Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“That’s it?”

“No. I suppose we have an exceedingly awkward dinner to look forward to.”

My father’s gift for understatement may have been matched only by his good manners. He wasn’t Midwestern, though people often assumed he was. He started on the stuffing while I stood there, mostly stunned by the fact that I wasn’t all that stunned.

Before I had much time to figure out where to go or what to do next, I met my brother coming down the stairs, looking disheveled and relaxed, and decided to ruin his day. He asked me if I was okay and I did that thing of not answering, of making it seem like something was so wrong I had lost the power of speech. Aaron wasn’t a nervous person, he didn’t see trouble everywhere, but when he did see it, it concerned him. He had been a cuddly boy, and though he tried to toughen up (headphones, a hooded sweatshirt, a stony, unmoved look on his face), he hadn’t lost his need to comfort and be comforted. I took him out to the front porch, and he folded his bare arms against the cold and stood over me a little. When had he grown so tall?

I played the reluctant confessor. But I hadn’t expected my brother to be so calm.

“Why are you bringing me into this?” he asked.

“I’m not bringing you in. You’re already in it.”

“No. I’m not. This is part of some fucked-up thing between you and Lee. And I didn’t need to know.”

“You really don’t care?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, something honest? Because what I don’t understand is why she went for Dad when she could have easily had you.”

“Fuck you, Viv.”

He brushed past me and went inside.

Our lawn, its flagstone path, its low row of shrubbery by the empty sidewalk, had a hard quality to it this time of year. This suburb was an old one, old trees, old houses, streets named for old Protestant families. I had read enough to know what happened in places like this, and I wanted to be sophisticated and accepting of the messiness of life. I wanted to be unassuming but I assumed, I assumed. Had Lee planned it? Had she worn a pretty bra? Had my father, the rugged oil rigger, for an instant, enjoyed it? What had it been? A kiss? Had his hand touched her shoulder, slid to the small of her back? Why had he seen it so necessary to tell me? Why not let it rest as one of the moments that shape one’s secret life? Lee needs help, I get it, but wasn’t there also some pride on his part, that he could still attract that kind of attention and that he was principled enough to turn it down? Maybe he saw it as his fatherly duty to let me know. Did Lee, familiar with my father’s honorable code of behavior, initiate this whole thing precisely because she knew that he would tell me?

I waited for Lee to say something to me about what happened for most of the day — how could she not have said anything the night before! — and she waited me out, with such unbearable patience that we made it all the way to the big meal without bringing it up. By then it was too late for her to leave. Choosing our places at the dining table had the kind of tortured, overdetermined suspense of THATH scenes: Elena Sterling, faced with a tangle of different colored wires, having to pick which ones to clip to prevent a bomb from exploding. Lee wound up between my parents’ friends the Manns and Genevieve, who was at the foot of the table. Aaron next to her, me between Aaron and my mother, my father at the head. I kept looking at my mother, but she revealed nothing. She seemed a little mystified that the rest of us let Genevieve dominate the evening’s talk. Genevieve asked us if we’d ever heard of Noam Chomsky, told us about her town-gown efforts to introduce local underprivileged children to manga, and, while pushing some sweet potato around her plate, enlightened us about the toll exacted by mainstream media on the female body image. Had Genevieve seen any of Lee’s ads? Maybe. But would she even cop to reading those magazines?

“It’s true, it can be pretty vile,” said Lee gently, dipping a toe in Genevieve’s stream.

Aaron said something under his breath. All I caught was “you” and “vile.” Genevieve didn’t hear it. She’d heard Lee, though. And she’d certainly heard Aaron the night before: You’re Lee fucking Parrish. Their smiles.

“Why do you go along with it?” she asked.

“Good question,” said Lee. Like if she had an answer for that, she’d be ready to take on poverty next and then war.

Genevieve garbled Audre Lorde’s words about using the master’s tools to dismantle his house. And Lee started to say she understood when Aaron snapped.

“Nobody gives a shit, Lee. Just shut up.” And she did, mutely looking to me, for help maybe, or forgiveness. I stared down at my plate.

“Aaron!” cried my mother.

“It’s fine,” said Lee.

“No, it’s not.”

“Natalie,” said my father. “Let it go. Let’s try to enjoy the rest of this meal.”

Aaron apologized, primarily to the Manns, while my mother gave my father a squinty-eyed grin that contained (just barely) embarrassment, irritation, and incredulity. Natalie and Jonathan. I had the sense of having walked in on someone else’s life in what I had thought was my home. My mother found that sheepskin coat in the closet, and it signified a whole world I knew nothing about, a whole secret history. It seemed to me that I was learning something about marriage, though I couldn’t have said what.

We finished the meal. As soon as the Manns left, I took up the pie plates and shuttled them into the kitchen with my mother. In years past, the cleanup had always been a group effort, but this time everyone found a reason to scatter. My mother’s silence made me think she would have preferred me gone, too, but then, tearing foil for leftovers, she asked me to tell her about Ben Driggs Stern. There wasn’t all that much to tell, I said. She frowned.

“I got started too late and gave it up too early,” she said.

“It?”

“Oh, you know. Sex. As a vital thing.” She sighed. No provocation in her voice, nor was she proud of herself for being frank. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. “I missed my chance, in a way. Men don’t look at me like that anymore and I don’t look at them, not like I used to.”

My mother, looking at men. Men looking at her. Who was this woman? Not the woman who hadn’t changed her bob haircut since the birth of her son. She did regularly apply store-bought dark auburn dye to cover her gray, but it seemed more about maintaining the status quo than about her looks. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. This was the woman, after all, who had determined that I was ready at fifteen for a trip to a salon in the city instead of Kathy’s Fountain of Beauty in the shopping strip. So what was it? Better not to be seen in the first place than to be looked at and found wanting? Had that happened with my father? Had he looked at her and been disappointed or, worse and more likely, stopped looking? They had been blinkered horses, canting along together, pulling the load that was our family.

“What men?”

“No one. In the past, I. . I had. . thoughts. . and maybe once or twice those thoughts were met with an opportunity. I never acted on it. Looking back, I don’t know if that was courageous or cowardly of me.”

“What were these opportunities? I mean, who were they?”

“Nobody you know. I wasn’t going to run away with another teacher or a neighbor or anything. It was such a long time ago. I would never leave your father. Not now. I don’t have it in me. That’s all I’m trying to say. I think at some point even your memories change. They become what you need them to be. Marriage is such a strange thing. Who you end up with. This person who, if you’re lucky, makes up so much of your life. In certain ways it seems fated and in other ways so completely arbitrary. . Remind me not to give this speech at your wedding, will you?”