Daddy's Girl.

When a lot of attention is too much attention.

“Bring two oranges back from the kitchen,” my dad yelled from the other room.

I was nine years old, and fatness was not my problem yet. My mom and brother were at a golf tournament, and Julia, our nanny, was spending a few days with her family in Barcelona. Dad and I were alone, and he’d decided to organize a photoshoot with me as his model. There’d been regular photo shoots of this kind over the years, but this one would turn out to be our last.

He’d moved the furniture around in the large living room to create a stage. He had me in a polka-dotted burgundy dress, brought back to me from their last trip to Spain. My mom and I already wore the same shoe size, so he had me wear red pointy high heels- it matched the dress, he said. He had me put on this red lipstick Mom had just bought; again, it matched the dress, he said.

He pointed his camera at me.

“Smile,” he said.

“Spin,” he added, putting on music to get me going. I was taking ballet lessons and was used to moving gracefully, but I became a little dizzy twirling around. I giggled, feeling free. I loved the attention. My dad was usually at the office or at the golf country club, and when he was home, we were all together as a family. I wasn’t alone with him very often.

“Slide the oranges in your dress, to make it look like you have breasts,” he said, shooting faster, pretending to be a fashion photographer.

“Lift your skirt a little,” he said. And I did. “Lift a little more”, he said again. I stopped when he could see my undies. Something felt off; too much attention—the wrong kind.

“I want to play something different,” I said, removing the oranges.

My mom and brother would be home soon, and I wanted not to be doing that when they arrived. He seemed upset; as if I’d interrupted a scene in a movie he wanted to see through to the end.

I locked myself in the bathroom to switch from the dress back into my PJs. I was slow to take the dress off — I liked wearing it; I felt like Mom. But I was worried she’d be mad that we’d used a fancy dress to play. So, I removed it carefully, holding the fabric delicately as I put it back on a hanger in her closet.

When I returned to the living room, Dad had put all of the furniture back in place.

“I have to work now,” he said, brusquely, as he turned on the TV; my cue that he was done with me. If he wanted to play, we played; if he didn’t, that was that.

I was disappointed to be abandoned, but I was also relieved. I found myself in the kitchen, spreading butter and Nutella on toast to help me deal/not deal with my feelings. I brought it back into the living room and plopped a tape in the VCR, “L’incompris,” a guaranteed tear-jerker about a busy-wealthy father who realizes how much he loves his son as the child is about to die. Wrapping myself in a beige cashmere blanket, I watched enough to make me sob.

In proper daughter-of-narcissist style, I needed to cry, but I’d learned never to cry over my own story, so I used this Italian trauma-fest to help me do so vicariously. I watched parts of this sappy movie dozens of times. It delivered; you could pick it up pretty much anywhere and start weeping.

My dad had his own sob story. He was born in Algeria, the only boy in a Sephardic family. After his mother had delivered two stillborn sons, she feared she was cursed by the evil eye. When she realized he was a boy, she “sold” him to another family to offset the curse. Actual money changed hands. Her thinking was that if he was not ‘hers,’ he would be protected. He had to go live with this other family for two years, until my grandmother felt enough time had passed, and he was safe from the curse.

My father also lost his dad when he was fourteen. It happened very fast. The two of them were kicking a football around; my grandfather said he was tired; my dad insisted they keep playing. My grandfather fell and broke his leg; a blood clot went to his heart; he died days later. My dad never processed his guilt. If I ever expressed a need for him to be a better father, he would blurt out, “What do you want from me? I killed mine.”

Hence, at fourteen, he became head of his family, three sisters, and a mother. They owned a factory that sold grain to the military. My grandmother was left to run it. She met a suitor who could have helped with the burden of single motherhood and offered business savvy. He asked my teenage father for his mother’s hand. The story goes that Dad beat him up and kicked him out of the house. He forbod her to ever see him again, or any other man, for that matter.

She agreed to let her son quit school at fourteen to run the company, acting as a surrogate husband. To this day, I wonder if that is where the lines started to get blurry for my father.

By the age of six, I knew something was off with his boundaries when I started noticing that he wanted to spend time with me more than with Mom. When the family walked down the street, he always held my hand, wanted me to sit next to him in the car instead of her, and always asked for my opinion first, if he even asked for hers at all. It made her jealous and marked my superiority. She didn’t like me, so there. It hurt her, and I loved that. It didn’t occur to me until much later that this dynamic, [him attracted to me = her resenting that = her favoring my brother = me downing Nutella = me getting fat], was the source of so much of my pain.

Dad often flirted with flight attendants, waitresses, store clerks, or any woman in the service industry; taking advantage of his status as a high-paying patron. They often played along, but not always. Sometimes, he’d cross a line — and a woman would respond negatively — he’d immediately back down, not wanting to feel rejected. He was likely just trying to boost his self-esteem. But most of the time, women wanted his attention and not just because it was their job; Dad was tall, had a sexy smile and piercing hazel eyes, and emanated power and money. Women like that.

Sometimes, these women would defer to me: “Ask your daughter if she likes this sweater.” To which he inevitably replied with his standard line, “She’s not my daughter, she’s my girlfriend.” For many years, it made me feel proud; I derived great pleasure from people thinking I was. I didn’t know better.

In my early teens, I started having actual boyfriends and became uncomfortable with the charade my father had me playing with him. I remember starting a little romance with a very short boy named Valentin; he was funny, witty and kind; and he liked me. He often came to my house to do homework.

One day, my dad was home, and he engaged Valentin in a poking and boxing game. He held Valentin’s forehead at enough distance that my poor boyfriend with shorter arms stood no chance of reaching my dad; Valentin went along with the game, not knowing he was being slaughtered at the altar of my father’s fractured ego.

I was sitting on my bed, rolling my eyes, wondering when the unbalanced pissing contest would be over. Waiting for that to happen, I changed out of my school uniform into more comfortable jeans and a t-shirt. I went to the kitchen and asked Julia to make us a snack, so I’d be ready when Valentin was all mine again.

The game had started in good fun, but testosterone being what it is, I could hear menace in dad’s tone. When the poor, humiliated Valentin finally joined me, I apologized to him. I spent much of my childhood apologizing for my father’s lack of boundaries. No one apologized to me for crossed boundaries when I was his casualty.

I loved having Valentin over. He was my first boyfriend to come to the house. It felt that my real life was about to begin; he was an ally who balanced the power dynamics of my household. When the doorbell rang for his mother to pick him up, I experienced a collapsing feeling in my chest, similar to the one I felt when Julia would be done with her day. Between my father’s over-sexualized attention, my mother’s narcissistic lack of nurturing, and my brother’s propensity for torture, Julia and Valentin acted as a protective shield. 

Mortified Valentin started asking if my dad would be there before he agreed to come to the house. And eventually stopped coming altogether; I always wondered if that was more about avoiding my father than me.

My dad got away with a lot because he was charming, but when it comes to playing with little girls, the distance between charming and creepy is strangely short. Saying hello and smiling at little girls you’ve never met is one thing; tickling them, taking their pictures, and commenting on their beauty is something else entirely.

“What size bra do you wear?” he asked my abnormally-large-breasted-for-our-age friend, Caroline, when she came over for dinner when we were fourteen. She stormed out as I ran after her.

“You may think that’s normal because you’re used to it, but it’s wrong for your father to ask that question of a girl my age”, she said, starting to cry.

I walked back to the table, wishing I could have left with her.

 “Your friend’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” mom asked.

“She sure was uptight,” dad added. “What’s for dessert?” he said, like nothing had happened.

I offered to get the poached pears with strawberry jam from the kitchen to give me a moment to process. As I walked back, carrying the plate, I held back tears and bit my lip. In the time it took me to get from the kitchen to the dining room, everything came crashing: shame, fear, anger, sadness, and guilt — realizing the wrongness of the moment.

“I’m not feeling well; I’m going to bed,” I said, dropping the pears on the table, avoiding making eye contact. I knew that scene wasn’t normal, as I was beginning to see that much of what happened in my household wasn’t; but it would take many hours in therapy to unpack this mess. That night, all I could do was induce a Nutella coma and sleep it off.