My Father’s Daughter    by Vanessa Lindsay Wray

    One day, when I was a little girl, my mommy and daddy told me that we were going to grandma’s house. My father had grown up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I’d never been farther north than Baton Rouge. My grandfather had died years before, and my grandmother didn’t like to travel; she said it hurt her to walk down the long terminals of the airport, and she didn’t like southern weather. The heat was too much for her forever-Iowa bones. In fact, she lived her entire life in the same small northern corn-town. My grandfather had been a physician in the army during World War II, and the Wray hands were passed down through generations. Precise movements, surgeon’s exactness, flawless results were required of the Wray hands. My grandfather was a lapidary. I remember that trip (the only one I ever made) to see my father’s childhood home. Memories imprinted in my thoughts of the past recreate that world I would see if I were four feet tall again, looking up at my father as he stood in the basement of my grandmother’s house.

    I remember the day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that I arrived at that house, my fingers pinned to my father’s pockets. I surely would have ripped them off, had he not been patient and taken steps equal in size to those of my short, little legs. It had been that evening that he wandered down to the basement to look at his old playthings. Artificial light flickered from a bare fifty-five-watt bulb that hung from a chain on the ceiling, hardly illuminating white walls, yellow and olive green linoleum floors. Six steps led down into a room where children had played with marbles and toy trucks and trains, and teenagers had laughed around a pool table, sipping root beer from glass bottles, laughing about the events of the last trip out into the snow. My father sat on the floor in a well-worn area of carpet, where little buns had placed themselves for years of make-believe and don’t-shoot-your-eye-out-with-that-marble games. There he watched his little girls playing with the toys he and his brother had long kept in that tiny room, underground. Sometimes he would get up and walk to the wall of cabinets, only to open one and see that it had been vacated, and when we tired of the trucks and glass marbles, I slowly followed him, anticipating his next move.

    Just to the left, as one strolls down the stairs, there is a tiny room cut out of what seems a solid wall. The door is still held open by a brick from the garden wall in the back yard. My grandfather had stolen it, so as to keep the room from becoming so dank in the winter that it caused a cough or a chill. Cork sheets, hung on the walls, held tools, and a huge machine that cut his stones loomed in the corner. Plastic sets of drawers lined the work bench, none opened by a hand other than his, and stones sat in those drawers as if placed there yesterday by the master himself –same angle they rolled into after being carelessly dropped there for the next time they’d be used. Shavings lay on the bench and ashes from the sparks by the machine made a blackened ring on the floor around the gigantic monster. On the wall adjacent to the tiny door and under the well of the stairs was a short bench. The wood hardened and cold, that bench hadn’t revealed the floor beneath its feet for fifty years. A column of cement interrupted the room right, smack dab in the center – it was a center around which the activity of the room circulated.

    Dad’s feet seemed to drag out a sad rhythm of memories that drifted back after years of being stored in the wall of cabinets that used to hold his toys. He paused at the base of the stairwell, and gazed into the workshop. I watched, as slowly and deliberately he shoveled his feet past the threshold of that forever-open door. That shoveling revealed years of running in snow, making rounds in hospitals, and carrying sleeping girls on his shoulder. That room nearly made him collapse, but he remembered the tiny hand that was clasped to his pants pocket. Strolling about the room, he looked at his father’s shaky penmanship: "Amethyst," "Jade," "Turquoise," "Alexandrite." The labels on each of the plastic drawers were a tale of unfinished rings and necklaces, pendants and earrings that his father had left in that room. Half-cut stones lay on the workbench and had rested there for almost twenty years.

    My father sank to his bench under the stairwell, and I climbed into his lap. He rocked and rocked and rocked. I remember being carried on those big shoulders; the picture of my father, opening ancient drawers, plastic treasure troves left for my thoughts.

    Now I am eighteen. Just before my father died, in the last months before I moved out of my home to the wide world, I remember my two sisters and I, holding hands and walking through the backyard. The smell of sweet southern spring surrounded us. The bees huddled around my mother’s roses and nectar-flowers. The stillness of a southern garden stood, and the three sisters strolled toward the garage door. As you pass through the door, immediately to the left is a tiny door. Inside that tiny door are walls covered in tools and monstrous machines with workbenches along each wall. Scraps of wood hang from piles formed on shelves on the walls, and a brown rotary telephone hangs next to the door where it has since I was four years old. That morning, the floor was covered in saw dust, and the workbench supported mounds of wood shavings, curled neatly as if they were meant to be ringlets on a doll’s head.

    My sisters and I crossed the threshold of that door, but none collapsed. We released the bond of fingers and strolled about, looking, just looking. My eyes scanned the workbench at carving tools, carelessly laid on the bench to be used later. My gaze rested on the figure of a rooster, half-carved and raw. That was his last project. That was the last tool he had laid down before his hands were still. The fine lines of the rooster’s crown were just like the hands of a surgeon –perfect cuts.

    "Don’t touch it."

    The three of us gazed down, the oldest in the center, with the long, brown, curly hair, sandwiched by her two little sisters with long, blonde, straight hair –the picture of symmetricality. Time stood still –that raw rooster paused the work of a carpenter for a glance at perfection from his three daughters. One of us shuffled and moved on; the grit between the floor and the shoe crackled like fireworks announcing a new celebration. I bent low to look at the cabinets below the worktables. Dust covered the floor, and the cement slab showed the wear of scuffmarks where my father had paced back and forth from one position to a machine and back. So many times, I’d sat in that room and watched him intently working his masterpieces. He’d quizzed me for tests in that room, asked me about my days, told me that he’d be in the house in five for dinner.

    I knelt down, both of my sisters with their backs to me, and pulled out a scrap of wood. It was a masterpiece: there in the rough, unsanded, raw wood was the name "Vanessa" in carpenter’s calligraphy. I sank. I felt the hand of the little girl who had so tightly held her father’s pocket. It was crushed when I allowed myself to fall. I sat on the shadow of the little girl, and she rocked me, as my father had rocked her. He had written my name with his perfect hands. I held the scrap to my heart, then turned it over; the memories came rushing back. That scrap was just a scrap of wood. He had picked it out of the junk pile one day when I sat on a stool in that shop. We worked, his hand over mine, for hours: there were hundreds of tiny chisels on the back of the scrap. But when I finished with it, it didn’t have my name. He had written my name.