Now, I suppose I must explain Father. I guess I have a lot of explaining to do so I’ll start with Trenton Malone, a selfish bastard whom I see about twice a year when he’s gracious enough to invite me to his holiday gatherings with his wife Carla, a young tart who gave birth to my half-sister Ashley exactly six months after my father moved out of our home. Even at twelve years old, I could do the math. Then came Whitney and Paige, pushing me even further into the margins of Father’s life.
I refuse to call him “my father.” He’s known as either “Sperm Donor” or “Father.” I like to call him Father because it is so formal it reminds him that we have no familiarity. The sound of my voice calling him Father poses such a hideously beautiful contrast to the voices of his daughters calling him “Daddy.” Whenever we’re at events and the older Goldilocks Sisters start in with “Daddy this” and “Daddy that,” I always make a point of going up to him (preferably in front of large groups of guests) and saying with the gloom of Morticia Addams, “Father, you’re running low on canapés.”
Chad’s unexpected apology brought me back to the restaurant. “We just care about you, love,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so hard on you, but I think you’re making a terrible mistake and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
Sophie agreed. “This all does seem rather sudden, you must admit. Let me ask you, what is it that you love about Matt?”
“I guess I love the way he makes me feel,” I answered. “He makes me feel, what’s the word? Visible. Heard. He makes me feel whole. He completes me.”
“Isn’t that a line from
Jerry Maguire?”
asked Jennifer.
“I don’t remember if it is, but it’s the truth!” I protested. “Matt completes me,” I said, satisfied that I’d answered their question. I signed the credit card slip and left the copy inside the folder for our waiter to pick up.
“Complete yourself, love,” said Chad. “What are you telling us, that you’re incomplete? Come on. You’re a hip, good looking New Yorker with an Ivy League MBA and a partnership at one of the biggest accounting firms on the planet. You’re in good health, you spend your free time the way you like, you’ve got a closet full of beautiful clothes and fabulous friends like us to hang out with. I don’t know how to break it to you, honey, but you are complete. Whether you know it or not, Prudence Malone, you
are
complete.” He smiled. “Now, tell us about the underwear ripping thing again. That
was
kind of hot.”
“Do you guys think I’m a slut?” I asked.
“A
complete
slut,” Jennifer laughed.
Sophie had a philosophy on sluts too. When she spoke, Sophie reminded me of honey being poured on a very grateful apple. It’s as if she knows she’s got something special to say and isn’t afraid to make you wait for it. “Women who are branded sluts are truly independent thinkers who dare to question and indeed redefine social mores. They’re frightening to the patriarchal construct because they live life on their own terms. I hate when women are called sluts. It’s so typically American to be so hung up about sex.” Sophie regularly defended her own lifestyle through abstract arguments that sound as though they might be from a cultural anthropology class taught by Hugh Hefner.
The table was silent. “Before I give you the big ‘you go, girl,’ let me clarify one thing,” began Chad. “Isn’t your family from Mexico? Didn’t you spend most of your life in San Diego?”
Sophie nodded, perplexed, as we all laughed.
“What is so funny?” asked Sophie.
Chad caught his breath. “Not exactly a bastion of sexual freedom, love. ‘It’s so American,’” he said, imitating her. “It’s not like you’re from Brazil, honey. You’re from San Diego. Didn’t they host the Republican convention there? Ever heard anyone singing about not forgetting to put flowers in your hair when you go to
San Diego?
”
We all laughed.
“Honey, say it’s stupid, say it’s rigid, but ‘it’s so typically American’ sounds like you’re from a band of gypsy whores who traveled the back roads of Turkey giving blow jobs for gas money.”
She joined in the laughter. “We
did
give blow jobs for gas money. Shut up and stop disrespecting our family business!”
“Okay, back to Prudence,” Jennifer directed. “What do you need from us to help find Reilly a new wife? Sounds like you’ve got some kind of
I Love Lucy
type of scheme up your sleeve, and if that’s the case, let me be the first to say, count me in!”
“And let me the first to say, count me out,” said Chad. “We had drinks last week. You said you were going to Michigan to spend time with your girlfriends. You said you were going for some big football weekend. This is out of nowhere, and I for one think you’re out of your mind. I’ll have no part of this. No part. Do you understand?”
Chad was right. The highlight of my weekend was supposed to be seeing Cindy and Evie. If University of Michigan won its football game, even better. Never did I predict that the homecoming weekend would begin a chain of events that would fundamentally change my life. Chad once told me that when he painted, the canvas always ended up completely different than what he’d originally envisioned. He said his process was one where unexpected choices had to be made, and that art was about being open to the change that would inevitably unfold before us. I thought it sounded a bit goofy at the time, but now I’d give anything for him to apply this philosophy to my current dilemma.
Chapter 2
From the moment Evie picked me up from the Detroit airport on Friday night, we recognized our present differences before remembering our shared history. Waving her arms at the airport gate, she started mouthing something and laughing as she pointed at me.
“What?” I said as I hugged her. “What were you saying?”
“Omigahd,” she laughed again. “You are such the after shot now. You look so, so New York.”
Youaaare such the aaaafter shaaat naaaw.
Michigan. This state has been sponsored by the Letter A.
In college when I teased Evie about her Michigan accent, she smacked me back in place by saying, “Tank Gawd yous New Yawkahs came to teach us how to tawk right.”
I was glad Evie noticed and seemingly approved of my shedding the 1980s leg warmers and big hair for a more urban, new millennium look. I was wearing my straight-lined black suit with a white blouse underneath, chunky black leather heels and a long black leather coat. I now dye my naturally mousy brown hair jet black and spend forty minutes every morning trying to get my short cropped cut to look just-out-of-bed messy.
“Love the glasses,” Evie said of my thick black frames. In the 1950s, they’d have been considered nerd glasses; today they’re hip. “Is there anything even wrong with your eyes?”
“Not a thing. Still twenty-twenty,” I said before hugging Evie again.
“Would you believe I’m wearing bifocals these days?” she asked. Actually, I would. Evie was still an attractive woman, but looked as if someone rubbed over her with an eraser. I wondered if she was thinking the same of me. I noticed that the half moons that formed around the outside of her lips didn’t go away when Evie stopped smiling. I refrained from smoothing over that area of my own face with my finger.
In the absence of response, I smiled. “Let’s grab my bags and go for a bite, okay? I am absolutely starving,” I suggested.
Evie maintained her Talbot’s preppy look from college, but it had matured from knapsack to purse. A band of renegade grays found their way onto her blond head and were threatening a full-on coup any year now.
Cindy said she’d be in at around eight, and we planned to meet her at Rick’s bar at nine for drinks.
“Where do you want to eat?” I asked.
“I can come to Ann Arbor any time. You decide. This is your first time back in, how long, ten years?”
“I haven’t been back since graduation, Evie.”
“Omigahd, has it been that long? Fourteen years? Oh, Prudence, you definitely get to decide where we eat then. You are not going to believe how much Ann Arbor has changed. Where to for dinner?”
“Steve’s Diner,” I asked. “Is that place still around?”
“Lunch,” said Evie.
“No, dinner. Evie, it’s eight at night.”
“No, Steve’s Lunch. It’s called Steve’s Lunch, not Steve’s Diner.”
“Whatever. Does that place still exist?”
Not only was Steve’s Lunch still there, but the place had not changed in the least since we left. How I envied it. Despite its All-American sounding name, Steve’s is a Korean restaurant about the width of two bowling alley lanes. Nineteen sticky black vinyl stools line a glitter-speckled counter overlooking the single grill. Steve’s menu is still posted on a dingy yellow light board on the back wall. The prices hadn’t gone up at all since the place opened its doors in the mid-eighties.
Living in Saginaw, Evie could eat at Steve’s whenever she pleased. The one-man show, presumably Steve, recognized Evie immediately. “Bi Bim Bob?” he asked with the familiarity one would share with a regular.
Evie winked at him. “Hold the meat on one of them. You’re still doing the vegetarian thing, right, Prudence?”
I nodded. Five minutes later, my taste buds were on a sentimental journey delivered in a metal bowl. Steve’s specialty was a half basketball-sized silver bowl of rice, vegetables, ground meat and a fried egg on top. And of course some secret ingredients that prevented civilians from trying to recreate the meal at home.
As we left Steve’s, Evie told me we had fifteen minutes to walk around campus before meeting Cindy at Rick’s. Stepping into the autumn night in Ann Arbor was like being slapped in the face by a piece of frozen aluminum siding. Evie and I turned up our coat collars and looked at each other to confirm that we were really going to go through with our journey.
I saw the arch of the West Engineering Building, where legend had it that couples who kiss underneath at the stroke of midnight remain in love forever. I remembered the night Matt and I did this after dating for about two months. It was an unusually sweet gesture from a guy who was far too cool to engage in any type of romantic sentimentality. Luckily for me, he’d drunk quite a bit that night.
On what’s known as “The Diag,” the very center of the Michigan campus, coat-bundled students passed a joint around in a circle. Signs welcoming the graduating classes from different years hung between the old trees. Hand-lettered announcements about protests, boycotts and teach-ins cluttered kiosks. I felt betrayed that Ann Arbor had gone on without me, guilty that I had abandoned it.
A breeze blew the front page of the
Michigan Daily
down the street. It rushed to greet me the way a dog does his owner. “Gross,” Evie apologized, peeling the campus news from my thigh.
“It’s in color now,” I said.
“Hmm?” Evie asked.
“The
Daily.
They print it in color now. I’m not sure I’m crazy about that.”
“Oh,” she dismissed. “I guess they thought it looked better that way.”
“Shit!” Evie said looking at her watch. “Cindy’s probably waiting for us at the bar.”
Cindy was already standing at the bar flanked by the only two guys at Rick’s so early in the evening. She had this effect on men wherever we went. Cindy is now a journalist in Minneapolis, where she lived with her husband and two children. Her look is neither mother nor newspaper reporter. She has a mass of long, wavy “come fuck me” hair and a body so perfect it only reinforced the invitation. She was tall — most of it legs — and thin without looking emaciated. Her boobs were so round that you’d swear they cost her three grand. However, in one of life’s many great injustices, my pal Cindy had never once been under the surgeon’s knife, not even for a necessary medical procedure. She’s just nature’s little way of saying, “Look what I can do if I really concentrate.” Cindy spoke with such animation that her hair bounced around from side to side whenever she really got going with a story. I could imagine Minneapolis city officials being interviewed by her, mesmerized by her hair, mindlessly spilling the confidential information that would cost their corrupt boss’s head.
Cindy hopped off her stool when she saw Evie and me at the entrance. “Bye guys,” she said as she gave her dismissed fan club members each a simultaneous pat on the shoulders. She ran to us with arms wide open, and pulled Evie and me close to her with a hug. “I am so excited to see you two!” she exclaimed. “God this place is dead, though. I forget the night is young for these kids. Nine o’clock and I’m ready to collapse, but these kids aren’t up at seven working and cooking dinner and changing poopy diapers now, are they?”
Why must she keep saying “these kids”?
“Can we get a nice Merlot?” I asked the bartender.
He stared at me for a moment, then flashed a gorgeous sheepish smile. “I’m new here so you’re going to have to help me out. What’s in a Merlot?”
I needed that Merlot more than ever. “Grapes,” I smiled broadly, hoping he thought my smile was as attractive as I found his, but at the same time knowing he couldn’t.
“Grapes?” he puzzled. “Oh, okay. Merlot is wine. Grapes, I get it. Okay, okay, I know we’ve got some wine around here somewhere. Let me check in the back.”
He returned to our table five minutes later with a bottle of white wine. Wiping the bottle with his bar rag, the bartender flashed us his winning smile again. “A very good year,” he said in a charmingly self-deprecating way.
“Indeed,” said Cindy as she watched him walk away.
For the next hour, Cindy and Evie swapped photos and stories of their children, which was interesting for the first five minutes. After twenty, I started playing a game where I counted how many times each said the word “we” or “our.” In fairness, Cindy did have quite a few outside interests, but just as all roads lead to Damascus, all conversation eventually came back to the blessed hearth and home. Part of me felt like their lives of spreading peanut butter, slicing cake and driving to tumble gyms (something I’d never heard of till then) sounded like pure servitude. I had visions of Evie like Sisyphus pushing a stroller up one of Michigan’s few hills every day. I saw Cindy wearing bright red PVC leg shackles made by Tonka. On her, they looked cute. The other part of me felt a bit envious. I didn’t want to trade in my life for a lawnmower and PTA membership, but I did want a “we.” I wanted to say “our.”