Her Father’s Daughter

Tasha’s father stood hunched at the grill, wrapped in a bloody apron. Maybe this wasn’t the best time to announce she would stop eating meat. But in two short months, Tasha was leaving for college on scholarship. What did she have to lose?

Tasha’s father was once a hunter. Now he was old with aching bones, so he shopped at the deli. And yet when she said it—"You know, the livestock industry is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases,"— he turned to her quivering voice like it was a sound in the forest. Behind him birds chirped in the serviceberry trees, and Tasha understood that she had made a mistake.

"Eat," he grunted, shoving a platter of ribs at her.

Tasha wanted to cry the way she always had, but lately something water-proof had been growing inside of her, something like thick plastic encasing her organs, her bones, even her tear ducts. She began to suspect that when she blinked, she could hear a click.

At the picnic table in the backyard, her brother sat stroking Horace the boa constrictor. As she placed the platter on the table before him, he said, "Who cares about a pig, anyway?" while dangling a white mouse by the tail.

Tasha put her hands on her hips. "Why don't I just eat Horace instead?"        

When her brother released the tail, the mouse disappeared, and their father sat down at the table, which rocked and settled beneath them. Once, when she was 12, and because she didn’t have a mother, her father had bought her triple-thick, extra-long maxi pads fit for an incontinent person. Now, his barbecue sauce oozed down his jowls like blood.

"We're animals, too." He was watching Tasha not-eating. "Animals eat animals," he said.

She knew she shouldn’t have said it, but the words lept from her mouth with a life of their own. "But you didn't kill that pig."

Her father was far from spry, but he stood up rather quickly and slammed his palm on the table. Once, he read her storybooks, The Three Little Pigs and The Three Little Bears. Now, he was choking her wrist with his fist.

"You think you're going off to college to become some hot shot? No man wants a woman who won't cook him steak."

"I’m not going to college to meet a man," she said, which was true. But also not.

That night, she read a book in the basement amongst her father’s kill, the heads of the trophied bears who, if you stared at their glass eyes for as long as Tasha had, began to stare back, to see you, too, and to whisper memories of their freedom, the joyful routine of their sweet bear lives: licking honey with their tongues, skimming water with their noses, catching salmon with their teeth. She imagined herself as a Goldilocks who didn't trespass, but who joined the bears in their play. In the night Tasha spoke to the bears, who penetrated her fitful dreams. We'll prove him wrong, she whispered through her own sharp, yellow canines. We'll show him the man who would rather serve a piece of himself.

***

But in college, the men were shit. First there was Nick, who gave her a single red rose, and later, black nylons.

"I want to encase your legs in them," he said, "then draw you in nothing else." 

She liked Nick, his wiry torso, the charcoal beneath his nails. If she refused the nylons, he might think she didn't. So she put them on, and nothing else, while he drew her lying on his mattress on the floor, her legs tangled with his stale sheets. At first she was aroused, then she was hungry. But she refused the hardened coins of summer sausage he offered, which he'd found in a dusty cabinet. Starving, she fell asleep, then woke to his penis filling her, and his body jerking above. There was a sensation of cracking, a trickling sting.

"What are you doing?" she said, for it was only her first time.

"I thought it would turn you on."

Eventually, and thankfully, she became wet, though the plastic inside of her resisted that, too, and the wetness dried up quickly. She suspected her joints might snap upon use, so she wasn't sure how—or if—to move. Then Nick finished and fell asleep, but Tasha could not. In the bathroom she found toilet paper, and after she flushed the blood she stared at herself in the mirror, as if under a spell. She stared so long her features moved like puzzle pieces escaping from their intended order. That's when the bears from her father's basement wall appeared; their disembodied heads floated around Tasha's head, mobilizing in ghost formation.

"What are you doing here?" she whispered in the dark.

He's not the one, the bears chanted.

Back in Nick's room, Tasha saw that his drawing of her had been quite good. In it, she looked delicious, coy, her eyes closed, thickly lashed, with charcoal puffing around her nyloned calves like smoke. Gazing with the bears at how she looked through Nick's eyes, she felt she couldn't blame him for diving right in. Part of her enjoyed being irresistible. To have a body made of hand-drawn parts.

And yet, with their killer teeth and their piercing claws, the bears tore the drawing to bits. For it was some kind of wholeness Tasha craved.

***

Next she met Perry, who was pre-med. After three weeks he teased her with chicken potstickers.

"I just don't want you to miss out," he said.

She liked Perry, his furry legs, his sweet beer breath. If she refused the meat, he might think she didn't. So she chewed Perry's chicken and spat into her napkin, unnoticed.

Later that night, at his apartment, Tasha reclined on his pillow but remained alert. Cautiously, she allowed him to pull down her pants. He loved her juicy thighs, he said, "so round at the top like big turkey drumsticks." It hurt to feel her hopeful affection suffocated by the plastic— creeping, surrounding— but when he went down on her she clenched his head with the muscles of her thighs. She clamped just a little too long, and was delighted to find pleasure in the way his skull writhed against the walls of her flesh.

When he came up for air, it was as if she'd birthed a drowning boy.

"What the fuck, Tash?"

"I thought it would turn you on," she said.

Later, as he slept, Tasha peered at his soft, dozing penis, its innocence exciting and infuriating. So in his bathroom, she got herself off on the corner of his bathroom sink. Then, just as she hoped they would, the calloused faces of the bears her father had killed cascaded in from thin air. In the mirror she watched them gather behind her. She knew right away that what she'd done to Perry had pleased them. 

He would have killed us, too, the bears growled.

Now, she didn't have to ask what they were doing there. In the kitchen, they overturned Perry's garbage can, spilling chicken bones and condom wrappers. They opened his medical text books, his charts of human anatomy, his illustrations of the layers of human skin, and shredded them with their hissing teeth.

***

Then she met Toby. He was a vegetarian, too. Walking the quad after bio, he asked so many questions about her that she almost forgot he was a boy. But he was— a boy so gentle and quiet his presence felt like a mist passing through her. Here, she thought, looking into his eyes, blinking her hardened lashes. The one.

Tasha enjoyed the unusual places Toby took her: a race track, a roller skating rink, and once, the undergraduate library, where he pulled from the shelf a large book titled Wildlife. Together they pored over photos of wolves in packs, traipsing through white, stinging snow. Each turn of the page filled in a detail of the image of her father in her mind. She'd always thought—with his silver hair, his small eyes, his long nostril nose—that her father resembled a wolf. Toby turned to a picture of a wolf draining a limp rabbit, flavoring the snow with blood. The beast's eyes looked snuffed, like killing brought no pleasure—unlike her father, for whom killing must have been ecstatic, like a drug or an art. She recalled walking in on him, once, in the basement, combing a bear face with her old little girl toothbrush, so entranced that he hadn't noticed her come in. She was young then, seven or eight, so she'd asked if she could help. And he let her. He let her brush the bears with the little toothbrush, then he read her the story about the feuding pigs while she stroked his soft beard. The memory flooded Tasha with a longing, even for her dim-witted brother, whom she hadn't seen or spoken to in months. But the longing made her angry. Clenching her toes, she sensed them being glued together.  

"This is natural," Toby was saying, pointing at a picture of a wolf pack in Wildlife. "Animals in the wild, eating each other for survival."

But aren't we animals too? Tasha thought. She remembered how in the end, even the three little pigs had eaten the mean wolf, and even as a kid she'd found that quite funny.

The bears returned then, their eyes rabid and bright. It was unusual to see them in public, murmuring in the fluorescent light of the undergraduate library.

We are animals, they said. And we're hungry, too.

But I thought he was the one? she asked their floating faces.

We're afraid it's too late, they cooed.

Later, she took Toby to her dorm room because her roommate was out of town. On the bed, Tasha waited for him to ravish her, but he only sat there, like a rumpled puppet, flipping through a magazine. So Tasha opened her dresser drawer, and found Nick's nylons, still marked with her blood. Playfully, she wrapped them around Toby's eyes. He asked what she was doing.

"Don't ask," she responded, because she, too, wasn't sure. 

In the mini-fridge: her roommate's Lunchable, opened, half-eaten. Tasha removed a square of bluish-pink ham. It felt anatomic, like something from a lab. Did this even count as meat? Holding it between her fingertips, she began to float, to see herself from above.

Do it, the bears whispered. Brush his lips with the stuff.

Of course she obeyed. And when she did, he jerked away, and ripped off the nylons.

"What are you doing, Tasha?"

Part of her wished he would run, and fast, but it wasn't her fault he stayed.

"Eat it," she said.

"Why?" he asked.

We're hungry, the bears chanted.

Toby opened his mouth where, inside, Tasha saw her tiny father crouched on the bed of his tongue, straddling a tiny rifle.

You don't have the guts, the tiny father whispered.

Tasha gripped the ham.

But we do, the bears sang.

Toby fled the room as if he'd heard them, the bears groaning with animal glee.

***

There were more like Nick and Perry and Toby, of course, the campus like a forest or a sea. For the rest of college, Tasha lived alone in a small apartment, which she stocked with tempeh and almond milk, a jungle of cheerful house plants, and the bears who slept in the cave beneath her queen-sized bed. Her father had been right; she wouldn't find a man to prove him wrong. But it didn't matter anymore. Clad in vegetarian leather, her lashes long and hard, she went out to catch them, one by one. First, she held them softly in her teeth. Then she licked their honey skin. And when she was finished, she hung their pictures on her secret closet wall: a gallery of boys who would never eat her first.

Lara Levitan is the author of a campy road-trip novel called The Secret Sugar Daddies. Her writing has been published in Levee Magazine and On The Seawall. Currently she's at work on her second novel, which explores celebrity obsession, marital power struggles, and the pursuit of art in a culture of commodity. Read more: laralevitan.com