The Men on the Dais

An excerpt from Daphne Merkin’s novel, Enchantment.

In a taxi, sitting next to my father, I cross my legs. I am accompanying him to one of his hundreds of dinners, a fund raiser for a politician who furthers Jewish causes. There is a run in my pantyhose that stretches upward from my left ankle; I noticed it when I put the pair on but decided to wear them anyway. I am not good at cutting my losses; I am webbed in all around by dangling threads.

“Very pretty,” my father says when he sees me, overlooking my run.

But there is so much else to overlook; I am marred by tiny imperfections.

“Shit,” I say, hating my eyes for being myopic, my lenses for being uncomfortable, myself for being a woman rather than a man or neutered creature. The trouble with being a woman is that you are supposed to enhance men—to add gaiety to their evening, like balloons, even if you feel heavy as stone. In profile, my father’s eyes look small and sparsely lashed, his skin porous. No one thinks to transform him into an Adonis, to require him to mascara his lashes or tint his cheekbones a delicate pink. Getting ready to go out in the evening always puts me on edge, makes me feel glaringly deficient-like walking into shul on Yom Kippur in a black dress. All the aids and tricks I have learned from magazines, the painstakingly penciled definition around my eyes, the smoky shadow on my lids-all this undoing of my genetic limitations doesn’t fool anyone. Why can’t I be incontestably beautiful, Grace Kelly lolling on a man’s arm, a blonde in a camel coat adding luster to the evening just by the composition of her facial bones and the sheen on her skin, an undeniable visual asset?

“The Waldorf-Astoria,” my father says loudly to the taxi driver. “The Waldorf. Straight across and down Park to Forty-ninth. The Waldorf.”

My father repeats everything; he trusts no one. He leans back against the seat and turns to me. “New coat?”

“No,” I say. “You’ve seen it many times.” My father is convinced that everything I wear is newly bought, another marker in my ongoing pattern of degeneracy.

“He doesn’t seem to know English.” My father says, gesturing forward with his head. “Do you think he knows how to get to the hotel?”

“Yes,” I say. “You told him.”

A light turns read ahead of us, and the taxi jolts to a halt the driver muttering to himself, my father falling against me. …