"Meet Cute" by Rachel Duboff
The man sitting across from you at the candle-lit table asks a question, hoping for a certain type of answer.
“How did your parents meet?”
You study the crease between his eyebrows, a line that looks less like a wrinkle and more like a scar. The bar is colored by shadow and his face appears disembodied, like a carved-out pumpkin illuminated from the inside. His lips press against each other hard like he’s not sure what to do with them in this stretch of silence, and for a moment you think he’s gotten the wrong idea, but then they contract.
He leans forward, elbows crossed on the table, something your mother always told you not to do. When you were young, you made a song out of this etiquette rule, so each time she told it to you at the kitchen table you’d start singing, making her look of solemnity disappear entirely. These were the nights your father stayed late at or traveled for work. On the nights he called in advance to say he’d be home, your mother had you set the dinner table, teaching you where the cutlery goes: napkin on the left of the plate, fork on the napkin, knife on the right. She exuded rays of light, Mary Poppins meets Maria von Trapp, and one evening, tucking you into bed like a mummy, she told you her parents sent her to a finishing school in Switzerland. “It taught me how to be married,” she said, and her eyes suddenly seemed far away, as if gazing into a past she hoped to forget.
In a picture from before your mother met your father, she is lying on a beach, smiling so wide her eyes are closed in glee. Her teeth glimmer white in the sun. Her chest is tan and freckled, the bathing suit top your mother wears is strapless, a deep magenta. Her hair, auburn and wavy, is up in a bun, strands falling like velvet stage curtains, framing the centerpiece of her, freedom you’ve never known with any intimacy, lived-in and effortless. You discovered this photo after you moved out, in an album in the back of a drawer in the hallway of your childhood home, dusted over in neglect. When you brought it to your mother’s attention, she stared for several seconds. “I was so different then,” she said, and asked you in the tone she reserved for correcting manners to put it away before your father comes home.
As a witness at the door of your parents’ room, you learned every argument is a circling around the same unnamed problem. A raised voice is a shunned voice is a measured voice. It is your mother, sitting at the foot of your bed as you pretend to sleep, stroking the comforter above your leg, apologizing in a language she’s stopped speaking. It is her passing cash to you for groceries you can’t afford, asking you to speak of this to no one else. It is her insistence, and your obligation, to make each occasion more dignified than it truly is, to keep your arms at your side, your pain someplace else.
At an age where you stopped singing songs, even in solitude, all of you celebrated your mother’s birthday out at a steakhouse downtown. As you reached for the breadbasket, your father put his elbows on the tablecloth, talking with his hands, dipping the loaf into the small plate of olive oil and balsamic vinegar before popping it into his mouth. “No elbows on the table,” you said, reciting words like a worn-out incantation, a contrived prayer. But he didn’t move them; he kept them there all through dinner. Your mother said nothing. The woman who raised you had evaporated. When they brought out the tiramisu with a candle, she reached for your father’s elbow and held it, firm. She closed her eyes, and before she blew out the flame you already knew her wish.
The man across from you raises his eyebrow like he’s flirting, repeats the question.
“They met on a blind date,” you say. “My mother almost didn’t go but changed her mind at the last minute. She says it was the best decision she ever made.”
Rachel Duboff is a writer from Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Porter House Review, Hobart, and The Rumpus, among others. She was an Asylum Arts Reciprocity Fellow and an Inquiry Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Creativity.
