Wedding Season by Darcy Cosper Page B

lashing over one eye.
    “He didn’t come. He’d promised, and he just never showed up. Mom was furious. She told us that he had done it on purpose, to teach us a lesson. To teach us that you couldn’t count on anyone, and that promises meant nothing. You were sitting on the floor of the living room, very quiet. Then you stood up and announced to us that you would never break a promise, and you’d never make a promise you couldn’t keep. And Mom laughed at you, and then she started crying, and went into her bedroom, and stayed there for the rest of the day. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
    “I can’t believe you do. I think you’re making it up. You’ve been sitting in on too many of those freshman psychology classes.”
    “Your denial is embarrassing.” James glares at the waiter, who has returned with our meal. “Look, there’s Donald Trump’s new girlfriend.”
    M Y BROTHERS AND I grew up in New York City. Our family lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, a nice big prewar place with too many little rooms and not enough closets, a creaky old elevator and a creaky old doorman, not too far north of Lincoln Center, and just off Central Park. Allthree of us kids attended some freaky experimental grade school that was part of the education program at the university where my dad was a professor. Starting in middle school we commuted to a private day school downtown, also of the alternative variety. We spent the Jewish holidays with my father’s parents, who lived out on Long Island along with most of the sprawling Silverman clan. The other holidays we spent with my Granny Celeste, a lapsed Catholic from a small town in southern France. My mother’s father died before I was born; Gran jokes that her cooking did him in, that he, a first-generation American, born to English immigrants, wasn’t man enough to eat like the French.
    Anyway, after not quite sixteen years of marriage, my parents separated and then divorced—irreconcilable differences, they said. My father moved out and took a studio closer to the university, a one-room apartment so small that we couldn’t even spend the night with him there. Instead, we lived with my mother, who was granted uncontested custody of us, and had outings once or twice a month with Daddy, for whom my brothers and I had a definite preference. He was a clever, easygoing, unflappable man who seemed amused by everything. He was always laughing, always making these dry, droll, deadpan asides to us, delivered with knowing looks and conspiratorial winks. He reminded me of James Bond or Cary Grant in the old movies I saw on television, suave and cavalier, able to master any situation with cool charm and a witty comeback. When my mother or James, who both tended toward the high-strung, voluble end of the spectrum, got worked up about something, my father would chuckle, flexing his hands out in front of him as if he were smoothing wrinkles in the air, and say, “Water off a duck’s back, sweetheart.” Once, in response to the duck comment, James quacked at him and my father laughed for five minutes straight; after the divorce, whenever my mother got intoone of her fits of temper (which was often), James and Josh and I would make quacking noises at one another and usually ended up giggling helplessly while Mom yelled at us. Daddy, by contrast, was rarely angry or impatient—though I can see now that this was in part because he left all household and child-rearing responsibilities to my mother and secured the Good Cop position for himself in perpetuity. At the time, though, he was our uncontested, adored favorite, and in particular during the first few years following their divorce we looked forward to his visits with the manic anticipation most kids reserve for school vacations. I honestly don’t remember the particular afternoon James mentioned, but I can imagine how wounded I would have been if he had failed to show up.
    About three years after the divorce my