VI

What my parents wouldn’t admit was that they both still loved each other. So on a routine trip to the mall December, I arranged for them to be in the same place at the same time. Fridays, my mother liked to comb begin the weekend with her Friday shopping ritual at Macy’s. My father liked to comb the racks for sales that preceded the weekend. He also liked to haggle with the salespeople on new suits, which never worked, but he still did it anyway. This was a no-brainer; they both loved shopping for clothes, especially the expensive, department-store kind you find only in fancy print magazines like Esquire or Vogue, or whatever that’s supposed to mean.
At Macy’s, I surveyed the front entrance from a comfortable distance between the glitz of the perfume counters and mother perusing the new lines of purses. I spotted father stroll in, heading right for the men’s suit section in the back. I waited a few minutes to let him settle in and dragged mother back to there to look at argyle socks. I needed some for school in the spring. What I didn’t expect was my mom to see him and pause like a doe caught in a hunter’s gaze. He hadn’t seen her, but it wasn’t difficult if he’d just pay attention.
She dashed behind the undershirt rack as he pulled toward her. Looking for underwear after he discovered his entire underwear drawer submerged in red paint. I watched in anticipation as their eyes met when they reached for a set of clean white tees, a careful pause as two animals sized each other up to fight or to flee. To be honest, I rather this situation more because of the moment of decision before the click of action taken. Do they fight, as they’d (what seemed like) always done? Or do they make amends? It is their Friday ritual and they’ve discovered each other in the fierce woods of Macy’s on a late Friday afternoon before the sales went up for the weekend.

What would they do?

V

Thursdays meant pinstripes. Father has a light grey with white pinstripe suit he wore every Thursday with a delicate, red, paisley tie.

IV

Wednesdays are a gray suit day for father. He wears a pair of black wingtips and gray heather suit with a lovely solid black tie over a solid white shirt. He says the Italians make the best suits – they are comfortable and sleek at the same time. This, he tells me, is a contradiction worth wearing. Mother coordinates just as much. After all, they’d been married for 15 years and routines were difficult to break. She wears a grey pinstripe suit with a pink blouse underneath with black trim. It’s very fetching my father admits to me when he picks me up from school.
Wednesdays also meant that I saw them both in the same room. We had family counseling after school and we’d meet mother downtown at the therapist’s office. The greetings were cordial as the room was not. It was always cold despite being colored in a lot of maroons and browns. Even the leather couch the three of us sat upon as a dark mauve. It was not very comfortable and I always had to sit in the middle between my parents. The therapist wanted to remind my parents that I was their middle ground and should always remember that.
Of course, we were to only spend an hour in therapy, talking about this and that. Often times, father fell asleep and mother would slap his leg every fifteen minutes or so until the session was over. It had now been six months since father moved into the house across the street.

III

Birding is a dance. It takes a lot of grace and rhythm to approach a bird, let alone spot one. My father says it has a lot to do with approach. He says approach is how music finds your feet, kind of like dancing, for which he would reminisce about mother dotingly. Their first dance was at a prep school dance – once of those up-tight gatherings where all the kids divide into girls and boys and stare their shoelaces until their eyes burn holes in their feet. Father says that was the cause for the dance-craze, “The Hot Foot.” He’d managed to fend off is competition by feigning a dreadful illness and letting mother nurse him to health. She’d come over every day to do so, ignoring all the other boys to play house nurse to my pseudo-ill father. She’s a very nurturing woman, but she can be quite vindictive; as was the case when she discovered before the dance that he’d feigned his illness just to isolate himself with her.
She was flattered of course, but didn’t care for his duplicitous act. So as revenge, she dressed up a homosexual boy to look like her to dance with father for the first dance. The boy, a smallish lad, whiter than the whitest cocaine (one of Father’s pet similes), was a beautiful sort and with my mother’s makeup, he became divine. Suffice to say, father was quite smitten until he discovered that his true love, Lily, wasn’t so Lilliputian after all.
So it was that one Tuesday afternoon, my father found himself on the twelfth floor of his office complex, sitting in one of his power meeting to talk about what powerful men talk about, when a package arrived with a delivery man named Chad.
It was a bit surprising to all his fellow executives that a package had to be delivered directly to him, but to hear father tell it, it sounded pretty urgent.
They were talking about their favorite subject, how to make more money and create different markets and what not when father’s secretary alerted him of the package. Confused, he asked her to wait, but she said it was urgent. He wondered what it could’ve been and asked to bring send it in. That’s when Chad burst in the door, all smiles in his tight tan deliveryman garb, buttoned up, but wearing tan shorts and mocha moccasins. He went directly over to my father put the package on the table and revealed it to be a small boom box. At this point, Chad asked if anyone had asked for a special delivery.
My father’s eyes became saucers, as wide as he was telling me the story over dinner that night. Chad turned on the boom box, which played some dance tune from CC Music Factory, whatever that means. My father swears it was a good tune up until this day. The moment Chad took off his shirt and danced on the conference room table, my father slinked in his designer leather chair and covered his face with his cornstarch blue tie, which he wore with another black suit, Armani, he said; the conference room phone rang. He pulled the receiver close to him and knew exactly who was calling.
“Hi honey,” he sighed. He nodded along as she spoke very calmly. “Yes, I got your gift. It’s…lovely…the guys just love it.”
He looked over as the other suits cowered in their seats except for Stephen, who was a flamer.
“Yes, I’ll pick up our son from school today. No, I won’t be late. Yes I can pick up a gallon of milk on my way back as well. Uh-huh. Very well played my dear. Goodbye.”
Defeated, he hung up the phone and left the office, his head quietly slunking between his sagging shoulders.

II

Robert Kennedy Elementary is down the street from where we live, but my mother drives me there just to drop me off a block away every day. She says it’s preparation for my later rejection of her when I enter my precocious teen years – rebel, paint my finger nails black and listen to Bauhaus. I’d never dream of the latter, but the first two always intrigued me to some degree. Perhaps it’s my father’s influence. Especially since he moved in across the street.

But they always didn’t fight. I promise. Mother and father used to be very loving towards each other – at least intensely so, as my mother put. Blind intensity, she would always remind me. They met prep school. A casual glance in chemistry lab set her heart ablaze; along with half of the classroom that day. She’d inadvertently caught her the sleeve of her favorite Casmir sweater while lighting a Bunsen burner. It was love and blame at first sight – something my they both continually do. I’m not convinced they’re out of love with each other. I think the fighting is a mask for some much deeper affectation – two neuroses battling it out to assert a level of sexual dominance.

Why, the other day, my father picked up milk for my mother after he picked me up from school. It all started when my father bought a new pair of binoculars for birding, a hobby of his since he was my age. He’d bought me one as well because he’d wanted me to pick it up as hobby so we’d have something in common. I told him we’d already had lots in common (I’d made a list and given it to him when he moved across the street), but he insisted and I acquiesced. Of course, he had to test them both out the moment he’d purchased them, drove over to my school and checked me out due to a family emergency. He was quite convincing.

“Son, execution is all that matters in this world,” he said adjusting the focus as he stared out of his bedroom window facing mother’s bedroom window. “That and dressing appropriately for the occasion.”
And he was – dressed in a stunning three-piece cage with a bright red tie, which meant only one thing in our family, it was a Monday. I peered through my new pair of binoculars finding focus as my mother was reaching for a new outfit in her large, automated closet. She could be found in some new outfit every four hours during the day, just to keep fresh. Today being Monday, she reached for her favorite red slip.

“Precision as well, son,” he said distracted. “Precision is what makes the world cling and clatter, I promise, and it drives the ladies wild!”

He paused for a moment savoring each of those last words. I looked at him, momentarily admiring him and turned back to window. This time my mother had managed to make her way into the closet and was followed by the loudest shriek I’d ever heard emanate from her mouth.

My father laughed and pumped his fist in excitement. I watched in confusion; finding my mother screaming with red paint all over her red slip and finally turning towards the window to find my father and I, watching with our new binoculars. Her words needn’t be mouthed; we could both hear her quite audibly. The phone rang but my father neglected to pick up. He turned away from the window, gathered me with my binoculars and took me to the park to do some birding.

As we departed from the driveway, my mother came screaming out like a banshee, chasing after us dripping with red paint, promising sweet revenge while wielding a rolling pin. My father smiled a quiet smile as he glanced into the rearview.

“Precision, my son, is the timing of the gods.”