Incarnations
Boy. My dad called me “Boy” when I was little. Never mind that I had an older brother—the moniker was not a response to something lacking in his life. Never mind that our hot southern summers had not yet taught me the horrid realities of slavery and degradation. I was little. I didn’t know. I took no offense.
He used the word with no particular malice or animosity. He loved me, truly. As I grew, I found that love harder and harder to see, but that is the nature of a girl’s relationship with her daddy, I suppose. He taught me things sons learn—drinking beer, flat tires, oil changes, and NASCAR. He never made note of my girl-ness, never pointed out that my education was unconventional. He just taught me what he knew because it was all he knew about how to greet the world and how to survive it.
When he worked on cars, I was there. When he fired up the grill, I was there. When he went to the races, traded cars, or fell asleep watching the news with a lit cigarette balancing precariously between his yellowed fingertips, I was there. I was truly a “Daddy’s Girl.”
I remember his old green pick-up truck. I must’ve been four or five. There were holes in the floorboard from salted-road rust where I would watch with glee as the pebbles blurred into streaks when our speed increased. We didn’t really concern ourselves with seatbelts back in those days, and sometimes I rode on his lap as we made our rounds through the neighborhood. On more than one occasion, he would lift my rear-end and seat me, facing him, within the steering wheel, tilting my whole little body left or right to turn the wheel. Looking back on it now, I recognize the recklessness, though I never once felt unsafe at the time. All I remember is laughing like a Bond villain when he would turn me into some part of the truck, and being as serious as a mortician when I became his garage assistant to fix the real thing.
I would dutifully stand in the sweltering summer sunshine, anxiously waiting for the next command. “Nine-sixteenths,” he would say, or “quarter-inch,” and I would search the toolbox for the magical numbers. I would hand him the wrench or socket, never seeing his face, but knowing in my tiny 8- or 10-year-old mind that he was beaming with paternal pride. I never considered that he was too engrossed in his knuckle-busting to be grateful for my invaluable assistance.
A few years later, as I began to notice boys and malls and make-up, I stopped visiting the garage so much. The 14-year-old me, while not so enamored of him as I used to be, still at that point thought of my Daddy as invincible. I had never paused to recognize that it was an untenable situation. I understood mortality, but never applied the lesson to him . . . .
He sat across from me at the dining room table, laughing about some incident in the weekend’s race, and took a big bite of his toasted BLT, so laden with pepper that I could smell it across the room. His face went slack, and his eyes, for the first time I’d seen, held fear. He dropped the sandwich and clutched his chest, his ruddy skin turning ashen. His other hand reached toward me. My mom was dialing 911. One small word punctuated the chaos, “Boy . . .”