Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
-Sylvia Plath
He had a thousand-watt smile. That's what her mother liked to tell her, anyway, when she begged for stories. Tell me, tell me, she'd say, rocking back and forth on her bed with Seal and Giraffe and Dog. Tell me stories about Daddy. And her mother would sigh and lean back, hands clasped in her lap.
"Well Sara," she'd say, "he gave me that thousand-watt smile the day I met him."
Sara liked to think he had given her a thousand-watt smile the day he met her, too. The day she was born. Pink blankets and balloons and lots of smiles. He would have held her with hands as big as God's. And just as clean.
She saw the thousand-watt smile, sometimes. It was artificial and bright, and usually it was right before the shouting started. Before who the hell do you think you are and before oh, so it's all fucking my fault. That was when she closed the door to her bedroom and climbed under her bed with Dog. The sound of a fist striking a face was very loud. She covered her ears and closed her eyes, because it didn't seem right the way her stuffed animals smiled so happily when there was blood just outside the door. Cover your ears, squeeze your eyes tightly shut, whisper mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy just in case you forget who they are. That was before she knew words like masochist and sadist. Her father had a thousand-watt smile.
Her first boyfriend was a rock star. Or he was going to be, anyway. He was eighteen and she was fifteen, tall and skinny and awkward. He liked to think of himself as a maverick, a sexy rebel. He wore raggedy old jeans and black T-shirts, and perpetually abused his guitar. Whenever he played, striking chords savagely with calloused fingers, she just looked away. It reminded her of exactly what she came here to avoid.
"Tell you what," he told her one day, sitting in front of her so that their knees touched. They were in his garage, and she was sitting on his tacky old sofa, counting all the tiny burn marks on it where cigarettes had been stubbed out. There were fifteen.
"You can be my groupie. Wouldn't that be rad? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll." By the time the words rock and roll had rolled off his tongue, as syrupy as canned fruit, his hand was halfway up her thigh.
"Lay back," he told her, dark eyes glistening. It wasn't romantic and it wasn't right, but she did it anyway, because in a way she was already his groupie.
His mouth tasted like stale beer and cigarette smoke, and she wondered what hers tasted like. Then his mother was suddenly wrenching open the door of the garage to yell at him to clean his goddamn room or else, and his hands were snaking down to the button of her jeans. She left quickly, and afterward tried not to think about that day, how she had almost let him inside of her. Cover your ears, close your eyes. Let no one inside. She started ignoring his calls, and looked away when she saw him at Sonic, flashing a cocky, desperate, somehow haunting smile. Her father had a thousand watt smile.
She met Mike when she was a sophomore in college. Mike. It was a simple name, a no-nonsense name. Sara and Mike. She was a sophomore and he had graduated five years ago. Mike was a romantic, the kind that insisted on candlelit dinners and roses, and she fell so hard. He dressed stylishly, pressed pants and scholarly jackets. His square jaw was shadowed by stubble, but it was stylish stubble. He liked escargot and sometimes played footsie with her under the table, and she told him I love you even before he said it himself. Mike was a tormented genius.
"No one understands, Sara," he told her gravely one night in his apartment as he picked at a piece of asparagus. Sara was rolling a bit of pork chop around in her mouth and pretending to enjoy it. She liked being a vegetarian, yes, but Mike didn't really approve. And she liked Mike more than even vegetarianism.
"It's hard, doing what I do." He was in the police academy. "People are shitbags. I swear to God, Sara, look at eighty percent of the people on the street. Shitbags." And she nodded and swallowed, and wished she were enough to take his pain away.
Mike, Mike. It was a beautiful name. She found him cheating on her the same semester she started taking a psychology class.
"You just don't get it, do you?" he asked her sadly as he zipped up his jeans and the girl in their bed scrambled to gather her clothes. Sara just shook her head and gazed at the girl. She was a blonde, and somehow that made it just a little worse.
"I love you, Sara," he said evenly when the door had finally closed behind him. Her mouth felt dry. Suddenly she had an overwhelming urge to close her eyes and plug up her ears, to say stop it, stop it.
"….but life is complicated. We're complicated. You and I, we're complicated people. You knew that when you started dating me."
"Fuck you," she whispered, but she didn't really mean it. She loved him.
"I'm not the only one at fault here, Sara," he said, placing a genial hand on her shoulder and smiling. Thousand-watt smile. Had she never noticed?
"Get out," she murmured, not bothering to wipe away the tears that were already falling.
Before he left it, he stopped in the doorway and looked up at the ceiling, like he was collecting himself, but she knew he wasn't.
"I'm sorry, Sara, baby."
She shivered.
Her father had a thousand watt smile.
In the fourth week of her psychology class she studied what they called an electra complex, but it wasn't the first time she had heard of that. It was something she'd been studying in her nightmares and her shadows for more time than she cared to think about.
Electra complex (Daddy complex): A daughter's unconscious libidinal desire for her father.
It made the bile rise in her throat. She didn't want him, she didn't need him, but psychology itself seemed to insist that he was as much in her subconscious as he was in her blood. Daddy. Following her, so very stealthily, even from the ashes. Maybe he rode with the wind, maybe he glared down at her with the sun. A thousand watts of cruelty.
So of course Sara thought about that fourth week of psychology when she met Gil Grissom. He was fifteen years older, which naturally set off her electra-radar. Back off, it said, back off. But it was futile, really. He was so different. He was timid, and had a small smile, the kind that said he didn't want to attract attention. Two weeks of entomology seminars, and all she could think about was the way he smelled like soap and didn't have any social skills. Two years of working with him in Vegas, and she was usually too busy arguing with him over a case or trying to coax him out of his shell to think about why it was, exactly, that the men she loved were so wrong. Two years of living with him, and she let him tell her that he loved her. She even said it back.
"You're the only woman I've ever really loved, you know," he told her quietly one night as she feigned sleep, not knowing what to say. "You have no idea of the kind of power you have over me."
She could feel him smile a little in the dark, and as she slipped into sleep she saw his smile, a slight and hesitant smile. It was so different from her father's.
Her father had a thousand watt smile.
Her father had been dead for a very long time.