My Father

I’d met her once before. She came over for dinner and we ate chicken. I wasn’t quite sure why. My dad never even tried to cook anything. We always heated up canned soup, or we ordered pizza. He never even tried to cook. Not since he’d moved out, anyway. We sat down at the table, transformed by a tablecloth and actual glasses. My brother and I looked at each other warily, confused.

Conversation was awkward, strained. I picked at my chicken, dried out and vile. My father looked nervously at her, as though waiting for an opinion. She smiled and looked as though she were enjoying the juice-less mass of poultry. A good actor, she seemed. I didn’t think for a minute they might be in love.

After dinner we played Scrabble. It was a travel edition, and the tiny plastic pieces kept popping out of their holes. She won, with “quiz” on a triple word score. I spent the entire time wondering when my dad had made a friend. She had shared his office, but she’d moved across the hall. I didn’t even wonder why.

A month later I was playing Solitaire, bored and lonely in his apartment in Watertown. I’d never really liked going, but it was okay. At least I got homework done there, where there was nothing but a computerized card game and a shelf of thick, dull books on the impact of transportation in the economy to distract me.

My father looked nervously at me, and then at my brother, struggling in a corner with multiplication. "What would you think, you guys, if Sari and I were to get married?"

The wedding was in two weeks. There was nothing to be done about it. He said he asked our permission first, before planning it, but nobody can pull off a wedding in two weeks. He asked me to play cello for the guests. I stared at him in disbelief.

On the morning of February 20, 2005, I picked at my eggs. They were cold and clammy and I’d never liked eggs, but they were the only think he knew how to cook. He told me to get ready, and he sat there in his tuxedo and his incredibly shiny shoes. I stared at the floor, and caught my reflection in his shoes.

I cried for three and a half hours, alone in the apartment. I didn’t go to the wedding. My brother told me that he sat next to her mother in the ceremony, and she cried. You’re supposed to cry at weddings, I thought, but not because you hate the idea of two people spending their lives together. Not because you hate the bride and you wish her a slow, painful death. Not because you feel like your father betrayed you. You’re supposed to be inordinately happy.

I hate weddings.