Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“Are you leaving the grounds? Because if so, you really want to be careful,” I tell her, as if she specifically suggested walking the streets of Germantown at midnight and specifically intends to not be careful about it.

“Don’t worry, I’m just staying in Mixed Mews. But it’s sweet of you to be concerned.” There’s a kiss there. There’s a kiss in it for me, for my diligence in not being possessive.

“Who are you going to…?” I try to do it casually. Again, I am solely concerned with her safety, and protection is different from possession.

“Text me tomorrow, when you’re done, okay?” Sunita tells me, and nothing more. Because I already told her I didn’t want to know about anything but us. I’m trying to be free of history too. And I don’t want to know. But I have to know. I have to and I’ve waited this long and that alone should stand as a testament to my enlightenment. I have to know so I give another quick peck then hurry out.

My laptop’s on in the dining room, the screen is dimmed until I resuscitate it. I look over to the tent, wait to hear Tal stirring in response, but notice only the unchanged rhythm of her slow and unconscious exhalation. Even so, I tilt the monitor away from her side of the house. And then I pull up the feeds from the security cameras.

I switch through the camera feeds until I find the one focused in the direction of Sun’s trailer, then I zoom in. But not so far as to try to peer straight into Sun’s windows. Because that would be wrong. That would be beyond security measures. I am not a stalker, I am just a cautious man sitting in the dark watching my lover through a spy cam as she leaves her trailer in the dead of night to possibly go to another person.

Sun walks out. She stops. She looks up. She looks up at the camera. No, just at the night. She goes back inside again, comes back with a scarf this time, wraps it around her neck and then pulls a hat onto her head as if to cap the entire outfit. She has something with her. A bag. No, a box.

I shouldn’t care where she goes. I’m not worried about breeding, about protecting her womb from alien sperm. I don’t believe she can use up any love that she could give me. So I must be doing this to protect her. That must be this horrid feeling, a will to ensure against harm. That’s believable.

Sun walks toward the camera, up the hill, in the direction of my father’s house. She is coming to the house. It has all been a test. She’s coming to the house. I realize that I have to shut the equipment down and run upstairs before Sun actually gets to the house, but on the screen she turns in to a line of trailers and she’s gone.

—

“I’m not ready for college,” Tal says, all the materials her fat packet offers spread out on the table before us, my laptop open to a Walla Walla realtor’s page. “This is crazy. I’ve never left the east coast. I’ve never even been to California. And I just got here. I want to stay in this house. This house feels right. I mean, doesn’t this feel right? Like, this is where we’re supposed to be?”

“Hell no. Feels like it’s time to go. And I’m not going to leave you here with the ghouls.”

“They’re not ghoulish. They just want to be known,” Tal tells me. And she’s not kidding.

“That’s some crazy ish you’re talking, honey. Get your shoes on. We were supposed to leave for the museum ten minutes ago.”

“Not yet. I want you to look at something.”

“Honey, get your bag, get your phone, let’s go. If you want to get clothes from Irv’s first, we got to go.”

“You’re rushing me and that makes me feel like you don’t respect me,” Tal recites, and makes no move except to fold her arms.

“Fine. What?”

“Before we go gawk at other people’s art, I want to show you something. My own art project. I’ve been working on it all week. I want you to see it. And I don’t want you to just say nice things. I want you to be frank, Pops. Like the kind of critiques you give Kimet.”

I grab my coat but follow her to her tent, wait outside as she goes poking around behind the canvas. “I thought you were all about dance. You’re a painter now?”

“Sculptor,” Tal says, and pushes it out in front me, resting it on the top of a stool. “I’m starting to believe that, like, ‘found object sculpture’ is my secondary medium, you know? I’m thinking, maybe not college? Maybe art school would be better for me? In Philly. Eventually.”

It’s my Frederick Douglass action figure. I use it in class as a body model. I know where she found it: in my cabinet drawer. Since Mélange’s relocation, I’ve kept all my art materials in the house. She’s stripped the doll down to a naked body. And it’s truly a naked body, because Tal’s compensated for the natural neutering of male dolls by adding a prosthetic penis to his groin. Oh great. It’s not erect or anything, but she’s been fairly generous.

Amazingly, Frederick Douglass’s cock is not the most startling aspect of Tal’s work. She’s painted him white. No, she’s painted half of him, right down the middle, pink. Pink and tan and white, the skin of a Viking in the dark winter months. The redness hints at those parts of his body where the blood runs closest to the epidermis. Oh, and his hair. It pains me to see it. Frederick Douglass is the Samson of African American history; his Afro basically freed the slaves. Here though, on what used to be my doll, half of that hair has been shaved off. Replaced with a flat blond mane just as voluminous.

“I got it off an old Barbie doll,” Tal says when I go to touch it.

“Yeah. Okay.” There’s my trepidation; Tal hears it. I’m holding the doll, looking all around it as if the answer for how I feel about this could be found there. Tal goes to take the sculpture out of my hands, then stops herself.

“It’s suppose to offend, you know that, right? I mean, you’re supposed to look at it, and go, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then, after you do that, hopefully you ask yourself, ‘Why does this piss me off?’ Is it because black history types are considered, like, saints? Or is it the fact that this points out that he was half-white. Because he was, you know?”

“Genetically. Half-European. Whiteness — that’s not really something you can be half of. That’s more of an all or nothing privilege, perspective thing.”

“You know what I’m saying, Pops.” Tal yanks it out of my hand. I think the penis is going to fall off, but no, it’s really stuck on there. She lays it on the table, on a fleece blanket. Tenderly wrapping it up, it looks like she’s swaddling a baby. “You still haven’t said anything. And saying nothing is actually even more shitty than saying something you’ll regret later.”

“I’m offended by it,” I tell Tal, calm. “And then I wonder why I’m offended by it. And it makes me think on that. And I know, I mean I am pretty damn sure, that my reasoning is probably a lot different from what you’re thinking about it, but it is making me think. So it’s working.”

Tal stops packing it away, but when I finish talking, she starts up again. “Cool,” is all Tal says.

I hug my daughter from behind, kiss her on her head. “Ice cold,” I say.

She repeats what I say right after me. “Ice cold.” This makes me feel like I’m starting to do damn good as a daddy.

“I mean, I know you’re a failed comic-book artist, but since you’re my parental unit I value your opinion,” Tal tells me.

And this pisses me off the whole ride to Irv’s apartment. I already know I’m a failure. That doesn’t mean I want to be called a failure by any voice not in my head. Certainly not by my own daughter. The fact that, again, I know I’m a failure, just infuriates me further. I grip the wheel. I get to the turn for the highway but I take the long, beautiful way instead, and it’s a damn nice day and I should enjoy it. But I’m still pissed off. Winding down the Wissahickon’s stream, out onto the Schuylkill River. It gives me time to take in the green space and the water and reflect on just how pissed off I am.