Never Been to Hackensack

Karl

So Kay’s ancient parents are there, and Hils and Danny with our baby granddaughter, and Mel, Kay’s friend-from-way-back. Mel only eats white things but she can drink any color and she’s chosen the Olive Garden to go full spectrum.

Me, I’m hitting the Pinot.

Kay’s saying, “You should have seen the costumes! I was Mary Poppins and Karl was the chimney sweep – like, Dick van Dyke? Karl – you have it on your phone?”

I look for the photo. She leans over to see.

“It was later. That’ s September. Scroll down.”

I scroll down and…

“Oh, my God, Karl!” She snatches the phone. “What the actual-eff is that?”

Beats me. I don’t remember taking that. I really do not remember taking that.

Her mother’s straight in there like a SWAT team. “What is it, Kay? Let me see.”

Kay lets her see.

“Oh, sweet Lord! Garry, look.” She takes the phone from Kay and hands it to my father-in-law, shaking her head. “I wish I could say I was surprised, Kay - but I’m not. I really am not. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The woman has waited twenty-four years to use precisely those words. And her husband can barely contain his self-righteous glee. “When I was an officer we knew how to deal with guys who took pictures like this.”

This is spiralling, right?

“Garry,” I say, “I swear I have no idea where that came from.”

“I guess someone borrowed your phone? Color me unconvinced. This is not my first rodeo, buddy.”

As an aside, I’d like to note that my wife’s father speaks entirely in clichés. I have actually spent Christmas visits collecting and compiling them so that I can slip as many as possible into the eulogy at his funeral.

Hils takes the phone. “Dad, what even is it?” She shows her husband, who shrugs. “Is it something real close-up?”

Kay sighs. “You have no clue. We brought you up right.”

“You did, honey,” my father-in-law says. “Mr ZoomLens here gets zero credit.”

Never one to let an exposition go undeveloped, Lisa’s onto that like a daytime soap. She lightly touches my daughter’s arm. “It must have been tough for you, Hilary, with your father away so often.”

I bite my lip. As we’ve been with Garry and Lisa for three days it’s just a question of slipping my teeth into the established indentations. Hils, though, swings at her grandmother’s pitch.

“Away earning the money to pay for our house, my education, my acting lessons, my pony, and later my car and my apartment at drama school? Yeah, I really resent him for that, Grandma.”

Lisa withdraws her hand, lips pursed. “Well, okay – if the material things matter to you that much…”

“Oh, that’s not fair,” says Danny. “Hils isn’t the type to worry about material things.”

“As she married you, that’s probably just as well,” Lisa says sniffily.

My wife’s mother, as you may have guessed, is a veritable geyser of bile. But right now I’m pretty grateful for the shower of indiscriminate toxicity that erupts out of her every hour on the hour. I need a distraction from…

“Is it part of, like, a dog or something?”

Kay’s friend Mel is holding up my phone in one hand and a Sicilian Sunset in the other. Squinting, she rotates the phone to landscape, and her other hand does the same thing in unison. The Sicilian sun sets in Mel’s cleavage with a splash.

“Whoo, that’s cold! Oopsie!”

“Oh, my God,” my mother-in-law groans. “Why do you always invite this lush, Kay?”

The lush looks up. “Lisa, maybe you should yank that stick out of your ass and use it to prise your husband’s eyeballs off my headlamps?”

At which point the server arrives with our food, and the lively flow of conversation is briefly stemmed.

“Well, this all looks delicious,” I venture. “Bon app, everyone.”

Danny’s looking at the phone. He lays it on the table beside his Carbonara. “Karl, were you ever in Hackensack?”

Now, I love Danny. He’s a kind man and he’s good to my daughter who is not the easiest person to live with, given the tidy-freakery and the ceramic frogs. He’s extremely bright in a single-minded, relentless way that I’m sure makes him an excellent forensic scientist – but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee intelligible conversation.

“Was I ever what now?”

“Hackensack. Were you there?”

“Never. I get anxious north of the Delaware.”

“The metadata on this picture suggests it was taken in Hackensack.”

“Open and shut case,” says Garry. “Book him, Danno!”

“I’m telling you, I have never been to Hackensack.”

“That’s possible,” Danny says, in his unflappable way. “But the photograph was taken there.” He glances at the screen. “19:42, March 15^th.”

“Aha!” I cry. “March 15^th we were at a Black Crowes gig in Philly – right, Kay?”

Kay looks back at me wide-eyed. “I think that was February,” she says, pretty firmly.

“No, no. It was definitely March, because...”

Oh, damn.

“….you told me you had Covid!” shrieks Lisa. “You couldn’t come to my birthday because you both tested positive for Covid!”

“Jesus, Karl, you’re an idiot.”

“You were in freaking Philly? Garry, they were in Philly when we were at the Shore!”

“I had to pay for your room,” says Garry. “It was a junior suite.”

“Mom, I’m sorry,” Kay begins - but she just gets slimed.

“Oh, this explains everything! Everything, right back to your wedding. Las Vegas! Could you even have gotten further away?”

“Oh, not this again, Mom. We wanted a quiet wedding! There was no family there at all!”

Hils grins. “I was, very nearly.”

“You’re not helping, Hils,” I mutter.

“You know your mother can’t fly,” Garry says.

“Oh, lawdy,” Mel says, deadpan. “Did she lose her broom?”

I mean, you see the trajectory here. As a social occasion, the evening is kind of falling apart. There’s a ton of pasta uneaten, a lot of salad wilting. Everything's going to waste. I’m determined that the wine won’t suffer the same fate. I glug out a generous glassful.

Lisa takes a break from delivering her outraged chronicle of betrayal in order to sidebar my alcohol consumption.

“Garry, look at him. Have we ever seen him when he wasn’t drinking? Even the first time he came to the house, he was drunk.”

That’s not true. I was high. Probably not worth correcting her though.

“Of course, the photo may have been downloaded,” Danny says.

Hils waves a shushing hand. “Danny – no one cares about the photo anymore.”

Lisa does. Having been reminded of the photo, she sees the opportunity to bring her many festering grievances together in one steaming sac of….actually, I’m not sure I want to pursue that metaphor. I’ll just say that I featured prominently in the summary that followed, which I attempted to annotate on the wing.

“You only married this pervert loser to spite me. ‘Oh, mom, I love him.’ Of course you didn’t love him – he’s a stupid, smirking, foul-mouthed show-off…”

“…comedian, but carry on…”

“…who knocked you up on a first date...”

“…first anniversary to be accurate…”

“…and was too broke to get rid of it.”

“It?” says Hils.

“After all I did for you! Seventeen years. Seventeen years slaving and scrimping to get you nice things, to teach you manners, to get you to make something of yourself…”

“Actually I was nineteen when we got married,” Kay says. “And I haven’t asked you for a cent since.”

“Time to hit the road,” Garry suggests. “Come on, Leez. Just leave it, huh?”

“And you couldn’t even come to my seventieth birthday! You lied! You lied to me and your father! Well, I guess it’s just bred in the bone.”

“It’s what?” Kay says.

Garry takes her arm and coaxes her to her feet. “Let’s all calm down. Leez, come on now.”

“I was a good mother to you!” Lisa yells, as Garry steers her to the door. “You don’t know! You just don’t know!”

“Tell you what, hon,” I say once they’re outside. “You’re all kinds of weird, but I have no idea how you turned out so likeable.”

“Thank you. Oh, by the way, I know for a fact that you’ve played Hackensack a dozen times.”

“It was funnier to deny it.”

*******

Kay

I emailed my dad.

I can’t do this anymore, Dad. I’ve spent thousands on therapy. I’ve accepted and rejected and progressed and regressed. I’ve meditated till my ass was calloused. What it comes down to is, I just don’t think it’s my fault that she’s horrible to us whenever we see her. And there’s only one way to stop that.

K

He emailed back immediately, asking me to meet him at his favourite steak joint in Bridgewater, which is about twenty minutes from their place and two hours from ours. But okay.

“Hey, you look thoughtful,” Karl said, as he brought me dinner in the family room. “Do we roll the movie and then you start talking twenty minutes in, or shall we get to it before the title?”

“I wrote to Dad. He wants to see me tomorrow.”

“Ah, alright. Another ‘forgive her, she loves you really’ lunch.”

“It’s dinner, and he’s booked rooms at the Courtyard.” I took a sip of my wine and gestured at the TV. “I dunno. Just roll the movie.”

“That arm-waving thing you did there,” Karl said. “It’s very reminiscent of your dad.”

“Is it? I don’t think I look like him at all.”

“No, you don’t. It’s a learned gesture.”

“Ha! Well, I certainly don’t look like my mom.”

“You have some her gestures too. Which you would, given that she looked after you for seventeen years.”

“Yeah, what was that supposed to mean?”

“What’s the earliest photograph of yourself that you can remember?”

“Umm….” I mentally turned the pages of the family album. Browned-out monochromes of my father, slim and slicked-back on a Brooklyn stoop, then in his first uniform, then smoking and laughing with the guys at Coney. And my mother, hippy bangs and miniskirts on a perfect lawn in Cape May, then outside her office building on Sixth. The two of them cutting their cake at a golf club somewhere along the Parkway. I don’t show up till…God…some celebration at Grandma Lou’s. I’m a toddler. I have on a knit beanie.

“So, what? Two, three years old?”

“Yeah, I guess…”

“Odd that. No baby pictures at all.”

“Cameras weren’t so common in those days, you know. I mean…Oh, Jesus. No!”

“It would make sense, right? It fits.”

It did fit, and I felt so dumb.

The following afternoon I drove to Bridgewater with a two-pint yeti full of strong coffee and all the windows open. I hadn’t slept a minute.

“How was the drive? You take the 78? That can get pretty snarled up on a Friday. I got a beer – you want one?”

Over rib-eyes, I said, “So, you want me to forgive her and carry on like nothing happened? Again?”

“Ah, baby. Let me cut to the chase here.”

He looked so nervous and uncomfortable, I very nearly leapt in to get him off the hook. ‘Dad, I figured it out. I’m adopted. That’s the headline – now give me the details.’ I could have said that, but I didn’t. I wanted to see how he’d deliver it, simply because we’d never before had a conversation about anything more important than the Mets.

“Here it is…two years after we got married, your mother got pregnant. She lost the baby. A year later, she lost another one. And another the year after that. It was a bad time for her. For me too.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Because we never told you. But we both wanted a baby. And I thought it would help your mother. Like, she’s always been kind of spiky and difficult. Because of her childhood, you know? But I thought a baby would…it would help her.”

“So you found me.”

“Found you?”

“…but she never bonded with me. She couldn’t really see me as hers.”

“What? I don’t…well, you could be right about the bonding.”

I nodded, picking up my beer, trying to hold it together. “That happens sometimes with adoptions, I guess.”

“Huh?” Dad pushed back from the table. “Wait. You think you’re adopted? Are you out of your mind?”

“I don’t look like either of you!” When I said it aloud, it didn’t seem quite the clincher I’d rehearsed all the way from Lititz.

“You’re the freaking image of my sister! You wanna look like me?”

“There are no pictures of me as a baby!”

“I need another beer.” He got to his feet. “And the bathroom. Wow.”

Striding back to the table, he was wearing the face that means ‘this stops here’. I’ve seen it on him in the principal’s office and at neighbors’ screendoors. Maybe they teach it to all cops. He started speaking even before he sat back down.

“When we brought you home from the hospital, something wasn’t right with your mother. She was distracted. Elsewhere. Your Aunt Elspeth came over most days. And one afternoon – you’da been maybe four months old - I got home and Elspeth said, ‘She’s gone.’”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“I had no idea. Big panic. Checked the hospitals. APBs. Three days later she called. Said she was fine and she’d be back soon. She was away two years.”

“Where was she?”

“It took me a while to find out – but cops can. She was in Wildwood.”

“Doing what?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“Did she have another relationship?”

Dad shrugged. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t lonely.”

“What did you do?”

“I looked out for you. I didn’t chase after your mother. I got on with stuff. And then, one night, she showed up in a cab.”

“And you took her back? Just like that?”

“Not ‘just like that’. There were conversations. But yeah.”

“I do not get it. I do not get that at all.”

Dad was rolling a coaster over and over in his fingers. “You wanna know what I think about Karl? I think he’s a lazy wise-ass jerk who got lucky. He gets paid for shooting his smart mouth off when what he deserves is a punch in the face. But you love him and it looks like you’re happy. I do not get that at all.”

“Yeah, but...”

Dad held his hand up. You don’t argue with the held-up hand.

“I didn’t mean to tell you any of this. You kinda blew me off course. ‘Nother beer?”

The table was cleared and we sat in the booth, me drawing lines in the condensation on my glass, Dad fiddling with the coaster.

“Oftentimes I was too late home to get groceries, we used to come here to eat, you and me. Charlie – the current guy’s dad – he used to do a plain chicken risotto just for you.”

“I wish I remembered that.”

“It was cute. Listen - I understand why you don’t want to see your mother no more. It’s never pretty.”

“Dad, it’s just…”

“No, no. I get it. And you’re right.”

“I mean, I know she loves me and all…”

Dad folded the coaster and jutted his lip. “See, I don’t think she does. I don’t think she knows how to love. No one ever taught her. Her mom had passed, and you know what her dad was like.”

“You don’t think she loves you?”

“She needs me. That’s as close as she’ll ever get.”

I paused. Kinda none of my business but…

“Do you love her?”

He wrinkled his nose and rubbed it. “If someone needs you, that means you’re important. If you’re a cop, people need you – so you’re important, right? A dad. A husband. You matter.”

Here's something I learned from living with a comedian – comedy comes from the merciless pursuit of a proposition. Karl just cannot leave that kind of thing be. He has to track it and harass it and trap it in a corner and poke it, forcing it to admit its contradictions and own up to its irrationality. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to say, “Why is it so important to be important? Why do you choose that over love? What do you get?”

But I didn’t. There’d be nothing to gain. Certainly not laughs.

Out on the street, Dad said, “I’ll have to take her side – you know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we have dinner like this once in a while?”

“Yes. You matter.”

Back home the next day I asked Karl, “So, what was that photo, really?”

He said, “I honestly don’t know. I must have downloaded it, but I have no clue.”

I decided not to pursue that one either. But, again, I really wanted to.

*******

Hils

Dad was playing a club near us, so we got a babysitter and went.

He was doing this bit about how it’s not possible to think of something you’ve never thought of before. He riffed on that for a while, and then said he was going to make everyone in the audience think of something they’d never thought of before.

“…and once you have, you’ll never be able to not think of it. This random thing will be there in your brain forever, associated with me, and this venue, and this street in Philly. Ready for it? You ready? Here it is - a llama’s tonsils.”

He got a pretty good laugh.

Danny leant over and said to me, “Aha! He’s very thorough, your dad.”

“Huh?”

“I sent the mystery picture to myself from his phone, and reverse-searched it. There’s a llama farm just outside Hackensack.”

“Oh, wow. Bizarre. But very Dad.”

“You going to tell your mom?”

“Nah. They seem to have made peace with it.”

"Really? I thought she was furious. How does that work?"

I kissed his cheek. “Baby, no one ever understands how anyone else’s marriage works.”