American Fraternity Man Read Free Page B

said.
    “Mom,” I said. “Don’t tell me she’s in the car?”
    My father looked up at the gigantic Greek letters painted onto the tall wall behind the living room staircase, took a deep breath. “I dropped her off at the hotel.”
    “That’s a little bit out of the way,” I said.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “And why are you here so early?” I asked. “The event doesn’t start for three hours.”
    My father exhaled, still staring at the wall…and suddenly everything clicked into place: he’d committed her to the event without clearing her Friday night schedule, hadn’t he? He’d forgotten to tell her about the Senior Send-Off, and now—somehow, some way—she was making him pay for his oversight. Maybe she was shopping right now. Or maybe she would show up later in the night in a brand-new sports car she’d bought while his back was turned.
    My father has always been the type to meet problems head-on, plowing directly through the thick of the continent, but my mother is the opposite: she has, over the course of many years, honed the fine art of circumnavigation. When I was a child playing with G.I. Joes, she’d help me with the A-B-C steps of building the tanks and armored vehicles, but when my imagination took over and I made a tank fly, she knew to back slowly away from my play-time rather than argue the impossibilities. “Oh, tanks can fly now?” she’d ask. Or: “Oh, his hands shoot lasers, do they?” My father would argue, try to explain that I should make the tank roll and the jetfighter fly , but my mother just let me live in my fantasy world. Even throughout my time in youth soccer, Little League, JV baseball, I might leave the field complaining of poor refereeing, blatantly missed calls, and she’d say only, “I know. Bad refs. Sorry.” My father would sit me down and for thirty minutes explain the nature of the calls, the difficulty of refereeing, the need to accept the penalties. Confrontation . If my standardized test scores were low, he’d outline why I needed to change my study habits, and he’d tell me over and over how I should do it. Meanwhile, my mother would just sign me up for SAT prep courses and drop me off before I even knew where we were going. Circumnavigation .
    To the casual observer, it seemed almost as if my mother lived in a constant state of defeat. At home, while she watched the evening news, my father might snatch the remote and change the channel. “I just want to see where that hurricane is headed,” he’d say, and the station would remain fixed on the Weather Channel for the next hour. Out to dinner at Outback, my father might veto her appetizer recommendations, her drink (“You didn’t like that the last time you ordered it.”), or even her meal itself. “I suppose you’re right,” my mother would say, sighing. But then, while my father left town on business, she’d have the house painted. Or, at a silent auction, she’d buy a ten-day trip to Paris, signing her name and a too-high bid, committing my father to the bill while he was at the bar ordering drinks. Better to just act and then apologize, my mother told me once, and probably that’s why I’d joined the fraternity without telling him.
    “Your mother is at the Ritz-Carlton’s Spa and Salon,” my father said, and for a moment he placed the wine bottle on the bar’s countertop . “She knew about your graduation ceremony tomorrow morning, but apparently she didn’t know that we’d be getting a hotel room in town the night before. So she scheduled some extensive…activities. I’ll need to pick her up in a bit.”
    “She is coming tonight, though?” I asked. “To the Senior Send-Off?”
    “Your mother’s made her own plans for the afternoon. But yes, she’ll be here for your event.” And I could tell from my father’s careful language that the long-standing marital tug-of-war was as taut as ever, though perhaps the flag in the center of the rope was crossing the line to my mother’s