The three of us stood by the headmaster’s table, our necks craned. “There’s a girl here now whose dad is a senator,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was revealing this-maybe because they’d be interested and because I knew that I hadn’t been acting very pleasant.
“What’s the name?” my father asked.
“Tunniff. She’s from Oregon.”
“I wouldn’t mind meeting a senator this weekend.”
I turned my head sharply to look at him, but he was still gazing up at the wall. Though he could probably feel my stare, his expression remained placid. It was impossible to tell if he was kidding-whether he was saying this because he knew it would bother me or because he had no idea. “Let’s keep going if you want to see the whole campus,” I said.
We walked to the chapel, which was empty except for someone practicing the organ. In the nave, we stood looking at the vaulted ceiling a hundred feet above us-a hundred and three, actually-and my father said, “I’ll be damned.” As they peered up, it struck me that my parents were less like characters from a fairy tale than like tourists in Europe. (Not that I had ever been to Europe myself, but Ault made you familiar with the cheesiness surrounding certain phenomena, even if you weren’t familiar with the phenomena themselves-European tourists and a cappella singing groups and middle-aged Jewish women with hoarse voices and shiny sweatsuits and long painted fingernails.)
My father said, “This is where you pray for your sins, Flea?”
“Where I pray for yours,” I said. “I don’t sin.”
He grinned, and I felt a smile come onto my own face.
“What about Mom’s?” he asked.
At the same time, I said, “She doesn’t sin, either,” and my mother said, “I don’t sin.”
“See?” I said. “If we both think so, it must be true.”
“Au contraire,” my father said. “If what happened this morning between your mother and Burger King wasn’t gluttony, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
“Terry, I didn’t even eat the last hotcake,” my mother said.
“Guess what, Dad?” I said. “It looks like you’re a monkey’s uncle.”
“What do you think that makes you?”
“I’m fully human.” Dropping my voice, I added, “Because we all know my real father is Mr. Tonelli.”
“Oh!” my mother said. “The two of you are disgusting.” Mr. Tonelli, who was in his early eighties, lived in the house behind my parents’; his wife had died a few years before, but even when she was living, we had all been convinced that he was in love with my mother.
“Have you heard the latest?” my father said.
I shook my head.
“They went on a date.”
“That’s nonsense.” My mother had walked several feet away from us, picked up a hymnal, and begun leafing through it.
“Where?”
“Ask her.”
“Where, Mom?”
“Mr. Tonelli isn’t driving these days because of his glaucoma, and he asked if I could take him to get some dinner from Szechwan Garden. That’s all.”
“That is most definitely not all.” My father was still grinning.
“There was some miscommunication,” my mother said. “I thought he wanted to pick up the food, but it turned out he wanted to stay there. And, really, I had no choice but to join him, and then he insisted I order-”
“He insisted,” my father repeated. “Here, her husband and sons are at home holding dinner for her, but when Mr. Tonelli insists–”
“Lee, I had a shrimp and black bean dish that was fabulous,” my mother said. “You know I’m not a big fan of seafood, but Mr. Tonelli suggested it, and it was just delicious.”
“Look at her trying to change the subject,” my father said.
“Did he kiss you good night?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re revolting,” my mother said. “You’re worse than Dad.” My father and I smirked at each other. These were the best times with my family, when we were teasing one another or being gross. We talked about diarrhea at the dinner table; after we ate a meal with garlic, my brothers would bring their faces near mine and try to breathe into my mouth; and when Joseph got kicked off the bus once for singing a song about the scrotum, my father was so tickled he made Joseph write down the lyrics. (It was sung to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March”-Scrotum: It’s just a sac of skin/ Scrotum: It holds your testes in…) And then at Ault I never mentioned such things, certainly not to anyone other than Martha. And Martha’s own family, apparently, never mentioned such things to one another. She once told me she had never even heard her mother burp. The way my family behaved felt both truthful and indecorous-another version of my real self, perhaps the realest of all, but one I took pains to conceal. Just a few months before, when Martha and I had eaten lunch at a table of boys, they’d been speculating about why a classmate always missed breakfast, and one of them formed a circle with his thumb and other fingers and jiggled his hand back and forth. Another of them, a guy named Elliot, turned to me and said in a not-unfriendly way, “You know what that means, Lee?” Did I know what that meant? Was he serious? I had been raised in a house where my father shouted up the stairs to my six– and thirteen-year-old brothers, “Quit whacking off and come down for dinner!” But when Elliot asked me, I actually blushed, as if even my physiology were conspiring in the lie of my seemliness.
My father snapped his fingers. “What say we blow this pop stand?”
My mother replaced the hymnal in the little space on the back of the seat, and we went out the front door, and as we did so, we collided with Nancy Daley, a willowy senior, captain of the squash and tennis teams, who had her parents in tow. The six of us stood in a kind of benign face-off, and then I said, “Hi. These are my parents.” I glanced back at them. “Mom and Dad, this is Nancy Daley.”
My mother extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Nancy.” My father shook her hand, too.
My heart was pounding-the thing was, I had never talked to Nancy before. Literally. And I had introduced her only because I hadn’t known what else to do, because suddenly, with parents present, the protocol of Ault seemed absurd: that you could live for years in the same small community with people, that you could know their names and their secrets (as a sophomore, Nancy had hooked up in the music wing with Henry Thorpe, then a senior, and while they were hooking up, Henry had opened the classroom window, reached out, gathered snow in his hands, brought it back inside, and smeared it on her breasts), and that even with such knowledge, you could when passing on campus-you were supposed to, if you’d never really met-not speak or smile; possibly you would not even make eye contact. Surely neither Nancy nor I would have uttered a word had our parents not been there. And it wasn’t that this absurdity offended me philosophically-it was just that I knew it would strike my parents as strange, and knowing that had made me panic. (But really, who cared what my parents thought was strange? What did I need to convince them of? It was Ault people I wanted to convince.)
My mother was shaking Nancy’s parents’ hands-“I’m Linda Fiora,” I heard her say, and Nancy’s mother said, “I’m Birdie Daley”-and my father was following suit. “Where are you folks from?” my father asked.
“Princeton,” said Nancy’s mother. She was wearing a silky maroon skirt with a swirling paisley pattern and a maroon sweater set, and Mr. Daley was wearing a suit. My own parents were dressed more nicely than they usually were on a Saturday, my father in khaki pants and a khaki blazer (surely, since they were not part of the same suit, that was some sort of faux pas) and my mother in a red turtleneck and a gray corduroy jumper. Over the phone, I had haltingly explained to my mother that most parents dressed up; I had felt unable to request that they should, but she had understood.
“We’re from South Bend, Indiana,” my father said. “Just got in about an hour ago, and we’re damn glad to be here.”
The Daleys laughed, or at least Nancy’s parents did; Nancy herself gave a watered-down smile.
“Are you a junior, too?” my mother asked Nancy.