Daddy's Girl

By Lovelli Ariesti   |  Sun, 10/19/2008 11:02 AM  |  Bookmark

Daddy was born of a suitcase, dressed-up in his best suit: a pair of black pants, a shirt with a collar that never wrinkled and a blood-shot red tie. On his feet were shoes, shiny as the sun, untied, without knots. The first thing he did after his bloodless birth was lace them up and loosen the blinding, scarlet bind.

He never told me if he was successful in his first attempts, but as he took his first steps, as he often serenaded to me, a doll was lying on the naked earth. Its long dark hair kept growing and growing and growing, until it reached her tiny hips. It was a beautiful sight, Daddy would say to me, one rivaled only by a fountain spring during a drought.

He didn't touch the doll, not even when that long, dark hair glittered in front of him, inviting, flirtatious.

Especially not when out of the doll's artificial red lips came these few words, painting a mirage right in front of him -- a living daydream.

I think about you constantly.

This first sentence, laid out before him by a talking doll. He ate the words that she fed him, chewing them slowly, and began singing the next verse of the song -- just like an ever flowing stream. Your memories haunt me constantly.

Only a talking doll. Until, suddenly, it walked and, surprisingly, not away from, but toward him -- and not for long, against him.

As the doll drew her sword, which she had raised up from the earth, it sang the song, constantly. Blood shed from his stomach, reminding him that this was not a dream.

Certainly not, although pain -- the bodily response to physical and biological stress Daddy would later learn to cope with -- was absent.

As the thick liquid made its way into the pores of his fine, broken, white shirt -- tap, tap, tapping along monotonously -- the doll's feet began to melt like candles.

He had never seen anything as beautiful as the color of melting plastic feet, which by then were completely dissolved. Blackish peach with dabs of whites, mauve and then, boiling black. Disinfected and cleaned; sublime.

And that was when he knew he should marry the talking doll, who was by then no longer singing, but mumbling the magical word she seemed to be very fond of, in a static low note -- constantly, constantly, constantly.

The doll's long and flowery skirt covered the remains of her feet completely. She was no longer a whole doll, nor was she a half. Her long, shimmering hair, dragging along the earth as she inched down the isle in her flawless white wedding dress, was the only remnant of her first encounter with Daddy.

The wedding was held on the beach, where sands would absorb the leaking, melting candles from the doll's feet, who continued to lose her figure by the second. The only witness was a sunset that never arrived, one which neither of them had realized was the only thing they should have waited for.

"So, Dad," I asked him, "When did you decide to marry a walking, talking doll?"

But he wasn't finished with the bedtime story, and from the look on his face, I knew that he was recollecting the memories of what had been laid out for him in the past. He had become forgetful lately, which was a blessing for me.

There were times when, just because of his absentmindedness, I could get away with two bedtime stories in a night. He never knew, or at least didn't tell me if he did, that he had tucked me in twice during those lucky days. "I'll continue the story tomorrow," he whispered. His voice remained solid, slightly discordant at the end, as if he knew that there was never going to be any tomorrow. Not after that night.

Then, he gave me a kiss.

It was near midnight and I was wide awake. Rattles grew louder and louder from outside my window, which looked out onto a gigantic mango tree that, for more than ten years now, has not born fruit.

In my dreams, sometimes, I see the tree changing shape into an even more gigantic apple tree. It is always spring in my dreams, and the apples taste just as sweet, perhaps even sweeter, as they were in real life. Of course, they were all red.

"Daddy?" I looked around for that familiar figure amidst the darkness. I heard the hissing sound of water cascading down the open roof, a boiling kettle whistling in the kitchen and smelled the scent of loneliness -- but no Dad.

From the look of things inside the house, messy and dirty, some sort of storm must have hit. An uninvited guest on an unattended night such as that night could only mean one thing -- death.

After they got married, Dad and the doll went for a stroll along the beach. He had to carry her around, whatever was left of her, so I was told.

It was to my great dismay that I am now telling you this story, for it is not a lovely one. It could never be beautiful to know that the day you were born is the day your mother died. It makes you feel sort of like a murderer, one who deserves to be burned alive, like the witches in history books.

But the truth of the matter remained attached to my life. Just nine months after Dad married the doll, she completely disappeared. She vanished. On her bed, one morning, was an empty spot and there was nothing on it under the blanket but a messy bundle of flesh and blood -- right next to Daddy.

"It was a strange morning and the air smelled like thick, boiling loneliness," Dad once told me. "The same scent," as you would later learn, "is present when there are newborns or when people pass away," he said.

At our house that night the scent was unmistakably real, and that was how I knew he had died. Daddy had joined his doll, his -- in his own words -- true love.

I never once saw Daddy again after that night and in the morning I was surprised by a sight that would never again be present in front of me. The mango tree that was growing high toward the sky in the backyard, was covered in fruit, juicy mangoes weighing down, waiting to be picked.

So I took one and had it for breakfast, my first one alone. For the first time in my life, I understood a little bit how lonely Dad must've felt the moment he popped out of the suitcase. Poor little Daddy, I thought to myself.

As I usually did after breakfast, although this time I had to do it on my own and without Daddy, I sang that song I knew so well I could not picture a world without it -- A flame that burns so bright, not only through the night but constantly.

Jakarta-Liverpool-Jakarta, Sept.7, 2008 *All are excerpts from Sir Cliff Richard's song Constantly

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