Bottle Caps

Daisy

The first time I learned about women, I was three years old. My mother had been gone for about a year by then, but I don't remember registering that. I did register, however, sitting with my father in his recliner, he with a bottle of PBR in one hand and a postcard from her in the other, as I balanced my tiny body on the armrest.

"Dayton," he said and snorted, taking a strong sip from his bottle. I looked at the postcard. There was a big red building on it with cars parked under its sides like Mother Ginger lifting up her skirts, welcoming back her little Polichinelle children. Of course, at the time, I hadn't endured hours of torture with the Arkansas Civic Ballet and had no idea what Mother Ginger was, let alone the Nutcracker. And being three, I couldn't process that this motel was what my mother had left me for.

"She's cleaning up other people's shit, but soon enough, she's going to be the local weather girl. Look at you having a fancy mama like that." He was in a good mood because he was drinking and because he was making fun of her. And maybe because he was making fun of me also, but it hadn't become official yet. It wouldn't be until years later when I did stupid things like not grow breasts in time or drive into our garage door at fourteen, practicing for my driver's permit.

I thought about the woman on the other side of that card for so many years later. The day he split, he benevolently gave it to me as a gift, the backside down on the kitchen table so I could read her tangled writing. Did she look like me or me, her? Did she ever become a weather girl? What's so great about an invisible dream when you're given all the flesh and blood you could ever really want?

He snorted again, rested the motel postcard on my leg, and poured a small amount of beer into his bottle cap. "A toast," he said, lifting bottle and cap, one in each hand. I studied him as he did it, seeing something beneath the deadening happiness in his eyes, something that maybe could have told me who he used to be before I ever knew him, his own three-year-old version who had once been tiny and small and prone to the whims of all who claimed a part of his life.

"To Jackie, our own little hometown nobody. May she get where she's going or strike us all dead." He put the cap to my lips, and I sensed the beer like a cat at its bowl, its scent strange, and watched my father gulp down all the things just as invisible as Jackie's dream – his fears, regrets, an underlying sense of never being enough.

And I drank down mine too.