No One’s Girl
Jennifer Wortman
My father had a strong pessimistic streak, for which I am grateful: he prepared me for life. I was not surprised by the rising oceans or mass shootings or our proto-fascist president or my own worst behaviors, by my money problems or health problems or failed marriages or his cancer death. What did surprise me: After a night of drinking, I found my dead father smoking a cigarette in the bar parking lot. He was leaning against my car, a sturdy, well-maintained sedan that had not long ago been his. He waved me over and offered his pack of Marlboros. I grabbed two, stuck them in my mouth, and let him light both. I wanted to double my pleasure in this meeting, which I knew would end.
I had questions, but I feared his answers. This was the man who, one New Year’s Eve, said, “What’s to celebrate? This year will be like last, only worse.”
“It’s great to see you, Dad,” I finally said.
“Lovely to see you, daughter.”
“So what’s next? Do you now get to smoke with impunity?”
“Impunity?” he said, like the word were a curse. “Next, I’ll lose my sight. I’ve always been on the verge of blindness and soon it will happen. Then I’ll die again.”
When he was dying, he took off his glasses and broke them in half. By that point, he’d lost his senses, yet he understood enough to know he wouldn’t need glasses where he was going.
“But isn’t it nice,” I said, “that you’re here with me now?”
“Extremely.”
I loved it when he used unnecessarily big words. It made me feel special. Like I was worth the extra syllables.
There was a man I’d left in the bar. An older man who managed the deli counter at my grocery store and vaguely resembled a TV character--a world-weary renegade sheriff—I liked. But he wasn’t the sheriff. He’d counter any misgivings I’d have about our transgressions—we were stepping out on significant others to be together—by saying, “We’re good people,” with such pathetic conviction that he’d forever ruined my desire to be good. Who were these morons who thought they were good people? Surely they were ruining the world.
“You look sad,” my dad said. “Is it a man?”
Why did he always think it was a man? I mean, yeah, it was a man—but there were a million other reasons to be sad. It was insulting that he thought I only knew about one. I inhaled my frustration, my cigarettes glowing tusks.
“More like a boy,” I said. I meant the deli guy was like a boy emotionally, with his goodness fetish. But maybe I also didn’t want my dad to know I’d been with someone near his age: yet another way my life had become an icky cliché. I decided to change the subject. “How’s the afterlife?”
“The food is terrible. There’s no privacy. Everyone’s pleased with themselves.”
“You could stay here,” I said.
“That’s not how it works. I don’t just get to do what I want.”
“But is it supposed to be a good place? Like a heaven?”
“Who knows? Nothing about it makes sense. In that regard, it’s much like here.”
His formal “in that regard” nearly did me in. No one had said “in that regard” to me since he’d died. People barely even used transitions. They just skipped from sentence to sentence as if connections were implied. Connections, I wanted to holler, were never implied.
Why stick around? Whatever its flaws, the afterlife probably didn’t have climate change. Or the military-industrial complex. Or camping bans criminalizing homelessness. Or homelessness. Or angry deli guys who, when you broke up with them, said things like, “You think the world’s ugly because you’re ugly. On the inside. Where it counts.”
“Maybe I could go with you,” I said. My cigarettes, one in each hand, pointed askew, somehow punctuating my foolishness. More wasn’t always better. But I wanted it anyway.
“No!” he barked. “Absolutely not.”
“Why? You hate this world.”
“No, I don’t. What makes you think that?”
Before I could respond, the deli guy staggered from the bar. “Hey!” he shouted. “You sure bounced back fast. Looks like you have a type.”
“This the man?” said my dad. “Seems like a real prize.”
“He’s normally not like this,” I said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“I’m talking to you,” the deli guy screamed. “Answer me.”
My dad stepped forward. “I don’t believe you asked a question,” he said, with a slow stab of his cigarette.
“Here’s a question,” said the deli guy. “Here’s a question.” We all waited for his question. “Here’s a question,” he said again.
“Good god,” my dad said.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
For what? I was sorry my dad saw the deli guy at his worst and, by implication, me at my worst. I was sorry the deli guy hated me and couldn’t express it without embarrassing us both. I was sorry my dad died and came back for this. I was sorry I made the world worse instead of better. I was sorry I was alive. And that I sort of wanted to die. And that I was ugly on the inside, where it counted.
“Here’s. A. Question,” the deli guy shrieked. “You think she’s your girl? She’s everyone’s girl. She’s no one’s girl.”
It was almost true.
“Are you sure I can’t come with you?” I took another quick drag on the cigarettes, the smoke an inverted prayer, smearing my ugly insides with darkest hopes.
My dad turned to me, his eyebrows shifting from generally angry to specifically worried. “Daughter,” he said. He leaned his head, his eyes taking on a shine, not tears, exactly, but a sad illumination. Had I not, in some sense, already followed him my whole life? I think, finally, he saw. And I think, finally, he was going to invite me along. But I’ll never know, because then he blinked and blinked, and he dropped his cigarette, and he flung around his hands, and he said, “It’s happening! I’m losing my sight. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?”
“Yes,” I said, “you told me.”
But I doubt he heard, because he clutched his throat and dropped to his knees, his breath choking out. I didn’t want to watch him die again. I shut my eyes. The rasping stopped. Then I heard the angry scratch of feet running across gravel: here came the deli guy, to kick my dad when he was down. Before I could intercept him, though, he too dropped to his knees and laid my dad, who’d collapsed on his side, onto his back and lifted my dad’s chin and pressed my dad’s chest and puffed into his mouth. He pressed and puffed, pressed and puffed.
about the writer
Jennifer Wortman is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split/Lip Press, 2019). Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. An Ohio native, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review and teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.