Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  Two months later, in January, Peter finishes his master’s thesis. I’m thanked in the acknowledgments for both my typing skills and my patience, and soon we’ll be moving. Peter has a job offer from Cytogen, an early-stage pharmaceutical company in Princeton, New Jersey. I start calling everyone I know in New Jersey to try and wrangle a job at a newspaper, trade magazine, nonprofit, anywhere that will let me write. The only thing I find is a job in Baltimore as features editor at the alternative weekly there, the City Paper. Midmonth, Peter leaves Binghamton to start his job, staying with friends of mine while searching for a place we can live, somewhere between Princeton and Baltimore.

  I am on my own in the cottage now, for what I assumed would be a tedious month of work and sitting at home. The big activity of the evenings would be starting a fire in the wood-burning stove without my hair catching fire (which has happened twice), then reading and bed. It is nothing like that. It is surprisingly wonderful. I finally do some good reporting because I stop looking at everything here as inconsequential small potatoes and begin to appreciate my role in the fabric of the community. Everyone reads the paper in Cortland and that means everyone knows my name. They call me during the day with news tips and comments on my stories. I start socializing a little with some of the single reporters. Turns out that one of my colleagues, Jackie, another female reporter, is in a relationship with a woman, but in this neck of the woods that information is mostly kept private.

  She and her girlfriend, Natalie, rent a small house on a street I’ve never seen before. Inside it’s wood floors and jute rugs with geometric designs and hand-me-down furniture, same as I have. We have dinner and wine, and they talk about leaving Cortland so they can come out and be a couple in public. We gossip about the paper and its editors. “I wish you weren’t leaving,” Jackie says. “Just when we’re getting to know you better.” There’s a part of me wishing I wasn’t leaving too. I’ve been so much happier the last few weeks with Peter gone, although I miss him. It’s like there are two people inside me, one who misses him and one who wants him to go live his life while I stay in the cottage, keep working at the paper, make new friends, and build my own separate life. The thought of joining Peter, as I will do in a couple of weeks, feels like a relief—we’re out of this freezing place!—but also a new beginning I know on some level I haven’t exactly chosen.

  By February I’ve left Marathon and the newspaper for Philadelphia, where we will live and from where I will commute to Baltimore by train. We’ve conscripted as many of our friends as we can to help us move into a loft on the corner of Ninth and Arch Street, a stone’s throw from a big mall and around the corner from the Trocadero, a music club. The loft is roomy, precisely because it has no rooms—it is the top floor of a brick building. It’s also cheap—$500 a month—located three floors above a Chinese restaurant.

  Moving weekend, we pack up what little we have in the cottage, get the rest of our belongings out of storage, and drive to Philadelphia. On the way, we stop at my father’s house in Hackettstown, New Jersey, near the Delaware Water Gap. We are here to pick up an old couch, a love seat, and a large area rug he and his girlfriend no longer need. “What are you going to do with this?” my dad asks, motioning toward the couch—which has seen better days—with his chin, his hands in his pockets. “It’s got a few holes in it.” The three of us are standing in a big storage building that houses an old car, some furniture, and a ferocious German shepherd named Max. My dad and Carol bought this house on ten acres—complete with a little pond—when they left New York City, about four years ago.

  Carol seems like a fish out of water so far from Manhattan. She has thrown all her energy into decorating the house, which looks like the outcome of a duel between Country Living magazine and Bloomingdale’s.

  “You could cover it with something, like—” She coughs and covers her mouth with the back of her hand, the nails polished deep red. “Like a drop cloth,” she says, taking a drag of her cigarette. “You just go to a paint store and ask for a white drop cloth, you know? Those heavy cloths for catching paint splatter, but you could drape them over the couches and just staple them underneath.”

  “Burt,” she says, turning toward my father, who is talking to Peter. “Do we have a staple gun we can lend them?” Carol turns to me. “It’ll be like a quick reupholstery job.”

  By the time we get to the apartment building in Philly, our friends are already outside, waiting for us. We grab furniture and boxes out of the U-Haul and drag them up three flights of stairs. It’s an unusually warm spring day, and the breeze holds a glimpse of summer in it. After all our junk is upstairs, we sit inside the empty truck, the door still rolled up, and drink cans of cold beer.

  It’s the hottest summer of our lives. The loft—we can’t afford an air conditioner—is like a brick oven. At night, Peter and I drive around in our 4Runner with its air-conditioning on high, away from downtown to the neighborhood of Manayunk, where we get soft ice cream, perch on the hood of the car, and try to feel a breeze off the river. Three years ago, I was working right around the corner from here in the offices of that tiny arts magazine, Scan (which went belly-up nine months after I came on board). I was dating Peter then but not exclusively, feeling free and happy, getting paid to write. Now I’m sitting on the hood of a car that belongs to my boyfriend, the engine making ticking sounds as it tries to cool in the ninety-degree heat. Why is it I felt more confident back then, more important to Peter? I wonder. I glance at him lazily licking his ice cream cone. Maybe for him it’s the difference between chasing what you want and getting it.

  The sun is setting over the Schuylkill River and my mind is back at Scan and how proud I felt every day walking in there, even though most of us knew very little about publishing a magazine. Now I travel two and a half hours a day, each way, to Baltimore for a job as a features editor at a weekly newspaper, which I got thanks to a friend on the staff. I have come to understand that I don’t know the first thing about editing someone else’s work—I only know how to write. I am anxious and insecure, exhausted by the five-hour daily commute. I know in my heart it can’t last, but for this moment at least, I am employed and the breeze feels good. I have held on to Peter, moved with him and for him, and found a job in journalism. I am twenty-six years old and committed to this man, not sure I’d find another person I could love this much, with whom I could talk about so many things, someone this intelligent, who lets me tell him the plots of all the novels I read, whose very heartbeat makes me feel at peace. We’re together, I think. This is working.

  Ten months later, Peter and I decide to get married. It’s February and we are talking about his birthday in two months. I ask him what he wants. “Why don’t we get married?” he says. “I have three pay periods in March. So that’s like an extra paycheck. Why don’t we get married, and then you will have health insurance?” The City Paper can’t afford to provide health insurance to its employees. It’s something I’m worried about and we’ve talked about, but haven’t found any good solutions other than for me to find another job. Getting married solves that problem, it’s true, although this is the least romantic marriage proposal I can imagine.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t expecting a down-on-one-knee kind of thing, Peter offering up a black-velvet ring box. I don’t see myself as the kind of woman who receives a diamond ring or has a wedding that requires debates about caterers and color schemes. Other women might be the star of that kind of fairy tale, but not me. I have convinced myself—perhaps because I know this is what Peter wants to believe about me—that I am completely nontraditional, just as Peter feels is true about himself. So why on earth would I want a traditional marriage proposal? Or wedding? Looking back, I suppose I was afraid to admit to Peter that deep down, I did want that—or at least some of that. A few weeks from now, when we tell my mom we’re getting married, she will be so excited that she’ll dig out her wedding gown, tucked in a silver box in a bedr
oom closet. She will tell me to try it on and see if it fits. And I will. My mother had it custom-made and it’s stunning and simple, white taffeta with a pearl-studded neckline. It is so tiny, I will barely get it zipped up. When I show myself to Peter, twirling once, he will laugh. “You look like the Good Witch of the North,” he’ll tell me. Yeah, I’ll agree, embarrassed for thinking this was an option, acting as if I’m in on the joke.

  Later on, in midlife, I will better understand why it was so hard for me to ask for what I wanted back then, to admit that I actually loved that dress and wanted to wear it. Lots of things conspire to create or cut down someone’s sense of their own worth. In my life it wasn’t one big thing but many, many small ones, a collection of insults and humiliations that piled up over time until they were bigger than I was. And the piling up started early.

  As a kid, my teeth were so badly misaligned I wore heavy silver braces for four years. I went through puberty late because I was underweight, which left me underdeveloped compared to my curvaceous classmates. My father told me many times, “It’s a good thing you’re smart, because you’re not pretty.” It created an odd juxtaposition of feelings in me, believing my father loved me while he also humiliated me, like when he called me “Stupe”—shorthand for stupid—because I struggled with my math homework. Or asked me when the hell I was going to get my period. Or when he threatened to send me to “the skinny kids farm” if I didn’t start eating more. I often begged him in tears not to send me away, believing I was about to be packed up and sent to Mr. Brown, the name of the fake head of this nonexistent punishment camp for society’s underweight children. He and my mother stopped short of packing my bags but instead made me sit at our dining room table in the dark for hours, in front of a cold plate of unfinished pot roast or meat loaf. I would lay my head down on the table and daydream that I was someplace else. Hours later, my mother, silently siding with my father, would scrape the uneaten food on my plate into the kitchen trash can and, without looking at me, tell me to go to bed.

  In school I felt like an ugly outsider, Jewish in a community of largely Irish and Italian Catholic kids, ashamed that my family was different, that we celebrated different holidays and ate different food. In seventh grade, someone painted the word Jew in red across my locker.

  By the time I got to high school, my parents were so involved with their own disintegrating marriage they knew little about my life. They didn’t even know if I had applied to college, although my father eventually asked. When I said I had, he made sure I understood that he wouldn’t be able to pay for it, and my mother didn’t have any savings of her own. “You can’t get blood from a stone,” my father often said, any time he feared I might be thinking about asking him for some financial help. The small amount of money my parents had put aside for college—about $900—they gave to my older sister, who dropped out before the end of her first year.

  That is how I become the kind of woman who gets married because she needs health insurance, who does not expect a romantic marriage proposal, who gets married because she’s afraid if she doesn’t, the man she loves will change his mind and then no one will want her.

  The truth is, at least on some level, I hate the thought of being someone’s wife. Marriage turned my mother from a vivacious, interesting, happy woman—one I know about from stories and old photos—into a depressed and lonely wife. My father was rarely home when I was growing up, and the enduring image I have of my mom is her standing at the kitchen sink, hands encased in yellow rubber gloves, doing dishes after dinner. Sometimes she would just stand at the sink holding a sudsy plate for several minutes, staring blankly out the kitchen window into the backyard. Most nights my father wasn’t home. He moonlighted as a driver for Air Brook Limousine, both because we needed the extra money and because it gave him the cover and freedom to have lengthy affairs with other women. My mom waited at home for something to change, and my dad led a double life.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s get married.”

  Peter laughs. “That was easy.”

  Only one condition, he tells me. He doesn’t want to do any of the planning. “I can’t deal with that,” he says. “Also I’m really busy at work.” Peter is a bench chemist (bench being chemist shorthand for a lab table) at Cytogen, which is a lot like being a line cook in a restaurant kitchen. The Ph.D.s are the chefs, creating recipes for compounds they want to test, and the bench chemists mix up the ingredients. He is adamant about preventing our families from getting involved in the planning. “Just find a place and we can do it in the next two months. Let’s keep our mothers out of it,” he says. “Let’s do it our way.”

  “Our way” of course, is really his way, I realize, with me doing all the work. Two months to plan and execute a wedding on a small budget. Peter has removed himself from the entire process, although he’s paying for it. Yet that’s okay with me. I’m invested in this relationship and this man; I hope getting married will pave the way for stability, a family, a more mature love.

  A few nights later we are in New Jersey visiting my dad and we decide to go out for pizza and tell him we’re getting married. “We have something to tell you,” I say, when the three of us are seated. My father starts smiling. He already knows, I think. He’s probably dreamed of this moment. He desperately wants each of his daughters married, wants someone else to be taking care of them, even though he has done little caretaking himself. He told us years ago that he had $5,000 saved for each of us, which we could have when we got married. A carrot, he hoped, would motivate each of us to get the job done. At my older sister’s wedding a few years earlier, he seemed downright giddy to be checking her off his list, despite the fact that his $90 monthly child support payments to my mother—so small they were more symbolic than anything else—ended long ago.

  “We’re getting married,” I say. My father’s smile is two feet wide. “That’s fantastic, congratulations!” He stands up to hug me and then hugs Peter. “When?” he asks, and we all sit down again. “Probably April, in Philly. Eilene is planning it.” Yes, we acknowledge, it’s quick, and no, I’m not pregnant. Quick is how we want it, and so that’s how we’re doing it. “Especially,” Peter adds, “since we’re paying for it.”

  My father nods approvingly. This is language he understands: the language of money and control. If Peter and I are paying for our wedding, we don’t have to explain the timing. Money is something my father covets and respects, although he has never had much of it. And like my father, who can tell you every single dime he’s ever spent on you, Peter also keeps score when it comes to money. He points out the things for which he has paid almost like he’s flexing a muscle. There’s the wok we bought last week, the white paint we’re going to use this weekend to spruce up the loft, the take-out Chinese food we had on Thursday night, the car payments. I’m hoping that after we’re married this kind of claim-staking will become unnecessary, a vestige of our prenuptial past.

  Peter excuses himself to use the bathroom and my dad stares at his hands on the wooden table, one folded on top of the other, and then turns to look at me. “Don’t blow it,” he says, his smile gone. I can feel my face getting hot. There are a million things I want to say in response, but I’m so shocked I can’t form sentences, other than to say “I won’t.” I am burning with shame and embarrassment. I wish I had been indignant instead, had stood up angrily and shot back, “Why aren’t you saying this to Peter?” Why didn’t my father think I was special, that I was the great catch here? At that moment, though, his words felt like the truth, an obvious one that didn’t need to be stated. Of course I wouldn’t blow it. Did my father think I was an idiot? That I didn’t understand how undeservedly lucky I was that this smart, handsome, ambitious, sweet man I’d fallen in love with had also fallen for me?

  What I didn’t understand then was that my “falling” for Peter likely had as much to do with my father as it did with Peter. Research has found that whether or not a fath
er is absent or present, emotionally available or emotionally distant, critical, supportive or indifferent, has a significant effect on the type of man his daughter chooses as a husband, and her interactions with him. It also affects a daughter’s self-image and self-esteem. Linda Nielsen, a professor of adolescent and educational psychology at Wake Forest University who has studied father-daughter relationships since the 1970s, says a present, involved, supportive father builds up his daughter’s self-confidence and passes along the implicit message that she does not need a man to make her valuable. “If a young woman gets that affirmation and approval from her dad, she is not going to be desperate to get it anywhere else because she already has it in him,” Nielsen said in a 2015 interview. This was not the message I got from my father. The message I got was “Don’t blow it.”

  Peter comes back to the table. My father is smiling again and just like that, we pick up the conversation where we left off.

  I decide we’ll get married at the Warwick Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. For the reception, our guests will commandeer the hotel’s Sunday brunch, which takes place in a bright, open area in the hotel’s historic lobby. I reserve a small banquet room for the brief ceremony. There will be chairs, lots of standing room, and champagne. And Peter’s father will marry us.