That Weird Quiet Girl in the Corner

I called my parents yesterday afternoon and invited myself over for tonight’s dinner. My mom, upon announcing that they were going to be having chicken stir-fry for Sunday’s dinner, thought she had me foiled. But — ah! I fired back with, “I bought some Morningstar Farms fake chicken strips. I’ll just bring those over and cook them!” I will win them over yet! They will eat dinner with me, and at least enjoy my conversation, if not my fake chicken.

One of my high school English teachers warned my class that we would all someday be met with the sobering epiphany that our parents are, indeed, real people. I waited for that for a long time, expecting to eventually witness my mom or dad having an emotional breakdown, or have a moment of moral trauma a la Lisa Simpson when she watched Marge eating unpaid-for grapes in the supermarket. I lived with a vague sense of worry that I would one day be hit with a loss-of-innocence revelation so intense that I’d be left lying on my back on my bed for days, finally arising feeling hungry and empty, and my eyes a little duller than before.

What I expected never happened; what I got was an almanac of moments that revealed the undersides of their characters to me bit by bit, memories that came to me long after the fact and persisted in showing themselves to me until I admitted to myself what they meant. Sitting helplessly in the passenger seat of my dad’s vinyl-seated Toyota Tercel as he got teary over the death of John Denver. Watching my mom jog up and down our short, creaky, carpeted hallway in her flimsy Keds, attempting to fit in twenty minutes of exercise on a weeknight in January. Remembering that we used to occasionally get together with my dad’s very tall and tanned stepbrother, and wondering why it’s been ten years since I heard a word about him and his lawnmower sales business. Knowing that my mom and I have the same unfortunate habit of getting up at 6:30 AM and finding a way to still be wearing pajamas and grumbling in front the closet at 8:30 AM. Watching my dad resign himself to throwing away the soot-covered books that were recovered after the fire at his childhood home in Florida. We rescued those books from his oft-burglarized storage unit one summer during the early 90s, and besides the one time that I dragged a sooty Shakespeare compendium upstairs to read, they’ve just sat in the garage for years. He offered me anything I wanted, but I knew I didn’t have any more use for a dusty suitcase full of blackened Dickens books than he did.

I wonder what moments from my current relationship with my parents will start glaring at me with didactic persistence in the next five years. Lately there have been the relationship ruts my parents and I have fallen into in the time since I graduated college and moved in with Adam — how they don’t call me unless I’ve instructed them to do so at a particular time and for a particular reason, how we have to plan even the most humdrum dinner get-togethers at least a day in advance, how I’d be shocked out my skull if they ever showed up at my and Adam’s apartment because they were in the neighborhood and thought we might like to go out to dinner with them. This is human, I realize. Their insecurities and their phone phobia with me probably follow along the same lines of how my thoughts whip themselves up into a dizzying mess every time I try to sit down and write an e-mail to anyone I’ve known for years but haven’t written to in months (“Why would they want to hear from me right now? I’m sure their life is a hundred times more fun and happy and pleasant without my barging my way back into it…”).

And then there are the times, however occasional, that I note something a little more insidious going on between my mom and me. She suggests that when I finish up with the Big S contract in the fall, I go back to my old gig of fighting to get more than ten hours a week of ESL classes at the language school, and she lightly congratulates Adam and me for continuing to rent at this crummy apartment complex that keeps getting batted about from one property management company to another. At some point, my mind considered and then rejected the possibility of getting angry at her. Maybe I was asleep at the time. In any case, I’m not angry. I’m oddly calm, and sometimes amused. Ah! I’ve gotcha, mom. You’re petty and jealous sometimes, and so am I. And since I’m not as desperate and destitute as you’d sometimes like me to be, how about I treat you to a movie next weekend? It’ll be a celebration of these unfortunate traits that we share! Yesterday on the phone, she said that she wanted to see “Breakingback… Mountain?“, and I said I did too, and then, because it seemed like the natural next thing to say, I suggested that we go see it sometime. I think I got a “Hmm” back from her, because think of the phone calls we’d have to make to each other, the coordination of schedules and movie times and theaters and who’s driving and who’s paying. Oh, sheesh, I’ll just wait for the DVD. In the meantime, I hope she likes the way I cook fake chicken.