Authors: Diana Spechler
Skinny (23 page)
It is time I explain what I did to my father on my twenty-sixth birthday. From my parents’ house, he drove me, in the car I’d grown up in, to Morgan Rye’s Steak House. On the radio, Billie Holiday sang, and behind her, men played saxophones. I was wearing a long red sundress, hoping that it made me look happy.
I hadn’t seen him in three years. He looked fatter than I remembered. His face was a deeper pink. His hair was grayer, and there was less of it. His breathing seemed labored, and sweat shone on his neck, minutes after his shower.
He asked, “You doing okay with money?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Yeah? So you’re still . . .”
“Yup. Same job. Same career. Comedy. Booking.”
“Terrific. And . . . you like it?”
“Obviously. It was my idea.”
“Right, right.”
“I get to be with people. And they’re funny. And it’s challenging.”
“And it pays the bills.” He chuckled and signaled left, and the turn signal lulled me with its
click-click, click-click
, the way it had in my childhood. “So your old man doesn’t have to worry.”
I leaned my forehead on my window.
Don’t say it
, I told myself. I told myself,
Gray, don’t start.
Inside the restaurant, chandeliers hung like costume jewelry, bartenders wore bow ties with matching vests, and the white tablecloths still held creases from when they’d been folded into smaller versions of themselves. We were the early birds. The scattering of diners were couples with canes and hearing aids, families with children who colored on paper place mats.
My father ordered us a bottle of Chianti. A creamed spinach appetizer. Extra bread. “And plenty of butter,” he told the waitress. He laughed and grabbed her hand as if they were old friends, as if she were in on the joke, as if his ordering extra butter made this dinner a wild party.
The wine helped. It was a thing we could pass between us like a guitar at a campfire. But still we were stuck there together. We were sitting by a window. We both kept looking through it, gazing longingly at the trees, at the highway, at the parking lot where pigeons hunted scraps on weightless feet.
“Your mother and I haven’t been here in years,” my father said. “I like this place.”
“It’s good. I mean, I remember it being good.”
“Yeah, it’s good. It’s really good. Consistently. Always gets ranked in that thing . . . What’s that thing?” He snapped his fingers a few times.
“Oh, um . . .” I snapped my fingers, too. “Whatever,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. That thing. Whatever it’s called.” He laughed too loudly. He shoved his linen napkin into his collar.
When the waitress brought the appetizer, she refilled our wineglasses, and my father set to work smearing butter and creamed spinach on chunks of bread. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach felt tight. I sipped my wine and looked out the window.
“So Mikey’s good?”
I looked at my father, who was intent on his plate, pushing food into his mouth, his pink chins spilling over his napkin bib. Tears burned my eyes. I tried to focus on the birthday party I would have the next weekend, how my friends had reserved the back room at a little bar in Alphabet City, so we could sit too close around a too-small table, drunk on Belgian beer and the love that exists only among company one’s chosen to keep.
I took a deep breath and released it. “Mikey’s good.”
“He’s still . . . performing his comedy?”
“Performing his comedy? Yeah. He’s a comedian, Dad. What else would he be doing?”
“I don’t know.” My father swallowed and brushed crumbs from his hands. “How should I know?”
“Right. I guess you wouldn’t.”
I often replay that part of the conversation in my mind. I want to know who started it. Which of us first let the venom in?
My father ordered a porterhouse. I ordered a rib eye purely because we were at a restaurant that served steak and I couldn’t think of what else to do. I drank more wine. I sat stiffly in the silence.
“How’s that wine? Good, right?”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“I had it last time I was here. Can’t believe it’s still on the menu.”
“Wow.”
“I love Chianti.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. If I’m going to have wine? Chianti. Otherwise, scotch. But it’s your birthday. Makes sense to celebrate with a bottle of wine. If you want champagne, just say the word.”
I picked at my mashed potatoes, but I barely touched the steak. It was fatty and greasy and slimy. I felt hyperaware that it had once been alive. I poked it a couple of times with my fork, as if I might revive it.
“I’m thinking of becoming vegetarian,” I told my father, even though I was not. “I’m starting to have a visceral reaction to the reality of what meat is.” I set my fork down.
“The solution,” my father said, taking a gulp of his wine, then smacking his lips together, “is to stop thinking about it. If you stop dwelling on it, on what that meat
was
, if you just enjoy it . . .”
“Impossible.”
“You’re choosing to make it impossible.”
“Not everything is a choice. These poor animals. They don’t get a choice in things.”
“Choice is such an American concept, Gray. Specifically, it’s a disease of your generation. You’re so focused on your choices. You’re overwhelmed by them, terrified of them, so you do things like become ski bums. Or you become glassblowers. Or you extend your youths so long, you forget to have children. You tell everyone you’re following your hearts. But really, you’re just not choosing. Not engaging in life. Or you’re choosing the wrong things.”
“Me?”
“Did I say you?”
“I’m asking.”
“Trust me, Gray. If you just go with the flow, if you just do what you know you should do, and don’t question it too much . . .”
“Like eat meat?”
“Sure. For example.” He pointed to my plate. “If you don’t question everything to death, you’ll be content.”
“Ha!” I said. “Quite a thing to raise me to be a critical thinker, and then tell me, now that I’m all grown up, to stop asking questions. I should close my eyes and accept everything at face value, and then I’ll be content? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“You’re twisting my words.” He smiled as if he pitied me. “Besides.” He pointed at my steak with his knife. “You’d miss meat.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d think,
Wow, I should have given up meat a long time ago. I’ve never felt better in my life. I can’t believe how many years I spent letting meat drag me down
. It does make you sluggish, you know.”
“Just stop thinking about what it is. You can’t bring this cow back to life, can you?”
I looked at what was left of his steak: a few bites in a pool of watery blood.
“So just enjoy it in its present form.”
“Barbaric.”
“It’s called letting go. It’s called letting bygones be bygones. The rabbi at the Cha—”
“La la la,” I said, sticking my fingers in my ears.
“What?”
“No rabbi talk.”
“I just wanted—”
“Not tonight. Please don’t.”
“All right,” my father said, lifting his palms. “All right, all right, I won’t. Since it’s your birthday.” He was quiet for a few minutes, eating. And then: “But one last thing: Do you want to come with me to the Chabad House tomorrow? There’s this terrific class.” He pulled the napkin out of his collar and tossed it on his plate.
“Dad!”
“Okay, okay.” He refilled his wineglass. Swigged his water. “I know how you are. But you would like it. If you just opened your mind to it. Anyway, it’s relevant to you. It’s a class about interfaith relationships. It’s a lecture that . . . explores them.”
“You mean condemns them.”
“You’d be surprised, Gray. You’d be surprised by how open this rabbi is. How clear-thinking. How brilliant.”
“So with his brilliance he’ll talk me into breaking up with my boyfriend. Yeah? Dad? Really? You had to bring this up?”
My father sighed. He plucked his napkin from his plate and patted his lips. Then he searched my face and his eyes looked old. “Gray, I don’t want to fight with you,” he said. “I love you. But you’re—”
“No, no, no, no, no, don’t
say
it.”
“—making a mistake—”
“Dad . . .”
“—and I can’t just sit here and watch.” His speech picked up speed. “It’s been agony sitting here and watching. Three years. For three years, I’ve been hoping you would come around.”
“Around to
what
?”
“You don’t seem to know what you’re signing up for. How hard your life will be.”
“What is it that you think I don’t know? I’m a grown woman. I’m responsible. I haven’t asked you for a dime since college. I pay my rent on time. I run a goddamn business.”
“Please don’t speak like that.”
“You keep thinking I’ll become like you. You think when I grow up, I’ll become like you.”
“It’s not that.”
“But I
am
grown up. You had your chance to instill your values. You’ve instilled many. Maybe too many. But now, the parenting part of your life is over. I’m an adult! I vote! I read the news!”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Are we seriously having this conversation?” I stared at his flushed cheeks and hands, and I thought (this is the hardest part to admit, but I thought),
He looks like a heart attack waiting to happen.
And then I pushed my plate toward him.
“Have this,” I said. “I don’t want it.”
“Gray, eat. Why don’t we just—”
“No. Really.”
So he ate. We didn’t speak. He finished every last bite of my artery-clogging dinner. Even the buttery mashed potatoes.
And then?
And then the entire floor staff of Morgan Rye’s Steak House gathered around our table in their black tuxedo pants and vests and sang “Happy Birthday.”
“Christ,” I said, as one of them set a dark chocolate soufflé between us. A blue candle flickered sadly in its center.
“Please don’t say ‘Christ,’ ” my father hissed.
“Make a wish!” our waitress said, straightening her bow tie.
I didn’t. I was massaging my forehead with the tips of my fingers. I took a break from doing that just long enough to blow out the candle, to watch the thin wisp of smoke slither into the air.
My father ate the whole soufflé.
• • •
In the parking lot, we were almost at the car when I stopped walking and stood still beneath the cottony pink dome of sky. My father stopped, too.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
He looked at me, wide-eyed, hopeful. We were standing inside two yellow lines that designated a parking space. We were too close.
I stepped outside the line, arranged my shoes so they didn’t touch the paint. “Mikey and I are getting married.”
The hopefulness faded from my father’s face. Then he laughed.
“It’s not a joke.” I linked my hands behind my back in case he decided to check for a ring. “We got engaged last weekend.”
He stopped laughing. Then he sighed.
I thought he sighed.
I suppose it was something else: the life being squeezed from his lungs, the sound one makes when one’s heart explodes. He fell to his knees as if to pray. And then it was my turn to laugh.
That was our last exchange: He didn’t believe me that I was breaking his heart. Then I didn’t believe him that his heart was breaking.
His heart was literally breaking.
For at least half a minute, I didn’t believe that he wasn’t joking, even though faking a heart attack was not his kind of humor. He never cared for physical comedy, never delighted in the sole of a shoe skidding with a banana peel. For many years, we’d laughed together at the things he’d deemed funny—someone he disliked displaying foolish bravado, or the time my mother’s cousin left her vibrator in our shower. So what I thought was,
We’re going to go back to the way we were. We have agreed to spend our time laughing again.
I thought this even when he toppled sideways, even when I saw the life leave his eyes; saw his lips, open, emitting no breath. And by the time I understood, it was too late. And that was when I screamed.
I sat on the steps and waited, not moving, counting silently. By twenty, Mikey would be back. Or by forty. Or one hundred. Mikey never stayed angry with me, never stayed away from me.
If he didn’t come back, I could talk my way out of this. Mikey always let me talk my way out. I could tell him he had caught me off guard, hadn’t given me a chance to give my side of the story. “I’m not cheating on you,” I could say. I could even twist it around a little: “How dare you accuse me?”
Yes. I could call him on his cell phone. Maybe he’d driven all the way from Brooklyn in his parents’ car, and now he had hours ahead on the road. Or maybe he was driving a rental car back to the airport. He was alone. He missed me. He was heartbroken. I could win him back.
I watched the door. The rain, slower now, ticked against the rectangular window. And then the rain stopped. And then the sun came. I heard one of the little girls say, “Can we go back to the water park now?”
Yes, please,
I thought.
Let’s go back.
