“Look at her. She’s like three feet taller than me. She’s like a giraffe. A cute one, I love her, but you get me. You wouldn’t believe how much the girl eats. That hair: don’t let it fool you. It’s straightened now. But usually, it’s like lamb’s wool.” He points up at my own hair, smiling. Then looks closer at my straight strands, and sobers. “Still my bubi’s was the same way, so who knows which side that came from. But Tal’s yours. She’s very artistic. Not academic, this one. Always about the art, the dancing, the whole tortured artist thing. You’ll get it. I been Googling you. Almost two years now, I been following you.”
“So why today? Why didn’t anybody tell me before? All this time, if you had my name, why not contact me?” I don’t want to sound mad. I don’t want him to get up from the table, for the girl outside, now on the cell phone, to fade away from me.
“My daughter.” Irv Karp shrugs. “Promises were made. And I was particular about who I would let in my granddaughter’s life, no offense. But I researched you, I saw who you became. And I saw on the Internet you’d be in town, at this little cartoon thing.
“This girl, I can’t handle her anymore. And Tal’s like you. She’s your people.”
—
This girl looks more like my mother’s daughter than mine. She’s even darker than I am. I’m proud: I knew I had more black in me than my own appearance implies. I’m jealous: that melanin should have been mine. The genes that gave me the palest of tans on her looks like a two-week Caribbean vacation. The African kink of her hair is chemically treated and combed straight enough to be European curly. She’s been passing for white and not even knowing it.
“So, I’m a black. That’s just fucking great. A black. That’s just what I need right now.”
“You’re not ‘a black.’ You’re black. It’s a good thing, nowadays. You can be president.” I grin for her. Her smile back is quick and fraudulent. She’s trying to act composed and mature, and she’s not old enough to know how to pull off the illusion like the rest of us.
“Jesus, I thought you would be Israeli or something. I hate rap music,” she says, then looks off. “You know, I was the best dancer at Kadima, since like third grade. Guess that’s explained.”
“I can’t dance, sorry.”
“Maybe it skips a generation. God, school. He told you to tell me to go back to school, didn’t he? He told you to tell me to get back in high school, finish up and go to a good college. That’s why he’s doing this to me, because it’s easy to get into college for blacks. Don’t they get scholarships or something? That’s what this is about.”
My daughter is a racist, I think. I adjust that to, My daughter is mildly racist. My daughter is casually racist, I settle on. She’s casually racist. “You dropped out of high school?”
“I’m an artist too. I’m a dancer. I’m going to dance school anyway, so I just need my GED and an audition piece. Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m going nuts in his apartment. You’ve met Irv; you have to see what he’s like. I’m going to graduate, like, any minute. I’m almost eighteen. I want to get out of the house now. Tell him to let me go, and I’ll leave you alone. You can go back to not being a dad.” I want to protest this, but my mind doesn’t have the words my mouth needs, so I choke on nothing for a bit till I raise my water glass.
“I’ll take the year off, backpack in Europe, take some classes, just build my repertoire,” she keeps going. “That’s what matters. Ol’ Irv doesn’t understand that. I’m sure as hell not going back to Kadima Hebrew Academy. Look at you. Look at me. I don’t even know if I’m even Jewish anymore.”
“You’re definitely still Jewish.” Where is her old man? I ask myself, then realize this is the same question Irving Karp has been asking himself of me for seventeen years.
“Oh right. The whole Jewish Vagina Clause. I guess that fact hasn’t changed.” When she says “Jewish vagina” I think of her mother’s literal one before I can catch myself. I’m so damn light, my blushing looks like the igniting of a funeral pyre. She sees this, and then her face goes red as well.
“I didn’t know about you until a week ago, okay? Irv saw that you were coming to town, finally decided to tell me. I didn’t know you were a black till today.”
“Okay, look, it’s not ‘a black.’ It’s never ‘a black,’ okay? Just ‘black.’ Or African American.”
“You don’t look very African, but whatever.” My newfound daughter rolls her eyes at me, twirls her straw. “God, I guess I’m going to have to start using hot sauce on all my food now.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t possibly believe that,” I say, kind of laughing, hoping she’ll start laughing with me. She doesn’t. “Hey, I didn’t know you existed at all. But I’m glad, okay? I’m really glad,” I tell her. I just say it. I don’t say it because I mean it. But when I hear it out there I can tell it’s true. Hey look, Becks, I’m finally a father. My own father’s gone, Becks is so gone, but here is new family. Seventeen, but new to me.
“I saw your illustration, online. Some of it’s okay.” Tal shrugs. I want to tell her about her other grandfather, about my father, about how she just missed him, but don’t. I want to tell her that my mother died when I was young, too, but it’s morbid. Instead, I find myself saying, “You should go back to school. Your grandfather is right about that.” It’s a safe thing, an easy thing to latch onto, probably the only fatherly advice I’m qualified to give.
“I am so not going back to Kadima. I don’t fit in there. I never fit in there. I never fit in anywhere. Especially not now.”
“Then you’ll go somewhere you do. It’s important. I’ll help you. Let me do that for you. For your future. Whatever you decide to do once you get your diploma, that’s up to you. But you need to have the choices available to make—”
“You want to help me, want me to go back to school? Want us to be daughter and daddy? Fine. Just get me the hell out of here, and you got a deal. Take me back to Wales with you, that would be awesome. I could go to school there. Or just send me to boarding school. Send me someplace, like, Phillips Exeter. I have the grades. That’s it, Exeter. Send me there. Irv will go for that.”
“Exeter? That’s, that’s a lot of loot. And it’s so white,” I catch myself saying.
“But I’m white,” she says, and I look hurt. I must look hurt, because she leans over the table and adds, “I’m as white as you look.” Then my new daughter pulls back again, twirling her hot-combed hair with a nail-bitten finger, my own snarl on the adjective mirrored.
4
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re here. I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” Tosha tells me from across her kitchen table. She’s got a table, a house, kids, her chosen husband. A whole established life. All new to me, and already old to her. She’s done so well since she rejected me. “And you’re a father, too! To a racist white girl.”
“Not racist. I said ‘casually racist.’ She just…she just doesn’t know better.”
“Because you haven’t been there to teach her. We never even met the wife, besides on Facebook, and now you’re a single dad of a teenager just as fast.”
“Biological. Biological father.” And then I think of Tal’s face and muster up all the nostalgia for yesterday and amend my statement. “Tal has a cleft chin. She got my mom’s cleft chin. All this time there was someone walking around with a chin I loved, and I didn’t even know it. She’s my daughter. I got a girl. An almost grown, pre-woman, girl.” This is the third rotation of this discussion. Apparently, we’re going to keep cycling through this information until both of us firmly accept it. “And she’s a white girl.”