Accordion Story

My father had never bought coffee for a woman before his twenties.  My mother had refused two marriage proposals by the summer she turned nineteen.  Twenty-three months after they met they were married.  There is something, says my father, about January.

They met at a party.  He found the bridge of her nose unusually high.  She can't recall her first memory of his face except the lashes.  So long, she says, it looked like he wore dusty little mink extensions.  She laughed from the nub of her belly and sometimes people would stare.  He could tell she knew they would.  She walked a little faster than he did.  Her calves were muscled like two near-drifting isthmuses.

Preserve, he tried everywhere that night to preserve -- across the room, in conversation with someone else -- the fallaway parts.  He watched her reapply lipstick once after dinner and again sitting on a barstool and again around 11:35 and again, he suspected, in the restroom.  She didn't have to watch herself as she did it.  He couldn't place a name on her accent, but she and Cary Grant shared a way with the long vowel o.  She wore suede gloves.  She'd studied Milton.  The first eight lines of Book Six of Paradise Lost were inscribed upon a pendant around her neck.  "Unbarr'd the gates of light," the pendant flashed at one point.  Whose gates, what light?

She didn't wear her engagement ring, so when he asked for her number at the end of the night, he had to find a way to clutch her awkward apology.  She was engaged to Blake E., and thought that everyone knew.  But you're from out of town, that's right.  You'd have no way of knowing.

The party was the first of my mother's several rejections.  My father didn't know it.  The night after the party he returned to his apartment and turned on the television.  An ad for the upcoming sitcom Seinfeld played.  Lucky, because that way in 1990, and again in 1991 when she rejected him again, at least he had Jerry and Kramer to come home to.

My mother and Blake E. were engaged for ten and a half months.  His family owned a company that produced jock-straps and a variety of athletic equipment that elicit less visual reactions.  Blake showered my mother with patience and distant looks of understanding.  He was her best friend in college.  He cooked her eggs the night her mom passed.  They had a dog named Rufus.  Blake would take Rufus for runs along the Marina when he felt his seasonal paunch set in, and on one such occasion, a man introduced himself to Blake, complimented Rufus, and asked if he wouldn't like to run the rest of the embankment with him and his rotund saddlebag of a pooch, Carter-Joseph.  The man quickly caught on to the little things about Blake.  He noticed, for instance, that Blake only had a dimple on the left side of his cheek.  A result of stitches.  Blake spent his childhood swimming in a pool with imprecise, jutting tiles.  When Blake smiled the dimple flexed inward more than a natural dimple would, revealing the hollows of fine, Teuton cheekbones.  Carter-Joseph's owner loved this.  Blake grew to love Carter-Joseph's owner.  They moved to Pasadena one April.  Following a long night's conversation, my mother was single again.

What an opportunity, my father must have thought.  What odds.  He called my mother one evening after work, to apologize for the news and try his luck again.  He folded his motives neatly within the telephone static.  She wouldn't have any of it.  Her memory of him from the party was watery and distant, a generic kind of dream you expect to have dreamt but can't be sure of.  Besides, her suitors were accomplished and already queued.  She'd already begun seeing her co-worker's nephew, a freshly minted nephrologist.  A kidney man.  A blood scrubber, my father thought.

After six months my mother became engaged to the nephrologist.  She didn't wear his ring either, but thought she loved him very much.  Sometimes he would laugh in his sleep, or do silly things like eat his oatmeal from a plastic bag in the shower.  He would speak widely on things other than work, and taught my mother the latin names for over one hundred species of autumnal tree.  I think my mother still thinks of him when she gardens in November and the leaves fall in smatterings we like to call patterns, in which we attempt to find images.  I have heard that he could whistle under water.

The summer following their engagement, my mother and the nephrologist made plans to visit Egypt.  My mother could only take twelve days off from work, at the very beginning of August.  This happened to be the same time when the nephrologist's mother had been planning the quinquennial family reunion.  It would be held at the nephrologist's favorite childhood beach.  Her plans had been in the works for nearly two years.

The nephrologist's mother had never taken to my mother in the first place; when she and her fiancé told her they couldn't make it, things did not bode well.  You could say she never "gave them her blessing."  The nephrologist loved his mother very much and felt an unshruggable sense of debt toward her; the nephrologist was a nephrologist because of her fierce parenting, her resolve.  He could not decide if one love could justify the other.  My mother and the nephrologist became less familiar to one another.  They lived in different time zones by the end of that winter.

A dead car battery brought my mother and father together for the third time.  My mother's car broke down in a part of the city she wasn't familiar with late one night, and running out of ideas, she ran to the nearest payphone and called the only person she knew from that neighborhood.  My father showed up within eight minutes.  They sat on the hood of her car waiting for Triple-A to arrive.  She told him about the nephrologist.  He told her about some girl he'd really only gone on two dates with -- tried to make it seem like there was more than Jerry and Kramer to his life.

They could have had a nice evening, him helping her and she being grateful and their being friends, and just left it there, but my father didn't have the sense not to push it farther.  When her car was ready he held the door open to help her in and asked her to dinner the following night.  My mother told him she couldn't.  Next week?  My mother then tried to make it clear that by couldn't she meant wouldn't -- that she was very thankful for his being there and that they could probably be great friends, and that he was really a very funny guy and had a kind of comedic value that would be great for television --

My father wouldn't have any of it.  Surely she could entertain the idea of his taking her out just once?  My mother considered this.  I'll go out with you, she said, if you can learn to play an instrument that none of my friends play.  Almost all her friends were musicians.

That's why my father learned to play the accordion.