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Show Knowing that she came from a more genteel background, a home in Rapid City with restaurant-owning parents who ate huevos rancheros and artichokes, my father spun stories of his father's wealth. He told her about his family's private airplane (a crop duster), the pool in their backyard (an irrigation ditch), and the gas stations his father owned (bankrupt). By the time he actually took her home to meet his family, she was too much in love to care about material concerns. Raised in a quiet household that observed cocktail hour at five on the dot, my mother was not ready for the rowdiness of my father's family, brothers who would argue politics, play pitch until three in the morning, and whir their baby sister like the blades of a helicopter. It was never quiet. Family lore has it that there is a picture of my twenty-year-old mother, sitting at a piano in my grandparents' living room on her first visit to their house, Christmas, surrounded by my father, his sister and brothers with their wives and children, forcing my mother to play carol after carol until she almost weeps with exhaustion. They feed on my mother's fingers as she flies up and down the keys, her face, I imagine, lit by an overhead lamp that casts the rest of her body in shadow. I want the fantasy as well, a marriage the unfolds as one long coke date, my father stringing stories like so many tiny lanterns for my mother to follow away from her own family where her parents increasingly act as strangers with one another, her mother wrapped in mink, her father in a halo of smoke, into the craziness of my father's life, the laughing, joking, card playing family, in the same way she falls into his arms on the 31 |
