BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON
425
Maybe there's a point to Sadie after all, she thought, and then she
wrenched her sympathy away from her mother. But she could not
find the father she loved, even in her dreams. Orphaned, she wept.
One day Clara arrived to find her father sitting at the kitchen
table . He was slurping lentil soup while Sadie hovered with a dish
cloth, a napkin. He asked for peppers and eggs, most of which he
ate. "I got a joke for you," he said to Clara: "A very religious man
was sitting in the park. A pretty woman walked by with a baby. The
baby was doing terrible things. It was ugly. So the man said, "Scuse
me, lady, but how come such a pretty woman like you has such an
ugly baby? Who was the father?' So the woman said, 'Well, there
was no father. I had artificial insemination.' So the man said, 'That's
what the Bible means when it says spare the rod and spoil the child.'
Get it? Spare the rod and spoil the child?"
"I love you, Daddy," Clara said.
"Sure you do," he said, "we know that. Tell her to go away." He
meant Sadie.
Sadie took a cuticle scissors from the pocket of her housedress,
dipped a dish cloth in a glass of water, snipped off two edges of the
cloth, and stuffed them in her ears: "I can't stand the moaning," she
said.
"Who's moaning?" the old man said. Clara mopped his face, his
chest. "No more talk about dying around here," he said . "She says
she's here all the time, but she goes away." He meant Sadie. "I'm
here, Daddy," Clara said. "Of course," he said . When he rose to go
to the bathroom, Sadie jumped up to help him. "You tell her, Clara,"
he said, "tell her I can do it alone . You know I can do it. You know
I'm good ."
"He'll fall and kill himself," Sadie wailed. She seemed to be
hearing all right, in spite of her earplugs. Clara thought he might
very well fall and kill himself; she willed him across the room. "Shut
up," she said to Sadie, who shrieked: "You're killing me!" He made it
to the bathroom, and then to bed. "I feel good," he said. "Do you love
me, Daddy?" He patted Clara's hand. He fell asleep . Sadie went into
her bedroom and turned the television on, "The Price Is Right."
Clara could hear her crying. She sat at the kitchen table and lit a
cigarette. She finished her father's peppers and eggs .
The next day Clara's brother phoned: "He's gone."
"Gone where?"
