Gay Walley - Strings attached

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title	:	Strings Attached
author	:	Walley, Gay.
publisher	:	University Press of Mississippi
isbn10 | asin	:	1578061997
print isbn13	:	9781578061990
ebook isbn13	:	9780585190525
language	:	English
subject	Fathers and daughters--Fiction, Domestic fiction.
publication date	:	1999
lcc	:	PS3573.A4355S77 1999eb
ddc	:	813/.54
subject	:	Fathers and daughters--Fiction, Domestic fiction.

Page 3 Strings Attached Gay Walley University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Page 4 www.upress.state.ms.us Copyright 1999 by Gay Walley All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by John Langston 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walley, Gay, 1951 Strings attached / Gay Walley. p. cm. ISBN 1-57806-199-7 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3573.A4355S77 1999 813'.54dc21 99-23576 CIP British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Page 5 Prologue I want to know why, as I begin this story, I want to call my old lover who does not love me. I want to dial his phone, which he never picks up, he has a whole life separate from me, you know, mysterious and wide as the night, and then I want to go to every bar on the Lower East Side and find him, standing tall and surrounded up at the bar, drinking his beer from the bottle, and I want to drag him out, pull his cotton sleeve from a shirt that I know his aunt gave him, pull at the woolen vest he always wears, I want to pull at him, I don't care if his clothes rip, I want to use all my force and just drag him out. He'll go because he'll think they think poor guy, she's crazy, and I don't care, I want to get him out on the street, away from the bar and the glowing people dining together and making promises together and hinting at things together, I want to get him alone in that hot night with just a street lamp lighting us and I want to force him, make him stand there and see there is no choice. He'll stand there pained and skinny, clenching himself because this time he's run for good. He'll close his eyes when he looks at me, why, why won't she just leave me alone, why doesn't she just go away, and I want to punch him right then, hard on the nose as he stands there wishing

Page 6 me away, punch him for not loving me, and then push his chest in, as if he's weak, push him for the way he never moves softly toward me.

Page 7 1 "There's a boat coming toward us," screamed Charlee in the car. Maybe her vision was not so good anyway, because she felt a little sick from the cigar smoke's growing interior fog. It was nighttime. She and her father had been driving all day, they had left Montreal for the back roads of Vermont. Her father enjoyed going to another country, as he would say, for a drive. He felt sort of powerful, she thought, going through customs, telling the men in their uniforms that he and his daughter were just out for the day. Back that evening. They would be waved through. Her father answered the customs men's questions with a secret smile, his dark eyes unfocused, as if he had something to hide and he dared them to discover it. Charlee shuddered, sitting beside him, at this smugness her father drove away from the customs with. As if he had fooled them. She shuddered because she knew he was not hiding anything. The smugness was her father's imaginary accomplishment. There were no other cars on the road. The trees slid by, full, white, and heavy with snow. Charlee and her father had watched the sun occasionally slip through the grey sky, only

Page 8 to finally fall down the car rear window. The snow hadn't let up since they left the second stop. Her father liked to drive and stop in little canteens, have two quick scotches. "I don't have a drinking problem," he said, although at ten she had never thought to ask. As far as she was concerned he was a nearly perfect man, difficult and selfish as probably all people must be, but big and capable of such original things as going to another country for the afternoon, and of having people from all walks of life, in gas stations, bars, customs, businesses, think he was someone special. This solitary man who was above, really, joining in crowds. "You never see me sit," he explained, ''like an American, for hours in a bar. I have two scotches and then leave." Years later, she knew his pattern only served a compulsion never to be known, and years later she added up those stops to twenty-six scotches a day. They'd stopped six times today. She'd had Cokes, admittedly, but she was the one seeing an ocean liner on the road coming toward them. She cracked the window a bit for air. "I don't hear any foghorns," her father said, and sort of harrumphed to himself. He brought the cigar back to his mouth and puffed so the sides of his mouth stayed open. Like a fish with gills. "Daddy, I feel sick." "All those Shirley Temples, Cokes, and cherries. It'll be

Page 9 a damn sight better when you start drinking real drinks." "Daddy, I really do feel sick." She put her head back on the seat, her hair felt damp and limp, and her shirt was starting to get wet. Some barmaid, a long time ago, when she had eaten too many oysters and sipped too many pink ladies, had told her to put her head down. She put her head down. "The boat is passing," he said. And she slowly raised her head up, opened the window full throttle to help with the clamminess, and fearfully, who cares what happens next, looked out the front windshield. "Oh, I see," she said, "it's a snow plow."

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