Candida Lawrence - Vanishing

My sister Anne wanted to explain a few things.
She said: Ill tell the story of long ago.
She asked me to take dictation, over a few days.
When she read my transcript she said:
So, thats it, so true, all of it.

Im sitting at my desk in the Daily Cal office. I have all my private papers here in a drawer I can lock with a key I keep on a string around my neck. Theres now nothing at home for my pesky sister to snoop intoor my mother or father, though I dont believe they snoop. Im in my second year as girl-who-does-every thing, including writing this or that, and my position here is thrilling, infinitely more exciting than my course work. I can lie to my parents about what Im doing, where I am (though I usually try to tell them the truth). I can lie because Im working on a newspaper!

Its now seven-thirty and I just returned from Til Two, the bar down Telegraph Avenue, where I joined some staffers for a game of bridge and lots of good talk and a few beers. Im guzzling ginger ale in hopes that the beer breath will evaporate before I get a ride home with the Editor, whenever he decides to leave. He lives off-campus in an apartment and can stay out all night if he wishes.

The problem is that the damn Administration has caught up with me and has ordered me to complete English 1A, which Ive been dodging for almost two years. I took the first half of the one-year course and then just slipped away. It was so stupid, all those freshmen writing asinine papers, the girls in their great clothes and perfect bodies, the few boys (because were at war) looking so 4F in their ROTC uniforms. All the girls except me were in sororities and that made me feel bad though I tried to rustle up some pride and not care that I didnt even get rushed so I could pretend I was not humiliated by being turned down. This is a mystery. Im intelligent, from good family, not bad-looking, but its as though I have some awful odor which makes these in-girls avoid me. Not that Id join if asked. Im against sororities; they are politically absurd. But Id like to be asked, then refuse.

The assignment, due in two days: Write 1,000 words on a member of your familyyour father, your mother, your sister, your brother. When the TA said 1,000 words there were gasps of panic in the room. These students can burble on endlessly about nothing, but a thousand words on paper sounded to them like high literature. Weve known about this task for weeks, and therefore Ive had much time to think. I know what is expecteda Readers Digest saccharine ode to a member of ones family. (The Readers Digest is the only periodical not allowed in our house. No one reads it and yet we all know what kind of article it just loves.) The trouble for me is that Im in a phase of my life when I dislike every member of my family, except our cocker spaniel and KitKat. My sister snoops, as I said, and raids my closet for items she wants to wear, then lies when confronted by proof. My little brother is a brat, holds his breath until he turns blue when denied something he wants. My mother says things like, Why have you dyed your hair blonde when your brown color was so nice? and Have you put on a little bit of weight lately? and Purple lipstick?... maybe just a touch of old rose would go better with your complexion, and worst of all, Isnt your beige sweater a bit boxier, not so tight? Fact is, she hates my body. She doesnt want me to attract anyone with my bosom, which is substantial; she wants boys to like me for my intelligence. (She wears corsets, even when she gardens, and support hose, Red Cross brown oxfords.)

As for my father, by far the most interesting subject for an essay, he doesnt know it but Ive been compiling a dossier on him for years, which is easy to do because hes a San Francisco daily columnist, syndicated across the country in 250 newspapers, and he sometimes writes about me, his daughter, which is unforgivable. He never asks permission, and for as long as I can remember Ive had to go to school and have people I dont even know come up to me and say: Oh, I read about you in yesterdays paper, and Id say: No, that wasnt me, that was my sister, and then, It sounded like you; it was a sweet article. Yeah, sweet, which he is not.

I have a collection of his articles, those about me and others, offensive politically and/or morally, in my locked desk drawer. Id been carrying them with me, in a binder, for years, which might lead one to believe that I admire them. One night, down at Til Two, they fell out onto the table and before I could grab them up, they were read (with cynical laughter, groans) and I felt for the first time understood. They said: What a charlatan! What mush! What is he really like? Get this: He (the father) hopes she does not see this article. It is not the best thing for a little girl to know that her father and mother watch everything she does and says AND IS. Who elected him God? That night I disburdened myself and locked them in a drawer.

I feel as though Im working on the Assignment, but deviously. I know Ill report only my admiration for my father, which is there, buried beneath a consuming dislike. (If I even started a critique of him, for public view, I would dissolve, cry.) After all, hes a successful writer and thats what I want to be. He was amazingly successful right here at this universitya scholarship student, on the Occident staff, the Blue & Gold, writer of Senior Extravaganza (text and lyrics and actor in black-face), editor of the Pelican, the campus humor magazine. All this from a fatherless poor boy from Watsonville High. He was a pacifist, joined the Ambulance Corps and served in France, was gassed and got the Croix de Guerre (his hair turned white). No floundering time. He was instantly a writer for the San Francisco Call Bulletin and he churns out articles faster than I can decide to go to my Underwood portable and try to write. (I have heard that typewriter ribbons are going to be scarce during this war and that no typewriters will be manufactured. I must go buy ribbons for what is now called The Duration.)

He is always watching. Last Saturday night I had a date, went to a movie, then parked a while with my date on the street near our gate. When he walked me to the front door, and I turned to kiss him goodnight, suddenly my father was there (at two a.m.) yelling, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING? WHORE! My date fled, I burst into tears and ran upstairs to my room. I could almost see dirt all over my arms, my pink angora sweater. I could hear his feet coming up the stairs, hesitate, then move on to his bedroom. I heard my sister say WHAT is going ON? then her door closing, my mother sobbing, How could you? said to my father.

Although his behavior with me is, at times, inexcusable and just plain nuts and causes me to wilt and want to die, I recover the instant I walk into my office on campus. My date does not exist here. He was merely a stray soldier from somewhere back east I met at a dance given locally for lonely servicemen. My profound quarrel with my father is more elevated and dates from many years back. I have been tracking the chasm between his public popularity, the acclaim he receives from his soggy readers, the person he projects with his writingall thatand the sullen, witty, satirical, mean, brooding father I know at home. I have never let him know my contempt for his duplicity, and he certainly doesnt know that I carry around the offending articles. Im waiting until my knowledge of the world catches up to my private disgust. Not now, not in an assignment for English 1A.

My stealthy pursuit of his corruption began when I was nine. I had been in an explosion in our neighborhood. I was burned, my face, my hands, and shards of glass were embedded in my chest and arms. I was at home, not yet allowed to go back to school, my hair growing back, my burns were not too serious, and the deepest wound in my chest was bandaged and healing. There was nothing for me to do but read and rest and play with KitKat. One afternoon, my friend Peggy was with me. Her hand burns were more serious, but wed been having fun cutting out paper dolls that she herself had drawn on stiff white paper. My mother opened my bedroom door and held out to us the