Unwifeable(42)

And for all those hypocrites who actively seek to string you up by recounting some hijacked, partisan, purely malicious curation of your worst moments?

Well, fuck them.



* * *




I ARRIVE HOME in San Diego before Blaine does, and I do a thorough sweep of my parents’ home for anything potentially embarrassing—weird New Agey magazines, crafting supplies, and the like. Meanwhile, my mom torments me by talking animatedly to her teacup poodle, Shady, who is dressed in a Santa outfit.

“Are you excited to meet Blaine, Shady?” my mom asks, glancing at me to see if I am reacting. “I know I am!”

I shake my head at first, but I can’t help but laugh at everything my mom says and does.

My mom is honestly one of the funniest, most original, most guileless people I’ve ever met. She is dry as a bone and knows how to cut to the quick in every situation.

When I asked her what she got for Christmas one year, she replied, “Well, I got a twenty-five-dollar gift card that I resented.” In a normal conversation (like that Christmas one), when I am busy journalistically extracting whatever gem she is uttering, typing into my phone, she’ll say, “Why don’t you tweet that, you cunt.” There was the time I told her all about Pussy Riot, the Russian all-female punk band creating a stir overseas, and she observed, “My pussy is a riot.” And when I eventually set up a Facebook profile for my mom, she absorbed my listing all the profile options (“Let’s see, hometown . . . relationship . . . are you interested in men or women?”) and my mom replied, deadpan as ever, “Women. It’ll be a whole new life.”

So, she is aware of how non-Blaine she is. And, more significantly, so am I. My love for her morphs into something like false concern. How will she be perceived?

“What is your poodle even wearing, mom?” I ask her.

“It’s Shady’s Christmas ‘pretty,”’ my mom says with a smile. And I can’t help myself—I crack up again. I love my mom for being such an individual, so playful and silly but also so wickedly acidic in turns.

She is the exact opposite of Blaine’s mom, who is steeped in propriety and controlled perception and by way of small talk asks me in a thick upper-crust accent, “Tell me, Mandy, are you in involved in supporting the arts?” I stammer in reply, “Um, I interviewed Jamie Foxx recently. How’s that?” Don’t get me wrong, Blaine’s mom is cool and all—funny, intelligent, warm at times—but she’s also a bit above reproach.

I look at my mom, and I love her, but I also wish I could quickly give her a makeover the same way I have fraudulently given myself one with the Lilly Pulitzer and Kate Spade costumes I am now wearing as if that’s what I totally always wear, not just because I’m dating a guy I call “Super Preppy” in a newspaper.

I get a text from Blaine. “Just landed,” he writes.

I nervously kiss my mom goodbye on the cheek, and we make plans to meet later for dinner.

When I pick up Blaine at the airport, my defensiveness is turned up to eleven. Blaine is a bit out of the loop when it comes to pop culture, so I play music on the radio, singing along, naming all the bands, trying to grab any bit of superiority I can.

“Do you know this song?” I ask, sort of ignoring him and driving straight ahead.

We arrive at a hotel that my dad has purchased a stay for us at with the thought that Blaine will reimburse him, but my dad has made the same mistake I often do about people with money. One of the reasons they’ve held on to it is that they are on the precipice of cheap. Blaine warns me more than once that he won’t be my “gravy train.” If anything, rich people don’t recognize the meaning that a few hundred bucks can have to the middle class versus the chump change it is to them.

I remember once borrowing $20 from a friend to get through the week while I smiled, nodded, and empathized as Blaine talked about how annoyed he was at losing $20,000 on an investment.

When Blaine and I arrive at the restaurant my dad has selected, my stomach drops a little bit. My last dinner with Blaine’s mother was at Jean-Georges, a three-star Michelin-rated restaurant, where she knew the celebrity chef personally.

The restaurant we are meeting my parents at is a literal piano bar. Like, a scene out of Saturday Night Live, Bill Murray-hamming-it-up-in-a-tacky-suit piano bar.

To add to this, my dad hands me a corsage like I am going to prom. It is so beautifully sweet and so horribly embarrassing I feel like splitting in two from the inner conflict of loving my parents so dearly and being so ashamed of them.

I feel like such a narc, such a sellout, such a dating-a-rich-guy whore that I actually have the gall to feel anything but adoration for my one-of-a-kind, well-meaning, utterly bizarre parents. What kind of asshole am I turning into?

“Nice to meet you,” Blaine introduces himself, reaching across the table to shake my father’s hand. Being blind, my dad sticks his hand firmly out in the opposite direction. That childhood feeling is rising inside of me. Of wanting to protect him. Wanting him to be someone different. Wanting him to be exactly who he is. Wanting to just disappear completely.

We settle in to order, and my dad turns to us and says thoughtfully, “Tell us about yourself, Blaine.”

I suddenly catch a shared look with my mom, who knows how worried I am, how uptight, how afraid I am that everything is going to turn into a disaster. She tries to stifle it, but the shared knowledge is too much, and she lets out an inadvertent laugh.