David Davis

an interlude on bad words

My older sister does not know profanity unless she is, briefly, crazy. Only then is she capable of words like asshole, fuck, or pissed off.

This is a stark difference from her normal idiom, a curious amalgamation of the quite young and quite old women who have cared for her over the years: Black college students, white single moms, Filipina grandmas. Sometimes I hear our own grandmothers in there, too (tickled pink, my stars!), along with quotations from Shirley Temple movies and episodes of Barney. For a good girl like my sister, profanity is not a matter of mannered restraint, but rather the expression of an essential badness.

But like all traumatized people, my sister isn’t always herself. If her body feels endangered, she will leave it behind while someone better suited for the fight takes over. Only after the danger is gone will she become herself again, the little girl that won’t repeat the words that once got our mouths washed out with soap, unless as a part of her heartfelt apology.

I’m sorry I called you a bitch, she says, delicately patting our mom’s shoulder. I’m sorry I called you a fuck you.

But even the bad words my sister secretly knows—many of them learned when I, sick of infantilizing her like I was raised to do, began using them in her presence—can’t do everything bad words are meant to do. Mere profanity was not big enough for her fury when the pandemic began and our dad disappeared.

He’s been doing it our whole lives, manipulating my sister’s low intelligence, as he sees it, to avoid accountability for his absences, his failure to send money, and his apathy for her wellbeing. But COVID pushed her over some kind of edge. Why this time? I didn’t know, just like I didn’t know where he was or why he wouldn’t answer his phone. Since mine was the next number on her speed-dial, in the early months of the pandemic she called five or ten times a day to demand answers I couldn’t give and make threats he would never hear.

Where is dad? she would ask. Why won’t he see me? She does not understand jargon like boundaries or intimacy, but neither do a lot of people who are smarter than her, so I don’t try to explain why I think he ghosted her. I try to be honest in a way that is accessible to her, and to not let my own anger cloud the water.

I don’t know, I tell her. I’m sorry he went away. That is not what a good dad does.

She screams.

I feel like I could call him a dragon.

I want to put hot sauce on his tongue.

I want to take out all his veins.

I wrote her curses in my journal because they were a strange and beautiful about-face from her normally awkward use of profanity, and because until last spring I had never heard her speak about our dad with such venom. Even when she is a bad girl, she has always been restrained with him in a way she isn’t with our mom. Even when we were kids. Back then, she was afraid of him—we all were. We were not going to gamble with our dad, who already could take us or leave us.

Last year was very hard, but I think the hardest part was watching my sister confront a truth that I, for better or worse, learned at a much younger age: that her father did not care if she lived or died. He’s alone without me, his daughter who loves him! she told me. He makes me feel like a maniac! Then she would scream and throw things while I waited for her to return her mouth to the speaker, where she would alternate between declarations of love and desire for his literal blood with language that was baroque, biblical, truly obscene. My good girl sister had left her body, as she often had before, but whoever took her place was new to me. There was a maturity that made me proud, even if it also made me desperately sad. Whoever was in there was more adult than anyone my sister had ever been before.

Unlike my sister, I didn’t want anyone to hear to me scream, so I journaled, as I always have. I wrote that I was a failure, that my whole life was a mistake, because all I could do was listen while my child—because my sister is also my child—grieved a loss that began the day she was born wrong. I feel like I'm losing my mind, she told me, forever unaware that the world has never thought her to be in possession of one.

Last May, my journal reports that my sister called to tell me that her heart was broken. Lord help me, she said. Will you pray with me for daddy to come back? In our family, we all took turns saying grace at dinner. But she wanted me to begin, her logic being, I think, that as someone who tells her if she should wear shorts to her day program and whether it’s time to take a shower, I lent the prayer an authority she didn’t have. Maybe if it came from me, it would work.

Please god, I began, please help change Dad's heart...I hadn’t gone to church in 15 years, but the cadence will never leave me. Praying is like walking in my sleep.

And make him love me again, my sister interrupted.

And if not, I persevered, help all of us to understand that sometimes...

…Make him go back to the way he was, my sister soldiered on. And make him love his daughter again. In Jesus’ name…

For years now, I’ve journaled on my laptop. I remember lying in bed at my Brooklyn apartment, rubbing the burn out of my eyes as I typed. Why can't I be better at this? I wrote. No answer.

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