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No, not that word. You must be hearing things. Imagining things. Something wrong with you.
“What? She’s—what?”
Her husband paused a long time, staring into middle distance before adding, “My dad’ll be a nightmare.”
“Your—your poor mom,” she managed to stammer.
Her husband rested his head in his hands. “A nightmare. He doesn’t even know how to run the washing machine.”
Her own father lived alone. Her mother had been proudly thrifty, repairing broken appliances, computers, and bicycles for friends and neighbors. But after she died, he focused obsessively on fulfilling his wife’s “waste not, want not” admonitions. He collected broken things, clogging his house with them as if he thought that the right thing, the perfectly imperfect thing, might lure his wife back from oblivion. Over the years his walls of split wicker chairs, speakers bristling fuzzed wires, dusty motherboards grew soimpenetrable that when she took the children to visit, they stayed at a hotel, pushed from the house by the piles of his beloved, moldering memorials.
Yet even her father knew how to use a washing machine.
“Your dad was a successful lawyer. He’s capable. Maybe he’ll rise to the occasion?” She knew this was pure denial, and her voice faltered. “Not that we shouldn’t help your mom, obviously, I’m not saying that.”
Her husband shook his head. “He’s not going to lift a finger.”
She nodded. She knew. For years she’d silently observed her father-in-law, trying to understand him, trying to comprehend the vicissitudes of his moods. She’d focused close, as if the older man were a specimen under a microscope, acting and reacting to this or that stimulus. She’d eyed him from afar, hoping to get a whole, telescopic picture. She’d experimented with questions about his childhood, his beliefs, the older man a cow heart, a fetal pig laid on a metal lab table, in need of dissection to make sense of him.
When her husband (then boyfriend) introduced her to his parents senior year of college, a fluttering hope pounded her heart.
A real family. Mother, father, child.
Physically, her husband, compact and dark like his mother, barely resembled his tall, fair, thin father. But at that first meeting she recognized clear similarities.
Both talkative. Athletic. Confident. Loud. Quick to laugh. Able to wick a smile out of even the most pinched-faced stranger.
“You know what I like about you? You’ve got conversation enough for the both of us,” she’d teased her husband early in their relationship.
But it was true. Next to her gregarious husband she felt a part of things, despite being quiet. Despite being chronically incapable of small talk.
Her mother-in-law was quiet, too, only chiming in to compliment the food. Note the weather. Prompting her husband and son to discuss their day.
Is she the opposite of you, quiet because she’sonlycapable of small talk? Or is she like you, instinctually holding her cards close to her chest?
A few weeks after he introduced her to his parents, she was studying in her husband’s room when he told his father over the phone he wouldn’t be applying to law school.Crack!went the superficial, candy-colored veneer of her first impression as the older man screamed admonitions about expectations, wasted money, his bellowing tinny over the phone. “You’ve lost all respect! What the hell am I supposed to tell the men at the club?”
A month later her husband told his father he’d switched his major from political science to photography—a decision effectively made years before as he’d accumulated art credit after art credit. The calls became a constant, the phone vibrating with the older man’s fury.
“You don’t know what real work is. You want to swan into—what—some wussy little art world? Be famous? It’s humiliating.”
Why did her husband always answer the phone?
“He’ll get over it. He’s all smoke and no fire.”
But her husband’s father refused to pay his tuition. When his son still didn’t back down, still didn’t agree to go to law school, took out loans to pay for his last year of school himself, his father refocused his venom.
“I didn’t raise you like this. We’ve worked toward you being an attorney your whole life. You never behaved this way before you metthat girl. Christ. She’s disfigured!”
Her husband hung up on him. But even then, fuming and pacing, he picked up the phone when the man instantly called back, apoplectic.
“How dare you interrupt me?”
If that’s what his family thinks of you, it might end this relationship. His father might wear him down. Or wear you out. And do you really want someone like that in your life?
“They’re my family. I’m their only son. Once I start earning money, he’ll relax.”
Her husband had to be right. Family must be worth it. What did she know, really? There were the nine beautiful years her mother was still alive, idealized, she was sure, to a luminous sheen of perfection. There were the stable years when Grandma moved from Alabama to live with them, full of strict, loyal love and clear expectations. But ever since Grandma’s death, she’d been alone, her father dedicating himself to the shattered fragments of things he’d never repair.
