“I think ice cream is achievable.” My old neighborhood slid by, full of memories, some of them good. “Anyplace special?”
“Somewhere close. I have a lot of homework.”
I signaled for a right without replying, and Rina said, “I really do. Don’t get your feelings all hurt.”
Of course, my feelings weren’t hurt. I’m an adult. “What kind of homework?”
“Genetics.”
“In sixth grade?”
“I’m accelerated, Dad. You know that.”
“When I was in sixth grade we were looking at maps.”
“When you were in sixth grade,” Rina said, “most of the world hadn’t even been mapped.”
“Humor is a dominant trait,” I said.
“Brown eyes, too. That pisses Mom off, that I got your eye color.”
“Hard to imagine.”
“What?” She reached for the radio and I gently intercepted her hand. I loved my daughter but I hated her music.
“Your mother being pissed off,” I said, and then added “about eye color. But she’s dominant in other ways.”
“Mom’s lawyer would call that alienating the child from the custodial parent,” Rina said. “No music?”
“I meant it genetically, not emotionally.”
She made a sound I could only interpret as a scoff, sort of a burst of air. “You did not.”
“I did. Except for your eye color, you look just like her.” And she did; every time I looked at her I saw the girl I’d fallen in love with for life when I was sixteen and she was fifteen. Kathy and I had stayed together through high school and through her college and my sort-of college, and then we’d gotten married. And stayed married until it became inescapable that one of us was going to have to change, and that it was going to be me, and that I couldn’t. And none of it was anything I was proud of.
“You’re as beautiful as she is,” I said.
“Oh, I’m so beautiful,” Rina said. “How come nobody except you notices?”
“If by ‘nobody,’ you mean the boys at school, I’m glad to hear it. You’ll be fighting them off soon enough.”
“So why no music?”
“If we could find something we both agreed was music, it’d be fine.”
“No music, then.” She lifted the metal flap on her seatbelt and let it snap closed. Then she did it again. “What are you up to?”
“Freelancing,” I said. “Trying to stay out of houses with large dogs in them.”
“One way to do that,” she said, “would be not to go into houses that don’t belong to you.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’d probably end up watching television.”
Rina said, “Millions of people do.”
I turned right on Ventura, heading for 31 Flavors. Rina stole a look at me and said, “What happened to your face?”
“A chandelier exploded.”
“You were under it?”
“Actually, I was swinging from it.”
“See, this is one of the things that makes me different from my friends,” she said. “When I ask them what their fathers do, they say something like banking or real estate. I say he swings on chandeliers in other people’s houses and comes home looking like he donated blood with his face.”
“Interesting guy.”
She slumped down in her seat, the sit-on-the lungs posture of teenage discontent. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“Is there another?”
She rolled her window down and rolled it up again. Then she said, “Never mind.”
I’m always happy to sidestep a real issue. “All right.”
“Why’d you have to be so honest with me when I was little? Why couldn’t you tell me you were a chef or something?”
“Well, I only work about two nights a month, for one thing. And it seemed like a good idea to tell you the truth.”
“Maybe that’s overrated.”
“Telling the truth?”
“Let’s drop it,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about.” She reached over and took my hand. “We don’t see each other enough. I promise not to pick a fight.”
“In that case,” I said. “You can listen to whatever you want.”
It took her less than five seconds to find something that sounded to me like a fender assembly plant being attacked by a bunch of guys with nail guns, but she nodded along with it. I decided to show her how much I loved her, so I reached over and turned it up.
Rina laughed, and I felt better than I had in days.
“Remember how you once told me that the most interesting questions about a society are the ones they don’t ask?” Rina had a double-thick double-chocolate double-malt in front of her, so viscous she couldn’t get it up the straw.
“The thought wasn’t original with me, but I probably said it.”
“So explain to me about Japanese horror movies.”
“Not really one of my fields,” I said. “But which ones? The old radioactive monsters-”
She shook her head as she dredged the straw through the shake and licked off the clump of glop that came up with it. She was wearing rimless glasses that I hadn’t seen before, and it almost broke my heart that I hadn’t known she had them. “No, those are easy to figure. The newer ones, you know, Ring and Ju-On and those.”
“What’s hard to figure? They’re ghost stories.”
“Yeah, sure, but what’s with all the dead wet girls?”
“Ah. Dead wet girls. Well, first, they’re ghost stories, right? The dead wet girls are ghosts.”
“Dead wet girl ghosts.”
“Lots of Asian cultures, the Chinese and the Japanese, anyway, believe that the ghost of someone who was wronged before death is especially dangerous. Women and girls in Japan are sort of repressed. They’re relatively powerless. They can’t take revenge during their lifetime, so they’re more likely to bear a grudge after they’re dead. So the ghosts are female. And as for dead, well, they’re ghosts, so they’re dead by default. And my guess is that they’re young, meaning girls, because the audience for the movies is pretty much your age. So that gets you to dead girls.”
“That’s two out of three. And wet?”
“Well, that’s probably something else. The movies are made by men, and lots of men like to look at wet girls. You’ll notice there aren’t any movies about dead wet ugly girls.”
“No. They’re all dead wet pretty girls.” She gazed out the window at the traffic on Ventura, and I studied her mother’s bone structure, magically transferred to my daughter’s face. She caught me looking when she turned back and gave me a smile that was all in the eyes before she returned her attention to the goop in her glass. “Do I ask you too many questions?”
“I dread the day you stop asking me questions. Why are you watching Japanese horror movies?”
“Mr. Miller, he’s my drama teacher, he tells us to watch all sorts of stuff. Movies, old TV shows, even commercials. We’re supposed to look at a lot of different ways people approach acting, and see if we can figure out what works and what doesn’t, and why.”
“Old TV shows?”
“Millions of them. TV’s like a time machine. You can see how people acted all the way back in the fifties or the sixties. You know, like Lucy. Would Lucy get hired today?”
“If she wouldn’t,” I said, “I’m in a world I don’t want to live in.”
“Me, too. And the woman upstairs, Ethel. I wish we had a neighbor like Ethel.”
“I’ll bet if you stir that thing, you’ll be able to drink it through the straw.”
“That’s no fun,” she said, dragging the straw through it again.
“Have you ever watched a show, I don’t know the name of it, with a little girl in it named Thistle Downing?”
“Oh, my God,” Rina said, her face lighting up. “ ‘Once a Witch.’ Thistle Downing is like the queen of the world. We’re doing a unit on comedy right now, and Mr. Miller assigned us to watch her and see why comedy is funnier when it’s played completely seriously.”
“And you liked her.”
“Well yeah.” She just managed not to roll her eyes at the question. “She makes it look easy even when you know it’s like the hardest thing in the world. And she was a really serious girl.”