Why I Hate the Name Marvin
He was the father of a childhood friend of mine, or more accurately a girl my age who lived on my street and played with me by default, as I did with her. He wasn’t around all the time; he and the girl’s mother were involved in a circuitous and seemingly endless journey toward divorce. When he was in the house sometimes he was kind to us. Once I remember he brought us two lollipops — grape and cherry. When we argued over the cherry one he went out to the convenience store and bought a third, so we could each have the flavor we wanted.
Other times he was strange. He used to get our names confused, as though he had forgotten which one was his daughter. And once he knelt down and ate kibble out of the dog’s dish while we watched.
Then came my eleventh birthday. In the months leading up to that birthday, I had conceived a love for a black-haired boy in my class, and I lived in daily hope and fear that my love would be returned. Frequently when I was playing quietly at my friend’s house I could feel my heart bashing against my chest. On my birthday the boy gave me a card he had made of folded lined paper. He had drawn a picture of a bird on the front and on the inside he had written, “You are pretty.”
I don’t know why we were looking at this card in the bathroom, but we had it open on the counter, my friend and I, and we were marveling softly at it when her father came in.
“Dad,” my friend said, “Angie’s in love.”
He looked at us for a moment like he was trying to add a column of numbers, and then he said, “Let me show you what I think about love.”
He unzipped his pants and pissed into the toilet. His penis was the color of liverwurst and his urine was orange, as though he had not had anything to drink all day.
After that I did not go to their house any longer, but I remembered him, and every time I hear his name I think of him pissing in the toilet while I held my little card, and how that became, inevitably, what I thought about love too.