Labor Day

My car broke down on the way to the train station. I was heading to pick up Lisa and Matt, which made it even worse. Having never met the guy before, I was hoping to make a strong first impression. He was dating my daughter after all, and I knew very little about him, except from what Lisa had told her mom, who had told me, very little indeed, just the basics. I knew that he worked as a credit analyst for a bank (probably one of those faceless goons, the same ones that torpedoed my store), I knew that he was blonde and from the pictures kind of looked like Kevin Loranga (my high school nemesis), and I knew that his family was originally from Austria (birthplace of Hitler). I intended to fill in the gaps in my knowledge with silent intimidation. I'll be completely honest with you; I wanted to scare this kid.

I never had any practice with scaring boyfriends, Lisa had never brought one home in high school. She had gone to her senior prom with her friends, they picked her up in a minivan with tinted windows. She climbed in and I saw a flash of flushed teenage faces, eyes dark with heavy mascara, white teeth illuminated by glowing phone displays. After the van was halfway down the street, Brianna turned to me and said, "Do you smell vodka?". She immediately realized her mistake and hid my car keys so I couldn't follow them. Later, when Lisa returned, I asked her how her night had gone. She smiled, "Good", in her mysterious way and headed upstairs to her room. Brianna handed me a bag of kale chips. "Some reward," I muttered. I later found my keys near the bottom of the bag.

In college, the story was the same, but the characters were different.

Lisa was secluded in the basement of the school library, studying for a chemistry exam.

Lisa was attending an employee party at the public radio station.

Lisa was interning at Woods Hole, organizing saltwater jellies into Tupperware containers according to their transparency. She told me she liked the way the boats smelled.

Brianna was ever hopeful. "Lots of guys in the science department," Brianna said, raising her eyebrows (she knows I hate this). "Lot's of smart guys." I grab her sweater, pull it up, tickle her stomach. "I'll show you a smart guy."

Later, she said, "Working at a radio station, close quarters, dark lights, very romantic." I told her that radio stations smell like sweat and liberal disappointment. Brianna grabbed my chin, and smiled. "My little republican."

Later still, she said, "Betcha there's going to be a few hunks working on the boats, huh?" I snorted, trying to imagine Lisa married to a fisherman. I pictured Ben Affleck in The Perfect Storm. "Yeah, I'm sure Lisa would love a man that smells like fish." She smiled and turned back to her computer.

The truth was, I didn't know what kind of man I envisioned for my daughter. Completely uncertain. I felt like most fathers just knew, instinctively. I blame it on all the boys I grew up with. No sisters, just brothers. All my cousins? Guys, all nine of them. The Y chromosome ran strong in the DeMarco family. When I was a kid, I always wanted a sister. When I was older, I decided I wanted a daughter. I made vague plans of raising her to be the ultimate tom boy. I never really anticipated it would happen. When Brianna got pregnant, everyone on my side of the family suggested some great American names like Harry or Lou or Roger or possibly, if we were feeling festive, Clint. Brianna had other plans.

Brianna came from a family of gypsy's. I mean actual, off-the-boat-from-Romania, gypsy's. They were nothing like I expected; her father had found work as a lineman for the local electric company, worked for thirty five years, and retired with exactly one million dollars in the bank. Her mother had opened a dog-grooming business and qualified for the New York Marathon five years in a row. Whenever I came over to their house, they forced me to play a game of Scrabble (said it helped them with their English, even though they spoke better than I did). They argued about local politics, and sat in on PTA meetings (all of their children had graduated long ago).

Probably the most anti-gypsy thing about them was Brianna. Imagine this: a black girl from Baltimore adopted by a immigrant gypsy couple from Romania. Her mother wasn't infertile, either. She went on to have three more dark eyed pale skinned gypsy kids. One night, during a 4th of July party, I got drunk and asked her mother why they had adopted a black girl. She responded, "We wanted to be American. It was a good thing to do." Standing in the heavy blackness of that summer backyard, the glow of fireworks reflected in eyes, it struck me as an extremely sensible answer. 

Still, there remained something mysterious about them. Some gypsyness that must have been stronger than DNA because Brianna had it. Lisa had it. Predicting rain. Knowing when a pot of water was boiling and when it wasn't. A supernatural affinity for growing peppers. During Brianna's pregnancy the topic of gender had come up over dinner. I said, "It's definitely going to be a boy. Only boys on this side!" I forked some mashed potatoes into my mouth to seal the deal. Brianna immediately looked at her mother, who smiled with her eyes and at her father who said, "Who can tell these things?" I immediately knew at that moment, with mashed potato still in my mouth, that the DeMarco Y chromosome streak was over. Four weeks later, Brianna gave birth to Lisa.

Now I sat in my car, broken down on the side of Route 24. The cracked concrete shoulder was home to a very strong family of weeds. I kicked at them as I waited for the tow truck.

Lisa and Matt ended up taking a taxi to the house. The tow truck driver pulled into my driveway twenty minutes later. I hopped down from the cab, initiating a small avalanche of stained receipts, crushed paper cups, and empty candy wrappers. I was brushing my clothes and turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of the inside of my house. It was like I had x-ray glasses. The front door was open and I could see inside, into the front hallway, the stair case, and part of the dining room, the kitchen beyond. I could see Lisa standing near the door, her bags at her feet, and Brianna next to her. And I could see a man standing next to Brianna. My eyes narrowed. So this was Matt.

Lisa turned and looked through the doorway, and my heart broke in half at the thought of what I must have looked like, haphazardly exiting the litter filled cab of a tow truck. I payed the driver and tried to reassemble my heart as I walked toward the door.

"Hey baby." Huge hug. She scratched at my neck with her fingernails like she always did and whispered in my ear, "Hey daddy."

I looked past Matt, for a moment, at Brianna. She was looking at me with one eye brow cocked and a smile on her lips.

"And you must be Matt." I gave him the strongest handshake I could.

"Mr. DeMarco, very nice to meet you." He looked me and cracked an easy smile. He was lean and wiry, easily two inches taller than me, with arms that dangled. He wore a smart watch and his hands fingers were long and skinny. I finally realized what people meant when they said "hands of a pianist".  He was extraordinarily pale, his skin almost translucent in places, showcasing a spiderweb of blue veins. He held himself very easily, with confidence, like someone who felt supremely comfortable in their own skin. What can I say? I immediately liked him.

This threw a huge wrench in my plans.

"Welcome to our house."

We sat down for dinner, which I had prepared two hours before. Roasted lamb with grilled veggies on a bed of pasta. Not too bad if I say so myself. I couldn't let Brianna cook. Brianna is absolutely horrible at cooking, a complete disgrace. She hated it, it was a big point of contention for us. Early in our relationship we would fight over who would cook for guests. One night she gave Mike and Joanne Kosco a bout of food poisoning so powerful they later admitted themselves to the country emergency room for dehydration. "Mike works for the state," she said, in self defense. "He's got great insurance."

After that night, we struck an agreement. I would do all the cooking, she would take all the credit.

Matt spoke up. "This food is wonderful Mrs. DeMarco!"

She beamed. "Thanks Matt. Know what my special trick is?"

Matt wiped his mouth with his napkin in a very upscale way (I reflected at that moment that no one had ever wiped their mouth like that in our dining room before), and turned his attention. Brianna continued, "I include a little vanilla in the sauce and let it simmer for an hour. It breaks down into a really wonderful flavor, you probably didn't notice." Lisa started laughing and then started coughing.

Matt slapped her back a couple of times. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," she wheezed with closed eyes, rice stuck to the sides of her mouth.

"She's always been like that," I said. "Real messy eater, horrible to take out to a restaurant."

Matt laughed. "You're telling me. The first time we----"

Lisa spoke up, hastily clearing her throat. "Don't you tell that story."

Matt continued in a whisper, looking at Brianna first and then me. Lisa put on a mock look of dissatisfaction, the kind of look she would use with me as a kid.

"The first time we went out for dinner, everything's going great. At first. But then, as time goes on, Lisa starts to act weird. I couldn't really put my finger on it. But weird."

Lisa is covering her face with shame.

Matt continues, motioning with his hands. "So she's acting weird, and of course, I ask her if the foods okay. She says its fine. I ask if she sure and she says its fine again, so I drop it. I grew up with a sister who was a very picky eaters, so I know the signs."

He turns to me and says, "So I start to look at her plate and I notice that its almost empty---"

Brianna cuts in again, laughing so hard she can hardly speak. "Matt, please, don't."

Matt stops, smiles, and then continues on even louder and more confident than before. "So I notice her plate is almost empty and I ask her,  "Where are you putting this food? Her plate was completely empty at this point, I mean, she cleared it. Completely gone!"

At this point Lisa was almost in tears, laughing her snorting, inhaling laugh of hers. I had never seen her laugh like that before. But the story wasn't done. The best part was yet to come.

"This story is not done." Matt said. "The best part hasn't even happened yet." He clears his throat and closes his eyes for a moment, like he's rehearsing the next few lines in his head.

"So the waitress comes and collects our plates, and you can tell she was a little surprised too, but she was a very professional lady, so she didn't stare too long. She's grabs Lisa's plate, and Lisa goes to drop her napkin on top. She brings her napkin up for her lap, underneath the table, and its all balled up, and as shes placing it on her plate, it sort of unravels a little bit, the cloths just unballs itself and spreads open, and all of this food pours out of it, I'm talking like an avalanche of food, everything from her plate basically, artichokes, ravioli, spinach, there were things in that napkin that I didn't even know we had ordered. She had been squirreling away all of this food over the past forty-five minutes."

Lisa is laughing so hard that no noise is coming out. A neighborhood predator, creeping through our backyard, peering through the window, could not have been faulted for assuming her to be having some sort of seizure. This is the type of laughter that we were witnessing.

Brianna is smiling really widely, and looking at me the whole time. "Remember?"

My cue. I wrack my brain for a relevant memory. Pure panic for a moment, and then, I've got it. I compose myself before starting, trying my best to appear as though these stories are bundled in my brain in groups of ten, instead of hidden away one by one behind cobwebs and thousands of hours of SportsCenter statistics.

"When Lisa was, oh I don't know, about six years old," I said, "she would do the same thing. For about two months the only thing that she would eat was peanut butter and potatoes, weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life."

Brianna speaks up, her eyes sparkling. "Mr. Strict Dad over here was helpless. Didn't do a darn thing."

"What could I do? For a while I didn't even know she was hiding the food. She would never say anything, never complain, nothing. Just automatically begin to sneak it into her napkin, or stuff it into her pockets."

Lisa is again covering her face in shame. She's stopped laughing, her dark sphinx eyes peeking through her spread fingers, her smile wide and a little toothy, madly happy.

"Anyway, yeah, this went on for like two whole months before someone finally caught her. She was at a friend's birthday party. The blonde girl with all the pet birds. Nancy?"

"Nina." Lisa whispers, still staring, still smiling her sweet, knowing, mysterious gypsy smile. She hasn't looked at me this intently in years.

"Yeah, Nina, that's what I said. Anyway, Nina's parents throw her a birthday party and invite all her friends, and they cook up a bunch of food, and bake a cake, the whole nine yards. Later that night, Mom goes to pick her up. Total disaster. Food everywhere. I'm talkin' her backpack, her jacket pockets. Absolute disgrace," I chuckle.

Matt is staring at Lisa, Lisa is staring at me, Brianna is alternating between me and Lisa, and I'm staring at the ceiling trying to remember where I was that night.

Later, I sit with Brianna in the living room. Matt and Lisa stay in the kitchen and take care of the dishes. He's washing, she's drying. After she dries a dish, she places it upside down in the cabinet. I poke Brianna in the ribs. "Notice that?"

She looks over and turns back to me, one African-American gypsy eyebrow raised seductively. "Sexual tension, I noticed it too."

"No, dammit Brianna. The glasses!" I hiss angrily.

"So what?"

"It's different! We always dried them a different way."

She touches my chest and doesn't say anything. I feel a little stupid and turn back around.

Brianna drove them back to the train station. I sat in the living room and wept silently for about five minutes. Just wept. The kind of weeping that looks more like chest spasms, or cardiac arrest. The kind of weeping that looks like a ghost is performing the Heimlich maneuver on you. The tears stopped suddenly like they always do, and I felt a little fake, like I always do after I cry. My chest was sore and my hands were clenched tight, but the rest of my body felt cool and loose. I felt the wind blow in from the open window across the room. It was good air, late April after a rainstorm kind of air. I felt the softness of the couch on the skin of my arms and on the back of my neck. I lay there for a while longer and then stood up, walked to the kitchen and flipped the glasses right side up. I felt a little childish. I flipped them back again, turning them upside down, and then shut the cabinet a little too loudly.

I turned around and looked at the empty kitchen. I looked at the linoleum where Lisa had built a fort under the scuffed garage sale table set. I looked at the refrigerator, where the ghosts of a dozen elementary school spelling tests still silently prowled. I looked at the stove top where I had watched mother and daughter stand together, attempting to fix a mangled and burnt father's day cake. I stood and looked and remembered. I stood and mused on the sin of aging. I looked and dreamed of time travel.

Power Plant

A new power company had moved into our neighborhood and was at war with the old power company. The war was fought over control of our electric bill. The electricity still came from the local power plant, there was no question about that. I realized that the only difference between Company A and Company B would be the logo on top of the monthly bill. The blender would still work, as would the microwave, even the teddy bear nightlight in the empty room. Everything would go on as it did before.

Still, I felt special, like they were fighting over me. At first, the war was fought with pamphlets and flyers. I came home one day in autumn and from across the dry lawn, I could see a neon blue flyer tucked neatly into the screen door. The next day another flyer, this time a deep red, was placed in the same spot. Cath said it was more of a "burgundy". She liked it so much, she pinned it to the fridge with two souvenir magnets from my uncle's retirement party in Barbados.

The following day brought another blue flyer, which I immediately hung on the fridge, right next to the burgundy, using two souvenir magnets from my parent's 35th wedding anniversary in the Dominican Republic. I was brushing my teeth that night, when Cath shouted from downstairs, "Oh, so you like that company better?"

"Not really," I mumbled back through the toothpaste, but I don't think she heard me. The truth was that I didn't have an opinion, but I couldn't swallow the idea of her monopolizing the fridge.

The next day, three more burgundy flyers had appeared on the fridge, held up with souvenir magnets from my brother's 28th birthday bash in Key West. I suspected that Cath had stolen them from around the neighborhood, but said nothing.

By the time an actual human came to ring our doorbell, our refrigerator was completely covered in these flyers with glittering Carribean-themed magnets peeking through the cracks. We invited Mr. Burgundy into the house. Actually, Cath invited him in. I used to answer the door, but the sound of the bell now gives me panic attacks, so Cath has taken over as resident gatekeeper. I let her do the talking.

She sat him down at the kitchen table. He kept tapping with his fingers on his blue clipboard, one of those that doubles as a waterproof binder. I stood next to the dishwasher while they chatted about variable rates. "Looming", Cath calls it. She used to say to me, "You're six foot five. You're too tall to stand over people when they sit." 

It seemed like the conversation was going pretty well, until Cath got up to grab a jar of lemonade and the man, turning politely, happened to glance at the impromptu refrigerator shrine.To his credit, he recovered pretty quickly, but there was no hiding the horror in his eyes as he turned back around, his chair squeaking against the linoleum. "Wonderful house you have here."

Out of guilt or possibly embarrassment, we spent the next fifteen minutes signing the paperwork to open an account. As we ushered the man out, he explained that we might experience a very brief power disruption as the service was switched over. "Don't forget to reset your clocks!" He laughed nervously, threw one last glance towards the kitchen, and politely jogged to his van.

The power went out sometime early in the morning the very next day. I started watching the Goonies on demand at midnight and I fell asleep before they made it to the wishing well. When I woke up, the TV was off and Cath had pulled a blanket on top of me. I got up and, with moaning ankles, made my way to the kitchen for water. All the lights were out. Even the digital clock on the oven was missing. Fortunately, Cath's old clock from college was mounted on the wall. Its glow in the dark hands pointed to 3AM over a "Dole '96!!!" background.

When I woke up again, it was ten in the morning. Cath had already taped the refrigerator door shut.

I was limited to canned foods. I had inherited a considerable collection about five years earlier when my brother in law died. He had been a doomsday prepper, one of those people who prepares for societal collapse by hoarding canned food, ammunition, and pennies minted before 1982. He had kept a blog called "Peter the Prepper". When he died, Cath had asked me to help her take down the website. I couldn't figure it out, and she was crying every night. After a week, the crying turned into dry sobbing, so I just blocked the site on her computer so she could get some sleep and rehydrate.

My options were peaches, baked beans, or evaporated milk. I decided to go with peaches. With my mind set on playing solitaire, I spent the next twenty minutes searching for a deck, before concluding that Cath had already claimed them. The house was really quiet. It was missing all the tiny sounds associated with electricity, the humming, the creaking, the hissing. I ended up spending the next six hours alphabetizing my collection of Magic the Gathering cards.

I went upstairs to take a shower. Cath's door was closed, and it was quiet on the other side, so I carefully placed my mouth near the crack and whispered, "Hey, is the water heater still working?" I waited a moment and then pressed my ear closer. I could hear the faintest echo of her breathing. She was never a loud sleeper, but never silent either. If I had to pick three words to describe Cath, "quiet, steady, snoring" wouldn't be the worst choice. I had mostly forgotten the sound.

Later, we ate dinner together. I ordered pizza and clumsily lit a couple of candles. Cath placed a bottle of wine on the table and spooned salad into two bowls. She ate with small bites and spent most of the time examining the buttons on her shirt. This made me curious about the buttons on my shirt, so I looked down to find a white tee with a stain. At first, I was disappointed by the lack of buttons, but I soon began to notice a striking resemblance between my stain and the island of Great Britain, which held my attention for several minutes.

I looked back up and Cath was staring at me. It was her unique, trademark expression, the same look she had given me after our first date, like I had done something wrong, committed some horrible and unspoken social offense. The look that made me hesitate when I picked up the phone to ask her for a second date. The look that I later learned wasn't cold at all, but merely an unconscious reflex, emerging when she lost herself in maximum fascination, maximum affection. She was, under the surface, warmer and more vulnerable than anyone I had ever known. Outwardly, she was molded in the form of something harder, more oblique. Inwardly, she was tender, an extraordinarily deep reserve of empathy.

It had taken my family much longer to see it than me, but even they had eventually acknowledged her loyalty, her truthfulness, her magnetism to small and broken things, the baby birds she had rescued, the spiders she would spend hours carefully seducing into the narrow gap between a cup and credit card, the aquarium-loving boy across the street whom, for his birthday, she surprised with a tank she had found at a yard sale and de-scratched in our garage. I had no idea she went to yard sales. I had no idea she knew how to remove scratches from glass.

In recent years, it seemed that her capacity for selflessness grew at approximately the same rate as mine decreased. Maybe I hated it for it. Her face was now etched with lines, small ones at the corners of her eyes, and deeper ones that no one could see except me.

The kitchen was dark now, the cabinets flickered with the funeral flames of the candles. Cath looked at me for a moment, and I knew the moment would end, knew everything would end eventually. Still, I tried frantically to hold on to something, anything. Words moved on the back of my tongue and then collapsed, frozen, choking. I realized I had forgotten what her mouth tasted like. I realized I had forgotten the recipe for the triple cheese nachos we had invented the night before our wedding. I realized I would never play basketball again. I realized that over the last five years, she had lost so much more than I had. I looked down to see someone else clenching my silverware, their knuckles straining white.

The lights came back on a few moments later and I dropped my pizza in surprise. Cath giggled softly. There was a time, not so long ago now, when I would have desperately tried something else to make her laugh again. I would have acted like an idiot, made a ridiculous face or an embarrassing sound effect, anything, just to further propel the delicate momentum of her laughter.

Now I sat, surrounded by walls buzzing with electricity.

"I'll clean up."

She smiled and murmured a soft thanks before heading upstairs.

I continued to sit for a few minutes more, trying to think of five years ago, trying to think of five minutes ago. The fridge sat, the compressor quietly humming, its front face covered with flyers, its door still taped shut. I sat there for a few minutes more and then got up, stacked the dishes and, with moaning ankles, made my way to the sink.

Back Room

I recently organized my memory box. Surely everyone has something like this, right? A cardboard box full of old receipts, post cards, and photographs? Mine is a gray plastic milk carton with deep scratches, and a faded warning labeled on the side proclaiming "case misuse punishable by law". It includes a couple of long discarded cell phones, my Gameboy color from 1998, and a mysterious USB drive (I did not check the contents, in this case imagination is likely far more enjoyable than reality). I have never organized this box before. It has moved around a lot, seen the inside of the closet of my college dorm rooms, the underside of my mattress in a dingy Queens apartment, and most recently the attic of my mom's house. It has seen a lot of the inside of my car. Things have been added to it over time. There is a ticket for a 2008 Death Cab for Cutie concert at M Park Pool in Brooklyn, a concert I went to as a senior in high school with my best friend's older sister who I was lackadaisically in love with. There is a wrinkled composition book from high school, filled with my rambling critiques of an assigned piece of poetry.

In 2015 I read forty four books. This is six shy of the fifty books that I pledged to myself that I would read. The list is below:

Submergence - J.M. Ledgard

Giraffe - J.M. Ledgard

Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolf

Crow Fair - Thomas McGuane

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Old Gringo -- Carlos Fuentes

Anthem -- Ayn Rand

Missoula -- John Krakauer

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Nothing's Impossible - Lorraine Monroe

The Possession - Annie Ernaux

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

Beacon 23 - Hugh Howey

Injured Reserves - DC Bourune

The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Flatland - Edwin Abbott Abbott

In the Orchard, the Swallows - Peter Hobbs

Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick

Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson

Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius - Leonard Shlain

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Into the Woods - Bill Bryson

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Trial - Franz Kafka

The Girl from Krakow - Alex Rosenberg

The Hundred Year Flood - Matthew Salesses

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie

Blindsided - Jay Giles

A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Crystal Crypt - Philip K. Dick

The Scarlet Plague - Jack London

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan

My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

The Next 100 Years - George Freidman

So, I've failed my resolution to read 50 books in a year. My most ardent fans will remember that this marks the second consecutive year I have failed to meet the same resolution. I'm not too upset about it, overall. Of course I would have loved to have met my goal. But let's face facts: I read a lot more than most people do, and some of these books were pretty amazing. It's funny now, glancing back through the list. I think more about the circumstances surrounding the reading than the actual content of the book. Of course, some plot shines through, some characters cling, but the first memory is almost always where I was and what I was doing while reading it. 

There was a big chunk of these books read during the summer on my motorcycle road trip. I downloaded a big chunk of them to my Kindle and just blasted through them, one after the other, late at night, tucked away in my dark tent, listening to the engine of my nearby Honda slowly tick away as it cooled down. 

I remember being frightened, bruised, and exhausted, reading The Emperor of All Maladies in the backwoods of the the Arapho National Forest. I had just blown out my front tire and crashed, and I was miles from the nearest gas station. But I remember reading that book and thinking about cancer and the history of cancer research, and I was taken away from that situation and completely transported to a world of malignant cells and radiation treatment and surgical margins. That book helped me to forget myself for a few hours, and this happened with almost every book I read this year. Books can transport you, and that is what makes them so great. That is what, in my opinion, make authors such powerful people. 

The best book I read this year was probably a tie between The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes (dark, haunting, beautiful) and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (irreverant and honest).

My resolution for the new year will be to write (and publish to this blog) one piece of short fiction every month.

Here's a photograph I took near Montauk Point Lighthouse.