Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 65

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performed gyrations meant to demonstrate how they did not fit. He rotated his
athlete’s hands, fingers splayed for all to see, his fleshy palms peeking out the
bottom of the gloves. Johnnie Cochran claimed that a man “would be a great
actor if he could act his hands larger.” But it’s no feat to act something bigger
than it actually is. We all hone our illusions.
The summer my dad was leaving my mom and I was planning my
wedding, he requested a father-daughter conversation. When we met I noticed
that he’d gone ashy, his blue-black hair turned dull and peppery, his skin sagging
like sheets hung to dry. What he wanted to tell me was that he wasn’t to blame for
the current predicament. It was my mom, she’d been challenging him. He
suggested she was a lesbian. I asked him to stop. I said that I hoped that my
husband would never understand so little about me. My father went quiet, then
got up and left.
Summer drew to a close and events congealed. My father moved without a
forwarding address to a double-wide somewhere in Oceanside, California. My
uncle walked me down the aisle on a September afternoon that cast long, fall
shadows in our photographs. My mother wandered through the event on autopilot. There was never a word from my father about my marriage, or anything.

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It’s been twenty years since the release of Jagged Little Pill, my parents’
divorce, the day I got married, and the events of the summer of 1995. My
marriage survived. My ex-roommate and her skeptical boyfriend married too,
and had three children. We lost touch, but I sometimes wonder if he feels he
settled.
My father married the pet sitter, and my mother was happier alone than
she ever imagined.

!!Assisi!!!59!