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Authors: Dana Reinhardt
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Dad with Mom, only memories of Dad and Jane.
The time Dad rang his own doorbell on their anniversary, his face hidden behind an enormous bouquet of lilies.
Drinking too much on a New Year’s Eve. Dad changing out of his sweatpants into a tux and twirling Jane around the room to an old Nina Simone record.
The trip they took without us to Cabo San Lucas and how they came home with colorful shirts, peeled noses and straw hats.
The way he called her darlin’.
It was a marriage, like any other marriage, and it seemed real and solid and indestructible.
It was just there, and it would always be there.
I asked Dad. I asked him in the kitchen with the melting ice cubes in his Scotch glass and the root beer pooling on the floor. The kitchen was the center of our family life.
“What happened?”
Dad’s eyes filled with tears and he pressed his hands into his closed lids, hard.
“I don’t really know what to say.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. He picked up his glass and shook the ice cubes around and then drank the last drops. “It’s complicated, relationships are complicated. Life is long, and sometimes marriages feel even longer, and people get lazy, and worse, they get indifferent, and sometimes you start to think maybe you’ve lost some part of yourself, that you don’t even remember who you are and what it felt like to be somebody not married to this person, and then some days you love this very same person more than you are able to explain. You’ll be driving in your car at dusk and a wave of warmth will envelop you just because this person exists in the world, but the next day that warmth will vanish again, and the last thing I want to do is say too much, which I’m afraid, at this point, I’ve already done.”
I looked at my father. I was too young to remember what he looked like while he was coping with what happened to Mom, but it was hard for me to imagine him looking any worse than he did sitting at the counter with snot on his sleeve.
I thought of him in his tuxedo. Behind the lilies. His straw hat and peeling nose.
I thought about memory.
Do we choose our memories? Did I choose these memories of Dad and Jane? Did my mind reject … what? Silences? Disagreements? Departures from the house without a kiss? Late nights stuck at work?
I didn’t remember those moments. To a kid, how could a silence or a glare or a harsh whisper compete with Dad hiding behind an enormous bouquet of lilies?
It’s not like Dad and Jane were throwing things or hitting each other or disappearing for days on end.
I never even thought about them as people in a relationship; I thought of them as Dad and Jane, just Dad and Jane, and this other world Dad was describing now, hunched over his empty glass, was a secret world to which I had no access and wanted none.
A week later I went to lunch with Jane. Since she left, we’d spoken only to arrange this date. It was implied that this was to be our time for a big talk.
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what to say or how to act. But Dad told me I shouldn’t shut out Jane, that I’d feel better if I spent some time with her, and, well, this is kind of Dad’s whole thing. He’s a psychiatrist. Unlike most kids, I listen when my dad tells me he thinks something will make me feel better, because he’s usually right.
I got there first, this little restaurant on Montana Avenue that we would go to sometimes for a “girls’ lunch” that always included Tess and Rose.
I switched my seat. I rearranged my silverware. I folded and unfolded my napkin.
But the minute Jane walked in and started toward my table, whatever awkwardness I felt melted away. She was no longer the mysterious other half of the secret difficult relationship I had no access to. She was the woman who made me the paper crown on that June Gloom day, and I thought of all the days in between then and now when she was the only mother I ever knew.
By the time she reached me, without thinking I opened
The time Dad rang his own doorbell on their anniversary, his face hidden behind an enormous bouquet of lilies.
Drinking too much on a New Year’s Eve. Dad changing out of his sweatpants into a tux and twirling Jane around the room to an old Nina Simone record.
The trip they took without us to Cabo San Lucas and how they came home with colorful shirts, peeled noses and straw hats.
The way he called her darlin’.
It was a marriage, like any other marriage, and it seemed real and solid and indestructible.
It was just there, and it would always be there.
I asked Dad. I asked him in the kitchen with the melting ice cubes in his Scotch glass and the root beer pooling on the floor. The kitchen was the center of our family life.
“What happened?”
Dad’s eyes filled with tears and he pressed his hands into his closed lids, hard.
“I don’t really know what to say.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. He picked up his glass and shook the ice cubes around and then drank the last drops. “It’s complicated, relationships are complicated. Life is long, and sometimes marriages feel even longer, and people get lazy, and worse, they get indifferent, and sometimes you start to think maybe you’ve lost some part of yourself, that you don’t even remember who you are and what it felt like to be somebody not married to this person, and then some days you love this very same person more than you are able to explain. You’ll be driving in your car at dusk and a wave of warmth will envelop you just because this person exists in the world, but the next day that warmth will vanish again, and the last thing I want to do is say too much, which I’m afraid, at this point, I’ve already done.”
I looked at my father. I was too young to remember what he looked like while he was coping with what happened to Mom, but it was hard for me to imagine him looking any worse than he did sitting at the counter with snot on his sleeve.
I thought of him in his tuxedo. Behind the lilies. His straw hat and peeling nose.
I thought about memory.
Do we choose our memories? Did I choose these memories of Dad and Jane? Did my mind reject … what? Silences? Disagreements? Departures from the house without a kiss? Late nights stuck at work?
I didn’t remember those moments. To a kid, how could a silence or a glare or a harsh whisper compete with Dad hiding behind an enormous bouquet of lilies?
It’s not like Dad and Jane were throwing things or hitting each other or disappearing for days on end.
I never even thought about them as people in a relationship; I thought of them as Dad and Jane, just Dad and Jane, and this other world Dad was describing now, hunched over his empty glass, was a secret world to which I had no access and wanted none.
A week later I went to lunch with Jane. Since she left, we’d spoken only to arrange this date. It was implied that this was to be our time for a big talk.
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what to say or how to act. But Dad told me I shouldn’t shut out Jane, that I’d feel better if I spent some time with her, and, well, this is kind of Dad’s whole thing. He’s a psychiatrist. Unlike most kids, I listen when my dad tells me he thinks something will make me feel better, because he’s usually right.
I got there first, this little restaurant on Montana Avenue that we would go to sometimes for a “girls’ lunch” that always included Tess and Rose.
I switched my seat. I rearranged my silverware. I folded and unfolded my napkin.
But the minute Jane walked in and started toward my table, whatever awkwardness I felt melted away. She was no longer the mysterious other half of the secret difficult relationship I had no access to. She was the woman who made me the paper crown on that June Gloom day, and I thought of all the days in between then and now when she was the only mother I ever knew.
By the time she reached me, without thinking I opened
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