Paradise, 2017

Hell looks like four wicker seats around a low coffee table in the open-air lobby of a paradise resort.

The Cozumel evening is warm, with a gulf breeze brushing gentle fingers against my bare arms and face and bringing the faint smell of salt and fish and someone’s coconut sunscreen. Round light fixtures in the varnished wood-plank ceiling above us and strings of bulbs outlining the boardwalk back towards the condos cast a soft, magical light by which my three-year-old daughter is coloring pictures at the table. Her wavy brown hair, loose around her face, is tangled and windswept and probably full of sand from her adventures on the beach all day, and she is sucking on her pacifier while examining her work with determined focus. There is a little furrow between her brows, entirely for picking out the right color and not at all for the tension filling up the air. I was really looking forward to enjoying a cappuccino after a nice dinner with my family, and now my hands are sweat-lacquered pins and needles clenched around the white ceramic cup and saucer in my lap. I’m struggling to keep from standing up and dropping it, cup, saucer, and all, on the shiny sunburned scalp of the man seated across the circle from me.

“So, yeah, she voted for Hillary. And she probably doesn’t even know who the prime minister in your country is right now,” my dad says, gesturing lazily with his glass. I don’t know what he’s drinking at this point, but the resort is all-inclusive and he’s been at it steadily for the better part of an hour. His words aren’t slurred, but they’re relaxed, perfectly assured of themselves as they trot out of his mouth, pitbulls looking for a fight.

There is a faint ringing in my ears, and my cheeks are burning with rage and humiliation. I’m not sure what my breathing is doing: I can’t feel my chest. “Justin Trudeau,” I retort, addressing the two men standing smilingly, awkwardly, behind the chair to my right. I lean forward and carefully slide the cup and saucer onto the table. I’m not an idiot. For God’s sake, I’m a grown adult, I’m a teacher — I taught humanities for the last two years, and I might not have been anything like teacher of the year, but I did work pretty hard to at least know my content. “I know who the prime minister of Canada is.”

The men respond with some acknowledgment that manages not to be patronizing, which is a low bar but frankly an astonishing one for some of my dad’s compatriots to overcome.

He doesn’t even know these guys, really. When they strolled into the lobby, he got all excited to see them, the buddies from Canada, the ones he and his shiny new wife bump into once a year during their resort vacation. I already don’t remember their names. Did they tell me? It’s possible Dad didn’t even introduce them because he doesn’t remember their names. But he knows them well enough to want to drag his eldest child for buddy points. And I can’t decide if the worst part is that he’s doing it in front of people who cannot possibly be worth his effort, or that it isn’t the first time he’s done it in front of my face while acting like I’m not right there to hear it.

It was my junior year of college, the year after my family had gone to live in Japan for ten months while I stayed at my university, and I had transferred to a college close to home so I could be with my family again. It had been a hard year on my mom, and it had been a rough year on me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life; Dad was pissed that I kept changing my major and spending his money on classes that wouldn’t necessarily end in a degree, but I was also first generation and his ideas about what I should do with my life ended in becoming a doctor and then having babies and staying home with them, so we were never going to find common ground there. But he was my dad, and I was his little girl, and I wanted to be able to give him something, a solution he could be proud of me for finding. I transferred to a school close to home so I wasn’t spending money on room and board, and where I could apply to a nursing program. 

Late that summer or early in the fall after we had all reunited at home, my parents threw a small party for their friends. Endlessly my father’s hopeful shadow, sticking close to catch any scrap of validation or approval, I tagged along as he took some friends whom he hadn’t seen in years on a tour of our house, which he had built when I was nine years old. Down in the basement, we were standing near one of his workbenches while he and his friends chatted. The conversation turned to my experience of college so far, and one guy said something to my dad about how nice it must be having me back at home with the whole family.

“Honestly,” my dad said, barely two feet away from me, crossing his arms and turning toward the friend, “I wish she hadn’t come back.”

Just like then, my dad’s flippant words in the resort lobby have me frozen in place. I can't take in the rest of his conversation with his Canadian acquaintances, only the moments when those pitbull words snap at me, drawing pain and anger. There is so much casual sexism, implications that being female means that I can’t possibly understand the complexities of right-wing politics and that my stupidity naturally means that I am liberal. I’m shaking, just a small tremor but it’s in my whole body. I am a dormant volcano.

My daughter has finished her coloring and is starting to get crabby from being overtired. Tomorrow, my dad and his new wife are babysitting her for me and my partner so we can take a tour of Chichen Itza. I have so been looking forward to that trip. And I’m going to leave my little girl in the care of a man who can casually tie her mother to the back of a verbal coal roller and drag her. And her mother never screams.

My insides are still molten lava, my hands are still buzzing. If I wasn’t the good girl, maybe I could pick up that cappuccino and dump it on my father’s head while saying all of the angry, hurt things that are trapped in the cage of my breastbone and ribs, in the place where my lungs are supposed to be. But I am the good girl, and even when he's hurting me, I can't hurt him back.

After junior year, I transferred back to my original university. Leaving was easier than confrontation. Partly, because I didn’t want to know exactly how deeply he meant his words. 

Partly, because I am my father's little girl, his ever hopeful shadow, who believes, despite everything I have been shown, that one day he will stop treating me like an adversary. One day, some day, he will treasure me as a daughter.

I scoop my own treasure up, make my excuse — she’s tired, I need to get her to bed, early morning tomorrow — and leave my father and my cappuccino sitting peacefully in that paradise circle of hell.