Young Writers Society

It's a funny name. Alone of the familial addresses, it wants an article for completeness, a hinging my or the to protect it from sticking its foot in its mouth and supposing too much intimacy on the part of its speaker. In French, it can also mean: father of my someday husband, and in fact this causes my teacher much confusion, the third day of school, when I turn in a strictly autobiographical composition riddled with errors like aphids among the rose buds.

Such confusion.

He's a funny man.

He pauses before he laughs, and makes other people laugh violently, jokes a second nature cemented over the first. I would think him really quite clever, I assume, if it weren't for the fact that my father's subtlety has spoiled me, left me unfit for cleaner, simpler fancies. And maybe I spend too much time watching him to hear the music in his turns of phrase.

I know a little of him. The observation, it pays off in fits and starts.

He's twelve years her senior. He has a bald spot. Under the brown-gold threads that stripe his skull like railroad tracks, his scalp is brown, tough, spotted: a nakedness so old it doesn't even have the decency to look vulnerable. His face, on the other hand, is punctuated by worry: parentheses around his mouth, commas at the corners of his eyes, and no full stop in sight. Anxiety a -- prison -- sentence without an end, easy to read thanks to that careful, desperate grammar. I suspect he is afraid of her and her brilliance, and he does not understand her, and he is not only old but too old, and too innocent. I am the child who preceded him. It is my business to suspect such things, which are nasty and almost true.

Either way I try not to watch them together. Too closely, that is.

Tolstoy said, I think-- I am not good or even notably bad at classics-- that all happy families are alike. And, well, it is worth observing that our family has never before owned up to a story this familiar, this archetypical, this old; an architecture this suburban, following the same model as the house down the street. It is very possible, then, that we are a happy family, here and now, with his existence is folded over ours like medicine-soaked gauze. Of course, we are not an injured bone, ready to be cleaned of the past, for all that that past is sometimes, often, the color and consistency of blood. And a crumpled diaphanous cloth without a wound to seal, draped over unbroken skin -- what can it hope to be? A fashion statement? A flag of surrender?

But we are not so interesting that our strange stripes cannot be concealed by cotton. (Is that what gauze is made out of? Probably not.) No we are not. So it is very, very possible that we are a happy family.

I hope he does my mother good and I hope she doesn't destroy him but god help me, I'm no prophet despite my apocalyptic dreams. Sometimes, as now, I try to analyze, to decompose as was my want, soft mushroom child gnawing at old stumps; but my words skirt the woody tangle, running to hide behind their mother's skirts, huddling in the shadows of other people's stories, other people's anger or relief or numb despair. I forget a great deal of him every time he leaves my field of vision. One step forward, two steps back.

Whatever I expected, it wasn't this. This -- this faint irrelevance, this disinterest stubbornly clogging my throat, these meals we eat in silence, glancing at each other now and then across the long glass tabletop while outside the sky turns to dusk and the flat clouds with their dark undersides are made manta rays, skudding across the clear shallow blue.