By Cristy Moran

The car is heavy with the stench of stale cigarettes and occupied by a month’s worth of teenage girl wardrobe changes. On the backseat alone are three of my sweaters and one of my shoes, the partner of which is probably stuffed somewhere under the driver’s seat. From behind Dad’s head, I see the hood of a jacket that I hung on the passenger’s seat two nights earlier. Dad’s got his head laid back and his eyes closed. The Temptations bop softly from the stereo. He’s often told me that he’s happy for my musical tastes, which are much like his own. They make our drives more pleasurable than they would be if I was fond of driving to, say, Snoop Dogg or even Anthrax. His lips sing a step ahead of the song but he doesn’t make a sound. I drive, for the most part, completely unawares except for when I catch glimpses of him in the periphery as I check the side view mirror to change lanes.

The drive to Janice’s has taken us through three expressway exchanges, past the inner city streets and the ritzy urban condo-ridden landscapes. She lives in a mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of the beach. It being Saturday, I don’t anticipate much in the way of traffic. Still, I drive slowly through the streets. I feel criminal lighting a cigarette and releasing my tattooed forearm through the car window so that it hangs off the side and on display to the passerby. I pollute their clean little G-d-loving community with my Saturday morning car exhaust, my defiled skin, and my second-hand smoke. I do it because it’s habit and I do it with some sense of guilt. I am, at least, the compassionate gentile cruising the streets on her way to see Dad’s girlfriend, herself a non-Jew. I feel aimless driving through the streets, doing little but watching the foot-traffic. I watch the families walk down the sidewalks to and from temples, to and from friends’ homes. I watch the sons with their yarmulkes to the heavens, the fathers with full beards, the mothers with their covered hair, the daughters with their full dresses. I watch and wonder how things might’ve been different if he’d met Janice ten years ago and this had been the exposure that modeled my pre-adolescence. Instead, it was Claire. Then Jude. Then Maria. The Monicas. Charlene. And so on. The revolving door of Daddy’s love life. These were the women that I saw on leave on Saturday mornings having come by on Friday nights. None of them left on foot. None of them wore dresses with wrist-length sleeves or skirts that covered their shins. Besides that, I knew little more about them but their names. My female role models waned in the presence of a front door shutting.

My dad pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and drops his arm from the passenger side window. I see his skin from under the edge of his jacket sleeve. The colors of his tattooed arm blare through the smoke that covers its reflection in the mirror.

“Janice is a good lady,” he says. “I think you’ll like her.” Dad’s voice is gruff and deep but his words draw slowly from within. Deliberation, being my father’s strong suit in speech, means that he is a man of few words, so to speak. I’ve heard little of Janice in the three months they’ve been seeing each other.

“You said she’s a teacher, she must be smart enough.”

“Professor,” he corrected. “She’s Professor of Urban Studies at my university.”

Professor, a title better suited for one of Dad’s companions than the usual slew that I barely hear. In passing I might’ve heard tell of dancer or waitress or singer. None of those titles meant anything to me except that she might have a job now or she might not. Where he’d met them is anyone’s guess. What they inspired within him, the same. Dad’s social life is as much an enigma to me as the thoughts that run rampant in his head. Thoughts that I wouldn’t even believe exist had he not written a mountain’s worth of books to prove that they’re in there. Aside from those books (books I’ve pored through as many times as I’ve been able to stand it), there hasn’t been much in the way of an opening into his life. The daughter of a writer: a student of his books, a fan who needs not send letters to say, “That was good.” I get the writer on the sofa watching TV or at the stove making dinner. I get the writer driving me to school and taking me shopping for sneakers. I get the writer while Johnny Cash is playing. In effect, I get a writer who’s best at writing and a dad that’s best at just being there.

Dad leads me through the turns to a quiet street lined with quaint apartment houses and shady trees far removed from the bustling disco-crowded, palm tree-cluttered hustle just minutes across the beach. I park by the curb and he points to a two-story yellow building with a stone walkway that’s covered with the pink-petal droppings of the trees that hang over it.

There’s no rush to leave the car, it seems. Dad, still smoking his cigarette, kicks his beat-up Converse and ripped pant legs onto the dash. This is my dad. He wears a Dead Milkmen t-shirt under a tweed jacket. He takes off his hat and smooths the mess of salt and pepper hair on his head. Coming from the stereo is the beginnings of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman.” He turns up the volume and falls back into the seat, his head back and eyes closed again.

“This is a really good song,” he says.

Somewhere in the yellow building, in one of the apartments, is a thirty-something woman getting primed to meet her boyfriend’s kid. I picture her living room with modern furniture, wall hangings of the kind of art that you might pick up at a local Downtown gallery, a cat bowl in the kitchen, and lots of books in shelves lining the walls. I hear the sound of her heels on the natural wood floor as she walks to and from the bathroom, to and from the bedroom fastening her earrings or powdering her nose. I imagine that she thinks she’s sprung lucky. I imagine it’s what they’d all thought. This one’s the one. If I gave it any thought, I’d say they had a point. I’d say he’s rather dreamy.

Dad stops my inner-space montage by lowering the radio to nil. He’s looking at me with big wide eyes. He takes an errant strand of hair off my face and puts it behind my ear.

“Kiddo,” he says, examining my face tenderly. “You’re my only sweetheart. I don’t tell you that enough. You’re really quite a catch. Your mother would’ve been proud if she’d stuck around to see it.”

“Daddy,” I say. I try to think of all the things I’ve wanted to tell him. Questions that I might’ve had to ask starting with why it’d taken so long to say something nice, let alone something at all. I look down to his wrist bright with colors, patterns upon patterns, the beginnings of drawings upon drawings that reach all the way his to elbow to his shoulder and back. I remember my name on his chest and the angel beside it. “Daddy, I think we should go and meet Janice.”

With a kiss on the cheek between my Daddy and me, we’re out of the car and walking. Janice has probably been waiting for some time.

Author Bio
If asked, Cristy Moran would tell you that she grew up to be a struggling writer but still wants to be a ballerina.  She has had some poetry published in FIU's Touchstone magazine.  Cristy, who lives in Miami, also wrote an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink column called “I Don't Read Comic Books” in a now-defunct indie comic book and entertainment magazine. Furthermore, Cristy is the author of the greatest memoir ever written that's never been published because she's too terrified to send it out. She hopes that one day someone will steal it from her and get it to a publisher because it's really great.  "Natural Woman" is the first short story she's had published.