Philip Roth

Thank you, Ugly Betty.  This is now all I can think of when I think of my favorite author now.BTW – Portnoy’s Complaint: not his best. 

Inspired

I was just a young girl when the president and his wife fled the country.  When the news reached us I imagined the presidential limo passing through the streets with 100s of gourdes falling from the black tinted windows.  I figured that money fell from their clothes and their smiles.

    In those days I had loved them, longed to be like them.  The president’s wife with her jewels, her fabulous clothes, her proud demeanor: that was what I wanted to be.  I never understood my father’s venom towards the both of them.  They were in charge, and I respected them for it.  I would plug my ears when he spoke ill of them, my fingernails making tiny crescents in the soft flesh. 

    Long after they were gone, I would still wrap myself in mother’s best bed sheets and strut in front of the mirror, my chin reaching out, my neck stretched like a giraffe.  For a time I was convinced that I was their long lost daughter, and when they returned to Haiti they would claim me as their own, bathing me with presents in apology for the time they had lost with me, their precious only daughter. 

    Years later, when my father finally tired of my fantasies, I was told the truth about the couple I held so highly.  I ran screaming from the house, telling my father that he was jealous, that he was fearful for what my real parents would do to him when they found that he had kidnapped me.  My father caught me in his arms, and carried me, still hysterical, back into the house that was not my home. 

     We never spoke of it again, neither my delusions nor the incident.  Even still, when I hear of the atrocities that our former leader had ordered, I picture my father’s face in his stead.