because there had never been an option not to go to work, but it wasn’t that painful. Or if it was, it was a pain that you just had to get used to, like the one that came from sticking hard contact lenses into your dry eyes every day.
But the moment the actual possibility of not having to work was dangled right in front of you, the thought of going in the next day suddenly seemed like a very dreary prospect. Going to the office had always been a drag, but never to this extent. A tingling started in your legs, and soon your whole body wanted out of this job. The vibe at work had not been good lately, but you weren’t one to do anything to make it better. You knew from experience things were only going to get worse. The teacup in your hand was almost empty, but it suddenly felt heavy. When you set it down, it clanged into the saucer.
“How about six months?” you said. “Let’s try living together for six months. And then I’ll decide.”
My father nodded. He was smiling.
And with that, going to work was no longer the slightest burden. No, now you thought it was wonderful. Because work was now in the past. Even
the things that technically belonged to the future—giving notice, clocking in until your last day—all of that was in “the past”.
What you really looked forward to, more than living with my father, was living with me. You have a younger brother, but when he was a child, so were you. Since you became an adult, you had not had a single child anywhere near your orbit. A few times, my father brought me along to get to know you, and each time I was quiet and well behaved—exactly as my father had promised. I didn’t speak unless I was spoken to. ...
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