Silence of the Fam

Home in two days, I won’t be here for dinner.

Going home for the holidays brings about a tempest of emotion. The house I grew up in now has plastic covering the furniture and fake flowers. The clutter of my childhood is long gone, as if strangers now live there. Even the familiar smell is replaced by a foreign one. How did this happen? Oh, right, now I remember.

My parents separated when I was ten. I chose to live with my dad because I could not bear the thought of him being alone. We initially had a nanny, but she was let go during a brief reconciliation. For a while things were good. We shared household chores and cooking duty. Eventually my dad wanted adult companionship. He tried his hand at dating, but it did not work out as planned. American women were just too damn independent. One day he came home with a brilliant idea.

We spent the evening perusing a booklet with pictures of exotic Asian women, complete with profiles detailing their perfect mate and hobbies. We circled possible candidates then we went to the store and bought fancy stationery. I helped him write letters to potential contenders about how he loved long walks on the beach and poetry.

Two years later a 28 year old porcelain doll was in my father’s bedroom when I came home from school. She was kind and spoke in broken English. Neither of us was sure what to do, so we ignored each other. This worked pretty well so we continued for the rest of my teen years. My father joined in the game, and sometimes we went weeks without speaking more than a sentence to each other. He wanted to give the household a more congenial and respectful touch, so he insisted that I let my stepmother know if I would be home for dinner. So I left notes, never saying where I was going but always saying whether I would be home for dinner.

On days when we ran out of sticky notes, I wrote on napkins or magazines. Soon the entire house was filled with notations on every writable surface. When I come home now, I still look for them buried under the new life that now exists. I guess they were thrown out after I went to college. By then they realized I would not be home for dinner for a while. But I still make it every once in a while.