Papi

Marina's Papi was her person. Last night she had one of those old house dreams. She walked from room to room, looking. She didn't know what she was looking for. She found a starving baby standing in a crib holding onto the railing. She had starved this child. How could she have forgotten to feed this baby? A dream voice said, "You know who remembered to feed this baby? Papi remembered to feed this baby."

She woke up shaking, so far in her own mind's past she didn't at first know who she was, that she was Marina the woman and not Marina the love starved infant.

Her Papi was all the love food she got.

He laid the psychic velcro all her lovers failed to stick to.

He happened to believe women were smart so he was a benevolent patriarch. Because of him acting like she could do anything she got the idea male privilege was a kind of joke, a performed farce that everyone agreed meant nothing. The harshness of patriarchy took her by surprise. That missing information, added to Papi's official dismissal of sex, made Marina perfect sexual prey. She confused predation with love. She sought men's predatory gleam, took it for love, believed it, gave up everything for it.

He did what a father did: provided income, status, laid down laws Marina's Mami executed. Chief among these laws was that he must never be bothered with the truth. His vision of their little family as secure, harmonious, close, an incubator of future accomplishment must not be marred.

When Marina went off to college and went wild with freedom, Papi was not to be informed. When she lost her virginity to her college boyfriend right in her own bed at home during her first Christmas vacation, Mami sniffed out the truth, intuited. Papi was kept in the dark. Mami lunged at Marina, went for her long braid. All through the beating years, up until she started menstruating at 12,and after that the berating years, Marina had waited to be big enough to hit Mami back. Now she did. Papi couldn't pretend not to hear them screaming. He came into Marina's bedroom and pulled them apart.

He looked bewildered. Whatever it was a Father did, had he done it wrong?

A father laid down laws. His hegemony in the home carried the full weight of patriarchy. It was so absolute that the bluff of these laws could not be called.

Marina had begun to call the bluff.

After college she informed Papi and Mami that she was going to live with her college roommate in an apartment in Edgecity. She was not going to live with them until she left to be married.

No discussion. No negotiation. She had a job. She was an adult. It turned out the patriarchal hegemony of these two adults disappeared now that she herself was grown.

Papi and Mami drove her and her two boxes down to Edgecity.

In the car Mami said nothing. There was no way left to protect Papi from this. Papi had no alternative but to do his own berating. "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? This is not what a Venturan young woman does."

Marina spoke: "How am I doing anything different than you did? You were never home. But you did what you did for god. Well, I don't know what god did. I never saw it."

Papi swung his right arm back, forced at last to do the hitting himself. His arm coudn't reach Marina.

She was now beyond berating, beyond hitting.