The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes Read Free Book Online Page A

am so stunned that I become stupidly apologetic. I am not wearing what he wanted; I am not wearing a dress. I am not meeting his fantasy of his daughter.
    We go to a less-than-mediocre restaurant down the block. People seem to know him there. He introduces me to the maître d’ as though that means something. We sit down. The tablecloths are green, the napkins polyester.
    â€œYou don’t wear jewelry,” Norman says.
    I am single, I live in New York City, I am not wearing a dress. I know exactly what he is thinking.
    I say nothing. Later, I’ll wish that I’d said something, I’ll wish that I’d told him the truth. I have no jewelry, but if you want to throw me some diamonds I’d be glad to wear them. I come from a family that doesn’t do that sort of thing. I grew up boycotting grapes and iceberg lettuce because they weren’t picked by union workers.
    What kind of father makes his child travel to another city to prove that she is his child and then criticizes her for not wearing the right clothes to the blood test, for not wearing jewelry she doesn’t own to the lunch she didn’t know she was having?
    â€œHow will you feel if the test comes back and I’m not your father?”
    You’re my father, I think. I wasn’t positive before, but now, seeing you, seeing your ass, my ass—I’m sure.
    The heat is stupefying. I am being twisted like pulled taffy. I walk as though I have been hit with something, blasted. I have become a stranger to myself.
    To be adopted is to be adapted, to be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue.
    Â 
    Back at the house, my mother wants to do something to make it better. She takes me on a picnic. We go to Candy Cane City—the park of my childhood—and sit at a table under the trees looking out at the merry-go-round, the swing set, the aluminum slide. All of it empty now, deserted in this scorching heat wave. I put my hand on the slide, the metal is searingly hot—it feels good.
    My mother unwraps a bologna sandwich. This is proof of how hard she is trying. In our house there is no bologna, no white bread. This is my favorite sandwich from childhood, the one I got only for field trips and special occasions. She pulls a bag of potato chips and a cold Coke out of the bag, replicating my earliest idea of the sublime. We look out at the tennis courts, the basketball hoops, the water fountain, all of it indelibly etched in my memory. I could come to this park in my sleep, just as I have come to it often in my fiction.
    â€œTake me for a ride,” I say.
    â€œTomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow I’ll take the day off work and we’ll go somewhere.”
    In the morning we leave. The motion of the car is soothing—it makes up for my inability to move myself, it fulfills my need for someone else to move me, to carry me. The road unfolds.
    I don’t tell my mother what happened when I went for the blood test, I do not tell her how truly depressed I am. I don’t say anything because anything I say will make her anxious, angry, and then I will have to deal with her feelings. And at the moment I am struggling to understand my own.
    I wish I had a video of Norman, of his ass walking away. I wish I had him on tape saying, You’re not dressed right. I wish I had Ellen on audio, her misplaced projections, her odd habit of seeming to confuse me with her dead mother, accusing me of not paying enough attention to her, not doing enough for her.
    I wish I had it all in such a way that it could be labeled and laid out on a long table—as evidence.
    My mother is driving us into the past, to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a dark, dank old town. This is where George Washington went when he wanted to take a soak; home of the oldest mineral bath in the country—my grandparents used to take us here.
    This is a place from my past