You were aware though that this was true only relatively; the purpose must be reasonable; you could not cut the borders off of window curtains, or leaves out of books, anywhere at any time observed of anyone. You could not use pee as an intransitive verb, meaning go-go, except slyly with other children, who did not count anyway, being in the same precarious and anomalous situation as yourself; and since go-go was at an early age discarded as infantile, you were left without any verb at all for that particular function and were driven to the expedient of expressing the need for its performance by a series of facial and bodily contortions which seemed to you grotesque and shameful, so that you always felt yourself blushing; though your elders appeared to find them vastly amusing, since invariably they laughed and giggled when they saw you. One result of this was that now and then your underthings got wet; on those occasions the only desire left to you was that the crust of the earth should open under your feet and swallow you into the oblivion of hell.
Certain admonitions from certain people were as inevitable as Mother’s goodnight kiss or oatmeal at breakfast. From Miss Wright, “Take your pencil out of your mouth”; from Mother, “Don’t annoy your father, dear”; from Sam who tended the furnace, “Get on out of here now”; from Father, “Pull your skirt down.”
The last was the best remembered of all; she would never forget it; it made her uncomfortable and resentful even now to recall her father’s “Pull your skirt down.” When had she heard it first? No telling, that was lost somewhere back in the origins of things; nor could she remember specifically its farewell performance, after she had graduated into high school and begun to have beaux, had become a young lady in fact; but in between those two forgotten occasions, the first and the last, it had persisted throughout, with or without reason.
Come to think of it, that was her father, “Pull your skirt down.” That was him. Most other memories of him, from childhood and early youth, were fleshless and bloodless, mere punctuations of time, with no significance beyond the chronological. Her first remembered reaction to that command, as a plump freckled youngster of five or six, had been simple and instant obedience. She had pulled her skirt down, though there had been very little to pull. By the time it had undergone a dozen repetitions she had, unconsciously of course, added it to the category of rules headed: Father Specialties, No Exceptions. It first became annoying on account of its indiscriminate use, a purely logical indignation against the requirement that something be pulled down which was already down as far as it would pull. The day came when the command was uttered and her hand did not move; after a brief interval it was repeated, in a tone that surprised and shocked her into a sudden violent tug.
“If you don’t care about decency, I do,” said her father.
She was at that time twelve or thirteen. The plumpness was all gone, and the freckles had disappeared; her hair had already begun to assume the dark rich tone which later became her chief attraction. He, her father, standing near the door putting on his overcoat, looked as to her he had always looked, large, well-built, handsome, not so old as other girls’ fathers but infinitely more terrifying. She liked to watch his mouth when he talked or laughed; his red lips and gums and white teeth made fascinating combinations. At one time, when she was almost too young to remember, he had worn a short moustache, but it had been gone now for some years; of mornings in the bathroom she was often permitted, when necessity required it, to wash her hands and face at the tub faucet while he shaved at the bowl, and on these occasions she consumed a lot of precious time with her surreptitious delighted glances at his distortions and grimaces in the mirror, with the thick creamy lather making his white teeth seem by comparison a sickly yellow, and his skin, as the razor-strokes uncovered it, a fiery pink.
“Come come, you’ll be late for school,” he would say. “I’m not making faces to amuse you.”
There were at that time many things about many people which she did not begin to understand, but she understood her father and mother least of all. Why did it make him angry when her mother said, “Don’t annoy your father, dear,” and why in face of that invariable result did her mother keep on saying it? Why was he always in such a hurry when he told Mother goodbye in the morning, though often, on leaving the house, he would linger in the front yard, leisurely smelling the flowers, pruning with his pocketknife a shrub or rosebush here and there? Why did her mother always cry when he called her “my pale love” in that funny tone? The definitions of “pale” and “love” in the dictionary seemed to offer no basis for tears. Why did he dislike boys so much, and chase them off, even the nicest ones when they were doing no harm? Above all, why did he kick the cat? Four times he did that: the little black and white cat, when Lora was five or six; two years later the same cat, this time blinding it and injuring its jaw so that it had to be killed; somewhat later Brownie, no harm done; and the last time when Lora was in her early teens, a big male Maltese which afterwards limped around for a month or so and then suddenly disappeared.
In addition to these more or less frequently recurring enigmas and innumerable others like them, an isolated and unique one now and again offered itself. For a late example, why did he all at once stop kissing her, his daughter, goodnight? He made no announcement and offered no explanation; he simply stopped. This was at about the time when she was becoming for other males objectively kissable: sixteen, in her second year at high school, her hair up. For that matter she had always been pleasing to look at, even during her freckle period; a lovely child, everyone called her, then a lovely enchanting girl, which indeed she was, with her amber-grey rather solemn eyes, smooth fair skin, mouth a little too large and, closed, a little too straight, but, in articulation or smiling, flexible and sympathetic and capable of charming curves and twists. What startled was her hair; at first sight the contrast seemed freakish, put on a bit; but the harmony was there and soon made itself felt. She lost her girlish angularity earlier than the rule; at sixteen the final fullnesses were already shaping her calves and arms and shoulders, and her breasts could no longer be called hints or promises nor her chest boyish — obviously something was preparing there beyond a meager and superfluous decoration, plain to see when she drew her shoulders back to stretch and the silk of her blouse tried in vain to make a level plane from her throat to her middle.
She was minded, as a matter of research, to ask other girls in her class if their fathers still kissed them goodnight, but never got around to it.
She felt indeed that there was something peculiar about her father and she didn’t want to discuss him with anyone; least of all with her mother. He was not untouchable exactly, nor was he terrifying to her anymore; certainly she was not consciously afraid of him; and yet fear was in it somehow, though it was not fear of his authority or of anything he was likely to say or do to her. The feeling was with her constantly in his presence, and made her a little uncomfortable; she was always self-conscious with him, she couldn’t help it. Sometimes she was reminded, without knowing why, of an experience some years before, at the circus, when she had seen a man enter a cage and stand there smiling, surrounded by a dozen snarling and crouching tigers; it was the first time she had seen such a thing, and she had been rigid with fear, forgetting to breathe so long that finally she had to gasp for it. Why her feeling regarding her father should remind her of that was inexplicable; nothing resembling a threatening tiger, let alone a dozen, was discernible; certainly her poor mother was no tiger. Her poor mother! Whose tears became more frequent with each passing year, and who, with her comely daughter almost grown, had apparently only one piece of advice left for her, often repeated: “Never give your heart to a man, my child, never.” Weeping, she would add, “You’re too young to understand, but you’re not too young to be told.” To Lora that sounded like poppycock; her poor mother was unhappy, that was plain, and it was equally plain that her father was too. That was a pity, she thought; and that was as far as she got.