Read Online The Theory of Opposites by Allison Winn Scotch - Free Book Online

my eyelids feeling unusually heavy, my mind feeling unusually light. It’s not so bad, this floating. I think about Theodore, and how maybe I should write him back. I wanted to trust myself enough to, but then there was that tricky part about not trusting myself to at all. I was always doubting everything, even though I was also always placing my faith in the meant-to-be. My brain was at constant odds with itself, a bubble of confusion fostered by my father himself, and then nurtured by my paralysis in making any defiant moves against his philosophies.
    Theodore knew this because he knew me as well as anyone had, though who I was at twenty-five and who I was now were hopefully different enough that he couldn’t actually know me that well anymore — it had been seven years. A lifetime. Or part of a dog’s lifetime anyway.
    I close my eyes and listen to the clinking of forks against plates, the waft of conversation, the piano dimly floating out of the restaurant speakers. And then I consider that I may have gotten married and worked my way up the agency and found a different apartment and become a step-aunt and peed on a bunch of pregnancy tests, but really, I’m sitting here with my parents at the same restaurant we always sit at, and my sister is bickering with them, and my dad is the same old megalo-maniac, and my mother is enabling it all, and Shilla (the name is growing on me) is perhaps very acutely imploding. And then I realize nothing has really shifted too much at all. That who I was at twenty-five is actually very akin to who I am now.
    My dad always says that we can’t change, and by God, if my thirty-two years are any indication, he’s right. Jesus.
    I open my eyes in time to see my mom settle her napkin in her lap and move it just so. “Let’s just enjoy the sea bass,” she says.
    I am happy to just enjoy the sea bass if I’m being honest, but Raina coils up her face like a corkscrew, and since she has armed me with this unusually pleasant sense of nirvana, I feel the need to stand strong with her.
    So I say: “We can’t enjoy the sea bass if one of you is dying.”
    “If one of us were dying, I would hope that you wouldn’t treat it as lightly as you are now,” my dad says. “Even though” — because he can’t help himself — “it would be whatever was meant to be. If either your mother or I were to die unexpectedly, I hope you know that I wouldn’t want a big to-do.”
    A muscle in Raina’s jaw flexes, and she stretches her neck to one side, the pop! audible across the table.
    “So what it is?” she says. “Because once we know, then I certainly will enjoy the sea bass.”
    My mother clears her throat and purses her lips once, then twice. She eyes my father but then glances away, and he is no help (of course).
    “Okay fine, I’ll just come out with it.” My mom reaches for her wine before continuing. “Your father has had…a difficult year. With…the Nobel…”
    “Dad, you realize there are worse things in the world than being on the short list for a Nobel, right?” Raina says.
    “Well, it was very devastating for him,” my mom interjects. “And then there was that unfortunate restraining order.”
    “Punjab had no right! No claim!” my father cries, a shard of bread flying from his mouth and landing unceremoniously in the olive oil on my own bread plate. My mouth curls down, and I inch the plate toward the center of the table.
    “Well, with all of that happening, your father came to some decisions. And I don’t necessarily agree with them, but…well…you know.” My mom waves her hands, as if this explains it. Well…you know. It does explain it though, as good enough shorthand as any in this family.
    My dad dislodges the mucus in his windpipe, then announces:
    “What she is trying to say is that I intend on taking a lover.”
    At this, Raina spits her wine back into her glass. And though my head is cloudy and buzzy and thick, even I sense a widening of my eyes, a