Till Death Do Us Part

By Leslie Pietrzyk

I’m meeting my stupid father “pre-performance” at the Kennedy Center bar on April 15. Which happens to be his wedding anniversary to my stupid mother. I know, who gets married on tax day? Who meets their kid on his wedding anniversary? They’re not married now, but still. I’m supposed to be there at 6 pm sharp. That’s how he still talks, like he’s a hundred-and-ten years old, like people say “sharp” every two seconds. I don’t even know what show we’re seeing, ballet or symphony or whatever. He brings the tickets.

I shoot for 6:15. He’ll be late. Plus, it’s a bar and I know I look like I’m at least eighteen, but I’m fifteen, and sometimes people act like I’m a child and sometimes I catch grown-up men staring like they want to hike my skirt with one hand and fuck me, like they’re imagining no underwear in the way. Anyway, either makes sitting around a bar waiting for his entrance exactly what I’m not in the mood for.

He’s always late. He’s a very important man in Washington, DC, always “running behind,” with some assistant whose whole job is texting bullshit about how late he’ll be. Delete.

I’m supposed to take a taxi but obviously that fare’s in my pocket and I’m riding Metro and the free shuttle bus from Foggy Bottom. My income’s gonna tank the minute someone on his staff explains Uber. Once a month I meet my dad at the Kennedy Center because, he says, culture will be my savior, and because he likes people seeing me with him, people seeing him “culture me up.” Honestly, I think he pretends I’m his date or something super-uniquely insane like that. I don’t say this because of course I’m not stupid.

So, at 6:15 I’m on the elevator with a flock of lady tourists wearing what my dad might declare their “so-called finery” — fake-leather high heels with rolls of foot fat spilling over the sides; shiny, thick-fabric skirts that are too tight but also too baggy; wire-wrapped polished purple stone earrings from a spin-rack at a bad mountain town gift shop — and it practically damages my eyes looking at them. But no floor numbers to watch lighting up above since this elevator only goes one place, to the roof level where both restaurants are, the fancy one, where I’m headed, and the one where you pile crap on a plastic tray, which guess who will be going there? So I close my eyes, trying to imagine my parents in love, imagine my father creaked down on one knee, all, “Will you marry me, my darling?” and my mother’s eyes not their usual bloodshot fury, but starry, like a teenage girl watching a movie about herself, which she was, being nineteen. Fifteen years ago this happened, which is a whole lifetime — my whole lifetime — and, yes, I get the math and get why they got married. So I should stop with picturing flowers in her hand, a veil, an organ pumping out that stupid song. Stop thinking there was any love at all. There’s none now, that’s for sure. I don’t even know what love is or why bother.

The elevator door dings finally, and my eyes snap open. My mom’s mascara feels stiff on my lashes, but no touching or it’ll smudge. I flounce my way out of that elevator on very high heels that make me look at least eighteen and I go left as the Oklahomans or Iowans or Ohioans or whatever the fuck they are stare in cow-faced confusion at a sign, as if an ant-stream of people balancing sodas on plastic trays doesn’t clue them to go right, and definitely far, far away from me.

I like the bar at the Kennedy Center. Not because it’s almost always where I meet my dad but because there are these tiny round tables about as big as cookies dotted around what my dad calls an “alcove.” You sit on either white leather cubes or a short, stiff couch with fringy hippie pillows, and the lights are way low and the candles, which are real wax, flicker differently in here, kind of slower and moodier. We always snag a table in the “alcove” where I’m the youngest person by far and I love everyone staring at me through the shadowy light pretending they’re not. I love how a waiter might smirk something like, “Sure you’re in the right place, ‘miss’?” and I get to go all snot-bitch about how I’m meeting my father, and give his name, and their mouth pops like a blowfish and no more “miss.”

I love the Kennedy Center bar, the alcove, and if not my father, at least his name. I wouldn’t tell anyone this, ever, but I keep a secret scrapbook of our meetings, each ticket, each program with every single sheet stuffed in the program (“Tonight the part of Tobias Ragg will be played by….”), and the bar receipts, which finally, finally my stupid father figured out to just hand over to me instead of me shooting into a pout to make him agree one missing business receipt won’t collapse him down into to financial hell. Also, the pout is because why is meeting me business?

There’s so much money on those receipts — I like adding it all up. Then tossing in the ticket price. And the taxi, and the taxi home which I can’t ditch with him hovering around the line outside the Kennedy Center, working it, then doing the “last wave” when I get driven off, like a salute, like I’m off to war. What that money adds up to is a satisfying figure, almost a super-tremendously huge figure. That’s me knowing how much he loves me, which might be pathetic if the figure wasn’t so satisfyingly huge.

He’s not there yet, and the best table in the alcove is waiting for us, the one up front with perfect-frame view of anyone strolling up to the host stand or leaving the restaurant, anyone in the bar, and my father also in a perfect-frame, with me at his side. I snag that table, wedging in front of a wavering couple deciding drinks versus a real dinner in the restaurant, so I show them a thing or two, flinging myself onto the couch, then rearranging into a decorative pose with my arm draping along the back edge. I like how my tinkly bracelets puddle down my wrist, and I give a little shake to rev them. I’ve practically memorized the menu so I decided on the metro I’m ordering tuna tartare, a dish not in my mother’s kitchen repertoire, and French fries, which he’s chickenshit to order after his doctor said staying clear of fried foods would add years to his life. So he wolfs half mine and talks tough, going something like, “I think the man means it will feel like years.” Haha, ha-de-haha. He’s a little too used to people jumping to laugh their asses off at his dumb jokes.

The waiter is new, tall, thin, kinda toothpicky, but he doesn’t get on me, just hands over a menu — and wine list — and when I use my haughtiest voice, “We will be two,” hands me another. He doesn’t care. Good for him. I like people who don’t give a fuck. He looks barely older than me, like he’s supposed to be working a hipster hard cider bar on H Street, wearing a vintage ’94 World Cup T-shirt instead of this tidy little ensemble of black poly pants, shirt, and skinny tie. He goes away. He’s in charge of the alcove tables.

I read over the wines. My father drinks red if we’re ever somewhere private which we aren’t anymore, but white if we’re out because he’s all, “Red wine stains the teeth.” It’s only repeating what some top-dollar K Street consultant said, but in his voice like the deep-deep-blue-sea, it sounds very true. He’s like a hundred and ten but that voice of his won’t quit. No surgery to nip and tuck that, so it’s for real. Haha. Ha-de-haha. My mother drinks whatever. She couldn’t give the littlest fuck about stained teeth. She’d be on like her fifth glass now. She’s drinking herself to death. Last month, at this exact table, I told my father that, those words. He said, “I am not your mother’s keeper.”

“Me neither,” I said.

One of those lonely, late-nightish-feeling silences. Then I said, “It’s like stepping right over a homeless man in the doorway of the Starbucks where you’re going for a vanilla latte,” which he totally would do, totally, which I also told him.

“I would not step over a homeless man in front of the Starbucks,” he said. “I have sponsored many bills to protect the homeless,” and there he was, launching into it, H.R.-number-this, H.J. Res-that, about to practically pin a campaign button to my sweater, but in sanity’s self-interest I cut in: “Dad, I’m too young to vote, and I’m not in your district anyways,” and that launched his famous laugh, head flying back, table slaps, wounded crow squawks, haha, ha-de-haha. He laughs like someone’s filming it, like someone films whatever tiny thing he does. Probably sleeps like someone’s filming that. That time, when he stopped with the laugh, when he didn’t see me laughing, he went, “Remember what I said about not calling me ‘dad.’”

His district’s in North Carolina. That’s where his other family lives, the real one, the newest one, with the cute twin babies and their rhyming names. The chubbiest cheeks! You just want to pinch them! Even my stupid mother coos crap when they’re on TV, hauled in for some special event like the Easter Egg Roll which is a bajillion bawling kids uniformed in tiny suits and itchy dresses, shrieking, “Mommy! Daddy!” messing up the White House lawn, muddles of parents fraught with self-importance, pushing in for photos they’ll slap on Facebook and their office wall.

I could ding up my phone and see why he’s late this time, but I’m de-gridding, trying to push past grabbing Daddy Apple every nano-second. I mean, I love my phone, obviously, but this other way is super-interesting, very olden days not knowing the temperature unless you’re standing outside or remembering things with my mind, not a photo. No Channel of Me, broadcasting where I am, what I’m thinking. If I had more than one friend, two maybe, my current phone abstinence might be a thing, but my friend or maybe friends are so fuck-it, it’s like they’re forgiving.

There’s a man across the hallway, standing at the bar-bar, one foot on a stool rung instead of, hello, sitting on the stool, and he’s putting the eye on me. Yes, he is! I jolt straighter, give the bracelets a cute jingle. Toss my hair, trying not to be horsy. If my school was normal, I’d learn the right moves from those gorgeous bitch-girls, but I’ve been dumped into the rich kid black sheep school. The guy who started it ran a normal rich kid school until he noticed how like all those kids had a brother or sister not “working out” so he started this whole other school specifically for those kids. He jacked up tuition and plugged in the code words, starting with the “ives” — alternative, creative, progressive, supportive — and moving into the real salivators — group projects, common areas, independent thinkers, their own imagination, self-expression and discovery — all topped with the code word daddy of them all: EXCLUSIVE. Your kid will be a fuck-up alongside only the best fuck-ups. My dad pays my tuition which I won’t add to that number of how much he loves me because private school and college tuition are in the court papers. Tuition is business.

The man eyeing me does one of those itty-bitty head nods with a half-smile. He’s got wavy long hair down at his shoulders, so I like that, but he’s ancient and boring to look at. T-shirt and Brooksy blue blazer and old man gum sole shoes, like L.A. meets D.C. meets capital F fugly. He should be over with the plastic trays. He shouldn’t be looking at me. He should know better, dirty old man. I’m like half his age, even if he’s buying I’m twenty-one, or pretending to buy. Another stupid half-nod, and his foot drops off the rung, an on-the-move move.

Riding the metro, I overheard a soccer mom lady go into her phone, “Nothing stabs deeper than the eye roll of a teenage girl,” so I inflict that pain on him, flicking my lip in scorn, doubling down with a sneer, and giving him the heave-ho.

He laughs! He laughs at me and sucks on his cheap brand beer bottle, swigging the backwash sloshing the bottom before lifting a finger for another.

I will not grab my phone for cover though my face burns as hot as it gets, like a bonfire is raging over my cheeks. Everyone saw. Everyone heard. I’m so stupid.

The waiter stops by, blocking my view of the stupid man which is excellent for me. “Anything while you wait?” he asks like it’s a line he memorized for somewhere else, and I say, “Tuna tartare,” kinda the same way. If I eat it all before my dad gets here, he’ll pay for another. It’s appetizer size, so not like I’m hogging the trough, which is one of my father’s big sayings from the way-olden days. Then I say, “Pinot grigio,” pronouncing it I hope properly, and he cuts me a look, but then goes, “Yeah. Okay.”

Like they’ll shut down the world-famous John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and arrest everyone in it for serving underage!

This is an exciting development. I hope grigio is the white pinot, not the red, because the stained teeth thing sounds logically real.

What happens when my father pulls in and I’m sipping wine? It’s possible he’ll be proud. Why, when he was my age — he says in that deep-blue, rolling ocean voice — he was driving tractors into town and smoking a pack a day and his mother sold her grandfather’s “hooch” out of the back of the barn. I never met those people, so they’re basically a dream. There’s another family, by the way, the first family my father made, which didn’t stick, so he made another one, then another. Trying to get it right. Those first-family kids are grown-ups now, busy hating me and my mom. The cute rhyming-name twins are too little to hate us, but they will the minute they’re old enough to know what hate is, how to do it. I mean not how I hate grapefruit, but hate that bends your life. Hate that coils around and through your every breath, until it is your every breath. Hate like that is getting beamed right at me and my mom from North Carolina every single second.

I try not to feel it, but my mom does. Sometimes she says things like, “If I’d’ve known it’d be this, I’d’ve thrown myself off that bridge like all them wanted.” I don’t know what bridge, but I guess some bridge, some moment, some fulcrum. Then she’ll look at me and go, “Only thing he ever loved was his own reflection smiling back every morning in the mirror.” She’ll go, “He don’t love you none.” She’ll go, “We are lucky like hell that lawyer got teeth in him.” She’ll go, “If he loved you, would he leave you here with me? Am I right?” and it’s like the words jumped from my head to hers, and that’s when it’s shut-her-up-time and I cram in earbuds or slam a door running outside or wrestle her to bed, trying for face-up, leaving behind ice in a washcloth for the headache coming on later, if I feel like it.

Finally here’s my wine, and finally here’s my father, tornadoing in with left and right hand waves, and the smile and the voice going “howareyou” one word, not a question, grip-n-grinning as people cluster, even touching the awful man at the bar who steps in for his share. “He’s in love with a crowd,” says my mom. Sometimes he’s solo, which is whew, but tonight a couple shadows trail my dad like vapor. Those guys with their earpieces and sunglasses think they’re better than god with their glower. My dad said once he doesn’t like them knowing “too much” so it’s not his idea dragging them along. They never laugh.

He’s got on a gray suit, like always; a flag pin, like always; and a lavender tie, a new color I think, with its big, important knot pressed tight up into his collar. The silk looks extra-glossy, thick as tapestry, and just by that glance I know the tie’s super-hideously expensive. There’s a lady whose job is shopping. He hasn’t been inside a store since forever, since I bet before I was born. She buys the presents for me, and she’s got good taste, or good enough anyway, and certainly she’s got her calendar all set up right because gifts arrive on the dot, wrapped in store paper, brought by messenger. It’s dismal imagining that little ding on her phone yipping and her thinking, “Shit. Time to pick out a sweater for the second family kid.”

The waiter steps backwards, adding a second hand to balance the tray holding my wine, edging himself out of the way so my father can sit down, which he does, sinking onto the couch next to me. He’s no fan of the leather cubes, not my dad who likes “vertebral support.” The shadows melt back. “Hello, sir,” the waiter says, even though he’s supposed to say — and at the Kennedy Center there’d be a job requirement to know, plus about everyone in Washington knows — he’s supposed to say, Mr. Speaker…“hello, Mr. Speaker,” like that, tack on a “sir” to nail it in, “hello, Mr. Speaker, sir.” Plenty of people don’t like my father, maybe hate him a little bit, since some blogger and then the news found out he all of a sudden doesn’t recite the pledge of allegiance which, hoo-ray and boo-yah, is how they start every day of Congress, like it’s kindergarten. Sometimes he mouths the words, but he goes tight-lipped and perfectly still at “under God.” C-SPAN got a close-up. Suddenly, he’s America’s atheist. On Opening Day for the Nats, his butt was welded in the seat when everyone else leapt like sheep at “God Bless America,” and a fake GIF went up with him gobbling down corndogs while the chorus goes behind him. “I don’t have to believe in god to love my country,” he booms on TV, “and whose god do you suggest I choose?” My mom is really into this, with her witch cackles, saying he’s fast-tracking to oblivion now, with a political death wish and it’s “suicide by voter,” and she knows there’s an “end game” somewhere. I don’t know what to think. Good for him maybe? Some campaign manager quit, which everyone suddenly cared about.

The waiter’s sliding in the wine (the white one; I was right), and I’m reaching, but my father says, “This girl is fifteen,” and he grabs for the glass and I kind of keep holding the stem though I don’t think I mean to and the waiter’s trying to pull his arm out of the tangle, and anyway, the wine ends up dumped all over my dad’s pant leg and that’s so awkward and embarrassing and everyone in the alcove knows my dad after that “hullabaloo” entrance of his so he can’t yell at me or the waiter and he has to laugh a fake laugh like everything’s super-insanely hilarious and paste on a grim smile showing his white, unstained, politician teeth and now he’ll have to sit in Symphony Hall with a wet leg like he peed himself. And no wine for me!

The waiter races over a whole huge stack of clean white cloths. His face is too red, kinda scary like all his blood is right there, about to burn off, but my dad won’t pick up even one cloth, just leaves them tumbled on the table, while he hisses me a lecture, the whole waltz about how embarrassing this all is and I should know better and how people with cameras are everywhere and how YouTube is Satan’s tool (which is dramatic effect, unless an atheist’s allowed to believe in the devil? Does it work that way?). Anyway, who’s so lame and bored they’re going to watch wine spilling on YouTube? Really, is anyone? No one knows I’m his daughter unless I make a big fuss saying so. It’s not like my lip or any part of my body touched even one tiny drop of that tasty-looking pinot grigio.

Now the bad luck waiter’s got my plate of tuna tartare in his hand and he’s over to the side, stupidly tall and towering up there, like he knows don’t interrupt but like some chef was hollering in the back to pick-up, pick-up, so now he’s just planted there clutching that poor plate. Plus the jumble of towels fills up the table. I’m mumbling, “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” thinking I can quicken things, and the man who eyed me is at it again, the turd, but eyeing my father this time, with that rustling and clothes-tugging like he’s about to slither on over for “just a few words,” and it’s a 7:30 curtain so it’s not like we’ve got all the time in the universe or anything, and why these people think my dad even pays one iota of attention to what they’re spitting at him, or what makes these people think he cares — well, it’s ridiculous. Shoot him an email, dude — now is not when you want your political “coffee klatch,” with my dad busily whisper-yelling up a froth at his second family daughter, the girl who turned him into “not-president,” into “never-president” unless a line of people die first. So half the country hates him again, now that he’s turned atheist. How can he stand being so hated? How can he stand it? Maybe I’ll shoot him an email and ask.

Finally he stops his “filibuster.” Haha, ha-de-haha.

The waiter pounces to scoop away the million wasted cloths and squeeze in my plate of tuna, the polished pink cubes resting on scalloped rows of see-through-thin cucumber slices, each with a bright dot of sriracha sauce. So pretty! I want two. My father says for him, saladnodressing, one word, and I say, “And I’ll also take an order of French fries,” (they come in a paper cone), and my dad puffs a sigh, but then he looks right into my eyes and winks. I love when he does that. I like to imagine him and the president both way tense and jumpy at a long shiny table of people wearing suits and army medals, going all cats and dogs about something stupid and then there’s my dad winking. Make that GIF, you guys. My dad orders icedteaextralemon. I could mention how tea is staining to the teeth. But he’s not into people telling him things. He’s more of the permanent teller. The waiter goes. My dad could get him fired!

The wine smells razor sharp. That part of his pants is darker gray, the stain as big as cabbage leaves and same shape. “Sorry,” I say again. We’re alone, the shadows stiff dark-suited boards somewhere. It must be so boring being them.

My dad’s so quiet, but not quiet because he’s thinking. Not quiet because something important’s happening on his phone. Quiet like, show’s over, folks. My shoulders tighten. I’m way tensed up. I eat my tuna tartare very, very quietly, not clinking my fork against the plate or my teeth. It’s yum. I wouldn’t mind a Diet Coke since there won’t be pinot grigio. The whole rest of the place is as noisy as can be, the swinging alcove, people hugging and jostling around the host stand, even that guy at the bar bending to speak close to a red-haired waitress. But our tiny table is its own orb of quiet. He never knows what to say to me. I’m not so hard to talk to, am I? We’re both fans of the French fry.

These visits are in court papers, too. An order. He is ordered to see me. But they can’t order him to talk. He picks the Kennedy Center. He picks being late. I don’t care. Nobody has to love anyone for the show of it all to work, right? I’m swiveling so he won’t catch my frozen-shut face, hunting the waiter because I’m so getting more of this tuna which I have practically finished.

The red-haired waitress moves on, lucky for her, so the man eyeing us eyes us again, and yanks a sleeve, glides into the crowd, coming over to bore us to death with his “concerns” as my dad pulls up his plastic smile and gets ready, and there’s a knife tucked in the man’s hand that no one sees. I’m the only one seeing. The shadows don’t see but I do, the winking glint, the thin glimmer of slivery steel.

Time is a crawl so I can think a whole bunch of things strung one after the other, even if they don’t make sense, like it’s a stage knife from the props department, or it’s a joke and this man is from the fraternity with my father back in the olden days, and I want to stare into the man’s evil face so I can describe him but his face is pure blank, like there’s not even one single feature on this face, and all that’s in my head is John Wilkes Booth from my history book and his puffy flop of hair and wild moustache, and I’m not screaming or going “look out, look out, look out” because I’m plunged underwater, off a bridge, into that bad dream where you can’t move, chest crushed into a deflated ball and legs heavy like the sandbags I helped pile down by the waterfront when that hurricane with my very own name blew up from the Outer Banks a million years ago and basements and stores flooded in Old Town and there are all these thoughts, and I can’t decide if I love my father and I do, I have to, because he’s the only father I’ll ever have, and when my father stands up, and the shadows are pushing and shoving, and the bad-luck waiter comes barreling in, tackling the shadows, and everyone’s screaming their heads off now, even me, and I jump up and fling myself on top of my father’s body, protecting his chest — protecting him — and the knife slides carefully into my body, like I’m butter, “like I’m butter,” is exactly what I think I’ll tell the cops and TV people, and it doesn’t hurt, nothing hurts right now, and I feel brave and also so stupid, and I’ll tell that to the cops too, tell everyone because that’s who will be listening to me, everyone, and I will tell them, This is what love looks like, right?