Fourth Comings (21 page)

fifty-six

M
y dad tilted his head to the stars and whistled through his teeth. I looked up, too. The moon was a sliver shy of fullness, still on the safe side between sane and crazy.

“Why did
you
get married so young?” I asked.

“One word.”

Love,
I thought.

“Vietnam.”

“Vietnam?”
I hadn’t expected such a pragmatic response, even from my dad.

“I graduated from college in seventy-two. Your mother and I had been dating for five years, since high school. At that point it seemed foolish to put off a wedding.”

“Were you afraid of getting drafted?”

My dad rubbed his forehead. “No,” he said firmly. “Nixon was withdrawing troops. The war was winding down.”

“Okay…”

“I graduated from high school in sixty-eight….”

“The Summer of Love?” I asked.

My dad squeezed his eyes tight and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Didn’t you learn anything at that fancy college? Sixty
-seven
was the Summer of Love. Sixty
-eight
was one of the worst years in American history. More soldiers were killed and wounded in that year than any other. RFK and MLK were assassinated. Student protesters shut down your alma mater for a week. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Paul Parlipiano always talks about the enduring legacy of the Students for a Democratic Society.”

“Paul who?”

“Paul
who
?” I asked, incredulous. “I had the hugest crush on him in my freshman and sophomore years of high school, then he went to Columbia and came out of the closet and became this big social activist on campus….”

My dad signaled his boredom by blowing into his empty beer bottle, making a low
toot
like the call of a distant ship. It was time for
his
story, not mine, so I shut up without even telling him that it was indeed Paul Parlipiano, my high school crush-to-end-all-crushes, former obsessive object of horniness and gay man of my dreams, who had inspired my decision to apply to Columbia University in the first place.

“My friends who didn’t go to college got drafted,” Dad continued. “Guys I grew up with, guys I played ball with, guys I drank beer with.” He raised another bottle and popped off the top. “They went off to the jungle and never came back. Or came back changed men.” He took another gulp of beer. “I married your mother right after graduation because I loved her, and because I still
could.”

I was touched by this surprising romanticism, especially in light of his earlier protestations. Then he dropped the bombshell.

“And also because she was pregnant.”

“What?” I asked, clearly having misheard my father.

“Your mother was three months along with Bethany.”

“MOM WAS KNOCKED UP BEFORE YOU GOT MARRIED?!”

“Could you say that a bit louder?” he asked, shaking out his ear. “I’m not sure the neighbors on the other side of the lagoon heard you….”

I quickly did the math. My parents were married in June, Bethany was born in December.
Duuuuh.

“Why didn’t I figure this out?” I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Does Bethany know?”

“Of course Bethany knows.” My dad literally slapped his knee in laughter. “Bethany has known since she was seven or eight.”

“She figured it out at seven?”

“Or eight,” my dad corrected. “She was really into weddings, more than you ever were. Bethany was always throwing weddings for her dolls and stuffed animals. She couldn’t talk enough about weddings. She bombarded your mother with questions. What kind of dress did she wear? What kind of flowers did she have? What kind of cake? One afternoon she asked your mother if she had been a June bride, and your mother, worn down by her questioning and not really thinking about the repercussions, told her the truth. Bethany knew her own birthday, of course, and kind of figured it out from there with a little help from your grandmother Gladdie, who, as you know, never showed much discretion.”

I was still shaking my head in amazement. “I just can’t believe I never put it together….”

“All these years your mother and I have been waiting for you to do the math. But you never did….”

He’s right. The truth is, I’d never put it together because I’d never really cared. I have always been startlingly uncurious about my parents’ courtship. I just didn’t want to know. I wasn’t beyond snooping and prying and eavesdropping, but my parents’ secrets didn’t seem worth unearthing. Bethany made an infinitely more fascinating subject during the post-Jerry Years, when invading her privacy was my raison d’être. I pored over her photo albums, read her journals, analyzed her yearbook inscriptions. But my parents? Ack.

My dad said nothing, just looked out onto the water. I knew that if I didn’t say something fast, this conversation would end as spontaneously as it had begun. And I didn’t want it to end.

“Where did you get married again?” I asked. The “again” was misleading, as it implied that I had asked this once before, but only temporarily forgotten. But I had never once asked about my parents’ wedding day. I knew next to nothing about their nuptials. In fact, I’d only seen one photo from that day, a black-and-white candid of the bride and groom kissing. Only the faintest wisp of lace can be seen around my mother’s neck, and a headband that I had always assumed anchored a veil, though no such accessory could actually be seen in the frame.

“Why so many questions tonight?” Dad asked. “What, one trip to the infusion room and you think I’m gonna die on you or something?”

“No,” I said. (Maybe, I thought.)

“We got married in a civil service at city hall,” he replied. “Only our parents were in attendance. My own mother thought we were too young to get married, you know. She thought we needed to go out and live life, date other people. She used to go on and on about how we should take advantage of the ‘free love’ philosophy of the era….”

I can totally hear Gladdie saying this. Can’t you? Hadn’t she said the same to us about us?

“Of course, Gladdie changed her tune once we told her that there was a baby on the way. But I honestly never felt that we were too young. I felt like we’d lived enough life,” he said. “Until recently….”

He looked at the smeared reflection of the moon in the rippling bay water.

“You remind me of Gladdie,” he said.

“Really?” I asked doubtfully. My grandmother could win over anyone with her oversized personality. But me? Hardly.

“You know my parents didn’t get married until they were both thirty-five?”

“Thirty five?” I asked. “That’s not right….”

“Whaddaya mean that’s not right?” my dad asked.

“Gladdie got married when she was seventeen….”

“Seventeen?” my dad barked. “Where did you get that crazy idea?”

“She told me so!” I said. “At Bethany’s wedding.” I remembered this vividly. I had been flirting with the best man’s younger brother, and Gladdie grabbed me by the arm to interrogate me about setting the date for our own nuptials. I patiently pointed out to her that we had just met, and besides, I was only sixteen. At which point she said in that un-forget-table bellow, “I was only seventeen when I married your grandfather, God rest his soul….”

“She had a lot of crazy notions after that first stroke,” my dad said. “But I know for a fact that my parents got married when they were thirty-five, which was unheard of in 1945! My dad had been in the war, of course. An old guy. He left engaged to some other woman, and when he got back, she was engaged to a 4-F who worked alongside her in a defense plant.” He took another swig of beer.

“How did he meet Gladdie?”

Dad leaned back in his chair and smiled. “They met at a bar in Manhattan. Both rarely visited the city. Your grandfather was there for a boxing match, and Gladdie was there to see a Broadway show. They wound up at the same bar.”

“Did Grandpa spot her from across the crowded room and buy her a drink?” I got carried away with a vision of my grandfather as a tall, broad-shouldered soldier with slick, Brylcreemed hair, winking at the pin-curled tomato in a floral swing dress as she received a cocktail garnished with a cherry….

“No,” he said. “They met waiting on line for the john.” He chuckled to himself. “Romantic, huh? My dad—you never knew my dad, obviously; he died when you were two—he used to say, ‘When you start in the shitter, you can only go up from there.’”

We both laughed.

“Speaking of,” my dad said, standing up, “I’m gonna head up to bed.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to get on your case about Marcus,” he said. “I just…” He took a deep breath. This was not easy for him.

“What?”

“I understand what it’s like to be twenty-two and in love. I know what it’s like to be afraid of losing that person to the world,” he said. “But sometimes I think that Gladdie was right. That maybe your mother and I would get along better now if…”

“If
what
?”

“If we had broken up—even for a little while—back then.” He looked upstairs to their bedroom window, which was now dark.

“Oh, and one more thing…”

One more? Just one more? I could think of a bizillion ellipses worth finishing.

“Don’t let on to your sister that you finally caught on to the whole conceived-out-of-wedlock thing.”

“Uh, okay.”

“It’s kind of a touchy subject for her, best left untouched.”

“But she already knows. What’s the big deal?”

“She’s okay with
her
knowing the truth,” Dad said, “as long as no one else does.”

And without another word, he bent himself in half and kissed me good night on the top of my head.

And I stayed on the patio and wrote.

   thursday: the seventh

fifty-seven

I
t was the coughing that woke me up at 6:42
A.M.
A dry-throated hacking, followed by giggling.

Cranky and half-blind, I looked out the window that provides a clear view of my parents’ patio. If I craned my neck, I got a partially obstructed view of the neighboring concrete on the other side of the PVC latticework. And there, on the opposite side of the fence, two sixteen-year-old girls engaged in a Thursday-morning wake-’n’-bake before school. You know the ones I’m talking about. The same girls who boldly, shamelessly flirted with you right in front of me last summer, licking their Popsicle-red lips with studded tongues.

For as rebellious as these girls were trying to be (getting high! before school!), they were going about their business in all the wrong way. They were sitting outside, in the early-morning twilight, shivering in the first autumnal chill. That alone would be enough to arouse suspicion. But to be sitting outside, in the early-morning twilight, in the first autumnal chill, hiding underneath a large woolen blanket…Clearly there was something going on underneath that large woolen blanket that they didn’t want anyone to see. And this secret was illuminated every time they flicked the lighter, and again when they inhaled. Despite their efforts to avoid being caught—they lived up the block, and I can only assume they had chosen the patio of
this
unoccupied condo on purpose—they could not reign in their innate desire to be noticed. They loudly and ludicrously revealed their illicit intentions to anyone within earshot, which I was. I still don’t know their names, only their pet names for each other.

“Pass the bowl, Slut!”

“Bitch, I’ve got the munchies.”

I couldn’t pull myself away.

I’ve watched them other times, too. I’ve watched them catwalking down the sidewalks of my parents’ neighborhood, nearly identical in their ponytails, candy-colored camisoles, and premium denim hemmed a quarter-inch—upward, downward—from obsolescence. They stepped in unison, or rather, assumed a lazy, synchronized shuffle. Conjoined by a shared iPod and a secret song, these two BFFs each wore a tiny white plug inside a perfectly suntanned ear. I’ve watched Bitch yank Slut’s earbud.

“Gimme a cigarette, Slut!”

And I watched Slut silently obey because that’s the downside of being the
second
most popular girl in the sophomore class.

The last time I saw Bitch—ah, Bitch—she was wearing a pair of oversized, brown bear-claw slippers on her feet. The slippers were a masterstroke, a testimonial to Bitch’s brilliance, and the reason no other sixteen-year-old would usurp her any time soon as the most popular girl in the sophomore class. No one at Pineville High wore bear-claw slippers in public! They enhanced Bitch’s carefully cultivated crazy/beautiful reputation, an image fueled by the rumors that she spent last summer not at summer camp, but at rehab for…Drugs? Depression? An eating disorder? Does it matter? Rumors about Bitch’s mysterious and perhaps imaginary stint in rehab have only helped set her apart from the other merely pretty girls at Pineville High. And when the inevitable happened, when other girls showed up in
their
furry animal slippers, Bitch would be rightfully recognized not only as the innovator, but as the only female in school who could get away with wearing just about anything without suffering any negative social repercussions.

In that way, Bitch reminds me of you. I wish I could fully embrace your utilitarian philosophy about clothes: You have to wear clothes. So you wear them. Like you, I don’t want to be bothered by clothes, and more specifically, shopping for clothes. I also resent being judged by the quality, creativity, or cost of my clothes. It’s all so superficial, right? And didn’t we learn about focusing on our
insides
not our
outsides
in the “Can’t Buy Love at the Mall” self-esteem workshop in middle school? But here’s the major difference: You borrow one of my T-shirts and don’t even notice or care when it exposes the hairy expanse of your midriff like a hoochie drag queen in the Gay Pride Parade. Yet the look still
works
on you. It contributes to your freaky mystique. I believe your whole not-caring-about-clothes thing is sincere, but it also has the added benefit of enhancing your image, not detracting from it.

A similar sartorial carelessness doesn’t look so good on me because, in truth, I still care too much about how I look. The problem is, I don’t care
enough
to do much about it, despite my mother’s, my sister’s, and my trendier friends’ best efforts. Which is why I often end up wearing clothes that make me look pregnant. In a variation of that classic song by the Clash, I’m “Vain in Vain.” This is why Bitch and Slut mostly ignore me whenever I’m here visiting my parents. Sometimes they cast withering glances over their shoulders in my general direction. Other times they heave sighs and lungfuls of tobacco smoke. I was written off as a hopeless loser the first time I was caught watering my parents’ plants in my nondesigner cutoffs, nondescript T, and busted Chucks. My only redeeming quality was that I had somehow managed to seduce you.

Manda just argued that no human being could out-hubris a teenage boy, a strange assertion from the former most popular girl in the sophomore class. I swear Bitch and Slut have the boys beat. As the reigning most popular girls in their class, they can outfreeze anyone with an icy stare, or a crackly cackle of laughter. And even if they cannot ensnare their quarry (you, for example), they still
think
they can, which is close enough.

Whenever I gaze upon these girls—girls shimmering with the power of their sexuality, girls I would have hated when I was their age, girls I have to will myself not to hate right now—I am certain that even if I could fulfill that aphorism about going back knowing what I know now, I still wouldn’t fit into the caste Hope and I coined the Upper Crust. To play off that UK economist’s dire prognosticatians, I am, comparatively speaking, doomed to the Under Crust. I’d never be cool enough, pretty enough, or, most important, innovative enough in the art of adolescent sadism. At sixteen, I would have instinctively crossed the street if these superior specimens were headed in my direction. And though I’m ashamed to admit it, part of me still wants to avoid them now, even though one of the divine advantages of being twenty-two is that I don’t have to surrender to the oppressive, ever-shifting politics of high school popularity.

I watched Bitch and Slut hastily put away their contraband, giggling as they galloped toward a honk coming from the front of the condo. I couldn’t confirm this from my spot in the window, but I imagined that it was Bitch’s boyfriend, a senior, perhaps, who had just rolled up in the driveway in his SUV. It was 6:58
A.M.,
and if Boyfriend leadfooted it, he would get them to homeroom in time for the last bell. As they sped away in a screech of peeling tires, I asked myself why I was so bound by relationships forged during the zitgeist, the time of teen angst I couldn’t wait to escape, and to which I wouldn’t return even if I could.