Fourth Comings (20 page)

fifty-three

M
y dad and I didn’t talk much all afternoon. Occasionally we’d make comments about the low-life, no-class conflicts that are the mainstay of daytime television. Will a paternity test prove that Bubba Jon is the father of La’Shaundreequa’s twins? (No.) Will the plaintiff get back the fifteen hundred dollars she loaned the defendant so he could buy her a proper engagement ring but which he instead used to buy a plasma TV? (No.) Will the stripper be pleased to find out that her secret admirer is the scrawny senior citizen better known around the club as “the Geezer”? (
Hay-ell
no.) What if he offers to buy the new breast implants she’s been wanting to get? (Maybe.) Because he’s a millionaire? (Yes!)

After a few hours of these trashy entertainments, I couldn’t help but imagine how our own relationship might play out on one of these shows.

The Host:
On today’s show we’ve got Jessica and Marcus.

The Audience:
Woo. Woo. Woo.

The Host:
Jessica was a virgin before she met Marcus.

The Audience:
Ha. Ha. Ha.

The Host:
Marcus had bedded approximately forty young women before Jessica.

The Audience:
Daaaaaaaaamn.

The Host:
For years Marcus has remained faithful to Jessica, but Jessica has had several sexual encounters outside their relationship.

The Audience:
Oh, no she didn’t!

The Host:
Less than one week ago, Marcus asked Jessica to marry him.

The Audience:
Awwwwwwwwwwww.

The Host:
But Jessica didn’t say yes. In fact, just before the proposal,
she
was thinking about breaking up with
him.

The Audience:
Booooooooooooo!

The Host:
And it gets even more twisted than that!

The Audience:
Woo. Woo. Woo.

The Host:
It turns out that
Marcus
had also been thinking about breaking up with
Jessica….

The Audience:
Huuuuuuuuh?

The Host:
Which she found out from her best friend, Hope…

The Audience:
Mmmmmmm…

The Host:
With whom Marcus had carried a secret relationship behind Jessica’s back…

The Audience:
Oh, no he didn’t!

The Host:
Let’s bring ’em all onstage and welcome them to the show….

The Audience:
Wooooooooooooooooooooooo!

My imaginary televised nightmare was interrupted by a genuine commercial clip for an upcoming episode of
The Dr. Frank Show.
I pressed my face into my hands and moaned.

“What’s wrong?” my dad asked.

I removed one hand so I could point to the screen. “I had a job interview with Dr. Frank’s guest, Dr. Kate,” I replied, “and I blew it.”

My dad leaned forward to get a closer look at Dr. Kate, who was looking as luscious as ever.

“For her new business venture, the first to blend new media and neuroscience.”

My dad wasn’t impressed with the jargon. “Doing
what
?”

“Working as an online matchmaker for iLoveULab.” I blushed with embarrassment over the cheesiness of the job description, and the fact that I wasn’t qualified for it.

My dad threw back his bald head. “You?!”

“I know, I know,” I said, poking the channel changer. “But I blew the interview, so there’s no need to make fun of a ridiculous job that I didn’t even get.”

I assumed my dad would want me to provide the play-by-play of the botched interview so we could review what had gone wrong, and I could learn from my errors and prevent them from happening again. It was his preferred process for self-improvement, one best captured by the video collection of my worst high school track and cross-country meets, “Notso Darling’s Agony of Defeat, Volumes 1–4.”

But he let it go.

“I was thinking about what you said a few weeks ago,” my dad said. “About how you felt ‘unsettled.’”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, surprised by this unexpected turn to our conversation.

“The opposite of unsettled is settled. As in settling down.”

“Uh-huh,” I responded again, even more warily than before. I had no idea where he was going with this. I was starting to worry that this last bag of sterilized water had literally gone to his head. Was there excess fluid on his brain?

“When you get married,” he said, “you settle down.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But when does settling down turn into just plain settling?” he asked.

This was the perfect opening for me to mention your proposal, and how it had inspired me to ponder that same question. But I was compelled to take an altogether different route.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you crash your bike on purpose?”

“Who told you that?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “Your mother?”

I nodded, then waved my hand dismissively. “I know. She’s crazy.”

“She is crazy,” my dad replied, his mouth turning up at the corners. “And she’s also right.”

Just then the nurse in the Hello Kitty scrubs threw open the privacy curtain. “Looks like we’re almost finished here, Mr. Darling!” she chirped. “Is your daughter driving you home?”

I was rendered speechless by my dad’s revelation, so he answered for me. “My wife should be on her way.”

Hello Kitty clucked sympathetically, then said, “The hospital can’t release you without a ride home.”

Hello Kitty was a short, wide-hipped bottle blonde, whose birth date was probably within a year or two of my mother’s (actual versus claimed) D.O.B. The nurse’s rucked face and shirred neck flesh indicated that she was doing little to fight the advances of late middle age, or that those measures that she had taken were not successful. Meanwhile, my mother was at the aesthetician erasing decades from her appearance with the help of synthetic injectable gelatins not yet approved by the FDA.

It was all so completely fucked up.

How did my parents get like this? I asked myself. And how can I stop it from happening to you and me?

I laboriously pushed myself up out of my chair, winded by my dad’s confession and the prospect of trying to track down my mother. “I’ll go down to the lobby and call her on a pay phone. I’ll get her here.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than I heard heels clacking across the linoleum.

“No need,” my mother said, breezing through the curtains with a triumphant air. “I have arrived!”

fifty-four

M
y strange day stretched into an even stranger evening.

The first strange development was the car ride back to my parents’ place on the bay, which was strangely free of palpable parental tension and controversy. This would be strange enough on an ordinary day, never mind one during which my dad spent six hours in the hospital getting intravenously rehydrated after crashing his bike into a parked car in the failed attempt to steal my mother’s attention away from her rising career and her falling face. Their interactions were neither hot nor cold, but not quite warm, either. Their temperate discussion included driving (Dad got behind the wheel because Mom was worn out from her appointments), dinner (Dad wanted it but Mom didn’t want to make it), and their younger daughter (Dad encouraged me to spend the night, and Mom agreed). It did not include edema (Dad’s swollen face from the excess saline, Mom’s from a wrinkle-filling syringe) or any other topics outlined in the previous pages.

The condo hadn’t changed much since the last time I was there. It was still as beige and tasteful as ever, but with a cold, unlived-in quality. My mom’s own home seemed a lot like the empty rooms she was paid to fill with borrowed furniture and accent pieces to move white elephant properties off the market. I was standing in the foyer, overnight bag in hand, deciding what to do next, when I noticed that both my parents were staring at me expectantly, wondering the same thing. I felt that whatever I decided to do next was of monumental importance, as it would determine what we
all
did next. If I said, “Hey, let’s order a pizza,” we would order pizza, eat it together, and maybe, just maybe, have a conversation about what happened today. If I said, “Hey, I need to get away from you two because I’m totally freaked out about what happened today,” we would all go to our separate rooms. To be honest, I was feeling more in favor of the latter than the former, yet I was overwhelmed by a sense of familial obligation, to be the good daughter, to be the one who kept us all together.

“Hey, let’s order a pizza,” I suggested.

My mom picked invisible lint off her creamy sleeveless turtleneck. “I’m not hungry,” she said. “And I’ve got invoices to look over….” Without any further explanation, she swiftly headed upstairs to the corner of her bedroom that served as her home office.

I glanced at my dad, who was watching her retreat.

“I think there are leftovers in the freezer,” he said with a note of resignation. “I’ll put them in the oven while you get settled upstairs.”

“Get
settled,”
I said pointedly.

“Settled,” my dad said. “Right.” And then he laughed for the first time all day.

fifty-five

I
needed to wash off the hospital germs, so I took a long, hot shower in a stall so pristine I could’ve eaten my dinner straight off the tiles. I’ve lived in the city long enough that I can’t help but look at all available space in terms of its NYC market value. As I scrubbed my legs, my torso, my arms, I noted that the stall is roughly the size of the Cupcake, and could easily be advertised as a $1000/mo studio on Craigslist.

I got out, dried off, and got dressed in the same T-shirt and cutoffs from the day before. The smell of browned cheese and crispy crust wafted upstairs and my stomach rumbled in hunger. It dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten all day, which, as you know, is very unlike me.

On my way down the hall, I passed by my mother’s bedroom. The door was ajar, so I gently knocked before pushing it open. She was seated in front of her computer, wearing the cashmere sweatpants that Bethany had bought her last Christmas. The matching hoodie was hanging off the back of her desk chair, and she was wildly fanning her tank top with a bunch of receipts.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She clutched the papers to her chest and jumped, causing her reading glasses to fall off her nose and swing from a gold chain around her neck. “Oh, Jessie! You scared me! I’m not used to having anyone around when I’m working.”

“Dad’s around.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Actually, I don’t.” Mom was sort of panting, and her face was flushed pink. “Are you okay?” I asked again.

“I’m just
hot,”
she gasped, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist. “I’ve been having hot flashes for five years now. Enough, already!”

And before I could say, “Oh, menopause,” I was assaulted by the horrible shriek of the smoke alarm.

BEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEP!

Mom grimaced and covered her ears, but didn’t move from her spot in front of the computer.

BEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEP!

I raced downstairs to find my dad wildly waving two pot holders over the scorched leftovers on the cookie sheet. I slid open the back door to let in more air.

“Don’t worry!” he shouted over the continuous din of the alarm. “It happens all the time!” This explains why my mother hadn’t moved. “Damn sensitive smoke detectors!”

And just when I thought I couldn’t take another second of noise, the beeping stopped. My dad, in the meantime, had chiseled around the blackened cheese and put two slices on my plate. They weren’t inedibly burnt, just slightly overcooked. But at that point I was so hungry that I would’ve eaten the spatula.

Dad opened the refrigerator, reached in, and grabbed a brown bottle of light beer.

“Want one?” he asked.

“Dad! You spent the whole day in the hospital! You shouldn’t be drinking beer.”

“Athletes replenish fluids with beer all the time,” he replied, gesturing with his bottle opener made out of spare bike parts. It was another gift from the same Christmas as the cashmere tracksuit, only this one was from me. My mom hated it on sight and had tried to “accidentally” throw it out on numerous occasions.

“Alcohol is a diuretic.”

“Lighten up, Jessie.” He took a deep, satisfying swig. “It’s
light
beer, which is mostly water, anyway.”

I was aware of how totally uptight I sounded. I wondered what my dad would think if he knew his daughter had recently gotten drunk on whiskey right in the middle of the afternoon….

“Want one?” He held a bottle out for me, then quickly retracted it. “Or are you more of a wine person, like your mother?”

I knew that this was not a question of choosing beer over wine. It was about siding with one way of life over another. One parent over another. And if I had any chance of getting any valuable information out of my dad about what had transpired today, I simply could not align myself with the wine people. Tonight I pledged my allegiance to the beer people.

“Thanks,” I said, popping off the bottle cap.

“Let’s sit outside while it’s still warm,” he said, grabbing two more beers before leading the way to the patio.

We both settled into the cushions of two side-by-side deck chairs. It was dark, and the only lights came from the neighboring windows, a citronella bucket candle, and the moon. Earlier in the evening there had been a few small motorboats puttering past their dock, but now, at nearly ten
P.M.,
the channel was calm and quiet. Too quiet, in fact. I was no longer used to the total absence of white noise here in the remote out-reaches of suburbia, the blurry background buzz that muted all aural attention-getters. Without it,
every
sound called for attention. The teak furniture scraping across the cement. The empty beer bottle clanking the glass-topped table. The voice inside my head screaming, “SAY SOMETHING! ANYTHING!”

“It’s so quiet,” I said finally.

“We’ve got the perfect neighbors,” my dad said. “They cleared out after Labor Day.”

“For good?”

“For
our
good,” he replied, propping his legs up on another chair. “But only until Memorial Day. Most of these condos are summer homes that are empty the rest of the year. That’s why it’s so quiet around here.”

(Empty. Shunyata. Boundless. Open. Quiet…)

“What?” my dad asked.

“What, what?” I replied.

“You’ve got a constipated look on your face.”

“Well, that’s appropriate because I’m dealing with a lot of heavy shit right now,” I said.

My dad laughed, then asked, “Like what?”

“Well, we could start with what happened today,” I said. “Did you really crash your bike on purpose?”

My dad rolled the beer bottle back and forth between his two huge hands. “I didn’t set out to crash my bike when I left at four
A.M.,
” he said. “But about five hours into my ride—”

“Four
A.M.
? Five hours?” I asked, shocked.

“Sure,” he said. “I wake up before dawn with nowhere to go. I try to go back to sleep, but I just toss and turn and annoy your mother. I’ve gotten into the habit of just getting up and riding, no matter how early it is….”

I kicked off my flip-flops. “I used to do the same thing when I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I’d go running in those borderline hours between late-late night and early-early morning.”

My dad nodded. “I remember,” he said. “You sprained your ankle and ruined your running career on one of those runs….”

“No,” I replied, tracing circles in the air with my foot. “My ankle was fine. It was my head that was all messed up. I didn’t like the pressure. In fact…” I trailed off, unsure as to whether my dad was even interested in having this kind of conversation.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, I fantasized about orchestrating an accident, sort of like the one you had today. Only I wanted you to crash into
me
with your bike.”

“To get attention? I thought you wanted me to leave you alone.”

“I did,” I said, planting both feet back on the cement. “I figured that if I couldn’t run anymore, you would just get off my case. And if you had caused the accident, I’d have an excuse to scream and yell at you, too.”

“I didn’t want your mother screaming at me,” he said, “I just wanted her to see that I still needed her.”

It was so unspeakably depressing that my dad had believed this—even in a temporary state of dehydrated psychosis—but more so because his desperate tactic had totally backfired.

“I’m not the one with the Ivy League degree in psychology,” my dad said. “But it sounds to me like we’re both nutcases.”

“Apparently so.”

And then he held out his beer bottle, and I clinked it with mine. After a few swallows, my dad said, “There’s something else I should mention about today.”

“Okay,” I said, stretching my toes to retrieve my flip-flops and slip them back on my feet, feeling safe that there’s nothing my dad could possibly say that could be stranger than that which had already been said.

“I saw Marcus’s father,” he said. “Mr. Flutie. You know, Sam.”

A short but intense electrical current shot through me, like the sizzle and flash of a flying pest caught by my parents’ bug zapper:
Zzzap!

“When?” I asked, trying to sound casual for my own benefit more than my dad’s.

“Today,” he said. “In the hospital.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear the
whoosh whoosh whoosh
of blood pulsating through my brain.

“Jessie?”

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

“Of course I talked to him.”

“Why was he there? Marcus told me his treatments were over….”

I was more than a little convinced that you had lied to me about your dad’s recovery, just so you wouldn’t have to face my constant inquiries as to his current health status.

“He’s done,” my dad said. “He had stopped by just to say hi. Apparently everyone who finishes chemo promises to come back when they’re healthy just to say hi, but no one ever does. Mr. Flutie actually did.”

I imagined him promising all the nurses, “I’ll shoot on over when I’m done with all this stuff. I’ll shoot right over….” It reminded me of something you would do.

“He looked a little thinner than I remember. He was wearing a Princeton baseball cap because his hair hasn’t grown back, and he’s afraid that it won’t. I tried to make him feel better by saying that I’ve been living with my chrome dome for twenty years….” My dad rubbed his head. “He was making the rounds, you know, introducing all the nurses to his son….”

“His
son
?”
Zzzzzzzzap!
Another surge. “Marcus was there?”

“No,” my dad replied. “The other one. The older one. Hugo. You know, I never even knew Marcus had an older brother. You never mentioned it.”

“I’ve never met him,” I replied. “He lives in a cabin in Maine with a forty-five-year-old divorcée.”

“Oh, no wonder Sam kept referring to him as ‘the prodigal son,’” my dad said.

(Your acceptance into the Ivies sealed your fate. Up to that point, let’s face it, it was up for grabs.)

“So what was Hugo like?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my dad said. “Because as soon as Sam saw me, no one else could get a word in edgewise.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“That’s the interesting part,” my dad said. He put down his beer bottle, leaned forward in his chair, and massaged his bare skull. “He said Marcus asked you to marry him.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzap!