The Lovebird Read Online Free Page A

tired from reaching up, and his back got sore from bending down, we sat on the bleachers. We drank punch that stained our lips an unnatural red and ate cloying cookies that made me sleepy but had a revivifying effect on Dad.
    He was abstracted under the swirling hues of the rented light machine. His magnetism, which was the pull of something beautiful but broken and in need of fixing, changed the air around us the same way it changed the pupils in the eyes of the neighborhood wives. His hair was coal black, and it contrasted with his light green eyes, the lids of which swooped down dreamily over the outside corners. His skin was translucent, the blood easilyvisible beneath his fine cheeks. His body was long, and his head was aristocratic, like one of the nineteenth-century sculptures our class had seen on a trip to the art museum. Some of the female faculty, who had initially dreaded their duties as dance chaperones, held themselves in strange, self-conscious ways whenever Dad and I danced past them. They abandoned the crusty cardiganed slouch of teachers’ lounge lunches and Citizen of the Week certificate ceremonies, arched their backs to emphasize their matronly breasts, and sucked in their cheeks to resemble feminine fish.
    Dad was oblivious to the women. He was as focused on me as he could ever be, joking, solicitous, smiling, until the last hour of the dance. Then he lost his equilibrium, not on the dance floor, but on the inside.
    Maybe the music made him maudlin. The DJ had been punctuating poppy contemporary hits with occasional 1920s tunes, and one of those old-timey songs came on while we danced. I widened my eyes at him because it was called “Margie.”
    My little Maaarrgie, I’m always thinking of you, Maaarrgie, I’ll tell the world I love you …
    Or maybe it was the Beirut-brown color that my hair appeared to be under the golden glow of the slowly turning mirror ball.
    A few other people might have noticed the tears before I did because I had my face tucked into Dad’s chest. A movement there jostled my cheek, and that’s when I looked up. He wasn’t making any sounds, but his mouth was twisted down and his wet face looked like one face again, not two.
    We left. By the time we reached the car, he had composed himself. He asked me if I’d had fun. He couldn’t bear to mention what had happened. I said I had. At home, I went upstairs, took off my dress, put my corsage in the porcelain figurine shaped like a woman’s palm that had always been on my nightstand, the sameone that held my rose-scented rosary made of real rose petals, and tried to sleep.
    Life got lonelier after that. Even if only a few people had actually seen Dad crying at the dance, it was, after all, a junior high dance, and messages among thirteen-year-olds spread faster than fire on a parched prairie. Soon, the whole school knew. Violet Holmquist retreated to a safe and snooty distance. She joined the girls who stood in gossipy gaggles and whispered “weirdo,” “dad,” and “drunk” sharply in each other’s ears if I chanced to pass them. I did my best to feign contented absorption in a magical, private world of my own, wishing that someone would talk to me while also praying fervently to Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases, that no one would. Meanwhile, my cheeks flamed in the manner of Dad’s, and my feet felt far too big for my body. I buried my head in books.
    WHEN I CAME HOME FOR WINTER BREAK after my first semester at college, I tried to be strong in the face of Dad’s floundering. On Christmas Eve we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
and exchanged a few presents. I asked him if he wanted to go to midnight Mass, but he said no. We did pray together that night, though. I held his hand while we said the Our Father, and it didn’t feel anymore like my little hand in his, but like his little hand in mine. When I went back to school for the second semester, I was very sick.

3 GERBIL
(Meriones