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omelettes and café au lait. The sheets on the bed are pink with maroon and white diagonal stripes of varying thicknesses, definitely the fashion, meant to look a bit like a Frank Stella painting or
a Vidal Sassoon geometric cut. They are so straight and solid, and my dad is so twisted and gelatinous.
    On the wall is a poster, popular in the late sixties, of a broken heart held together by a Band-Aid, as if things could be fixed this easily (or perhaps it is making fun of that notion). At any rate, my father, still beardless at this point, is pushing himself up with his hands to sit against the black antique wrought-iron headboard.
    This is my only memory of Daddy at home. In all my early memories of him, he is sleeping or just waking up or about to go to sleep. Frequently, during our Saturday visits after the split, my father would take me for Chinese food, and afterward we would retreat to his studio walk-up, turn on the TV, and I would watch while he fell asleep. Usually on weekend afternoons, all that was on were college sports—I recall many NCAA championships—which didn’t interest me, and
Star Trek
reruns, which confused me (my dad, on the other hand, is a hopeless Trekkie, but he slept through all of this anyway). Occasionally there’d be a movie about the Donner Party or some other gruesome historical event. Sometimes he’d get me a model airplane or car to construct and paint with bullet gray enamel and the war stripes of the Allies or the Axis countries. I am the only girl I know who builds model vehicles, and it is only because it is all he gives me to do while he sleeps. Sometimes I tap him and try to get him to help me fit a wing in place or paint a tight crevice in a silver fender, but he doesn’t budge.
    I don’t take it personally that my father snoozes through our visits. After all, how much can you really say to a little kid, and probably we’d already covered it at lunch. Later on, when I am old enough to know about these things, I tell my mom that I think he’s narcoleptic, and she says that all men are like that, that the army teaches men to be able to sleep anywhere so they do. When I am old enough to ask my father about it, when I wonder why he sleeps through our little bit of quality time together, he just speaks of nerves—of nerves and Valium. Librium and Miltown and whatever else too.
    When I am three, my mother goes to Israel for three weeks, ostensibly to look into living there. Though we aren’t particularly religious, she thinks that maybe the Middle East, where the war zones are mostly outside the home, is a more stable place to raise a child. My father tells me that she has gone away because she is losing her mind, but whatever the reason, Daddy comes to stay with me for the time being. I think this setup is great because it means I never have to get to nursery school on time: My father sleeps right through the morning.
    He sleeps on the green sofa bed in the living room (apparently it is too unpleasant to stay in the bed he once shared with Mommy), and every morning I rise at the crack of dawn and play with my coloring books or read Dr. Seuss or ride on my rocking horse and watch
Captain Kangaroo
and wait for him to get up and make me breakfast. Hours go by. Eventually it seems like lunchtime and I am so hungry that I tiptoe into the living room, stand there staring at him, hoping the power of my gaze will wake him. It doesn’t.
    Finally, I approach the bed, over at the part where his face rests and the springs and coils connect the mattress to the couch, and I take my little fingers and carefully peel his eye open as if I were a police officer examining a corpse at the scene of the crime. At first, I expose just the white, but eventually the iris and pupil roll into view, and I in turn roll into his view, and he looks a little stunned, like this is not quite what he expected, like who is this stranger standing over his face, or like maybe