Sapphic Voices General Fiction

810 Minnie Street

“Do you remember eight-ten Minnie?” my father asked, his voice sounding expectant although it could have been the connection, he was calling from Colorado. There was a time when his baritone voice used to be comforting. Now it simply annoyed me. Those three words, “eight-ten Minnie” immediately produced an image in my mind, of a small 1950’s house with whiteboard siding and a porch in desperate need of repair, squeezed in between others that looked similar to it on a city block in Port Huron, Michigan. I stopped chopping garlic and set down the knife, fighting off an urge to stab it into the wooden cutting board. The telephone was my enemy.

“Yes, of course I do Dad,” I answered dully, waiting for some sort of lecture. He was a smart man and always wanted to share his infinite knowledge with me. I didn’t mind, most of the time he made me laugh. He once told me a story about lighting his farts on fire through his jeans in his younger years. I couldn’t help but giggle at the mental picture. He is an expert at diffusing a serious situation with a humorous anecdote. I guess I get that from him.

“Oh boy, that place! I hope you don’t remember too much about it,” he sighed. From the tone in his voice I guessed he thought the house we were fond of calling by its’ street address, had been a dump. He was 26 when he and his new bride had moved in. He was only 26! I tried to imagine myself with an 8-year old daughter from a previous marriage, and a new, pregnant wife, living in a run-down rented house in a bad neighborhood. I didn’t know it at the time but they had been struggling. “So what!” screamed the pessimistic demon living inside me. “You were struggling too! Struggling to survive living with your mother!” That demon was damn persistent, and it never allowed me to let go.

“Dad, I loved that house,” I replied, a little too indignantly. “I mean, I remember the kitchen floor had a slant to it and the front porch was a little treacherous, but that place was a safe haven for me,” I revealed, surprising myself with the accusatory tone in my voice. I immediately felt bad and was a little afraid that he’d think I was trying to make him feel guilty. I was angry that he considered my childhood safe haven a “dump”. It was one of the few reprieves from my mother’s tyrannical parenting style.

“Oh, wow, I never thought of it like that. I thought the place was horrid.” I could hear it in his voice. I didn’t have to make him feel guilty, he already did. Suddenly I felt not anger but sorrow. He was trying so hard to mend our broken relationship and I wasn’t making it any easier. I’d already made a promise to myself to really try this time, after all, he was my father, he was blood.

“Well, I remember it being a happy place,” I said, trying to change the tone of this depressing conversation, “there was always Cat Stevens or James Taylor on the turntable and exotic food in the fridge.” My mother’s idea of gourmet food was goulash; a macaroni, tomato and hamburger concoction. When I went to visit my dad and his wife, Cheryl, every other weekend, they’d feed me all sorts of alien things like pineapple, multi-grain bread, and tofu. At that time they were jazz loving, vegetarian transcendental meditators. How things had changed. Now they were hymn singing, meat-eating holy rollers. I felt that their Christian conversion had ruined them, had ruined my father.

“You know,” I continued, “it’s strange how I like Cat Stevens and James Taylor now and that I’m a vegetarian. Don’t you think?” I offered this bit of personal information to my father as I imagined his preacher offered him the thin, envelope glue-tasting wafer and grape juice that represented the body and blood of Christ. In the name of your daughter, her scars, and your choice to ignore them. Amen. There was that demon again, I fought against it as much as I could but always the old memories would creep back to fuel that fire, that anger boiling inside me like this pasta I was presently cooking as I grasped the phone. He knew what had been going on at my mother’s, but he chose to ignore it. There were several occasions when my mother wouldn’t allow me to go on my bi-weekly visit to eight-ten Minnie. “She can’t come this weekend because she didn’t finish her chores,” my mother would tell my father over the phone while I sat at the kitchen table, tears in my eyes, folding dinner napkins just right. He never argued with her, he just accepted.

“I didn’t know you liked Cat Stevens,” my father now chuckled, snapping me out of my reverie, “We still listen to some old records now and again. I guess now that I think about it, those were good times for us, too. At least we had each other.” I smiled, remembering the children I used to play with in that neighborhood. We would shout out cuss words at top volume and then ask the Lord for forgiveness. I remembered daring a neighbor boy to show us his penis and when he did, we all ran away screaming. I’d play outside all day, free until dusk to explore the intimate workings of the block my weekend parents lived on. Free from the familiar whistle that seemed to penetrate the entire wood behind my mother’s home, a signal for me to come home to wash dishes, fold clothes, vacuum. It was useless to ignore that whistle. I always ran home like a dog called to dinner.

“Dad, why didn’t you ever try to gain custody of me?” I blurted, surprising myself. I opened my mouth to change the subject but nothing came, except the realization that I wanted to hear an answer. I watched my hand drop fresh basil into the bubbling tomatoes in the saucepan before me and relived a flash of a memory; my ten-year old self, pajama clad and standing shin deep in snow next to the porch in front of my mother’s house. I remembered I hadn’t felt cold only ridiculous as my step-father walked up to find me there, holding a plate of Ragu spaghetti, black with pepper. This was punishment for having complained about the pepper and I wasn’t allowed inside until I ate every last bite. The memory reinforced my desire to hear the answer to the question I’d just posed to my father.

“That is something I regret every day baby. We were pretty poor at the time and your brother’s birth was unexpected, I don’t want to make excuses but I want you to try and understand the position we were in. We were the same age you are now. I knew you weren’t happy with your mother but I didn’t realize how unhappy you really were. If I had been a bigger part of your life, maybe I would’ve known more. Cheryl and I did sit you down and talk to you about seeing a judge, you declined but what child is prepared to choose between their mother and father?” There was an audible “click” in his throat when he swallowed. “I’m just trying to make up for lost time honey, I was young, and naïve and I’m sorry.” I was silent, trance-like, until he coughed into the static void between us and I could tell he was waiting for a response.

There was so much I wanted to say. I’d been angry with him for so long after he had sat me down on the living room floor of eight-ten Minnie and told me he was taking a job in Europe. I remembered sitting on the brown shag carpet, pulling at the long threads and looking at the three of them on the couch wanting to belong, feeling abandoned. But even as I recalled these memories, the only emotion I felt was relief. Hearing him apologize helped but hearing the remorse in his voice was all I really needed. I’d been carrying around this resentment for so long, I hadn’t realized I’d been so ready to let it go.

I stopped busying myself with dinner and leaned against the counter, staring at the wall in front of me, blank, like my thoughts.

“Dad,” I breathed, “thank you. You don’t know how much it means to me to hear you say those words. You probably thought I always knew that you felt bad, but I was young, I didn’t know. So, thank you.”

The line was quiet for a minute but there were scores of communicated thoughts exchanged in that silence. Then, with a chuckle, he broke it and I knew he was going to make a joke and I was glad.

“Hey, you know what baby?”

“What Dad?”

“We could probably get on Montel Williams Show, no problem.”

I laughed, “Yeah! Maybe even Jerry Springer, ‘Father and Daughter Reunite!’” And then he was laughing too and I knew, as my pasta boiled over and I rushed to the oven to turn down the heat, we were on a path to a new beginning. We were going to be father and daughter.

If you have enjoyed Ami's "810 Minnie Street", then please be certain to e-mail her at  taurian88[at]yahoo.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of Ami's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.