The Daily Write: A child frightened by something (July 25, 2012. 18 minutes)

There were no mistakes. Not when she was talking on the beige push button phone and pulled the extra-long coiled cord over to the stove where she was making Hamburger Helper and it caught on fire in the gas flames. Not when she bumped into the unfinished wooden planter with a mirror she made in wood shop, and knocked it over. Not when she spilled her milk.

Her father, a therapist without a license, practicing in a town full of rich and repressed drunks, told her so.

If she broke a glass, or misplaced a book, or scraped the bar of Irish Spring soap on the faucet to get a hair off of it until it was concave in the middle, or cut herself slicing beef steak tomatoes for the nightly iceberg lettuce salad, it was because she had ulterior motives. She dreaded the confrontation. So much so that she would rush into his shack, a brown room lined with plywood shelves, tables and counters piled high with radio gear, electronics, a soldering iron, wire, and tools, to tell him. It was worse to be found out later, woken from sleep and required to admit what she had done.

She hated talking. She hated waiting just inside the doorway, waiting for him to stop tapping, dah-di-dah-di-di-dah-di-dit, before he faced her for the confession. She shifted from foot to foot, twisted her tangled brown hair, stared at the intricate white meerschaum pipe on a shelf. It had belonged to her grandfather, a surgeon, now dead. Next to that some kind of fungus carved into a country scene, something he had done on a fishing trip. Someday these things would go to her brother, and she would inherit the old red and white china with ugly scenes of English cottage life.

"I have something to tell you," she would whisper while he stared at her, dark eyes hardly blinking, hands crossed over his chest with his fingers interlaced, tapping, analytical.

"Yes. What is it?" His voice was soft and low, but it did not comfort her in the least.

"I," she started to breathe too fast.

"I," she couldn't concentrate. She just wanted it to be over.

"I burned the telephone cord."

He raised one heavy black eyebrow. He squinted his eyes. He demanded to know how it happened. And then why.

"Why do you think you did that?"

She almost put herself in the corner to stare at the textured plaster painted over with misleadingly cheerful yellow to think about it until she came up with an acceptable answer.

"I guess I wasn't paying attention."

He looked dissatisfied. And worse, disappointed.

"That's not good enough. Why weren't you paying attention?"

Why? Why couldn't he just yell and get it over with, or send her to her room? Why did she have to stand there under his judgmental gaze until she could figure out what awful internal motivation had made her act out?

She wanted to scream. Instead she stood there, being watched, as she searched her mind trying to come up with a reason.