One of the fathers followed a Mexican soap opera. The women were huge-eyed and single-minded, and the story would never end. It would outlive the father and maybe even his daughter.
To the fathers’ wonder, their daughters drank like thirty-five-year-old women — a glass of wine with dinner, a cold beer at the end of a long hot week. They ate whatever was presented, whatever was handy, with equal zest, whether braised veal or a frozen cheese pizza.
The fathers could not discern the status their daughters held among their peers. It did not seem to matter that they were not wealthy. It did not seem to matter one way or the other whether they played sports. They were free to earn high grades if they wished. Their daughters were a clique, but took no pride in this. Exclusivity and welcome occurred naturally and were accepted without fuss. It seemed nerds no longer existed as they once had, or sluts. There was peer pressure to do such things as recycle and volunteer.
Each father understood that he could not tell how attractive his daughter was. Each assumed his daughter was beautiful because she looked similar to the other girls she hung around with, who were without doubt beautiful.
The fathers did not pal around with one another.
One of the fathers’ daughters had a suitor, a white boy named Tyrone. The father did not know if the boy’s parents had named him for a joke or a statement or if somehow Tyrone was a family name for them or what.
One of the fathers was in debt. He’d sold his crepe shop but no one knew at how great a loss. Now he cooked at an upscale breakfast place, folding mushrooms and lobster into omelets. He didn’t know what people thought — that he’d gotten weary of the responsibility of owning, maybe, or that he wanted to stay in shape in the kitchen. He hadn’t allowed his daughter to notice he was broke. He took her out for sushi and then, on his days off, he ate peanut butter sandwiches alone. He had begun secretly rooting against his daughter’s impeccable grades, knowing everything would be easier for him if she didn’t get into a prestigious far-off school. He had sold things out of the back of his garage, exercise equipment and a stately, attic-smelling grandfather clock. He had sold his bottles of fine California red. He had never decided what occasion might prompt him to uncork one of the wines, what sort of joyous triumph he was waiting for, and now he’d never find out. Good things had happened and he’d let them pass, occasionally handling and dusting the bottles but never celebrating with them. His daughter was the sharpest of the girls. She was a math whiz and a shrewd judge of character. He could not stand the thought of her being disappointed in him, of letting her down.
One of the fathers’ daughters spoke four languages. Fluent Spanish, of course. Enough French to hold a conversation. Also, they had hosted a girl from Zimbabwe for several summers and the daughter had picked up enough of some African tongue to continue learning it on her own. The high school had brought in a tutor for her, a linguist from the university. Though public, it was that kind of high school.
One of the fathers, years ago, had bought his daughter a boxy antique camera. Later he found it in a spare closet and tracked down film for it on the computer and used it to take pictures of the stagnant canals that snaked through their part of town. He tried to catch the canals at low tide, when clans of exposed crabs lined the oyster beds.
The fathers depended on their daughters to keep them in the correct shoes.
When in doubt, the fathers encouraged their daughters to get enough rest and eat vegetables and to tell the truth — timeless, tried-and-true directives.
The fathers were aware of how far things were going in some quarters. It wasn’t just nose jobs and breast augmentation anymore. Girls were getting their lips plumped. Girls were having their toes worked on, so their feet would look cute in sandals and flip-flops. None of the fathers’ daughters had mentioned any of this nonsense yet, but that didn’t mean they never would.
One of the fathers hired an escort every few months, an available reward to himself for how far he’d risen in life, and against what odds. The older his daughter got, the less purely he was able to enjoy this practice.
The era the girls were growing up in had no texture. The music betrayed nothing. The generation preceding the fathers’ had been wild, and the fathers themselves had learned to be jaded, but the girls were past all that. Jadedness, for them, was an old stale religion not worth its costumes. Rebellion, to them, was quaint.