The Girlfriend (excerpt)
Suddenly I am almost 20 and The Girlfriend is standing in front of me in Penn Station emitting a powder-pale glow. Before I can think about it my face has twisted into a grimace right in front of her, my feet propelling me forward as she stares wide-eyed at the digital board above—they’ve just replaced the analog ones.
The first time The Girlfriend calls I am seven, maybe eight, my mother has made tilapia and she’s even brought out the nice dinner plates, the light blue ones. A friend from the neighborhood is over and we flake our forks into the filets as the phone rings in the kitchen. By the time the answering machine beeps and her shaking voice cuts the room into stillness, it is too late. Hello, Camille. I’m sorry to call here but I need to speak to you about something. No one picks up. We spoon lime butter onto the fried-flour crust of the tilapia. The room reeks of fish.
The first time The Girlfriend meets my mother, we are at my sister’s soccer game. She shows up to the Yardley Makefield Soccer League in a tight sundress, one white breast threatening the neckline of its green-patterned fabric. “Camille”, she says, “ am so thrilled to finally meet you. Your girls have told me such good things.” She is all caramel-sweetness, red hair glinting amidst suburban preteens flailing for a ball in the tender May heat. My mother is not as sweet, but it’s a cordial exchange all things considered. At age 12 I am not thinking about it, but at age almost-20 I can’t imagine that it’s easy to see your children spending weekends with the infamous Mistress-Turned-Girlfriend. All of our thighs itch. They have just sprayed the grass with pesticides.
The Girlfriend is a photographer. The two of them met on flickr. Before long, my father begins to really understand photography as an art form. She wears a cowl-back dress to dinner one night and when she turns around he captures the nape of her neck, uploads it to facebook. On their five-year anniversary my father spends four figures on a DSLR—he tells me, after they split, “I almost wanted to ask her for the money back”. One Saturday in September or October, we go to an Apple orchard in Chester County and she takes portraits of me and my sister beside her two boys. They are 12 & 8, we 13 & 10. I’m in the process of growing out my bangs, wearing my finest outfit from Limited Too. We change outfits between rows of Pink Ladies. When she gets the prints developed, she gives a huge canvas of me and my sister to my mother, a sort of peace offering that still hangs in our study.
The summer I am 15, The Girlfriend’s aunt passes away and my father takes a week off of work to help her empty out the house. They are driving down I-75 into the heart of Florida talking excitedly about some story, probably GE’s tax evasion, when my father hears a snap. The words catch in his throat and for a second the two of them hang suspended in the middle of his sentence, the air conditioner in the blue car blasting as if to fill the space. The Girlfriend sits straight up once she realizes his pause is not for effect. Her voice pitches upwards into outer space as she asks, “Dave, Dave, are you okay?”
When he comes to, his hands are shaking, the veins bulging out in his forearms. At South Georgia Medical Center, a doctor explains (slowly) the meaning of an Atrial Septal Defect.
“But it’s not serious, right?” The Girlfriend asks. “Isn’t this type of thing common for men his age?”
After he is discharged, my father and The Girlfriend stay at the Hampton Inn. In front of the entrance there is a line of palms, and as the setting sun turns the impossibly thick southern clouds a pale pink they walk across the parking lot to Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen—it was either Cheddar’s or Wahoo Seafood Grill, and my father had sneered at the thought of seafood in a landlocked state. Being from the South, she can vouch for the value a swordfish filet, but she figures this isn’t the best time to argue. The two of them are silent, The Girlfriend over her salmon & strawberry salad and my father over his New Orleans pasta. He had wanted a steak before considering the blood clot in his brain that had nearly veered the two of them off onto the shoulder of the highway amidst the strange short palms that inhabited either side.
When the waitress brings out the check, she hesitates before cocking her head at my father and The Girlfriend. My father begins to prickle until the young woman, probably in her early twenties & wearing a tight blonde ponytail punctuates the tension, hazel eyes innocent and intentions true. “The two of y’all are so precious. And no ring?”
My father & The Girlfriend chuckle nervously, exchange a glance over the now-barren plates.
The woman quickly widens her eyes, realizes quickly that she has misspoke. “Oh, shoot. I’m sorry. You must not be from here!”
Before she can answer any of the questions brewing in the mind of my father and The Girlfriend, she grabs the check from the table and bounces off to seat another party. My father looks down at his empty pasta plate dotted Pollock-esque with bits of sauce, knits his eyebrows. “What the hell was that?”
Driving back one good night’s sleep and a decent amount of online research later, The Girlfriend admits that the idea is ludicrous, but isn’t it at least a tiny bit nice to have some tradition these days, sort of? In a fucked up sort of way, of course? She mentions her dearest now-dead aunt who married her high school prom date at 18 and never once thought twice about it. My father grimaces and keeps driving. Earlier that year, he had told me that he thought marriage was an outdated concept. I mean, it made sense when the life expectancy of humans was only 30 or 40 years old. Anyone could stay with someone for a decade or so. But now we live until 80, at least. Who could handle that?
