The Making of a Daddy
Art by Luanne Castle
The Making of a Daddy” responds to Sylvia Plath’s poems about her father, “Daddy” and “The Colossus”
Luanne Castle’s art appears in Thimble, Raw Lit, Wildscape, Does It Have Pockets, Watershed Review, Rogue Agent, Ink in Thirds (where it was featured online), and Best of Mad Swirl, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She has published a memoir in flash, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, and four award-winning poetry collections.
Ice cream
CNF by Cath Schikkerling
It is Tuesday afternoon and I am sitting in a brown Volvo with my father. We are going to stop for ice cream. This is how we bond. Once every few weeks dad picks me up from school and takes me to the orthodontist who looks at the movement of my teeth from point A to point B. My father sits in the waiting room reading The Farmer’s Weekly, teeth clamped around an unlit pipe. Afterwards, we go for ice cream.
We are stopped at a traffic light. The sun is shining onto my left cheek. I can feel the skin reddening so I put my hand up to shield it. My father looks over at me for a moment, but he doesn’t say anything.
Talk radio host John Berks is on Radio 702. He is brash and controversial, critical of the government and segregation and wet liberals. My father doesn’t like him. He has let me choose the station because Dr Zibarrus has tightened my braces and my teeth are all throbbing and I am going to be dropped back to boarding school for the rest of the week. I will continue to be bad at hockey and tennis and the history teacher will tell me to try to relax, again. She means unclench my shoulders and be casual, normal. Instead I am uptight and formal and quiet.
My father doesn’t know all of this, but he suspects things are not what he hoped (a math prodigy, linguaphile, and future foreign diplomat). Things are not what I hoped either. I would like to make friends easily, write like Antjie Krog and Sylvia Plath, have the courage of Olive Schreiner. So we are careful not to compare notes. The radio voice chips into our silence.
Now Berks is talking about his trip to New York, all torn jeans and a fucked up rucksack so he wouldn’t look like a target for muggers. Only he doesn’t say fucked up, I am thinking the words in a different context and the sounds tangle in my head.
The light turns green, and just across the intersection dad pulls into a parking space. We have come to a corner shop, The Mexican Hat, bang in the middle of a mainly Jewish suburb and run by an old Greek man. I close the car door softly, but it isn’t properly shut. My father’s lips purse and now my face is throbbing. I use my hip against the door and (thankfully) that does it. I brush dust off my school tunic–brown like the Volvo–and hurry toward the smell of dust and candy and washing powder.
“Kaliméra,” my father greets the man easily, orders two cones, one with a Cadbury’s Flake (my favorite) and one with chocolate and nuts. Behind the counter Mr Stephanos is dapper and crisp as though it is not the middle of summer in a hotbox. A small fan creaks behind him, blades ticking above the hum of fridges. He wears a white shirt like my father’s, sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows, and a cheerful cravat, not at all like my father whose pale green tie is meant to go with his deep green trousers. Both men have grey curls that spring from their temples. Dad plasters his down.
“Efharistó,” thank you. My father picks up foreign words like shiny pennies, hands them out with the ease of the truly gregarious. Taking my ice cream, I smile winningly at Mr Stephanos. The inside of my mouth roughens as it rubs across the tiny metal brackets on my teeth; my cheek muscles ache. I want my father to be proud of my social skills, of which I have none. So I am learning to fake them. It’s not going so well.
One-handed, dad hooks his wallet out of his back pocket, works out some cash, eyes on his left hand and the fat drip of soft serve that has escaped its chocolate cap. As he pays, I look out the window. He has a habit of snapping a bank note between his thumb and forefinger before he hands it over. A gesture of pride, I earned this. Across the road there is a To Let sign in another shop window. Afternoon sun hits the chrome frame just above the notice, a white starburst flash that turns black against my eyelids when I blink. To Let becomes Toilet. My bladder is too full, but my father is talking to Mr Stephanos about drought, maize shriveling up on its stalks.
I bite into the ice cream, eat around the Flake. My teeth hurt. Cold shoots a blade through my right cheekbone and into my eye until my skull pinches with pain. For a moment I envy my father’s false teeth; he is already crunching his way through the crisp sweet shell crusty with nuts. His jaw clicks when he chews. While the chill retracts, I count the clicks between his bites. I speed up my own to match his when I can eat again. Then I slow down. If my mouth is occupied with chewing I won’t have to talk.
“Punkin,” dad calls to me (in public!), “come say goodbye to Mr Stephanos.”
“Yiá sou,” I swallow and try my winning smile again.
Mr Stephanos cocks his head to one side, presses his hands together and his moustache smiles back.
“Goodbye next time,” he says, “see you one week.”
It will be a month before my next appointment, but I know what he means. Dad and I climb back into the car with half-eaten cones and sit a while, crunching wafer. Air-conditioning freezes our throats, the sun bakes our knees. I cross my legs tightly. Just a few minutes more and I can pee back at the dorm. The radio is on, it’s Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Come on Eileen saws into the air, hammers the quiet.
It is Tuesday afternoon and I am sitting in a brown Volvo with my father. We are going to stop for ice cream. This is how we bond. Once every few weeks dad picks me up from school and takes me to the orthodontist who looks at the movement of my teeth from point A to point B. My father sits in the waiting room reading The Farmer’s Weekly, teeth clamped around an unlit pipe. Afterwards, we go for ice cream.
We are stopped at a traffic light. The sun is shining onto my left cheek. I can feel the skin reddening so I put my hand up to shield it. My father looks over at me for a moment, but he doesn’t say anything.
Talk radio host John Berks is on Radio 702. He is brash and controversial, critical of the government and segregation and wet liberals. My father doesn’t like him. He has let me choose the station because Dr Zibarrus has tightened my braces and my teeth are all throbbing and I am going to be dropped back to boarding school for the rest of the week. I will continue to be bad at hockey and tennis and the history teacher will tell me to try to relax, again. She means unclench my shoulders and be casual, normal. Instead I am uptight and formal and quiet.
My father doesn’t know all of this, but he suspects things are not what he hoped (a math prodigy, linguaphile, and future foreign diplomat). Things are not what I hoped either. I would like to make friends easily, write like Antjie Krog and Sylvia Plath, have the courage of Olive Schreiner. So we are careful not to compare notes. The radio voice chips into our silence.
Now Berks is talking about his trip to New York, all torn jeans and a fucked up rucksack so he wouldn’t look like a target for muggers. Only he doesn’t say fucked up, I am thinking the words in a different context and the sounds tangle in my head.
The light turns green, and just across the intersection dad pulls into a parking space. We have come to a corner shop, The Mexican Hat, bang in the middle of a mainly Jewish suburb and run by an old Greek man. I close the car door softly, but it isn’t properly shut. My father’s lips purse and now my face is throbbing. I use my hip against the door and (thankfully) that does it. I brush dust off my school tunic–brown like the Volvo–and hurry toward the smell of dust and candy and washing powder.
“Kaliméra,” my father greets the man easily, orders two cones, one with a Cadbury’s Flake (my favorite) and one with chocolate and nuts. Behind the counter Mr Stephanos is dapper and crisp as though it is not the middle of summer in a hotbox. A small fan creaks behind him, blades ticking above the hum of fridges. He wears a white shirt like my father’s, sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows, and a cheerful cravat, not at all like my father whose pale green tie is meant to go with his deep green trousers. Both men have grey curls that spring from their temples. Dad plasters his down.
“Efharistó,” thank you. My father picks up foreign words like shiny pennies, hands them out with the ease of the truly gregarious. Taking my ice cream, I smile winningly at Mr Stephanos. The inside of my mouth roughens as it rubs across the tiny metal brackets on my teeth; my cheek muscles ache. I want my father to be proud of my social skills, of which I have none. So I am learning to fake them. It’s not going so well.
One-handed, dad hooks his wallet out of his back pocket, works out some cash, eyes on his left hand and the fat drip of soft serve that has escaped its chocolate cap. As he pays, I look out the window. He has a habit of snapping a bank note between his thumb and forefinger before he hands it over. A gesture of pride, I earned this. Across the road there is a To Let sign in another shop window. Afternoon sun hits the chrome frame just above the notice, a white starburst flash that turns black against my eyelids when I blink. To Let becomes Toilet. My bladder is too full, but my father is talking to Mr Stephanos about drought, maize shriveling up on its stalks.
I bite into the ice cream, eat around the Flake. My teeth hurt. Cold shoots a blade through my right cheekbone and into my eye until my skull pinches with pain. For a moment I envy my father’s false teeth; he is already crunching his way through the crisp sweet shell crusty with nuts. His jaw clicks when he chews. While the chill retracts, I count the clicks between his bites. I speed up my own to match his when I can eat again. Then I slow down. If my mouth is occupied with chewing I won’t have to talk.
“Punkin,” dad calls to me (in public!), “come say goodbye to Mr Stephanos.”
“Yiá sou,” I swallow and try my winning smile again.
Mr Stephanos cocks his head to one side, presses his hands together and his moustache smiles back.
“Goodbye next time,” he says, “see you one week.”
It will be a month before my next appointment, but I know what he means. Dad and I climb back into the car with half-eaten cones and sit a while, crunching wafer. Air-conditioning freezes our throats, the sun bakes our knees. I cross my legs tightly. Just a few minutes more and I can pee back at the dorm. The radio is on, it’s Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Come on Eileen saws into the air, hammers the quiet.
Cath Schikkerling is an emerging writer and poet. An accidental nomad, she has lived on three continents and two islands and explores migration, memory, and the body as archive in her writing. She is working on her first prose poetry collection.
