AN: To the five people who are reading this --- thanks for the kind feedback, and keep smoking that crack. As a person with a penchant for killing puppies, I am rather dedicated to kidfic. This will end soon, I promise.
Also, I'm stuck in a skanky part of Asia right now. I haven't the first clue about geography of the northeastern United States, or how the transit system works in Boston. Please excuse any discrepancies, and focus on the fact that this is pure insanity.
As far as I'm concerned, one of the true advantages of being adopted is that I can easily pretend my parents have never actually had sex. The fact that my parents were not wont to engage in public displays of affection allowed me to live in blissful denial for at least the first ten years of my life.
Even as a child, I was aware of how different my mom and dad were compared to my friends' and classmates' parents. While other parents used terms of endearment like "honey" and "sweetheart," my mom was still insisting on referring to Dad by his last name. (I can count on two hands the number of times Mom actually called Dad "Luke," and if my mother ever calls anyone "sweetie," chances are she probably means "dumbass.") Other parents went to Aruba or someplace tropical for their anniversaries, bought each other flowers and chocolates on Valentine's Day, went to marriage counseling to bitch at each other in front of a certified professional. My parents went to math conventions or environmental rallies (depending on who owed whom a favor at the time), refused to partake any event involving the Hallmark-Manufactured Manipulation of Catholic Saints and Greek Mythology, and didn't require the presence of a certified professional to bitch at each other.
All of this caused me a lot of grief and worry when I was ten. At the time, more than half of my friends were being shuffled in and out of therapy as their parents went through divorce procedures, and my parents' lack of a conventional married couple-type relationship convinced me that they were doomed.
When my mother's birthday arrived that year, I suggested to my dad that he should give her something a little more romantic than what he gave her last year, a jar of frogs preserved in formaldehyde. "Can't you do something spontaneous and romantic?" I asked him.
"It doesn't go over well with your mother," he said.
"Have you ever even tried?" In my head I could already see myself in court, having to choose which parent to live with. I was halfway toward a gold membership to the Divorced Kids Club.
My father looked up from the chemistry lab he was marking, and tried very hard not to cringe. "I don't really want to talk about this right now," he told me, which totally meant he'd tried, and whatever happened had probably resulted in catastrophe.
I went to my aunt Joan for more details, and learned of what my uncle Kevin calls, "the longest and most unsuccessful booty call in recorded history."
"The timeline's a little sketchy," Joan said, "what with the two of them constantly breaking up and getting back together and all. Are you sure you want to know this?"
The correct answer would have been, "No, not really," but morbid curiosity got the better of me.
"Let's see. It was Luke's senior year which means that Grace and I were freshmen at college. Your mom's birthday was on a weekend that year, and so your dad thought it would be a good idea to drive up and visit her. You know, like, visit."
"Ewwwww." I made a face, and then added as an afterthought, "Mom's going to kill him. She hates cars and global warming."
"Oh, wait till you hear the rest of this."
My dad had recently bought his first car. Aptly dubbed "the Polluter," it was nothing more than a beat-up aluminum bucket on wheels. Nevertheless, it was all his, and he'd had to work as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical company for little more than slave wages in order to pay for it. He was so proud of it that he couldn't wait to show my mom, so on the eve of her birthday, he skipped his last class and embarked on an eight-hour drive up to my mother's college.
Somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, he called her and told her he was coming. And she said, "Dude, I'm in the middle of freaking midterms. I barely have a chance to blow my nose. I don't have time to entertain you."
"But I'm almost there," Dad said, even though he had no idea where he was exactly.
"Fine." My mother sighed. "What time will you get here?"
"Around midnight?"
"I'll prop the door open with my Psych text. Maybe you can step on my roommate on your way in."
Loaded on caffeine and Sun Chips, my dad continued his journey. Traffic was heavier than he had calculated, and after being stuck behind a semi for an hour and a half, his mild neurosis escalated into full-blown panic. By the time he arrived at my mom's dorm, it was well after two-thirty, and after finding the correct room, he uttered, "Hey, Grace," and promptly collapsed at the foot of my mother's bed.
The next morning, he woke up to find a Post It stuck to his cheek. "Psych exam in the morning," it said. "Ethics seminar after that. Find you later. Don't mess anything up."
Now, my mother's note had told him specifically not to mess anything up, but didn't say anything about wandering around campus, so my father did just that. He stumbled his way through various buildings and somehow ended up crashing a math competition, which he was invited to write.
Several hours later, he returned to the dorm to find my mother on the brink of homicide. "Where the hell were you?" she yelled. "I skipped my seminar so that we could have lunch. I came back, and you weren't here!"
"Okay, don't get mad," my dad began. It was not the first time he had said this, and it certainly would not be the last. "But I kind of got distracted by a math contest."
And as if that didn't piss my mother off enough, he continued, "I did really well on the first round, so, uh, I have to write the second round tomorrow."
That killed whatever my mother had been in the mood for, and after calling him a loser, she threw him out and left him to sleep in the car. "It's the coldest March in the last fifty years," my dad protested.
"Well, I guess you can cuddle up with your soulmate, Pythagoras," my mom said, and slammed her door shut. (I look at this objectively: my father had driven several hundred miles in a machine that was actively depleting the ozone layer, and then he opted for probability theorem and Markov chains over an afternoon with my mother. I'm surprised that Mom actually let him live.)
My mother felt sorry for him after a while, so during a study break, she went down to the parking lot and brought him a bunch of her extra blankets.
"Should I skim the next part?" Joan said at this point.
"God, please," I answered. I didn't even want to consider the possibilities.
As it turned out, my dad not only went to the math contest the next day, he actually won it. He was awarded an invitation to write another math contest, as well as enough cash to pay for a one-way ticket back to Arcadia, which he decided to use, seeing as that he had already stretched the limits of my mother's patience.
"Yeah, but what about the car?" Dad asked. "I guess you can drive it back when you come home in a month or so."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Mom might be willing to partake in physical activity in the backseat of a fossil fuel-guzzling, nitric acid-spouting vehicle, but she sure as hell wasn't going to drive it.
In the end, they decided to keep the Polluter at the house of my mom's friend, Ben. It would be a temporary arrangement; Dad was going to MIT in September anyway, and he could pick up his car then. "Take as long as you want," Ben said cheerily. He came from old money, and he delighted in torturing his family by associating with what they called his "middle-classfriends." So they kept my father's piece of junk metal in the garage of Ben's mansion, sandwiched between two Rolls Royces.
When my dad finally went to college the following semester, he discovered that it was simply easier to take public transit. The Red Line brought him from his campus to my mother's in less than ten minutes, and the gas prices were so high by then it was economically preferable to travel by foot. Eventually everybody forgot about the Polluter, and it was only mentioned in passing whenever somebody said at a family gathering, "Remember the time Luke surprised Grace for her birthday and ended up winning that math contest?"
I often wonder whatever happened to my father's beloved vehicle. Did somebody else end up claiming ownership of it, or did it end up in the junkyard, where my mother claims it rightfully belonged? I try to imagine Ben's aristocratic, upper-crust parents, coming home from a trip to Switzerland or some other unaffordable country in Europe, opening the door to their garage and seeing the Polluter there, that little lump of scrap metal, and wondering where it had come from, or what, if at all, it had to do with anybody's life.
After hearing Joan's story, I understood that it was probably for the better if Dad never did anything spontaneous and romantic again, ever. Weeks passed and my paranoia wore off --- when you are ten years old, you have better things to worry about, like long division. After all, my parents had known each other for two decades, and so far there had been no bloodshed. I had a pretty good idea that they would carry on with their bickering until theywere beyond the grave.
Thanks to my mother, I was made aware early on of the erroneous depiction of love in the movies. Under the disguise of saccharine romantic comedies and such, the general public is mislead into believing that love involves circumstances like committing joint suicide with your boyfriend because your parents won't let you go to the prom together, or running into a four-alarm fire to save your lover, who's locked up at the top of a penthouse.
(During the height of my divorce obsession, I once asked my father if he'd rescue my mother from a burning building.
Dad: Why is the building burning in the first place?
Me: I don't know. It just is.
Dad: Is it an accident, or did somebody set it on fire?
Me: What difference does it make?
Dad: Our insurance doesn't cover arson. Also, is it a dry fire or an oil fire? Or is it spontaneous combustion? Remember what I taught you about combustion?
Me: Oh, just forget it. (stomps off to write an essay titled "Why Are Men So Stupid?")
Dad: Grace, listen to this. You won't believe what the kid just asked me.
Mom: (when she finally stops laughing) Yeah, like you can really save me from a burning building.
Sometimes, it's painfully obvious that my parents adopted me just for comic relief.)
In many ways, romantic comedies are much more hazardous than, say, blood-drenched horror flicks with predatory aliens or cannibalistic serial killers. The latter is so far removed from reality that the audience knows it's fiction; the former, however, manipulates us into believing this idealized notion of romance transcends into real life.
In reality, love is not so much about big, sweeping circumstances as it is about all the small, irritating things you deal with, even if you don't have a good reason to; you do it because you can't not. It involves people wearing each other down until all the rough spots are smooth, likethe jumble of rocks thrown into the barrel of the jewelry-maker I got for my birthday when I was seven.
It's putting up with stupid shit you wouldn't put up with otherwise, as my mother would say, and I still recall her picking me up half an hour early from Andrea Gallagher's sixth birthday party so that we could catch the end of Dad's lecture on bosonic string theories. When Andrea's mother asked why, my mom rolled her eyes and said, "We have to go and clap in case nobody else does." The other parents nodded in understanding; they, too, had spouses who are professors, boring as hell keynote speakers, compulsive nerds in each their own way.
Really, I think this is the only logical way to explain how my parents haven't yet killed one another, or me, since we spend such a great deal of our lives grating on each other's nerves.
Case in point, my parents and I had a fight of gargantuan proportions when I was in fifth grade, over Valentine's Day. That year, I had decided to give into peer pressure and distribute store-bought valentines to my classmates. My mom considered this the beginning of the destruction of my soul, whereas my dad thought it was kind of cute.
Halfway through the class list, I realized that I should have just listened to my mother and skipped the insipid ritual. Valentine-writing, I discovered, was a tedious and repetitive chore.
"I hate this," I whined after scribbling "Happy Valentine's Day" for the eighteenth time.
"Told you," said my mother, who, as usual, was not very sympathetic to my plight. "It's a big corporate plot and you ran right into it."
"Hey, I don't mind writing to the people I actually like. I just don't want to write one for everybody."
"Why do you have to write them to everybody?"
"It's in the stupid rules." I showed my mother the sheet of instructions the teacher had given me. It stated clearly that if I were to give out valentines, I was to make sure that everybody in the class got one. Nobody was to receive special treatment, and nobody was to be excluded.
I could see my mom's blood pressure rising as she read it. "This is one step away from communism. Why are you doing this anyway?"
Back then, I was young and impressionable, and naive enough not to be aware that everything I said to my parents would inevitably be used against me later. "Because I heard from Jeremy who heard from Andrea who heard from her brother who's on the soccer team with Timothy Park that Timothy Park likes me and he's going to give me a card tomorrow and tell me that he likes me. So, if I want to tell him that I like him back, I have to give him a valentine and if I have to give him one, I have to give everybody one. It's very stressful."
My parents stared at me in open-mouthed horror. Dad spoke first, "Who's this Timothy person?"
"You can't beat him up, Dad," I told him. "He's a jock."
"Wait, so you're completely selling yourself out and giving up all the values we've ever tried to teach you for a guy?" Mom asked.
"Yep," I said, nodding earnestly. Luckily, even after eight years, my mother had not yet disowned me for my lack of common sense. Instead, she had come to regard anything that came out of my mouth as an endless source of entertainment.
"No wonder corporate oppressors have given up on teenagers and are heading straight for middle-schoolers," my mother remarked.
I grew tired of writing and handed the job over to my father. He complied, even when he was teased for having the penmanship of an eleven-year-old girl. "You don't have to do one for Topher Finley," I instructed.
"I thought the teacher said you're supposed to give one to everybody," Dad said.
"Why should she do something just because the teacher said?" said Mom.
"I don't like Topher Finley. He's a geek."
My father was offended. "Hey!"
"Sorry." I corrected myself, "He's a mean geek. He sucks up to the teacher all the time, and he always tries to look at my grade when we get our tests back. He thinks he's so smart just because he can add fractions. Please, I know the quadratic formula."
"But you don't know how to use it," my dad pointed out.
"That's because it's so boring."
My father still did not graspthat appealing to my sense of moral rectitude was a lost cause. "Come on, Topher's going to feel so bad when everybody else gets these awesome valentines from you except him."
"Oh, please, they're cardboard cutouts with weird science jokes on them," Mom said, and she was right. I'd told my father to grab any old box from the drugstore, and naturally he'd come home with one that contained jokes about ionic and covalent bonding that possibly only he and Topher Finley would appreciate. "She shouldn't have to give them to anybody she doesn't want to."
"This kid is being singled out for deliberate cruelty, Grace. I can't believe you're encouraging that."
"You know, you are taking this really personally. Jesus, Geek, get over the whole third grade Tiffany Mendelbaum rejection thing."
"What Tiffany Mendelbaum rejection thing?" I asked.
My parents were too busy glaring at each other to answer me. I let them continue their feud while I finished off the rest of the cards, and by the time I headed off to bed, the fight had ceased being about my mother being cruel and heartless and my dad being overly defensive of his army of geeks, and was meandering into a dangerous zone about other trivial matters such as who was going to tell my grandparents we weren't coming down for Easter/Passover this year.
They were still at it the next morning, hiding behind respective sections of the newspaper and refusing to communicate to each other directly. For two people who were too overeducated for their own good, sometimes they had the emotional maturity of me and my friends at recess.
"Would you tell your mother that I plan to take the car to work today?" Dad asked. "Not because I don't give a shit about the environment, but because we're in the middle of a blizzard and I left my cross-country skis at the office?"
My mother, in turn, said to me, "Would you tell your father that there is a brand new invention called public transit? And would you remind him that he has to pick up the dry cleaning, which he was supposed to do yesterday?"
"Would you inform your mother that I offered to pick up the dry cleaning yesterday but she made me return her overdue library books instead?"
"Would you make it clear to your father that they were actually his library books, which he had borrowed using my card, and therefore the overdue fines should be his responsibility? And also, ask him if he really intends on wearing that hideous sweater vest to his faculty meeting this afternoon."
"What is wrong with this sweater vest?" Dad demanded, breaking the conduit in defense of his wardrobe. "I love this sweater vest. You gave me this sweater vest."
"You guys don't need me for this," I said, and went to wait for the bus downstairs. "Happy Valentine's Day," I added, and they glowered at me.
To be honest, I wasn't too worried about them. Sure, they were more stubborn and hard-headed than two metamorphic rocks, and inclined to fight to their death like Roman gladiators. They clung onto their beliefs, their moral values, whatever they thought was right, and they were as likely to back down as a couple of first-century martyrs would.
But these were the same people who understood, even if they tried to pretend it wasn't true, that they were wholly dependent on each other. That they were stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, as the bagel slicer in our kitchen cupboard could attest to. So, at some point, they had learned to wisely let it go.
And in this case, like two people truly in love, they proceeded to ignore each other for the rest of the day.