DAPHNE MERKIN
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ing gowns, Sulka's latest whorling-patterned silk. After 1 finished
reading the poem, he kissed my check, thrusting his lips out as
though to stamp them upon my skin, and made some mild joke.
Rachel said, "How nice, Hannah," and Eric said, "I really like it.
Good stuff." So why did 1 end up in tears? 1 went upstairs and lay
down on my bed, face into the pillow. 1 didn't know why 1 was cry–
ing so hard. 1 wanted my feelings to stay far away from me, to go
bother some other girl; they had no recourse in this family.
If
only 1
could have split myself in two like Patty Duke did on her show–
produce an identical cousin on whom I could fob off my worse
self. ... After a while 1 went back downstairs, where everyone was
eating birthday cake, and no one commented on my disappearance.
My mother passed me a piece of cake, vanilla with chocolate frost–
ing, on a pink paper plate, with a spoon and napkin to match. There
was nothing missing that you could see.
1 imagine my father saved the piece of paper on which this poem
was written, the way he saved all our stuff-diplomas (Rachel's and
Benjamin's outnumbering the rest of ours), citations , birthday cards
(Lily's being the most painstaking, with bits of yarn and colored
chalk and verses in French), a scattering of report cards. His affec–
tion displayed itself best in this sort of chronicled remove, a passion
for documentation. I bet if you looked for it today, you could find it
somewhere in a box or file in his office downtown, a graying piece of
blue-lined notebook paper where , in the spotty ink from a Bic pen,
my squat adolescent handwriting composed a blurred image of a
love poem.
But when I try and think of a clearer connection between
myself and my father, then and now, I come up with the name of a
TV show - one that eluded my actual viewing experience but that is
known to me as a concept and as a name: "The Price Is Right." My
father is always talking price; even when he is talking politics, he is
talking price, value for your money. He reports on everything-all
he has read, seen, and heard - with a succinct detachment, as though
he were addressing a shareholders' meeting: "Seven up, three down.
Trade today."
How, then, can 1 talk to him, ask for advice on my runny prob–
lems, problems that recognize no bottom line in their vast expen–
ditures of feeling? When I knock on his study door seeking some of
the lucidity 1 lack and that my mother keeps assuring me he can pro-
