Daddy's Little Girl

Jennifer sits at the kitchen table, the sun hitting her dark brown hair and highlighting the pretty red undertones. Her face is drawn and pale and she stares at the glass of soda on the table as though her life is over.

           I want to comfort her but at the same time, I fear that my words might sound hypocritical for I too am grappling with mixed feelings about her father getting married tomorrow.

           “It’ll be alright, honey,” I say finally. “Everything will be just the same as it is now.”

           “Everything’s rotten now!” she turns to snap at me. Then she looks guiltily back at her soda.

    Jenny had never been one to talk much about her feelings but I knew that the pain she felt was deep. After her father left, I’d often hear her crying alone in her rom. I knew she had never really given up hope of her father and me getting back together…maybe I hadn’t either. But tomorrow would put an end to the quiet longings we had each had over the past two years, and perhaps giving up the hope would be easier in the long run than hanging on to it.                           

    “I’m not going,” I hear my daughter say.

    “You’ll go,” I respond gently.

    “Why should I! I hate him and I hate that woman he’s marrying!”

    Jenny jumps up from her chair and I hear her footsteps moving quickly up the stairs. Then comes the sound of her bedroom door slamming shut.

    I step outside and light myself a cigarette. I’ve been meaning to give up smoking for over a year now but I always seem to be nervous enough about something to warrant putting it off just a little longer.

    I wonder if I should go upstairs and try to talk to her. I’ve tried before but gotten nowhere. “Don’t worry, mom,” she’d say whenever I tried to discuss the divorce. “Things will work out.” Tomorrow she’d have to accept the fact that things would not work out, at least not the way she’d planned.

    The telephone rings and I pick it up. It’s Larry.

    “How’s Jennifer? I called her before but she didn’t wanna talk to me.”

    “She’s upset, Larry,” I say.

    “But why?” he asks naively. “I’ve been engaged for almost a year now. This shouldn’t be coming as any kind of shock.”

    How shallow men can be when it comes to understanding feelings, I think to myself. Sometimes I don’t know whether to pity them or hate them for it.

   “She’s known about it but now she has to face it,” I say. “I’ll talk to her and ask her to call you later.”

    “This is just what I need,” Larry says. “Just what I need the night before my wedding!”

    I take a deep breath. I don’t have the energy to get into an argument with him. “I’ll talk to her and ask her to call you later,” I say again.

    “Okay,” he concedes. “Thanks.”

    I walk up the stairs and stand motionless in front of Jenny’s door, my fist raised and ready to knock. I take a deep breath. I knock.

    “Come in,” Jenny answers.

    She is sitting on her bed, her back resting against some pillows she has propped up for herself. The Little Prince lies opened on her lap.

    “I haven’t seen you reading that for a long time,” I say.

    Jenny shrugs. “I just felt like reading it.”

    I had first read The Little Prince to Jenny when she was six years old. She’d cried at the ending and when I tried to comfort her by telling her it wasn’t real, she announced that there were some things adults would never understand. I wonder if that’s why she’s reading it now.       

   “Let’s go for a drive,” I say. “I feel like getting out of the house for awhile.”

    She looks at me suspiciously. “Where do you wanna go?”

    “Oh…I don’t know,” I say. “Just for a drive. Maybe we’ll even stop and get a bite to eat.”

    “But you took the chicken out already.”

    “So what? I feel like being a little spontaneous.”

    “Okay,” Jenny says as she closes The Little Prince and drops it on the bed.

    I don’t know where I’m driving as I head north on the Sprain Parkway. Jenny and I have both been silent since we got in the car. 

    “Where are we going?” Jenny asks, breaking the silence.

    “I’m not really sure yet,” I say. “But with any luck, we’ll know when we get there.”

    I can feel Jennifer looking at me disapprovingly. She is at the age where any sort of unexpected or frivolous act by an adult, especially me, is intolerable.

    I pull off on a exit for Bedford Hills. Larry and I used to take Jennifer to a park around here, I think to myself. And, as far as I can recall, it was a beautiful park, perhaps just the place for a heart to heart.

    “Do you know where you’re going yet?” Jenny asks.

    “I think maybe I do,” I say.

    I make a right turn on a familiar looking road and there it is. Perfect. I park the car. 

    “Here we are,” I say as I turn off the ignition.

    “Where?” asks Jenny. I can see she is beginning to get impatient with me.

    “Bedford Hills Memorial Park,” I reply.

    “That tells me a lot.”

    “Doesn’t this place look at all familiar?” I ask as we walk along a narrow cement paved path, large trees lined up like tall soldiers on either side of us.

    Jenny shrugs. “A little.”

     “Your dad and I used to take you here,” I say as I sit down on a painted wooden bench with a view of a duck pond. Jenny sits down next to me.

    “Why did you take me here?” she asks.

    Now I shrug my shoulders. “It seemed like a nice place to re-visit some old memories, good memories.”

    Jennifer looks as though she’s been stung. “No memories with him in them are good memories,” she says. She gets up and walks over to the pond. She squats down and her hand plays with the water.                             

    She’s so angry, I think sadly – so hurt. I remember being in this very spot with a lively, bright eyed little girl, and a loving husband and father. We were so happy. It wasn’t all that long ago and yet it seems like an eternity. But then again, it could be yesterday. I take a deep breath of the cool evening air and suddenly feel more at peace with myself than I’ve felt in some time. Amazing how the years go by so quickly. We barely notice them going but they change our lives in wide strokes as they pass through. It’s only when we look back that we realize the magnitude of their passing.

    I sigh as I lift myself off the bench and walk toward the pond. “What are you thinking?” I ask Jenny as I squat down next to her.

    “For one thing, I’m wondering what we’re doing here.”

    I ignore the irritation in her tone.

    “I remember when you were five years old,” I say. “You used to drive me and father crazy because you always wanted to come here and feed the ducks. But every time you held out a piece of bread and the ducks came near you, you’d start screaming and crying until your father picked you up. You were scared to death of the ducks. Then the next weekend, your father would ask you if there was anything special you wanted to do and sure enough, you’d say you wanted to go feed the ducks again.”

    A smile forms on Jenny’s lips which she quickly withdraws.

    “Your dad loves you very much, Jen,” I say.

    “No he doesn’t,” she responds as she stares down at her hand which is hovering above the surface of the water..                                                 

    “He does, Jen.”

    Jenny whirls her head around to face me. “Then why did he leave me!”

    There are tears in her eyes as she turns her head quickly away from me and focuses back on her hand, her fingers playing nervously with the water.

    “He didn’t leave you,” I say softly. “He left me. We just weren’t happy together anymore.”

    Jenny splashes the water violently with her hand and stands up. “Okay, then it’s your fault too,” she yells, “but it’s not fair that I’m the one who has to pay for it!”

    Jenny is crying. She turns her back on me and walks a short distance, stopping in front of a large oak tree. Her back is still facing me but I can see her running her hands gently over the surface of the tree.

    I get up and walk over to her. “You’re right,” I say as I begin to lightly stroke her hair.

    She turns her head slowly to face me, tears streaming down her cheeks.

    “Your father and I breaking up wasn’t your fault and it’s not fair that you’ve been hurt. But sometimes life isn’t fair, Jen. Sometimes life deals us some bad cards but we’ve gotta go on. We’ve got to be able to accept that things change.”                                                   

    Jenny looks away from me, her eyes fixated on the pond. “Some changes are just rotten,” she says.

    “I know,” I say, “but we can’t dwell on the past because the past is over. All we have left from the past is memories and you have a lot of happy memories from when you dad was at home. Now it’s time to go on, to stop being angry, and to go on and make new memories…with me, with your dad, and even with Carol.”

    Her soon to be stepmother’s name elicits a raising of the eyes but she would accept her in time. Now she looks back at the tree and runs her hand over the names and initials that have been carved in it over the years. “Here it is,” she says softly.”

    “What?” I ask as I lean down to see what she’s pointing to.

    “Daddy carved this in the tree when I was six…I’ll never forget.”

    I look at the carving. It reads “Jenny – Daddy’s little girl.”

    She turns to face me and I hold her in my arms. “I love you, mom,” she says.

    “I love you, Jen,” I say.

END