Maroon

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Maroon
• Sonia Feigelson (bio)

My father wants to buy me a bikini. “It’s not an option,” he says, “to wear some ratty old thing to the infinity pool.”

I prefer to be ratty, which is our central problem. My father is devoted to proving that he knows the truth about me. To him, the world is not a matter of needing but of acquiring.

Just kidding. Being ratty is not our central problem. It is a problem, but it is probably located slightly to the left.

I lay my phone on the side of the bed where Kyle used to sleep, set it on speaker, turn my face to the wall, and close my eyes. “I have a bathing suit,” I say.

His voice crackles like an elementary school principal over an intercom. Authority, intimacy. Some days I wish there were a way to email God directly: “There is no need to be so literal. We are on the same page.”

My father David and I are going tropical. “Aquamarine dream.” That was the promise made by the homepage banner on the swim-wear website he sent me last night. [End Page 37]

“You mean,” I say, “is the suit suitable?”

On the line, the sound of his scratchy breathing. I don’t know if I can blame my father for not thinking I’m funny, but I’d like to.

“How do you know what’s appropriate?” I ask.

He says he can guess. He says he knows me. “I’m your father,” my father tells me.

That my father knows me, is a contested view.

He doesn’t know I’ve never gone tropical. I’ve been to Florida, but Florida doesn’t count. “For anything, in any comparison,” I might once have joked to Kyle, and she would have said, “You’re exasperating,” and she would have been right.

Among the many issues I don’t push is this issue—the not knowing—an issue which, if I pushed, is why David would say that we’ve got to go on vacation together. So he can hear about me, not here.

I am not like God, a good storyteller. If I were, I would’ve said that this is a story about going somewhere and coming back changed. It is like Star Wars.

In honor of thirty years alive, I am going in the water with my father. He wants to buy what I’ll wear to the water, in the water, soaked by water, evaporating up. He wants to take me to the same beach he wanted to take me when I was not thirty and we were not talking. My father and I are greeting the sun, say swimwear websites, we are breezebound. According to our therapist, Carolyn, we are letting the light turn us over a new leaf, though we are each, in our own way, mid-wither.

My father, at sixty, is divorcing for the third time. I am not.

He wants me to be less rude to him. I want him to stop doing things that make me want to be rude to him.

What was wrong with the years before I turned thirty? How unsuitable the school holidays smattered across a childhood in [End Page 38] which my mother boiled chicken franks in the same room where she slept, and I sat on the stained carpet of our studio apartment, watching a television show about a wealthy man making over the life of a woman he loved. I don’t remember any vacation offers then.

Without my father, I have survived a long time. With him, only briefly.

I was lying earlier. I am divorcing for the first time.

________

Now, in the light of a dressing room—thighs dimpled, belly bloated, skin blotted by new age spots I have never noticed before and will likely spend the rest of my life noticing—my father sticks his hand over the door and declares: “I’m not looking, I’m not looking!”

Into the dressing room are lowered a handful of sturdy plastic hangers and snagged bikini parts.

Carolyn, with whom we’ve worked for the past...