Issue Date: June 20, 1999

Back to the Summer Fiction series

An Inscription

by Alice McDermott

E WROTE, "I wish you success in your every endevor," and knew the minute he had committed it to paper -- powder-blue paper with a black felt-tip pen -- he'd misspelled the word. Still, he forged on. "All my love," he wrote, "Dad" -- even adding an old-fashioned xx oo since the effort was doomed anyway. A squiggle beneath the Dad, an exclamation point, a smiley face and then another. Why not? For surely an X-acto knife neatly applied to the innermost edge of the paper could remove the thing without a trace and he would write again, on the new page underneath:

"I wish you success in your every endeavor" -- or was it er? -- He could look it up. He could write, "I wish you success in your every pursuit." per?

On the facing page -- a pale pink page -- his wife had already written, "To our smart, sweet girl: The world awaits!"

Just a moment ago, he had thought it rather flat-footed, too brief, informal, open-ended. "The world awaits." Awaits what? he had thought, wryly. To devour her? To mug her? To wear her out?

But now, of course, he saw the beauty in it - the simple words, easily spelled. The lightness, the brightness of it. "Our," she had written - a brilliant stroke. "Our smart, sweet" -- it was even alliterative -- "girl: The world awaits!"

Not too heavy, not too much for the occasion, which was, after all, only their daughter's eighth-grade graduation. Only the first two pages of her official eighth-grade autograph book that tomorrow would be filled with smudged valedictions from her classmates: "Remember Science lab!" "Good luck in high school!" "Roses are red, violets are pink ..."

His own inscription, he saw now, even disregarding the spelling, was inadequate, distant, stuffy. Something that might be written by some seldom-seen grandfather, a white-mustachioed old man with a military bearing. "I wish you success in your every endeavor."

(He imagined her showing her own daughter the inscription someday, heard her saying, by way of sympathetic explanation, "Well, my father was 42 when I was born.")

"I wish you the best," he might have written instead. "I wish you the best of everything," which had a less formal air but also smacked, he thought, of some grill-room toast.

"I wish you much happiness in the coming years." A melancholy note: "the coming years." How many were there, after all: 70, 80, 100? How far into the future did a 14-year-old really want to peer?

"Good luck in high school!" When you thought about it, it wasn't bad.

There was an X-acto knife, he was certain, on his workbench. He carried the book with him. It was soft, a synthetic leather embossed with the school's name. He walked from the dining room, through the darkened kitchen, down the basement stairs. The house was asleep.

Signing her book was the last thing he'd had to do this evening. Earlier, before she had disappeared into her room for the night, his daughter had left it out for him on the dining-room table. He had already gone upstairs himself, taken off his belt and his shoes -- his wife was reading in bed -- when he remembered. Had his wife mentioned it in that moment when she raised her eyes from her novel, an accusation just forming behind them, he would have said impatiently, "I know, I know." Instead, he went back downstairs without her prompting, passing as he did his daughter's room, a jumble of clothes and schoolbooks and bath towels. She'd fallen asleep across her bedspread. Gently, he moved her heavy limbs - long and smooth and momentarily startled into sharp angles by his touch -- until she had gotten herself under the covers. He'd smoothed her fine hair and kissed her just above the spot where her braces distorted her upper lip.

" 'Night, Daddy," she'd whispered.

It was pit-of-the-stomach stuff -- as much love as fear, delight as wonder -- this being father to a 14-year-old girl. The quick-changing body, the dawning womanhood. Limbs, breasts, waist. Her adult face taking shape out of the face of her childhood.

None of them said anything, the fathers he knew. They stood at the edge of the soccer field, or sat on the bleachers at the gym, and as their girls flashed by they talked about lay-ups and missed goals, they shouted, Defense! and All right! and Damn! and might as well have been eighth-graders themselves, or no, more likely, sixth-graders, fifth-graders in their refusal to acknowledge their astonishment at their daughters' lovely arms and legs, the flushed cheeks and the beautiful hair and the near-heartbreaking ability to ignore completely that blurred group of men on the sidelines who occasionally shouted their names. (But then one girl would break away, at half time, perhaps, and still catching her breath would approach her father to say, "Can I have some money for a soda?" Then you would see it, as the father shook his head, reached for his wallet and joked, "What else am I good for?": the delight, the pride, the fear, the amazement. As he snapped the bill --"Here you go" -- you would see how his own face was flushed by the nearness of this breathless child.)

The challenge, of course, would be to remove the single page alone -- to cut it close enough to the binding to remove the one page without a tell-tale trace of quarter inch baby blue, but not so close that the binding was compromised, or the page beneath (this one a pale purple) slit as well.

He cleared a space on the cluttered workbench -- junk mail, burned-out flashlights, pocket change. Not his workbench, really, an inheritance from the former owner of the house, from a former generation, perhaps, when men required workbenches with wenches and vises and yardsticks etched along the edge -- now a place from which to launch the hanging of a picture or the changing of a washer, little more.

The X-acto knife was in a small plastic box filled with odd nuts and screws and thin nails. He lifted it, opened the book to the offending page and pushed his glasses to the top of his head, as he'd taken to doing lately for any fine-eyesight task. He leaned, bare-faced, toward the book.

These were the first two pages. The students had been instructed, his daughter had said, that no one should be allowed to sign the book until the parents had had their chance. It was, of course, some educator's last-ditch effort to get these novice adolescents talking to their parents before they disappeared into the silent monolith of high school, but the fact of the first two pages made his task all the more difficult. He had to hold his wife's page perfectly perpendicular to his own to make up for the imbalance, and as he placed the blade to the upper corner of his page, he suddenly saw there was some purposefulness to the color scheme. Mother signs pale pink. Father signs pale blue.

He lifted the knife and straightened up. Would anyone notice pale pink and pale purple? Could he tell his daughter he refused to be relegated to such sexist, not to mention infantile, categories? Could he simply tell her he'd misspelled a word?

He thumbed through a few more pages, wondering if he could cut down to the next facing page of pale blue. But eight pages would surely be missed and he could hear her already, hear the outrage -- the outsized, out-of-this-world outrage- - when she saw what he had done: "Daddy, you ruined it." He pulled his glasses down and looked at the inscription again.The tears, the opened-mouthed, face-collapsing tears that would recall so vividly her infant desperation -- except that then there was toothlessness and strands of saliva and now there were the constricting braces and rubber bands.

He could fudge it. Blot some ink over the e and make it look as though the pen had gone wrong and swallowed up his a. The pen's fault, you see. Although these felt-tip pens never blotted. And still there would be the matter of the xx and the oo, the exclamation point and the squiggle and the smiley faces -- all added in embarrassment and frustration and with the sudden confidence that he could remove the page with an X-acto knife and start over again.

Even with a blot over the e or an a squeezed in somewhere before the v, there was the sense of corny abandon that the xx oo and the squiggle and the exclamation point and the smiley faces evoked. There was the image of his daughter's rolled eyes -- God, Daddy -- his wife's cool shrug, "Well, if that's what you wanted to say." There was the grandchild of the future who would hear that he'd been kind of a formal guy, come late to fatherhood, a little aloof in his affections, perhaps, a lousy speller, who at odd and mostly unseen moments, late at night, when the house was asleep and every other task of the day completed, was stricken with corny abandon at the thought of what wonder, what love, she elicited in him, his daughter, their daughter. This life -- this new life -- they had produced.

He closed the book on the flawed page. He shrugged. So it is written, he said, almost out loud. He carried the book back upstairs and set it out again on the dining-room table so she would remember to take it with her in the morning.

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Allison Seiffer for USA WEEKEND