By Josje Weusten

His hair is as gray as the snow-pregnant sky above. Yet almost every other physical aspect fits the fading memory I have of him. Sharp profile: check. Powerful stride: check. Cigarette balanced on lower lip: check. The familiarity of it all throws me off so much I freeze in my steps.

I squeeze my mother’s upper arm. We tightly linked the moment we left her flat for a walk with her Pomeranian. “Is that…?” 

She follows my gaze to the man passing us.

“No,” my mum replies, no trace of doubt in her voice. “But I can see why you might have thought so. He has the same nose. I always thought it would make him look like John Lennon until he started wearing glasses.”

“He is too old, I suppose,” I muse, still not entirely convinced the man isn’t who I took him for. “And too thin.”

“He was never skinny,” my mother answers, while Spud pulls her in the direction of a plot of snow-covered grass. “But not fat either. He was muscular. And tall, like you.”

Ever since I was fifteen, I have been a foot bigger than her in every direction. Petite is how you could best describe my mother. In that specific 1970s French way. Growing up with her has made me feel awkwardly clumsy. As if I am taking up too much space. Which is why I don’t come home very often. Only for holidays. It’ll be Christmas Eve tonight, the trickiest one. So many memories lying in ambush.

“He was a good-looking man, you know.” My mum usually mobilizes a different vocabulary to talk about him. Corrupted. Degraded. Despicable even. 

I glance at her sideways. 

She exhales slowly, her breath clouding in the cold air. 

Was he attractive? I can’t remember him well enough to say, but people were drawn to him. He had a way of making them feel good about themselves. Friendly and accommodating. Creative too. He had volunteered to craft the life-sized, papier-mâché manger scene they’d put up at my primary school. He even crocheted their tawny-colored outfits.

They didn’t use it anymore afterward, obviously. I guess it was because of that amiability that they also hated him so much in the end. They felt fooled. And my mother and I were unknowingly part of his cover-up. No wonder everyone loathed us.

~

I didn’t learn about his unscrupulousness from my mother. I cobbled it together from the children at school. Little pieces of information were whispered in passing. They didn’t dare say anything aloud. Not because they were afraid of me, though I did once pull out a strand of Cynthia’s hair, which must have made an impression.

Cynthia was a large, coarse-spoken girl who had to repeat the year when she joined our class. She immediately singled me out as a target. Each day, she’d wait for me outside of the gate, out of sight of the other children, and most importantly, their parents and teachers. They wouldn’t have done anything to prevent her from lashing out at me anyway. They all knew about what he had done, well before I did.

I found myself reaching for one of her pigtails during the final rehearsal for the annual school play. I yanked until I saw blood. A piece of her skin was stuck to the roots of the tuft of hair I had pulled out.

I got expelled of course. My mum was beside herself. “You are just like your—,” she started on the way back home in the car, after collecting me from the principal’s office. She didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what she wanted to say.

From that moment onwards, the shame started to build up under my skin. I tried to ward it off by not talking about him. If I had to, I would do so in the same way as my mother did: by othering him completely. Whoever he had been beside the unspeakable part of him ceased to exist.

I stopped remembering how he loved to spend hours on the tiled living room floor playing with us or that he liked comic books as much as I did. I only recalled he didn’t let me touch the house he built with Lego when I wanted to make something different with the bricks, and how angry he got if I read the latest Mickey Mouse Weekly before he could lay hands on it, and I dog-eared some of the pages.

It helped for a while. Yet as I grew older, I started to take increasingly after him. Not in terms of looks—although I am indeed relatively tall; I have my mother’s blonde hair and green-blue eyes—but in habits. Like him, I feel compelled to tell stories to stroke people’s egos, making them think well of me. No big lies, just minor compliments, but I’m disturbingly good at it.

It upsets me to realize I am my father’s daughter. Not that I have any of his “preferences,” which isn’t the right word. But I don’t want to think or say that other word. I will never be ready for that word. I am definitely not that word. Still, who knows? His weird, fucked-up stuff might be tucked away inside me too. I worry it’ll get out someday.

~

“Can you hold Spud’s leash for a moment?” Without waiting for an answer, my mother pushes the leather loop into my hand. It feels unexpectedly pliant. She rummages through the pockets of her wax coat to pull out a little, see-through bag. I watch her bend over to pick up Spud’s shit.

“I don’t know if he was handsome. But he was charming, wasn’t he?” My voice is soft from diffidence. “I’m not, Mum. You know I’m not.”

As my mother gets back up, she gently zip-locks the plastic bag with poo. Her cautious smile expresses remorse as well as affection. “No, you’re not, honey. Not at all. Not like him.”