Non-fiction / Commitment Phobic: the father daughter dance

A strong stride and step, perfectly timed to music that is the dance that gets us from one end of the aisle to the other. I am tone deaf and graceless in my approach to the opposite sex, but this was not always the case.

I am six years old.

The corner of a table consumed with Barbie’s beach house and hastily made cardboard chairs; each small, makeshift stool balancing the weight of various odds and ends of plastic figurines. Toilet paper is dissecting the friends of Barbie from the friends of Ken sides of the pretend church. Barbie is beautiful in her cream dress and Ken is listless and propped up with a doll stand. The hum of that old familiar tune rumbling over the imaginary guests as Barbie makes it down the aisle. The ceremony is brief and besides a few objections from a hostile Skipper doll, went off without a hitch.

It is the reception and New Kids on the Block are the band. Suddenly the performance is interrupted by the Father of the Bride, wanting to cut in for the dance. The grey haired Ken takes over the steps and dances to Tiffany with his daughter Barbie and it is perfect.

I am eleven years, 25 days and 1 hour old.

The morning is loud and busy. Everyone has emerged from their separate corners of the split floor plan house. The sounds of crashing pans and comforting smells of pancakes are filling the rooms. It is Sunday and breakfast is the only tradition we stick too. Surrounding the coffee table in our boxers and tee shirts, Cara arguing over her curfew because “it’s a school night”, Christina is trying to help in the kitchen, and I sit there mesmerized by some stain on the inside of my pinky. The house phone is ringing loudly in the kitchen and my mother’s bedroom. No one is getting up; no one is acknowledging the tinny ring. Everyone is carrying on and letting it go. I hear my step father swear off in the kitchen and then run past the living room. He quickly disappears into the Master bedroom.

“Susie, I need you to come in here” my step dad’s voice barely audible over the noise of the morning. Suddenly everything is silent, and my sister is completely still. I hear my mother fall apart, I watch my sister run to the bedroom, and I hear my step father call me to the other room. My dad is dead.

I am 14 years old.

I hate walking home from the bus. It is a reminder that I am still grounded. Despite my better judgment I am veering off the sidewalk into my friend Nicole’s front yard, through her front door and to her room. The music is so loud the phone isn’t even audible. Our merriment and intensive study of fashion magazines is abruptly halted by her mom’s sharp rapping on the door. My mom called and by the expression Nicole’s mom was giving me, I can tell I am in deep trouble. I snag the seventeen I am reading, toss it in my back pack and head home. My pace was excruciatingly slow and I wasn’t going to hurry to my execution. Forgoing the shortcut through the school, I take my time meandering up to the house.

Half my family and the police are parked in front of the house, my mom was horribly overreacting to the fact I wasn’t home yet. I walk in to the house, and realize I am not walking to my execution; I am walking into a crime scene. Mom is crying at the table, Cara is quiet and the police are rifling through everything, or what is left of everything. We have been robbed.

Actually we were worse than robbed. My step father ran off with everything of value, including 3 months worth of bills he didn’t pay. We were broke, devastated, and about to be homeless.

I am 15 years old.

I am trying to scrub the bathtub but the damn thing won’t come clean. Giving up on maintaining an air of clean is easy when you live in the slums with your sister and cousin. I am angry and cleaning, trying to ignore the fact that all I had today was a third of an apple cinnamon power-bar. The phone is turned off again, and the fridge is empty. I hate this place, and the fact that I haven’t seen my mother for weeks. Shortly after losing the house, she disappeared with our social security, as well as our emotional security. We are three orphans 19, 17 and 15; keeping up the pretense of adults. I only go to school for the chance that I can talk someone into buying me lunch. Everything is a waste.

I am 16 years old.

I am engaged, I am in the most beautiful gown I have ever seen, and I am surrounded by strangers. I am poised to walk down the aisle. Fear sweating from my hands, anxiety gripping every muscle. I stop smiling in hopes that the grimace that is overwhelming my face was not seen by any guests. I am scared for the first time in a long time, I am sober for the first time in two years, and I am facing my dream in reality. I can see the outline of James waiting at the end of the church, compelling me to start walking towards him. But he is not the one dragging me to the altar, it is some stranger, some Watson family patriarch.

The skeleton man gripping my wrist is nauseating me; the iridescent colors of the stained glass making the church feel like a bad dream. I am having an anxiety attack; my heart won’t stop beating so fast. I run away. Away from my ruined dream, away from the stranger standing in for my absent father, and away from the reminder that I am alone.

I am 18 years 5 months old.

Walking down the icy road that runs between the cemetery and dormitories, I am alone. The boy who kicked me out of his car didn’t care that it snowed. He only cared that I said no. The smell of wet dust filled the car as the heater fogged the interior. Then he pulled it out.

The ring was garish, an example of everything he didn’t know about me. He made some speech about wanting to ask my parents permission, he doesn’t know that I haven’t seen my mom in years and my father has been dead almost as long. He wants to marry some ideal version of me, his dream like my Barbie and Ken. I try to tell him orphans make bad brides, churches crumble when they are that lopsided. My humor could not break the tension, he told me to leave. He doesn’t know that his was the 5th ring in a string of proposals by strangers.

I am 22 years old.

I am crying at James’ funeral. I am alone in my sadness, everyone else is so angry it chokes the air from the room like black smoke.

I am 23 years old.

I am alone. I am frightened, that I will one day have to make that walk down the aisle alone. I am paranoid that some thoughtless DJ will call for the father daughter dance, and I will dissolve. No more boyfriends, not since James died. Any dreams of a beautiful wedding disappeared when my step father committed suicide. The pretty picture in my head of my father daughter dance was left behind in junior high. I am commitment phobic, or so my therapist will tell you.

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