“I get to New York now and then,” Doug Pratter said.
“I suppose you and your wife fly in,” she said. “Stay at a nice hotel, see a couple of shows.”
“She doesn’t like to fly.”
“Well, who does? What they make you go through these days, all in the name of security. And it just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it? First they started giving you plastic utensils with your in-flight meal, because there’s nothing as dangerous as a terrorist with a metal fork. Then they stopped giving you a meal altogether, so you couldn’t complain about the plastic utensils.”
“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? But it’s a short flight. I don’t mind it that much. I just open up a book, and the next thing I know I’m in New York.”
“By yourself.”
“On business,” he said. “Not that frequently, but every once in a while. Actually, I could get there more often, if I had a reason to go.”
“Oh?”
“But lately I’ve been turning down chances,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers now. “Because, see, when my business is done for the day I don’t know what to do with myself. It would be different if I knew anybody there, but I don’t.”
“You know me,” she said.
“That’s right,” he agreed, his eyes finding hers again. “That’s right. I do, don’t I?”
Over the years, she’d read a lot about incest. She didn’t think her interest was compulsive, or morbidly obsessive, and in fact it seemed to her as if it would be more pathological if she were not interested in reading about it.
One case imprinted itself strongly upon her. A man had three daughters, and he had sexual relations with two of them. He was not the artful Daughter Whisperer that her own father had been, but a good deal closer to the Drunken Brute end of the spectrum. A widower, he told the two older daughters that it was their duty to take their mother’s place. They felt it was wrong, but they also felt it was something they had to do, and so they did it.
And, predictably enough, they were both psychologically scarred by the experience. Almost every incest victim seemed to be, one way or the other.
But it was their younger sister who wound up being the most damaged of the three. Because Daddy never touched her, she figured there was something wrong with her. Was she ugly? Was she insufficiently feminine? Was there something disgusting about her?
Jeepers, what was the matter with her, anyway? Why didn’t he want her?
After the dishes were cleared, Doug suggested a brandy. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t usually drink this much early in the day.”
“Actually, neither do I. I guess there’s something about the occasion that feels like a celebration.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Some coffee? Because I’m in no hurry for this to end.”
She agreed that coffee sounded like a good idea. And it was pretty good coffee, and a fitting conclusion to a pretty good meal. Better than a person might expect to find on the outskirts of Toledo.
How did he know the place? Did he come here with his wife? She somehow doubted it. Had he brought other women here? She doubted that as well. Maybe it was something he’d picked up at the office water cooler. “So I took her to this Eye-tie place on Detroit Avenue, and then we just popped into the Comfort Inn down the block, and I mean to tell you that girl was good to go.”
Something like that.
“I don’t want to go back to the office,” he was saying. “All these years, and then you walk back into my life, and I’m not ready for you to walk out of it again.”
You were the one who walked, she thought. Clear to Bowling Green.
But what she said was, “We could go to my hotel room, but a downtown hotel right in the middle of the city—”
“Actually,” he said, “there’s a nice place right across the street.”
“Oh?”
“A Holiday Inn, actually.”
“Do you think they’d have a room at this hour?”
He managed to look embarrassed and pleased with himself, all at the same time. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a reservation.”
She was four months shy of her eighteenth birthday when everything changed.
What she came to realize, although she hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, was that things had already been changing for some time. Her father came a little less frequently to her bed, sometimes telling her he was tired from a hard day’s work, sometimes explaining that he had to stay up late with work he’d brought home, sometimes not bothering with an explanation of any sort.
Then one afternoon he invited her to come for a ride. Sometimes rides in the family car would end at a motel, and she thought that was what he planned on this occasion. In anticipation, no sooner had he backed the car out of the driveway than she’d dropped her hand into his lap, stroking him, awaiting his response.
He pushed her hand away.
She wondered why, but didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything, either, not for ten minutes of suburban streets. Then abruptly he pulled into a strip mall, parked opposite a shuttered bowling alley, and said, “You’re my little soldier, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“And that’s what you’ll always be. But we have to stop. You’re a grown woman, you have to be able to lead your own life, I can’t go on like this...”
She scarcely listened. The words washed over her like a stream, a babbling stream, and what came through to her was not so much the words he spoke but what seemed to underlie those words: I don’t want you anymore.
After he’d stopped talking, and after she’d waited long enough to know he wasn’t going to say anything else, and because she knew he was awaiting her response, she said, “Okay.”
“I love you, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’ve never said anything to anyone, have you?”
“No.”
“Of course you haven’t. You’re a soldier, and I’ve always known I could count on you.”
On the way back, he asked her if she’d like to stop for ice cream. She just shook her head, and he drove the rest of the way home.
She got out of the car and went up to her room. She sprawled on her bed, turning the pages of a book without registering their contents. After a few minutes she stopped trying to read and sat up, her eyes focused on a spot on one wall where the wallpaper was misaligned.
She found herself thinking of Doug, her first real boyfriend. She’d never told her father about Doug; of course he knew that they were spending time together, but she’d kept their intimacy a secret. And of course she’d never said a word about what she and her father had been doing, not to Doug or to anybody else.
The two relationships were worlds apart in her mind. But now they had something in common, because they had both ended. Doug’s family had moved to Ohio, and their exchange of letters had trickled out. And her father didn’t want to have sex with her anymore.
Something really bad was going to happen. She just knew it.
A few days later, she went to her friend Rosemary’s house after school. Rosemary, who lived just a few blocks away on Covington, had three brothers and two sisters, and anybody who was still there at dinner time was always invited to stay.
She accepted gratefully. She could have gone home, but she just didn’t want to, and she still didn’t want to a few hours later. “I wish I could just stay here overnight,” she told Rosemary. “My parents are acting weird.”
“Hang on, I’ll ask my mom.”
She had to call home and get permission. “No one’s answering,” she said. “Maybe they went out. If you want I’ll go home.”