Biology Textbook for Fathers and Daughters

emma estridge

I tear leaves. The brown pieces fall between my feet, sticking to the porch in the fleecy humidity. I’m fifteen and depressed and on the back porch steps every day when my dad comes outside to fiddle with his fishing tackle.

He holds his Whopper Plopper lure to the sun and squints at the hooks, asks, “Are you alright?” 

A few years ago, he could still tell when I was about to cry. If I missed three passes in a row while we practiced volleyball in the backyard, he’d let the ball roll into the weeds at the bottom of the hill and hug me until I got tears all over his shirt. But I don’t know how to tell him what’s wrong, now that he can no longer guess what it is. So I tell him I’m fine.

“Good,” he says. He nods to the pile of leaf pieces. “You’ve been doing that? I thought we had a critter. Like a possum.” He turns back to his tackle box and locks eyes with another lure.

There have never been any possums in the backyard, only raccoons and cats and fat cicadas. He used to call me to come watch them, telling me to hurry because there were three scruffy rabbits under the magnolia, a snake curling around the hose, a wren caught in the porch netting. If he saw a sharp-winged moth while I was at school, he took a picture to show me when I got home and had the species name pulled up on Wikipedia.

Once, he led me outside in the middle of the night to look at a lunar halo I could only see when I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. It was below thirty that night, but he cupped my hands and blew to warm them. “I didn’t want you to miss it,” he said.

When I tear a leaf, I hear the zip of the cellulose coming untwined.

*****

Humans are unable to digest cellulose as we would any other nutrient. Without enough water to flush it along, it clogs our intestines, obstructing our friendly digestion. However, cellulose is a fiber and therefore necessary for clumping food waste together so that it may be excreted. But too much causes discomfort and bloating. A teenage girl will often be conflicted over how much cellulose is necessary in her diet, and whether she should ask her father to go hiking on a Saturday when he could be fishing instead and she could be listening to his favorite rock songs in her room again and again like a litany, squinting at the Googled lyrics for clues. Whether he notices that her babble about the boy she hates at school is the only sound other than the swish of her hiking boots filling the silence. If she should mention her favorite Black Sabbath song because he’s going to explain to her again how Ozzy was sued over “Suicide Solution.” He doesn’t remember telling her about it last week. They sat on the front porch, and she didn’t listen very well, and he told most of the story without looking away from the passing cars.

I try to write a story about a girl obsessed with biology. She collects scat samples from the possums that streak through her yard and counts the intricate bumps of cells in a magnolia leaf under her microscope. It’s a terrible story. I wander into a scene of the father teaching her how to swim and can’t escape. I don’t know what he would say while he buoys her in the deep end, and I don’t know how to show the reader that he’s the person she’s the closest to in life, because her fatal flaw is being scientific, because they eat their sub sandwiches in silence when he forgets that she doesn’t like turkey. Can’t she see that she would never have loved biology if he hadn’t bought her a microscope for her eleventh birthday? But he doesn’t understand when she talks about gemmules and phloem, and she can’t seem to remember not to flail when she dips below the water, no matter how many times I rewrite the scene. I make the father short because mine is tall. I work on that scene for four months and never finish it.

Termites, who eat cellulose, rely on the Protozoa in their digestive tract to break down the macronutrient for them. Protozoa absorb nutrients from the termite and would not be able to exist outside of the termite’s body. This relationship is an example of symbiosis, more specifically mutualism, in which both symbiotic parties benefit from the union. Without the other, both would die. The Protozoa forgets sometimes that it wouldn’t survive without its termite, but this doesn’t mean the termite stops providing nutrients. The father and daughter might text one-word answers, stay quiet for long stretches of the car ride to the orthodontist, and disagree about the best of Pink Floyd. But the termite will always be there to sustain its Protozoa.

I’m eight and go roller skating down the sidewalk with my dad, which means I shuffle beside him while he walks, clutching his arm. I snap off the low-hanging leaves he points out as being symmetrical and put them in the pockets of my cotton shorts, already heavy with extra-round pecan shells he spotted in the grass. I squeeze my fingers tighter around his bicep as we navigate the juts of the sidewalk. When I start to go down, he lifts me up before my knees touch the ground. Never once does he let me fall, and, with the strength of our linked arms, I am sustained.

Emma Estridge is a junior at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, SC. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and she gets her best ideas while walking in the woods.