She loved teeth.

She said she could tell everything she needed to know by just looking at someone’s teeth—just from how they all sat together, the spaces, the color. She even had a theory that you could tell how good a lover a man was by how his teeth were shaped, but I never let her explain that to me. There are some things a father just doesn’t want to hear from his daughter. Actually, there are too many things. So, we never discussed teeth again.

When she moved in with me, it was the first time we’d lived together since she was six. She’d visited most every other weekend as she grew up, but that was easy. If we fought, I took her shopping and everything was fine by Sunday. That kind of relating just doesn’t translate to living together, I figured. If it did, I might go broke in three weeks.

She’d just been laid off from her first real job, and she wasn’t the girl I knew at all. She wore black pajamas all day and was quiet unless she was on the phone with her mother—who had met some guy on the Internet and moved to Hawaii—or her boyfriend, Dave. She called him her “boyfriend” though he was barely around, thank God. He was still in college and in the two times I’d met him, I realized that he was a fine example of what the guys in my old neighborhood called a “Jerkoff.”

His tongue was pierced and it gave him a lisp. Maybe it justified his lisp.

So, while she was there, I wanted to eat dinner with her every night, just so I could listen to her, be there for her. All the things I could never really do for her before. Maybe I could undo some of emotional knots that came with being my daughter, since—for the first time since she was six—I wasn’t occupied with a relationship or any life of my own. Her mother once told me that I didn’t know how to share myself with anyone. And that was maybe the only thing her mother had ever been right about.

But she wouldn’t talk. And I can’t stand silence. If I could, I would’ve become a librarian not an accountant. So with the TV off and only some classical musical in the background, we’d just stare at each other through most of our meals, communicating slightly by the way we chewed.

Finally, on the fourth night, I looked into the pupils of her eyes, which looked like perfect black peas, and said, “Tell me something. Please. Anything.”

So, she told me about teeth, her theory of teeth, which was interesting. And when she got to the lover part, I winced, and she stopped, thank God. But I was glad. It felt like a start.

“So, now you have to tell me something, right?” she asked, scooping a giant spoonful of couscous into her mouth.

“The remote control on the TV is broken,” I said. That apparently was the only thing I had on the top of my head to say. No wonder I was alone. “Only the down arrow works, so if you want to go from channel four to channel five channel-by-channel, it’ll take you a few hours.”

“I noticed,” she said, tearing a piece of bread into bite-sized pieces.

And after that, things were more normal. We started talking and fighting. I even took her shopping a couple of times.

**************

“I don’t know what to do. I think I’d like to give up on life,” she told me, as we waited in line at a gourmet ice cream shop. It was an unbearable place to be for her because the employees have to perform songs and dance a bit as they scooped; apparently ice cream itself isn’t sugary enough.

We had just seen a movie, a ridiculously cute romantic comedy—the kind of movie that really makes you feel like love can turn you into a good person. And it can, for stretches of about an hour and a half at a time.

“Haven’t you given up already?” I asked, watching her eyes trying to see whose teeth she might be checking out.

She blinked and shook her head to remind herself whom she was talking to. “How do you do it?” she asked, pushing her hand through her hair, which was as thick and wavy as a head of broccoli, just like her mother’s. “How do you wake up every morning at six fifteen, drive in traffic for an hour and then do the same thing every day, knowing you will be doing the same thing every day of your life until you’re basically too old to not do it anymore?”

“I told you, the Prozac helps.”

She closed her eyes again.

Right then, I realized the amazing thing about me is that I don’t realize how angry I am. It’s not until I’m lying in bed thinking about something I’ve said to someone I supposedly love that I realize I must hate myself. And that hate is the most active force of my brain. It’s my brain’s wind, scattering piles of important emotions into the horizon. I hate my own hate. And that’s why my daughter was living here with me, I realized, to make that hate obvious, so I could do something about it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.” She still wouldn’t make eye contact with me. “When I graduated college, I thought, when’s the next fun part? When you’re a kid, life keeps getting better—junior high is better than elementary, high school better than junior high, college is ten times better than anything—but then you’re done with school and what do you have to look forward to? Retirement?”

“Exactly,” she said, without looking at me. “It’s like a prison sentence. Give us thirty-five years…” She stopped and ordered her cone. “Give us thirty-five years and we’ll let you have your life back. It’s bullshit.”

I ordered my cone and said, “I felt the exact same way.”

“So what changed it? I’m not joking; tell me. What changed it? Besides the stupid Prozac.”

“Lots of things. You, for instance.”

She shook her head at me as if I was being impossibly ridiculous.

“I’m serious,” I said and put a dollar in the tip jar, which inspired one of the kids behind the counter yell, “A dollar down!” Then as if a drill sergeant had ordered them, all of the employees started singing some song about how great tips were, each mouth upturned into a charityworker’s smile.

Before I could get my wallet back in my pocket, she’d fled.

I didn’t find her until a half hour later.

She was waiting by my car, smoking a cigarette that she rolled by hand, which was the only new habit she’d picked up since she’d moved in with me.

**********

“Why are we the only country in the civilized world who doesn’t use the metric system?” she asked me, as we washed dishes from a Saturday brunch I made for the two of us.

“I don’t know.”

“You mean, you don’t care,” she said, dropping the measuring cup into the rack a little too abruptly.

“I guess that’s what I mean,” I said, shining up a fork that still had some part of an egg yolk clinging to it.

“Maybe that’s the answer,” she said. “Maybe I have to not care about anything.”

“Maybe,” I said and started in on the juicer.

“You’re lonely,” she said, drying cups with a cheap towel that was leaving loose threads on everything. “Do you know how lonely you are or do you pretend it’s fine and you just don’t care?”

“How can you tell I’m lonely?” I asked.

“How? Because you’re always talking to me.”

“Aren’t you lonely then too?”

“Yeah, but Dave’s coming over tonight. I hope you don’t mind. He’s not staying, of course.”

“Not at all. I have a date.”

“With whom do you have a date?” she asked; she had awfully good grammar. Like her mother.

“A broken remote control.”

“Maybe we’ll join you. I don’t want to be alone with him. He knows if he smiles it’s over. He has very perfect incisors.”

I hated what she was saying. Hated it so much that I wanted to smash a small dish, but everything was becoming so nice and clean.

“I’ll order us pizza,” I said. “You pick up some movies.” And I realized that if Dave smiled at me, I might choke him.

************

I guess I’d passed out on the couch, which is something I’d never done so early on a Tuesday night.

I’d only been home for a half an hour, and I was furious at myself for not picking up any asparagus on the way home. All day long—in meetings, on the phone, even on the crapper—I’d been thinking how ripe, plump asparagus, with its sinewy, meaty texture, would be perfect with the lamb chops that were defrosting next to the three or four half-empty cans of diet soda she’d left on the top shelf of the refrigerator. And as soon as I walked in the door, I realized I’d sabotaged myself. I didn’t have the energy to go back into the world. So, I lied down on my couch and came as close to crying as I’d ever had in my adult life.

Then, I guess, I passed out.

She woke me up. She was smiling and giddy, shaking the arm of the couch like a couch was a playful thing. It was disorienting.

“Dad,” she said, sitting down on the floor next to my head, so we were almost at eyelevel. “I’ve decided I’m going to Europe. I’m leaving as soon as my passport comes.”

“And what about money?” I said, as I stretched and yawned myself into an upright position, trying to break through the shock of an early evening weeknight nap. My feet settled next to her legs.

“That’s the great thing,” she said. Her legs were wrapped around each other like she was a little girl. “Dave told me about this debt relief service that will help you take control of all the money you owe. But they’ll only help you if you owe more than ten thousand. I owe about six now, so I figure it’s perfect. We’ll spend two months traveling and come back and start working on my debt.”

“Come back here?” I asked, attempting not to react one way or another with any animate part of my soul.

“Or to mom’s, if you don’t want me here.”

“No. No. It’s just that—”

“You don’t want me to go. I can tell. Or you don’t want me to come back. I can tell.”

“What can you tell?”

“You think I’m taking advantage. You aren’t saying it. But your eyes are saying it.”

“No!”

“No what? You don’t want me to go, or you don’t want me to come back?”

“I just think if you’re going to Europe…” I said, trailing off to examine everything in my living room, unconsciously totaling how much everything cost. I got to six thousand so quickly that the silence wasn’t terribly awkward yet. I smiled and realized that she was staring, staring right at my teeth. I covered them with my lips and said, “If you’re going to Europe in winter, you’ll probably need some warm clothes. So, if you’ll go to the store and get me some fresh asparagus, we can eat, and then I’ll take you shopping. You need a backpack, right?”

And she smiled at me, in this wide, dreamy way. Like she’d realized that after all these years of pressing my buttons, she’d just hit the jackpot.

And right then I realized that her teeth were very nice. They were just like mine, actually.

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