My estranged father’s death did not affect me as I had expected it would. I had been informed just two days before his passing that he was gravely ill. On the windless drive from France to Germany, somewhere in Belgium on the Sunday before the American elections, I was told he had died. My husband was driving us through a thicket of slow cars. He was the first person to hear me say it after receiving the phone call. “He just died.” We were three hours away. Our GPS predicted we would arrive at the hospital in Cologne where we expected to find him sedated by 6:43 PM. I had been looking out the window and my recollection now is of a mildly sunny pastoral view, like those from my childhood train trips through the flat corridors between Paris and the other side of the Rhine where he had lived since I was a teenager. Just the previous week I had been told he did not want to speak with me or even see me one last time after receiving his terminal diagnosis. But his wife had offered me the option to visit him during his final drift from consciousness. Perhaps he would recognize me or even be roused to speak. A close friend of his predicted he had been clinging to life so he could have a final visit with me. I was told my visit might ease his passing. The whole saga was bizarre. How could this man, whom I had not spoken with or seen in more than a decade, be dying? I had been in a state of apprehensive terror over the prospect of another Trump term, and hardly had the bandwidth to brace for another looming cataclysm, even for the passing of my father. It is hard to imagine the death of a man who bathed you and played with you as a child, made your favorite foods and told you when putting you to bed that he loved you; the death of a man who kept secrets from you, who hid whole lives from you while you grew up, who would invite his young graduate students to his living room and have affairs with them in the home you shared. There had been many lies and even more omissions that I would learn of over the years, so much that explained my mother’s outbursts throughout my childhood. My estranged father was a mild mannered and gentle man. He would cry occasionally, and rarely raised his voice. This made the rare occasions when he had violent outbursts towards me even more disturbing. I recall with special clarity the time he beat me with a walking stick till it broke. I had been playing with dolls while wearing one of my mother’s handbags over my shoulder. I cannot remember if I was also wearing her heels at the time. He came into the room, and asked me to hurry up or else we’d be late. “Get up now!” he shouted, which startled me. I began to put away the dolls and the toy tea set — it was aluminum, colored powder pink with magenta borders and I think some white rose patterning. I walked towards him in the doorway with my mother’s handbag swinging from my shoulder. He yanked it off as I passed and I asked, “Why did you take that off? I want to keep it.” He put the handbag down on a bench near the door. While he looked for his keys I picked up the bag and restored it to my shoulder. Enraged, he grabbed a wooden walking stick and struck me hard across my back with it. I screamed in pain and shock, and fell to the floor. He loomed over me and repeated the violence all over my body. I was shaking with terror and each strike felt as though it was cutting through my skin, which the bruises later would confirm. He had never hit me before. No adult had. I had always been the studious and obedient child. A primary school teacher had once told my parents that when boys pushed or hit me on the playground, I would never fight back. My parents said that the teacher found this passivity confusing and disturbing. The stick could not bear his wrath and it snapped mid-assault. He threw it down. He walked out of the door, and drove off in his car leaving me on the entryway floor. I was alone in the house, shaking and crying. After what felt like hours I relocated to my bed. Later I told my mother everything, and in tears she reassured me that I would never be staying with my estranged father again. Though he apologized profusely for what he had done, I felt numb listening to him as he explained his anger at himself and his shock at his own actions. On some level of consciousness it was clear to me that he had beat me because of the handbag, the dolls — that he had beat me because I was a girl. A girl, without the body to match. He had often seen me play with dolls or dress up in my mother’s accessories, and the most I could ever detect in his expression was a mild discomfort. Other children would mock me or ask in confusion why I played with dolls. Sometimes if someone was coming over while I was staying with him, my father would hide the dolls. “They don’t understand why boys play with dolls, and they will laugh at you.” At about four or five, having never heard of gay people, or queer identity, and never having seen a person in drag, I began to find it uncomfortable to be referred to as a boy. It was deeply confusing for me. When I played house, I always wanted to play the mother. In the early months of kindergarten, I remember walking past a few teachers, two
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