broccoli "salad," a secret wedding, & $1 plates

 the recipe

Serves: 2-4 servings at a party that really stressed you out to throw, 6-8 servings at a party at which you are a guest, 0 servings at a party consisting solely of New Englanders

Pair with: any kind of full-sugar soda, untouched “fancy” lemonades, polite and impersonal small talk 

Ingredients

Salad

1 head of broccoli, chopped

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

Shredded cheddar cheese, or Daiya, or none (ok)

Several strips of bacon or vegetarian bacon, cut into pieces (okkk)

1 cup raisins (……………………….)

1 half onion, diced

crushed Ritz crackers (Chef’s kiss)

Dressing

1 cup Veganaise or Duke’s mayo

White granulated sugar (because obviously)

Vinegar 

The Quick and Dirty

Whisk together dressing. Assemble salad. Mix salad with dressing. Serve. Or, don’t.  Whatever.  

Complete with crushed Ritz crackers, either by adding them to the “salad” or throwing directly onto the floor.

the essay

“Are you going to cry?” My best friend’s now jauntily slanted eyes peer over her water glass.

I am mid-hysteria.  I am laughing so hard that it almost hurts.  And, I can’t breathe.  Short hiccups of air burst from my mouth, and I scrunch my face as hard as I can—which feels so intoxicatingly good.  It’s the same sensation as slowly submerging myself into warm, lapping water.  It feels so good to laugh; and, then, the tears come embarrassingly fast.

“Yes,” she nods to herself as she eats the leftovers—baked chicken and roasted brussels sprouts—from the dinner Magda wouldn’t touch.  “Perfect.” Miriam, one of my secret “maids” of honor, has just flown in from the midwest to assist in the wedding spectacle. Magda, and her new wine-and-LUNA-Bar-based diet, has been here for a day and a half already.

My face, now a deep burgundy, crumples.  Tears stream down my cheeks in the most euphoric sensation.  I was laughing, and now it feels so good to just cry.  I am thawing.  I don’t know if I can stop.

Magda, usually moonfaced and confused, is horrified and stands between us.  “Is she okay?” She pushes up the side of her glasses in the charming way she always does and squints as she asks, in a near perfect but unintentional impression of an inquisitive child—which is not a far cry from her heavily-sheltered twenty-five-year-old personality.

Miriam says, “This is normal,” and waves her hand as she deftly begins to preoccupy Magda with a new topic so that I may compose myself.  Miriam, who gracefully stepped into my life just as my parents’ match-made-in-hell marriage collapsed, has only known me in crisis.  An impeccable Capricorn, she has always met my descent-into-madness-disguised-as-physical-comedy with calm compartmentalization and then gentle care that does not leave me feeling exposed or unfixable.

I let go of the dull chef’s knife and let it fall into the pile of chopped broccoli.  The smell of frying bacon, which is spilling into every nearby fabric, where it will lurk stubbornly for the next several days, triggered the tears.  It smothers me.

Miriam mercifully ushers Magda into another room.  I tell them I am happy to finish up in the kitchen alone and then head to bed.  “Please, go to sleep!  It’s not a problem.  I need your help in the morning more than right now,” I say honestly.  And, I just want to cry alone in this bacon-scented nightmare.

There is so much more that needs to be done for the housewarming-slash-engagement-slash-graduation party that I am throwing myself and my fiancé (but mostly myself).  I am assembling a “broccoli salad” now.  In the morning, we will make cucumber water and strawberry jalapeño lemonade that no one will touch.  I will pour these into decanters, with chalkboard labels, that I bought from a specialty website specifically for tomorrow.  I will also assemble a vegan pesto salad and a berry spinach salad that will wilt in the hot August sun.  The two layer cakes I made are crumb-coated and sitting on the counter.  I’ll put sickly sweet, handmade cake toppers on them tomorrow.  The rustic bunting, proudly screaming, “WE’RE GETTIN’ HITCHED, Y’ALL!”, is thumb-tacked to the doorway in the dark dining room.  Another one hangs in the barn.  Black gingham tablecloths and burlap table runners are folded by the door, ready to top the picnic tables my partner made and borrowed.  Stacks, totaling 48 white stoneware dishes, flank a buffet, left by previous owners, in the barn.

I am filled to the brim with dread and sadness—and guilt for the dread and sadness.  When I try to reach inside myself and fluff up some excitement like a tired duvet, I instead find that I am just a used plastic bag filled with sharp and jagged shards of glass.  My shattered pieces just don’t fit together like they should.

When we decided to throw this party three months ago (or, rather, when I decided I wanted this party), I was studying for the bar.  I stole a full day from frenzied bar prep to create and assemble the invitations: a white cardstock square covered by a sheet of bubble wrap, enveloped in Kraft paper, and stamped with a FRAGILE sticker to mimic a moving box.  On it, we proclaimed our excitement for our new house—in which we had already been living for eight months (but only four spent in semi-furnished Ikea luxury).  We announced our newest family pet, a greyhound rescue and consolation prize I felt I deserved after playing the rope in my parents’ tug-of-war divorce.  The party was also supposed to be our engagement party, even though we had been engaged for over a year (and, even though we would already be secretly married by that date).  At the last minute, full of brooding self-pity, I also decided to shoe-horn in my graduation, which had gone largely un-commented upon by my family.  

Meticulously planning the event had been therapeutic; but, now that it was here, I felt tacky and selfish for having thrown myself such a party.

“Is this poor etiquette?  Does this sound like bragging?  Does this sound like we just want gifts?”  I asked my partner.

I didn’t ask: Isn’t someone else supposed to throw these parties for you? What if no one likes you enough to do that?  If I throw myself a party, do I like myself too much?  Am I an entitled, selfish brat?

I acknowledge to myself that it is all probably poor etiquette, but I feel cheated out of having any of the “normal” wedding activities that are promised to the deserving, lovable, and Correct young women of the world.  Our long distance relationship, financial difficulty, and the rollercoaster of law school, bar prep, and, now, my family have tanked all of my hopes.  

“I think I’ll just call it an Etc. Party,” as if the compromise is an offering to the wedding gods.

***

On the day of my graduation from law school, I felt so sad.  In the three years I had spent gearing up to this date, neither of my parents had asked what the date of my graduation even was.  

Able had offered, “If you want to go, we can figure something out.”  But money was tight.  We were footing the bill for our entire wedding, which was also to take place that year and which, in hindsight, we should not have held.  In January, nine months before the wedding, I had erupted into a panic attack and breathlessly questioned Able about whether we should just call the whole thing off and, instead, marry each other in our backyard.  Everything about the wedding—from our initial date to the innumerable crises on the settled date—appeared cursed.

On top of the wedding costs, I was paying thousands of dollars for bar prep and another grand to take the bar.  My laptop was begging me to finally say goodbye and send it into hospice.  It didn’t seem financially feasible to somehow travel to the Midwest, find and pay for accommodations, and so on.  

And, even if I did put all of these things on my Banana Republic credit card, I still (oddly) wanted to have parents there.  I’m not sure if I wanted “my” parents there.  Afterall, my previous graduations had not gone well: in the eighth grade, they were not speaking to each other at all, which resulted in my convincing myself that I had done something to enrage them that they refused to tell me about.  In high school, I had enraged my mother earlier that day, which had caused her to shut down and not confirm whether she would attend the ceremony, which turn pissed off my dad, who then yelled at me for creating a problem.  In the end, they both attended, but my mom refused to speak to me and silently took one photo, which depicted my father awkwardly standing next to me, the camera’s flash poetically catching on a tear in my eye that I would not let fall past my lash line.  Given this history, after undergrad, I did not even broach the topic of my graduation, which landed on the same day as Barbie’s community college graduation for her associate’s degree.  I just quietly let it float off into the ether, half thinking that my decision to do so could not possibly be the final take on the issue because, surely, my parents would have intervened.

With this rich tapestry of prior disappointment, I never mentioned law school graduation with my parents, who now could not stand within a 2-mile radius of one another.  I knew neither could afford to go to the Midwest from our tiny rural southern town, and I felt selfish asking.  More importantly, I couldn’t pick one over the other.  My best option was to just not entertain this “need” to be celebrated. 

But the need still existed; it still--to this day--hurts, if I’m honest, which we know I am not always and even more rarely when discussing my feelings.  Today, I’m going into year six of being an attorney, and I still kind of want everyone I know to gently pat my shoulder and say, “I’m so sorry, and I’m really proud of you.  And, you meant well in trying to have no needs.  While unrealistic, that was very compassionate of you.  Graduating was a big deal, and you deserved to be celebrated.  And, I see you carry a wound that probably won’t go away.”  Ideally, every interaction I have should begin with this statement.

The day I should have graduated, I instead went for a walk with Able in the state park we love.  I tried to breathe through the ache.  At some point, my mom called, which was unexpected and, maybe, well, did she know it was my graduation?  Immediately, and without my consent, relief I didn’t know was attainable flooded through me.  I was a kid about to crawl into her lap again.  Like I had been carrying all this weight and sadness and now My Mom was there and I could just give it all to her to sort out.  

When I answered, though, she said, “I have something to tell you.”  She paused, and then quickly gushed, “I didn’t want to tell you before I told your father, but I moved out today and I am seeing someone.”  

“Whew, okay,” I breathed.  I didn’t ask for any details.  Not only did I selfishly wish to sink into myself without asking a single question of interest, I wanted to inoculate myself against the conspiracy that I, as my mother’s daughter, knew or encouraged her to leave.  At the end of the conversation, she asked if Able and I had any fun plans for the day.  

Unable to help myself, I said, “Well, today was supposed to be my graduation, so not that.”  

“Oh, honey bunny, I’m so sorry, I didn’t even know.” 

“I know.”

***

After the bar, wedding planning picked up exponentially.  I now had to do everything I had put off during the hours I spent studying—and the even more hours I spent trying to study but really just rehashing arguments I had with Barbie and my father or singing horrifically off-key to Shawn Mendes’s Stitches as if the lyrics applied to my relationship with my sister. I think it was supposed to be an enjoyable time, picking out and assembling details to celebrate our everlasting love; but I used it as an excuse to not think about my family.  I spent hours finding the best prices for the engagement party supplies: black and white striped paper straws with matching cocktail napkins, forty-eight mason jar mugs, and an endless array of cheap restaurant-quality silverware that I have since left in every workplace kitchen in which I’ve irritably eaten cold soup.

“I think we should get white stoneware plates for the engagement party,” I decreed with zeal.

“Are you serious?” My partner gaped.  “Why can’t we use paper plates?”

“Paper plates are tacky, and the ones that I would use are more expensive than these stoneware plates I found at the Dollar Admiral that will last for the multiple family parties we may end up hosting in the years to come.”  I presented my case, gesticulating wildly at my elderly laptop, whose 11-inch screen depicted a grainy photo of our future plates that would, in fact, be used at several family gatherings to come.

“Why can’t we use white paper plates?  They look exactly the same,” my partner moaned—a preposterous argument with no truth in it.

“These are also more environmentally friendly,” I said, having done zero research into backing up this claim.  “We’re seriously limiting our waste.”

He rolled his eyes.

“I’m paying for them, so I don’t see why it matters,” I closed with finality.

“Where will we even put fifty stoneware plates?”  He said in exasperation, with a tone of voice that (wrongly) implied he had an adequate grasp of what our cupboards currently held.

“I’ll figure it out.  Please be supportive.  I am wildly unhappy.”  I offered quietly.

Able sighed and put his arm around me.  I ordered the plates for one dollar per plate, which cost nearly as much in shipping to our house.  At the last minute, I smartly directed the shipment to the nearby Dollar Admiral store, enabling free shipping.  They were set to arrive three days after I took the bar and two days before I left for a week to visit my finally-divorcing parents.

When we go to pick the plates up, however, the acting manager tells me that she has no idea where our order is.  She is very slim and unsure of herself, frantically looking around the store for obviously missing merchandise.  “I’m sorry.  Are you sure it’s here?” She asks, big-eyed and pale.

The tight knot that is my stomach somehow tightens more.  “Yeah,” my jaw clenches.  “I got the email confirmation.  I can pull it up on my phone, if you’d like?” I point to my phone with no intention of pulling up the email.

“Oh…” She looks around, shakes her head, and looks around again.  “I don’t know where it would be.  I apologize.”

“Okay,” I said smoothly over my anger.  “Well, I’m going to write down my name and number,” I said too slowly and much to Able’s embarrassment.  “Then when you find my order, you can just call me.”  I help myself to a pen from behind the register and write down my information on the back of receipt paper.

“Yeah, again, I apologize.  I’m new, and I just don’t know where it is.  I’ll have the manager call you tomorrow.”  She looks like she is going to cry, and I know I should feel sorry for her. Yet, every apology she blurts out makes me hate her.

“Really, it’s okay,” I say gently but over wolf’s teeth. 

The next day, the regular manager calls and informs me that our plates are indeed there.  We again arrive to pick them up.  This time, it goes smoothly.  We take four large but suspiciously noisy boxes home, where I open them and discover twenty-six plates are shattered.

Even though I am a millennial, I immediately call the store.  The regular manager has already left for the day.  The worker on the line helpfully explains to me, however, that I cannot return the broken merchandise for a refund.  Instead, she offers me store credit, redeemable only at that particular store, which doesn’t carry the plates I believe I need in order to fix my life.

“I’m one-hundred percent sure that’s not your company’s policy because that’s not legal,” I huff irritably, ready to accuse the woman of having robbed me.  I fight the urge to scream, “I’m a lawyer!”  Partially because it would be rude and partially because it’s not true just yet.  

Unphased, she tells me to call the Dollar Admiral’s customer service line, which takes me thirty years to reach a human.  The woman at the customer service center informs me that she has to authorize my refund through Dollar Admiral’s secret headquarters before my particular store will honor it—as though there is an elaborate ring of fraudulent returns that have been such an Ocean’s Eleven type of problem that this dollar store had to institute this labor-intensive policy.  Or, the store just fundamentally loathes the poor people from whom it profits that it institutes an incredibly labor-intensive return policy, barely manageable even to a mid-crisis baby-lawyer, in order to further screw the poor.  But, what do I know!

“Do you want us to ship you a new box?” She asks pertly.

“Of broken plates that y’all can’t package correctly?”  I cackle emptily, well on my way to becoming an entitled white woman about to be wed.  “Absolutely not.”  Instead, like a totally rational person, I resolve to check every Dollar Admiral I encounter in the ten states between my house and my former childhood house for my stray twenty-six plates.

***

On the southern Gulf Coast, I stay at my dad’s house, which used to be my childhood home but now is just dad’s house.  Dad’s house is emptier, colder, and bleachier than my new home in New England, which is already warm and cozy and overwhelmingly decorated.  Every time I go to what I still call “home” but is simply just the carcass of what used to be “home,” more things are missing. Furniture and machinery have been secretly sold on Craigslist.  Sentimental décor—like my parents’ wedding photo in a collage frame I gifted my mom for mother’s day in the early 00s (but that she did not take when she moved out) and a wooden sign declaring THE PETTYMANS, EST. 1985, that was a wedding gift—have gone eerily missing.  The house, or at least the main areas, are consistently too clean when I arrive, but I don’t initially realize might be because my father is hiding something from me.  I don’t initially notice things that have been hastily repaired—the door to the den, a patch in the hallway’s wall.

My back corner of the house has been thoroughly neglected, however.  It had always been my mom who cleaned in anticipation of my arrivals.  When I get to dad’s house in the early part of the summer of 2015, I encounter a spider encampment in my closet and around the boxes of books I had intended to take from the garage but debate whether to now just burn.  When I put on the shower after my two-day drive home, the water floods out a hundred ants from the drain.  I mention this over breakfast the next morning, and my father angrily but silently sprays the areas with pesticides that will probably kill us, too.

When he does talk, he complains about his attempts to clean my mother’s old bedroom—a guest bedroom we had called “the purple room” because of its purple-striped comforter (we weren’t allowed to paint the walls purple).  “I never realized what a pig your mother was.”  He shakes his head and crumples his face in disgust.  “There was garbage everywhere.  I wish she would come and get some of her shit out of the closets.”  His tone makes the words sound more like: I wish she would come and fight me.

The complaints are better at his wry attempts to be upbeat. When I first spoke to him after my mom told me, he had said, “Did you hear I just lost 200 pounds?”

All of my attempts to improve his mood are met with harsh rebukes. When I offer to take him to a movie, he says movies cost money. I offer to pay, and he rolls his eyes. I offer to take him just for a walk, and he shuts down.

Ever the helpful, if reluctant, co-dependent, I finally but weakly offer: “I can take things to Grandma’s if you want?”  My mom has been staying at my grandmother’s.  I knew she was simply living out of her McDougall’s work uniform, one pair of pants, and a few shirts since she had moved out in May.  But I hadn’t wanted to help her.  

“Yeah, that would be good,” he says immediately, almost talking over my offer, as if I had finally met my cue.  As he speaks, he rises from the table and goes to the pantry, where he grabs several garbage bags that I can presumably pack with my mother’s possessions.  I look down at my half-eaten breakfast—a too chocolatey pan cookie that I don’t love, anyway.  He holds out the garbage bags to me expectantly.

In the purple room, my dad watches me as I packed my mom’s things.  He glares as I kneel on the floor and pull her clothes from the dresser and cram them into the black trash bag.  When I come across her tax information in the bottom dresser drawer, I pause to look at it.  She had specifically asked me to bring these documents to her for the divorce attorney if I happened to see them and felt comfortable doing so, but I had been evasive because I did not want to be involved.

“What’s that?” My father perks up at my pause, and my stomach tightens as though my pause had just betrayed my mom.

“I think it’s tax stuff?” I say in question-form.  “I think she needs this for the attorney?” 

“I need that.  Tell her you didn’t find it.”  He takes the papers from me.  I let him, feeling both guilty and afraid and guilty again for being afraid.  He stomps down the hall.

In the end—but it is not yet the end—I bring three large garbage bags of my mom’s things to her.  On her way out of my grandma’s house, she thanks me and apologizes that things are the way they are.

***

Barbie didn’t tell me about the drinking.  She should have warned me, I think.  And, she seems ambivalent about seeing me.  When I first go to her apartment, she yawns and tells me that she is tired and goes to bed, leaving me alone on her sofa to use her internet as dad’s house doesn’t have it.  While she is at work during the day, she lets me use her apartment’s internet so that I can watch bar prep videos and take practice tests; but she otherwise makes no other effort to engage with me when I’m home.  When I bring up dad’s obvious mental health issues, she laughs and says that he called her after my mom left.  “He told me to have bail money ready,” she rolls her eyes. She confirms that a lot of things were broken at the house, and that he rushed to fix them before I came down. But none of it concerns her, and she rolls her eyes when I tell her that is not normal. When I bring up the drinking, she shrugs and says, “That’s the way the Pettymans handle things.”

I move my studying to my grandma’s condo, where the air is warmer and somehow less heavy.  I feel at peace when I am there, which is jarring when I first arrive because the stress and hurt had built up so incrementally that I was not aware how much they weighed me down. The relief I feel at Gram’s is so intoxicating that I don’t want to leave.  At night, I find myself dreading my return to dad’s house, so I start leaving my grandma’s later and later.

Midway through my trip, I find myself seated at the kitchen table with my dad.  It’s mid-morning and bright.  I’m mad at Barbie because I am hurt that she has not reached out to me to make plans to see me, and I cannot help myself in voicing complaints to our dad.  I cannot remember exactly what I said, except that it was petty and mean-spirited and indulgent of my hurt feelings.  It sends my dad into a rage.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Penny.”  He bellows.  As he rises from the small kitchen table, he pushes it away from his body and into me so that it pushes my wheeled kitchen chair into the wall and nearly pins me there.  “My whole fucking life is falling apart and you can’t just stop your bitching for one second,” he screams as he turns around to exit the kitchen.  On his way, he passes the kitchen island, where a box of butter crackers sits on the corner.  He raises his enormous hand and violently swats the cracker box, which flies into the nearby wall and bursts open.  He stalks away to his bedroom.

Immediately after the incident, I am shaking.  I push the table off of me and retreat to my bathroom.  I am shaking so hard that I almost drop my phone.  I had been planning on taking a shower, but I don’t have my clothes in here.  I feel stupid.  I feel like I should leave the house, but I wonder if that will enrage him more.  Like, maybe I shouldn’t leave the house unless I am prepared not to come back to the house at all.  I think about all the things I do not have packed—both things from this trip (bar prep study guides, my aged laptop) and all the things my dad keeps pressuring me to cram into my tiny Ford Fiesta and bring up north because every day he considers just burning down the whole house with everything inside (like my high school graduation gown and that photo, which won’t ultimately make it and I will never see again).  Stuff is just stuff, I think, and “my things” seems like a silly reason to stay in an unsafe environment.  But am I unsafe?  Within ten minutes of the incident, I am already convincing myself that I need not “make a big deal” out of whatever just happened.  It’s easier to let it go.

But then my half-brother Petey texts, and I tell him what happened, which makes gaslighting myself harder to accomplish.

“It is literally the worst trip I have ever had.  Dad is drunk every night.  Like rum and cokes, tripping over shit in the kitchen at 2 am drunk.  And just screamed at me and threw boxes of crackers at the wall in the kitchen because I said Barbie didn’t text me back and that is my fault.  Probably staying at gram’s until Friday and heading home.  There is nothing I can do for him.”

But then, a few minutes later, the bathroom door shakes with my father’s pounding knock.  He coughs.  “I’m sorry.  Want to get ready and go to lunch?”

Declining doesn’t even enter into my brain.  It’s best to move forward.  “Ok, let me finish getting ready.  It’s fine.”

In the car, we are silent.  Finally, he says, “There’s a new place I want to try.”  

I say, “Okay.”  

And, we drive to the new restaurant across the parking lot from the McDougall’s where my mom works.  My dad slows, and we both see her car.  When we greet the hostess, he asks for a window seat and she leads us to a table where my mom’s car is within view. I don’t initially notice it, but, as we sit there, he increasingly fidgets with his phone. The next day, my mom gives me her new cellphone number—the third one she has had in as many weeks. In a couple of years, she will confirm that she needed to change her number because dad’s hobby at the time was barraging her voicemails with venom.

After the cracker incident, I not only dread going back to dad’s house but I am afraid to do so.  It is weird to be north of twenty-five and afraid to go home.  I stay at Gram’s late so that, hopefully, my dad will be passed out by the time I return.  I am so afraid of getting yelled at, or worse.  I had misjudged my dad, whom I had believed had gone soft in middle age.  I felt like a lion tamer, who had grown used to the incessant roaring and therefore underestimated my ultimately unsustainable relationship with a predator, who had given every indication it wanted to eat me but which I’d gaslit myself into thinking loved me too much to do that.  When I drive home, I pray my dad is asleep. (One morning, when he is passed out so deeply that he sleeps through his blaring alarm clock, I pray for more than sleep and hate myself for that.) At night, I quietly crept inside, leaving the garage door open (even though I know it will cause irritation in the morning) so that I won’t wake the rum-drunk bear.  The recycle in the garage is filled to the brim with beer bottles and cans.  Sometimes, an open Crown Royal or Bicardi sits on the counter with sticky liquid around it, obviously sloshed out of the poorly handled cocktail.  I tip-toe-race to my bedroom, where I sleep fitfully behind a locked door.  

Two days before I go back up north, instead of leaving an obviously unsafe house or directing my anger at my dad, I level my gaze my sister, Barbie, to whom I decide to attribute some responsibility for my having been in possible danger that day in the kitchen.  So, on this night, after sneaking back into my childhood bedroom and tucking myself into my bed, I send her a phenomenally cruel text message expressing that anger.

Barbie knows how to hold her weight in a fight, though, and pretty quickly texts me back.  “You’re just as crazy as your mom.  Every time you come home, there’s a problem, and I’m sick of it.”  I find this laughably untrue, and I convey as much.

The next morning, I am supposed to take a dear friend, who is also home for stressful reasons, to the airport.  A few minutes before my alarm is set to go off, my dad bangs on my bedroom door.  My bedroom door is no longer straight; it bows near the top because my father is incapable of knocking on a door like a regular person.  Even when I wasn’t in trouble, he beat my bedroom door like Jon Burge beat innocent teenagers.  Which is why, for a moment, I delusionally think maybe my dad knew I was supposed to take my friend to the airport and was checking to see if I was awake out of concern.  “I’m up,” I call.

“You want to open this door, please.”  He bellows.

Immediately, the tone struck out and gripped my stomach—which, at this point, has been through far too much.  I carry all of my stress in my stomach, which I lately feel has a leash around it that is tied to my father’s emotions.  

Shit, shit, shit, I scramble to think what I could have done that would have gotten me in trouble.  Reader, please remember I am currently twenty-six-years-old, a soon-to-be homeowner, a law school graduate, a soon-to-be public defender, and soon-to-be married, but I felt like a teenager again, wracking my brain for whatever invisible rule I might have broken and how I could—if I could—get around the punishment.

“You want to tell me why your sister called me hysterically crying this morning.”

Because of the cracker incident, I am more careful in this fight.  I tell my dad that it’s none of his business and it is inappropriate for him to mediate this argument between me and my forty-year-old sister.  I am not sure what exactly my sister said to him, and I brace myself for his retort that it wasn’t appropriate for me to call him a violent alcoholic.  But that doesn’t come.  Instead, he seems to agree that I create problems.  I say that I promised to take my friend to the airport, as I had previously informed him, and that I will leave for New England after that.  

He walks to the kitchen island and says, with disgust, “Well, here take these, then.”  He tosses a tube of green frosting and a bag of flour on the counter.  “This was for your cake.  Everyone was gonna come over tomorrow.  Happy Graduation.”

I immediately feel like shit.  It doesn’t occur to me until I am driving back to New England that it was weird for my father to wait until my last day home to supposedly celebrate my graduation, that there wasn’t enough time for him to have baked a cake (the full ingredients of which we obviously did not have), and that my sister and the kids—who had not been available to see me at all that trip beyond the one night on her sofa before she went to sleep—weren’t going to come over that day anyway.  In that moment, though, I feel like it is true that I have ruined yet another thing.  I do end up taking the green frosting and the flour, as if carrying it is penance.  The frosting tube will sit in my New England pantry for four years before I finally throw it away.

***

A glutton for punishment, I return to dad’s house at the end of the summer.  I am pleased to see less alcohol around this visit, at least initially. This inflates in me the false impression that things are improving. But, intuitively knowing better, I don’t want to spend too much time with him because doing so may burst whatever stable relationship we are pretending to have right now. Luckily, I have wedding activities scheduled throughout the week: a cupcake tasting, a visit to the venue, a meeting with the caterer, a seamstress appointment, and so on. My father doesn’t ask me any questions about the wedding, except whether my mother’s new boyfriend will be there. I am also supposed to see one of my bridesmaids (whom I had not seen in a year) and some old work acquaintances.  And, I can only stay for six days because my partner and I have scheduled our legal ceremony for the 17th. 

“You’re getting married, and you weren’t going to tell me?” My father gawks, which seems premature as we only scheduled the legal ceremony a couple of days prior to this moment.

I am also confused. Of course, I had informed everyone on my side of the family that my partner and I were going ahead with the legal ceremony in August. My health insurance from the university runs out in August, and it didn’t make sense for me to get my own insurance for a month and a half before going onto his. My father disagrees. He claims I never told him. I am smart enough to not suggest that maybe he was drunk when I told him. He is upset that he will not be there, even though nothing is preventing his visiting New England. 

“No one will be there,” I counter, “We’re not telling Able’s family because they’re so religious. I told you that.”  My father rolls his eyes, nonverbally informing me that I did not.

Despite our barbed conversations, I manage to schedule lunch with my father on one of the days that I am free. I tell him my plans every day that I am there, and he offers to make dinner several times—in addition to two dinners we’ve already shared—when I’ve told him I have dinner plans.  

“I was going to make bacon,” he says quietly, referring to his tradition for each of my homecomings where he makes pounds of burnt bacon—the only meat I will eat because I have no real principles and am a stereotype. 

“I told you, I’m going to see Monica. I probably will eat with her.” I purposely come home late on those days because I learn that he is secretly drinking. I am filled with intolerable pity and profound anger at him, the latter I don’t know how to function through and the former I force myself to swallow. Because of my dad’s heart failure, I have always given him a pass for being cruel, distant, and disinterested in me. During law school, when he and my mom were not speaking, his sudden interest in me was thrilling. Now, his need for my time, over and above what I’ve already carved out for him, feels controlling. When we are together, I don’t seem to make him feel any better. I appear to function solely as a witness to his unhappiness and as a receptacle for angry rants.

One day, he is visibly irritated but I thought, in the way that we were handling things, if I ignored it then it wouldn’t be a problem.

“Sit down,” he says.  “I’ve gotta get something off my chest.  Are you going to see your sister?” He bluntly asks.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I’m going to see the kids, though.”

“You’re going to see the kids but not her?” He glares at me, eyes boring into mine as though his look of intimidation will change my mind. It doesn’t. In my last conversation with Barbie, I had told her that I was not interested in fighting with her and that we could talk, really talk, after I finished the bar. Neither of us had made contact with the other since then.

“Yes,” I say.

“You know what, Penn, whatever. If you’re never going to talk to her again, then do it already.” He flings up his hands, his words harsh and seemingly out of nowhere.

“I didn’t say that,” the words stumble out of my mouth, alien in the tone of confusion and fear they take on. It was like I had spit them out, like loose teeth, after being kicked. I couldn’t even put together the thought of how one starts to never speak to another person again. I had only said I needed space to finish the bar without the drama of more fighting.

“You can just see her at my funeral, for all I care,” he shakes his head. “I have to get something off my chest. You know what your problem is?”

No, but I know you’re gonna tell me, is something I would normally say to anyone else who came at me with this tone. But, instead, I am silent and my body is tense and ready for flight if I have to, if he gets violent—again. He proceeds to tell me everything that is wrong with me, little of it seeming to relate to Barbie’s and my relationship, which is where this tirade began.

“You know, I saw that text you sent her last May, and it wasn’t all her. You said some pretty nasty things. And you lied,” he glares at me as he firmly hits the table for emphasis. “You said there was property damage here, you made me seem like an alcoholic,” and here I interrupt.

“The den door was broken—that’s what I said. And you were drinking hard liquor every day that I was here,” my stomach lurches. 

He rolls his eyes. “It wasn’t like that. You make it sound so—” he doesn’t have a word here so he just makes a face and continues. “Why did you lie about what happened the last time you were home?” 

“I didn’t lie,” I say.  

“You told everyone I threw things at you.  I didn’t throw things at you.  I threw the box at that wall,” and he points, “and the mark is still there to prove it.”  

I say, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that.” 

He rolls his eyes.  “Petey showed me the text you sent Barbie, and it was nasty,” he lectured. “Give me your phone,” he demands, as if I will hand it over.  “Let me see your texts, then.”

“No,” I say without even assessing whether I should feel fear.  He immediately seems taken aback, but the expression of surprise is just a flicker that quickly disappears.

“You know, I try with you.” And, he goes on to tell me his side of the last several years, how I hurt him by not going to my law school graduation, how he could have gone to both my sister’s associate’s graduation and my bachelor’s graduation, how I act like I did all of that on my own and how offensive that is to him. “You know, everyone acts like I’m a monster and I have no feelings that can be hurt. But I’m alone in this house. It’s like my tomb.”

“How can you say that?” I ask in disbelief.  “All I do is think of you.  I am always worried about you, worrying about your heart and how you’ll survive and pay bills and eat.”  It feels like a betrayal saying these things aloud, and I can see on his face that it is.

“I’ll figure my life out, okay.”  He breathes exasperatedly.  He levels the conversation back at me, detailing examples of my selfish behavior.  “At Barbie’s graduation party, you were moaning that no one asked to see your diploma.  So, we all said let’s see it.  And you paraded it out and acted like you earned it all on your own.  Like I didn’t contribute $50-60,000 to it.” 

I am incredulous at this fictional memory, “What?  What did I say?” I don’t even touch the financial statement, which my private student loan billing history disputes.

And, he says, “I don’t remember.” 

Emboldened, I say, “First of all, that can’t be right because Barbie and I graduated on the same day and diplomas weren’t printed until later in the summer.” 

At first, he seems ready to concede but then turns sarcastic and disbelieving.  “You and Barbie graduated on the same day?” 

Hercules could not have lifted my jaw off of the bleached tile floor.  “Are you serious?” 

“You act like I didn’t even want to go to your graduation. It broke my heart that you didn’t want us there.”

“Then you would have missed Barbie’s, and I didn’t feel right putting you in that position so, yeah, I didn’t bring it up at the time.”

Now, he turns incredulous, “It was the same day?” 

“Yes! In 2011, we graduated on the same day.  I had told you that at the time, but I wasn’t living at the house so I guess it makes sense that the information didn’t sink in.”  I roll my eyes.  In detailing my selfish behavior, he does not mention that I was the one who decorated and threw Barbie’s graduation party, which took place at the house that he decreed I wasn’t allowed to live in because of my chihuahua. Again, probably because I spent the whole summer relitigating my previous arguments with him, I feel embolden to say more. “Okay, so this thing I allegedly said almost 5 years ago—“ 

He interjects, “Don’t lawyer me!” 

And I say, “Whatever, that’s just a word that everyone uses.  You can’t remember what I said but you harbored it for years to yell at me about it now?”  

At this point, he changes tactics. He says that his father, my grandfather who died before I was born, always spoke his mind and my dad, who was the first person to ever call me a slut to my face when I was thirteen years old, never did that out of consideration for other people’s feelings so that’s why he didn’t say anything at the time. 

At some point, the fire in me dies. And, I sit there and cry. I am embarrassed by how silent I am, by my tears, by my lack of control of my emotions. By the end of it, I just want to leave. But instead, after I shower, his heavy hand pounds on the bathroom door.

“Can I speak to you.”

I open the door, clothed and shoddily made up. My heart is rapid. “What.”

“So, what, you’re mad now.” It’s not a question; it’s a blunt demand.

I shrug, “No.” My eyes stay dry.

“Do you want to still get lunch?”

And, we do. 

***

The rest of the trip goes like this. With each day, I am more emotionally exhausted. My mother and grandmother are sympathetic. They attend the cupcake tasting with me, but I don’t enjoy it. My eyes are so swollen from crying that I cannot even put my contacts in. On the way back, my mom stops at my dad’s place to pick up the tax form that he wouldn’t let me bring to her. She does not feel safe going alone, she says, so Gram, who is legally blind, and I accompany her as witnesses. We all enter the house, and I feel like I have aligned myself with an enemy combatant. Gram is polite to my father as we sit down. My mother requests the taxes and asks about blank spaces in my father’s financial statement. He reveals that he sold numerous pieces of farm equipment without telling her. They both look at me: my father wondering if I told my mother, my mother wondering if I’d known.

My mother chuckles a bit as she reminds my father that her financial contribution to their marriage outweighed his. We leave him sitting alone at the kitchen table, his hands folded, his tired and puffy eyes looking at the bleached tile floor. The image sucker-punches me: he is a toothless bear.  I know he will drink tonight. I kiss him on the cheek before we leave, and text him from the car, “Let’s get breakfast on Friday before I leave?”

“K.”

That night, with Barbie’s consent, I take my four niblings out to dinner.  I am still avoiding Barbie but I make sure I have her permission, I do not say anything negative about her in front of the kids, and I reiterate to my oldest nibling that they must attain permission before I carry the group off to Crapplebee’s. I resent that I will have to fix things with Barbie, but I resolve to do so the next day.  After dinner, I bring the kids to Gram’s house. She is overwhelmed at the sight of them and cries as she says hello. Since my parents’ marriage had gone to hell roughly three years before, she had not seen the kids, who have shot up like weeds and seem so heartbreakingly resilient.

“Thank you,” she grips my hand, her cold and fragile papery skin like silk over mine, the strength in her grip surprising. She gives each of them $1 and apologizes that it isn’t more. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have done something right.

A few minutes later, my mother unexpectedly stops by with her boyfriend. 

***

The next day, Barbie and I make up at a popular chain known for its burnt coffee and sugary drinks, neutral territory, a pattern we will fall into for the next few years. I don’t say anything about my mom’s boyfriend. Life seems like maybe it is stabilizing.

But, then, it all falls apart. Spectacularly.

On my last full day home, I wake up, and my dad is getting ready to leave. I ask him where he is going and what about the treaty breakfast I had negotiated over text the day of the Tax Reckoning. “I told you I have a doctor’s appointment.” He is curt. I know instantly from his tone that I have done something wrong. 

I don’t ask, though. I won’t be baited. “Okay.” I say. “I wish you would’ve have reminded me when I asked you to breakfast. I’m leaving then. See you in October.”

He won’t make eye contact with me. He is making coffee in a to-go thermos. After a minute, perhaps spent waiting for me to ask why he is so visibly upset, he finally says, “You know, Penn, I gotta get something off my chest.” He pauses long enough for my stomach to do its thing. “I don’t appreciate you introducing my grandkids to your mother’s new fuckboy.” 

The way he says “mother,” with such pure vitriol, sounds even more perverse than “fuckboy,” a term which he would be unhappy to know that he used incorrectly. It makes something in me snap. “You can’t talk to me about her like that,” I say firmly, willing my hands to remain still. “If you want a relationship with me then you can’t talk about her to me, period. I am done being in the middle of you two.”

This doesn’t end the interaction, though. Suffice it to say, he does not believe me that I did not, in fact, orchestrate a clandestine meeting between Barbie’s kids (who are “his”) and my mother’s boyfriend. It doesn’t matter that it was, in fact, the first time I had met him or the trifling fact that it was, actually, emotionally weird for me to meet him. The conversation is again one-sided. He leaves. I very hurriedly pack while crying, yet again, but I do not drive to North Carolina as I told him I would. I instead drive to Gram’s house. I cry there, on her sofa, and I watch Netflix all evening. One of my bridesmaids, Monica, eventually comes over and comforts me while we eat cupcakes that have no taste.

***

 “I found an article on Jezebel,” I text Miriam after my trip, while anticipating her arrival. “The Definition of ‘Fuckboy’ Is Not What Trend Pieces Are Telling You, discussing the way white people misuse this word. Thinking of sending to my dad,” I type.

“Haaa.”

Days after the fight, my heart is radio silent, mostly because the fight continued even after I left, culminating in angry voicemails and texts. I hadn’t seen it coming. He had called the night he thought I left, while I was at Gram’s house. I had decided, poorly, to be honest and tell him I wasn’t leaving until the morning and that I wanted to be alone. The next day, I didn’t hear from him. The second day of my drive, however, I ignored a phone call from him as I drove through Baltimore. My intention was merely to give him a few days so we could both cool down. My phone immediately informed me of a new voicemail. Then a text came through, which I couldn’t read fully but was able to catch, “In my voicemail I forgot to thank u for—”

My stomach sunk. My shoulders clenched. I felt ill. I knew this would be bad. As soon as I was able, I pulled off the highway. I really had to use the bathroom, anyway. But the area I’d pulled into was dense and unwelcoming. Every gas station I passed was a locked cube that fit only the gas clerk, so I pulled into a McDougall’s. After I used the bathroom, I read the text: “In my voicemail I forgot to thank u for the whole 2 hours of your time you gave me while you were here.” I was shaking by the time I was ready to listen to his voicemail.

“Penn, it’s Dad. I just wanted to get something off my chest. I don’t think it’s fair that you could be mad at me. I did not put you in the middle between your mother and me. I’m not the one that made you pack up her stuff. I had nothing to do with it. There’s no reason that she can’t come over here and get her own stuff. I never made any threats or anything towards her. I have not done anything to her, raised my hand to her. There’s no reason she couldn’t come and get her own stuff. It very deeply hurt me that my grandkids had to meet her boyfriend. And I don’t understand. If you don’t want me to be your father anymore, you don’t want to talk to me anymore, that’s fine. Have a nice life.” 

I got out of the car, and called him back. I got angrier with every unanswered ring, so that by the time I was asked to leave a message I was seething. I either had to be available at his beck and call to play his emotional punching bag or never speak to him. He gave me an ultimatum. His role as my father was purely conditional. “Thanks for the super hurtful voicemail as I’m driving across the country. You keep saying you have to get things off your chest, well let me take a moment to make some clarifications. You have been putting me in the middle. Here are the examples: you put me in the middle when you complain about her, when you go out of town and tell me to lie to her that you didn’t, when you tell me to lie to her about not finding the taxes, when you tell me to tell her to respond to your texts, when you ask me questions about her new boyfriend. That’s putting me in the middle. I wish you asked me half as many questions about my wedding as you do about her boyfriend and whether he’ll be there. I told you I was taking the kids to see my grandma. I can’t do this anymore. You can’t talk to me about her. I told her the same thing about you and Barbie. I’m treating you no differently than I treated her, and my having a relationship with her is not a betrayal of you. She’s my mom. Not everything I do is a scheme carefully calculated to hurt you. I’m sorry you’re hurting. I’m sorry you’re sad, but you can’t be mean to me. Until you can talk to me with respect, then maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while. You don’t want to be my dad anymore? Fine. Fine. FINE.” By then, I was kind of shouting, there in the McDougall’s parking lot with families sitting in the plastic picnic tables and staring at me. I climbed back into my car without making eye contact with any of them.

He called back within five minutes. I ignored the call. In a moment, there was a new voicemail. Blinking back tears, I listened. “Um, I just want to clarify I didn’t tell you—I didn’t want to make you lie to your mother. I just told you you couldn’t get them ‘til I took my stuff out of them. And I didn’t ask you anything about your mother’s boyfriend this trip, except for if he was going to be at the wedding. You know what? Don’t worry about it. Have a nice life. Sorry I was a shitty father. I’m sorry I’m a shitty dad. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a daughter. Bye.”

***

Two days later, I marry my partner in secret inside of a poorly air-conditioned elementary school gymnasium that serves as the temporary site for city hall, which burnt down. He wears a tuxedo t-shirt and cargo shorts. I wear a dress I found for $12 on the floor of a going-out-of-business Marcy’s. Afterward, we send out the invitations to our ceremonial wedding then go home to start prepping for the Etc. Party, which will host none of my parents or half-siblings or any blood relatives but several friends of mine who travelled hundreds of miles in an act that tells me I am not, in fact, inherently unlovable or too much or always a problem. They are perhaps wrong or deluded, but I am profoundly grateful they are mine.

I still send a $32 invitation to my father, who will not RSVP. I imagine he throws it in the trash, and sometimes I partake in detailed daydreaming of seeing it there. He will ultimately attend the wedding and say only the following sentence to me: “When the house sale clears, I’ll write you a check.”

But I don’t know any of that, yet.  So, I say, “I think I’ll make that broccoli salad on Saturday,” I tell my partner as we pack up the boxes of broken plates to bring them to the Dollar Admiral, where I will be fully reimbursed and able to buy new, unbroken plates as if nothing happened.

“Oh, I really like that one,” he says.

Epilogue

For what it’s worth, I found my twenty-six stoneware plates in two nearby Dollar Admirals. I have them all to this day, and I’ve used them at several family gatherings that my dad and Barbie have never attended. Not one of them has yet broken. When I use them, I think about how, a few years ago, there was a meme going around, and then it was an image on a personality-free greeting card at a paperie, that some broken potteries are mended back together with gold and considered even more beautiful than before.  Some people say a broken thing can be glued back together and be stronger than before as a metaphor for relationships.  And some relationships are forged in fire.  Some relationships do go through big things, hard things, horrendous things, and they get stronger.  Or, they endure.  And that’s meaningful, too. But we—my dad and me, my sister Barbie and me—we are shattered.  The broken pieces are just tiny, sharp bits, some too small to even see until you walk on them barefoot.  The kind of broken glass that stays on the floor for months because you missed it the first eight times you swept up the mess.  There is nothing left of us that is not a hazard.