10.

“I can’t take it,” my friend Jill said as she squeezed a slimy lemon onto a wedge of washed-out-looking honeydew. We were cutting fourth period at a coffee shop near school on a brisk morning just before Thanksgiving break. Jill’s mother raised Pomeranians and sold them at cut rates. I used to see the handwritten ad at a deli near my house. A sketch of a pug-nosed dog inside a lopsided heart. There were something like twelve Pomeranians living in Jill’s apartment, and Jill’s mother made her walk the bigger ones every night before she went to bed.

“She makes me carry these tiny wads of tinfoil, which aren’t big enough to pick up the poo,” she continued. “Then, when they get their periods, they walk around in public in little doggie diapers. People stare at me on the street. I hate her.” As I pictured twelve diapered Pomeranians dancing at Jill’s feet, a cold, sinking feeling rushed through me. Where was my period? I quickly calculated the dates in my head and realized I was a few days—maybe even a week—late. How could it be? I was a sophisticated, sexually active teenager on the pill. But then I remembered the Friday night a few weeks earlier, when I’d told Mom I was staying at Vanessa’s and instead I’d stayed at Will’s. I hadn’t brought my stuff with me. I’d told myself not to worry and to just forget it and had done a good job of it, until then.

I obsessed over whether or not to test when I got to Dad’s apartment that afternoon. Mom was away at a spa in France, and I didn’t think I could handle all those days in a row with Dad if the results were positive, so I decided to wait, wishing the weekend were already over. Will was leaving with his family to spend Thanksgiving at his aunt’s in New Jersey, and Vanessa was going upstate somewhere. Dad and I were having Thanksgiving dinner at home. A trader who worked for him was coming with his wife.

I went into my bedroom, found my crochet hook and yarn and curled up on Dad’s stiff canvas couch, grateful for a tactile distraction. I’d kept the project by my bed at home and I picked it up sometimes when I was on the phone late at night with Will, but after a while it hurt to crochet and hold the phone in my neck, and the phone always won, which meant I never got very far. But I liked having it by my bed, marking time, waiting to be finished.

Dad’s apartment was silent except for the noise from my grandmother’s antique clock on his desk. I looked up at the slats of dark wood, the old warehouse ceiling that was Dad’s favorite thing about the apartment. Sitting there reminded me of all the nights I used to stay up late, reading his old photography books, waiting for him to come home so I could say goodnight and go to bed. He’d been in that apartment on West Twelfth Street a while, two years maybe, and it was so much better than the dump on Twenty-Third Street he went to right after he moved out. Nothing was more depressing than that. The elevator buttons were the really old kind that lit up when you touched them, but they were so dirty and disgusting I’d only touch them with my elbow, which was hard when I had a coat on. A never-ending hallway with grassy, dentist-office wallpaper led to his scuffed-up metal door. He’d open it on Friday nights, his living room a murky brown hole behind him, and hug me and my knapsack with some strange kind of desperation, like he was drowning.

He came home that night at around seven, his phone jammed to his ear. “A Maserati’s a fine car, as long as you drive it in a straight line.” He chuckled. “That’s right. Well, enjoy. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” He took off his coat and smiled at me, slipping his shoes under the chair in the foyer. “How was school? Any homework?” He kissed me on the forehead and headed toward his bedroom. He did that all the time—asked a question and walked away or asked a question and looked down and read something. It drove Mom crazy. I try to look at it as some form of adult attention disorder. It could hurt your feelings if you let it.

“It’s Wednesday night,” I called after him.

He came out of his room, still in his suit pants and a brand-new white undershirt. His undershirts and socks and towels always looked brand-spanking-new. It was a complete mystery to me. He either bought new ones all the time or it was some secret of Rula’s, our longtime housekeeper who Mom and Dad shared after they split. It was his one fashion statement. “Why not get it over with, that way you’ll have the whole weekend free in front of you.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unwinding some more yarn from the ball.

“What are you doing?”

“Crocheting,” I said.

“Crocheting what?” He went toward the cluster of plants in the corner, arranged as precisely as a landscaped garden, and stood over each with his brass watering can.

“A scarf, it’s just practice. I just learned.”

“No kidding,” he said, looking up at the sculpted bust of the headless, armless woman in the corner. He’d bought it at an antique show, and whenever I looked at it, I wondered if Dad secretly hated women. “I’m all for hobbies where you’re actually making something. People don’t make things anymore. But start your homework soon, okay? How’s it going? Any tests this week?”

I told him I got a B-plus on a geometry quiz I’d taken that Monday.

“Where does that leave you?” he asked, setting the watering can down and balling his hands into fists at his sides. “Where does that leave your average?”

“I’m in good shape, don’t worry.”

“You’re sticking with that idiotic plan of yours?” he blurted, his metal eyeglass frames catching the light as he flinched in disgust. I’d applied early decision to NYU, which had effectively snuffed out his dreams of my attending Wesleyan for good.

“My idiotic plan?” I asked, stopping what I was doing to glare at him. He was completely incapable of editing himself. It was like thoughts came into his head and he would vomit them out without thinking about how the other person might react. Mom said he had Asperger’s syndrome, that it just hadn’t been diagnosed.

“I’m sorry,” he said flatly, plucking a dead leaf off the rubber tree plant he’d had forever. “I’m just really, really disappointed.”

“NYU is a great school and it’s the perfect fit for me,” I said, borrowing lingo from Ms. Weiss, my college counselor at school. “If they ding me, then I’ll apply everywhere else. It’s a waste of time, pursuing other schools right now.”

“Well, I couldn’t disagree more,” he said, tossing the dead leaf angrily into the wastebasket by his leather chair. “You did yourself a huge disservice, not leaving your options open.” He sat down in his leather swivel chair and started opening mail, the sharp sound of ripping envelopes cutting through the thick silence. I focused intently on my hook, torn between explaining to him, calmly and coolly, how carefully I’d thought about applying to NYU, and telling him to go screw himself for being his usual jackass self.

I looked at the photograph of Mixed Nuts, his beloved sonar racing boat, on the bookshelf. Ever since I was a tiny thing, Dad had found countless ways to demean me via sailing. When I was four, he took me out on his boat and tried to teach me how to read the wind. “It’s there, Thea, you have to pay attention,” he said again and again, flailing his arms in frustration. “Pay attention.” But the wind was completely lost to me. I couldn’t see it, only the menacing August jellyfish dotting the water and our big, brown shingled house gone all Shrinky-Dink from afar. When I started sailing lessons, he bet me I couldn’t get to the nun in the harbor a half a mile from our house, so of course I had to try. I got to the nun easily, but getting back took hours. Every so often, Dad would emerge on the lawn and watch with binoculars, as passively as if he were watching TV. I sailed the boat to the end of the bluff, my hands blistering from gripping the lines, then diagonally back toward the house, over and over, telling myself I was making progress.

“Why couldn’t you get in the dinghy and help me?” I asked when I finally made it in, freezing from my still-wet suit yet burning with rage.

He lowered the paper he was reading and looked up at me, as if he’d just realized where I’d been. “You’re going to have to get in a whole lot quicker than that, kiddo, if you ever want to race with me.”

That’s how life was with him, I thought, seething as he crumpled up paper and tossed it into his basket. My potential was the only interesting thing about me. If there was something to be achieved—winning a sailing race, getting into Stuyvesant, getting a high grade—count on Dad to swoop in, demanding dedication and results. Otherwise, I wasn’t worth his time.

I went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge for something for dinner. There was Old Amsterdam Gouda wrapped in wax paper in the drawer, just like at Mom’s. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with an overripe tomato and we had them on our laps in the living room. He ate his while I squeezed mine and tore it apart, feeling sick from imagined pregnancy symptoms. Part of me was afraid he’d be able to discern my potential problem just by looking at me, and I got a shiver down my spine at the thought of him finding out.

“So when is the turkey coming?” I asked.

“Tomorrow morning, between nine and eleven,” he answered, not looking up from his paper.

“Do you think they’ll drown it in rosemary bushels again?” I asked. Thanksgiving always came from some herb-crazy caterer uptown, which we joked about every year.

“I don’t know, Thea,” he said lifelessly. He could go forever without talking. When I was younger, I’d sit in the living room with him, and the silence compared to Mom’s chatting actually confused me. But that night I could tell he wasn’t talking because he was still pissed off about college. I picked up the empty plate from his lap and went to my room for the rest of the night.