THE BARTENDER ISN’T paying any attention to me—that’s the second problem with my night. I’ve fished out the fluorescent orange cherry from the bottom of my glass, and I’ve been swirling the stem back and forth between my cheeks, trying to tie it into a knot. I read somewhere that this is sexy, but even if I succeed, I still don’t think it’ll capture the bartender’s attention. He’s too busy wiping down wine glasses with a dust-gray rag to notice the not-completely-unattractive seventeen-year-old almost showing him how good she’d be at making out.
The first problem with my night is, obviously, that I’m leaving for Europe in two days and still haven’t packed. And in an act of teenage anarchy that I’m not regretting in the slightest, I left my room covered in paper when I left for the wedding. Sure, it’ll mean I’m facing a dual packing-and-scavenger-hunting endeavor when I return. But, you know: worth it.
And while I could be worrying about important things, like how I’m going to find my raincoat from underneath three semesters of essays (I still have a raincoat somewhere, right?) or my debilitating procrastination problem (will I be forced to tour Paris in a hotel towel because I forgot to bring enough underwear?), it’s much more fun to focus exclusively on how I’m going to get the bartender to flirt with me.
He’s cute in a brunette Ryan Gosling kind of way—if Ryan Gosling had a less-good-looking little brother who worked as a bartender and resented when strangers told him he kind of looks like that guy from The Notebook.
I probably shouldn’t have ordered a Shirley Temple. If I had sidled up to the bar with confidence and a world-weary look in my eye that said, “Make it a double, pal,” I bet he wouldn’t have checked to see if I was twenty-one. Do they even card people at weddings? Probably not. Especially not if you’re the groom’s daughter. Especially not if you’re the groom’s daughter and the bride is your former math teacher. Sure, they didn’t start dating until I was out of her class, but still, it’s objectively weird. I had to deal with snide “PTA meeting” jokes for six months after Nick DiBasilio wrote something about it in the group text we had for homecoming plans that year. If the bartender knew about all of that, he’d definitely pour me a real drink.
I twist the green strand of hair around my finger. I was going for a chick-bassist look, the kind of casual just-woke-up-looking-this cool that you see on street style blogs where people look amazing in long T-shirts and hats that would make me look like a crazy lady at the beach. It seems like the purpose of street style blogs is to point out how incredibly attractive people still look incredibly attractive in strange clothes.
But here, in the yellow lighting of the Chicago Radisson ballroom, with a swelling red pimple on my nose threatening to overthrow the feeble ranks of Maybelline concealer, the green in my hair makes me look sickly. The ends of my hair are cracked and dry. I might have left the bleach on too long.
It’s also worth noting that my dress—a taffeta nightmare that I’ve had sitting in the back of my closet since Bar and Bat Mitzvah season in seventh grade—is too tight. Even though I haven’t gotten any taller since the last time I wore it, I still look totally wrong. I feel like an undercover policewoman dressing like a kid to bust a suburban high school drug ring.
“It’s fine,” my mother had told me when I came downstairs into the living room wearing it a few nights ago, trying to convince her to let me buy something new. Her fingers were absentmindedly circling a few kernels of popcorn at the bottom of her bowl, and she didn’t even bother to look up from the latest episode of Property Brothers to see the way the fabric squeezed across my chest and stomach like a shiny sausage casing, outlining the shadow of my belly button. My mother also didn’t notice the way I rolled my eyes and headed back upstairs, slamming my bedroom door behind me just to make good on the annoyed-teenager routine.
For whatever reason, the ponytailed wedding DJ (do all wedding DJs have ponytails?) thinks that people in the year 2017 still want to hear “The Chicken Dance.” The song is quacking along when the DJ’s voice comes through the speakers: “Let’s welcome to the dance floor Mr. and Mrs. Holmes!”
My dad, Walter Holmes, who used to pick me up from soccer and tuck my stuffed elephant, Bobba, in bed next to me when I was little, is suddenly in the center of the dance floor flapping his arms and shaking his butt . . . clap clap clap clap.
I can’t watch. I need the semi-cute bartender to save me, but he’s still checking his cell phone and ignoring me. I abandon the cherry-stem plan (spitting it out as gracefully as I can into a monogrammed cocktail napkin), and I pick up a cardboard coaster from the artistically fanned stack in front of me. I place it, balanced, on the edge of the bar. With a quick flick of my wrist, I send the coaster into the air and catch it, one smooth motion before it even finishes its ascent.
It’s a trick Grandpa taught me whenever I went with him to his country club. He’d walk into the clubhouse after a round of golf, and I’d already be waiting at the bar, swinging my legs on a stool, drinking a club soda through a straw, and plucking the cashews out of the plastic bowls of salted nuts. As we waited for our lunch to arrive, he’d flip one of the coasters and snatch it faster than I thought he was capable of moving. “Always impresses the ladies,” he said, winking at the waitress in the clubhouse, the glint of his gold tooth deep in his mouth barely visible.
Just by looking at him, you’d have no idea that my grandpa is Great Living American Artist Robert Parker. With his taste for wrinkled khakis, sweater vests, and suspenders, he looks more like a retired middle school vice principal than the man who once sold a painting to George and Amal Clooney.
But even if people don’t always recognize him by his appearance, they definitely recognize the look of his paintings, the style he’s famous for—moments of tension, usually family scenes, frozen in time against a placid background.
The clubhouse had one of Grandpa’s landscapes—not an especially famous one—hanging in a gold frame with a little light above it meant to illuminate the scene of the hill and the water mill. But that’s not the painting that’d be an answer to a Daily Double on Jeopardy! or a question on the SAT:
Which of these is Great Living American Artist Robert Parker’s most famous work?
A) Nighthawks
B) American Gothic
C) The Reader and the Watcher
D) Water Lilies
Ding ding ding! The correct answer is C, The Reader and the Watcher, that image of a living room with two figures, a young girl on a couch reading and a man by the window, looking out anxiously at something off the canvas. It’s been praised for its ambiguity and tension. There have been at least two books written about what The Watcher is looking for: His wife? A lover? A mob boss after a drug deal went wrong? The distant promise of the American Dream? Most scholars have concluded that the stub of a still-burning cigarette in the figure’s right hand represents class anxiety.
Seeing that painting was always the best part about taking class trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Our teacher would announce that the painting was by Robert Parker, and then she’d pause, half-remembering some gossip from the art teacher or one of the other parents about someone in the class having a connection to the esteemed Chicago art figure, not quite confident enough about it to actually say anything. And then some kid would elbow me in the side and ask if it was by my dad, and I would say, a little louder than I needed to, “Actually, my grandpa.” Cue the jealous glances and slack-jawed teacher.
Twice in elementary school, Grandpa came to my class to teach workshops, creating a fluster of superintendents, principals, and teachers all trying to make a good first impression.
“Let’s use watercolors to paint the sky—darker at the bottom, lighter on the top,” he’d say, flicking his wrists and rolling up his sleeves to paint an example, while we, a group of seven-year-olds with no idea how lucky we were to be getting an art lesson from the Robert Parker, would try to imitate his paper as best we could with our Crayola watercolor sets. While other kids drew the sun as a butter-yellow circle in the corner of the page, I knew, even then, that my landscape should have a clear source of light coming from off the page, illuminating the Tim Burton–round hills. Mine was always the painting that the other kids would pause behind and stare at when they crossed the classroom to get another brush.
“Runs in the family,” a teacher would say with a knowing smile, and Grandpa would wink at me and dip his paintbrush again, like we were sharing a secret that no one else would ever understand.
Thankfully, “The Chicken Dance” ends, but the DJ replaces it with “YMCA,” so it’s hard to say whether there’s any real improvement. Instead of watching the flailing, middle-aged upper arms jiggling on the dance floor, I keep flipping my coaster, trying to snatch it faster out of the air every time.
A little girl sees my trick from the dance floor and abandons her parents to run up to me at the bar. She barely reaches my boobs.
“Are you playing catch?” she asks. I don’t recognize her—she must be on Ms. Wright’s side of the family. (It’s going to be weird to have to start calling her Tina.) Her purple dress already has an almost black streak of a ketchup down its front. A little bit of ketchup is also in the girl’s hair.
“Uh, sorta,” I say, and I demonstrate the coaster flip one more time.
“Cooooooooool.” The girl tries to snatch a coaster of her own, but she’s barely tall enough to reach the top of the bar, let alone flip the coaster and catch it in midair.
“Here.” I bring one down to her and toss it straight up into the air like a Frisbee and catch it again. It’s not even a trick, but she seems enthralled. She grabs the coaster with both of her tiny hands and waddles off to show someone else the miracle that is gravity.
Since the bar-trick thing didn’t attract anyone over the age of eight, I decide to take a more aggressive approach with Ryan Gosling Bartender. He’s slouched against the fake wooden wall behind the bar, still playing with his phone.
“Hey,” I say. He looks up. “How’s it going?”
He shrugs. “Not too bad, I guess. You?”
I look down at the cocktail napkin. “I guess I’m doing . . . all Wright-Holmes.”
He doesn’t laugh at my terrible dad joke, and I can feel my neck getting hot. “WHISKEY, STRAIGHT UP,” I say loudly.
The bartender slides his phone into his pocket and turns to look at me, one eyebrow cocked. Oh god, why did I say that? What does “straight up” even mean? He’s going to ask for an ID and call the police, and I’m going to get kicked out of my own father’s wedding. There’s no way my mom is going to let me go to Europe alone if she has to bail me out of jail for underage drinking. What was I thinking? I don’t even LIKE whiskey. I’m pretty sure it tastes like someone burned down a log cabin using chemicals of questionable legality.
Before the bartender even has time to react, I duck below the line of the bar so quickly that there should be a cartoon whoosh! sound effect. As I contemplate whether to continue crawling along the length of the bar or make a break for it toward the bathroom, I hear a voice crack through the murmur and music of the party.
“Nora!”
Instinctually, I freeze. Still, somewhere deep inside my animal brain, I associate that voice with not knowing Euler’s theorem. Hearing Ms. Wright call out my name autocompletes in my head to “Have you got the homework for today?”
She’s wearing a long-sleeved lace dress that would probably be pretty if it weren’t on the math teacher marrying my dad. She’s also still wearing her red, thick-framed glasses. You’d think a person would want to take those off for her own wedding, but I guess she’s a fan of the librarian-with-eleven-cats look. I wouldn’t have gone with mint green and peach as a color scheme for a wedding either, but to each her own, I guess.
“Nora! You look . . .” Ms. Wright—Tina—pauses, as if she’s deciding whether or not to acknowledge the fact that I’m currently crouching on the sticky floor of a hotel ballroom.
“Dropped something,” I say, quickly standing up. “It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for having me.”
She looks confused. My dad comes up behind her, wrapping his arm around her waist. It took about a year of seeing them together before I could witness something like this without dry-heaving, but now I’ve reached the point of almost being able to contain a grimace.
“Sweetheart. You look fantastic.”
That’s the thing about dads: They never actually know when you look fantastic. He has no idea that this dress is almost six years old or that I spent a grand total of thirty-seven seconds on my makeup because I was running very, very late to a ceremony in which I had the all-important job of reading a poem (“I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart”). But I smile and give my dad a hug, careful not to rip the taffeta of my dress as I raise my arm. And, in the spirit of gracious benevolence, I give a hug to my new stepmom, Tina, even though she’s wearing red-framed glasses to her own wedding and chose a mint-green-and-peach color scheme.
Tina looks over at my dad, then back at me. “Nora, we are just so happy you’re here and a member of our family. And we just want to let you know that of course you’re welcome in Arizona any time.”
Dad smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “It’s our home. I mean, your home too, really. Tell Alice—I mean, tell your mother—that we say you’re welcome any time.”
I don’t respond. Tina looks at the floor. The sweat gathering in my armpits decides to amp up production. My dad clears his throat and continues, “Your mother couldn’t make it tonight, huh?”
“No,” I say, not making eye contact. “Stomach thing.”
We all know I’m lying.
“She’s—everything’s good otherwise?” Dad asks the floor.
“Yeah,” I say.
I notice the way Tina and my dad both fidget with their rings the moment Alice comes up.
Do I tell them that I still hear Mom crying in the bathroom sometimes? Or that she demands to know the first and last name of every single person I’ll be hanging out with every time I want to go out with a group of friends that includes one or more guys, even though I’m about to be a senior in high school? Or that every morning she presents me with a new article she printed about how many artists don’t make a living wage and how I need to fall back on “practical skills, like engineering, or math, or science, Nora, something you can actually use to get a job. I know my father was successful as an artist, but you need to remember in addition to being extremely lucky, he didn’t sell his first painting until he was forty-five years old. Are you really willing to wait that long, Nora?”
“She’s great,” I say. “We’re both great.”
My dad takes a step closer and claps a hand on my shoulder. “Nora is going to be traveling to Europe to work on her art this summer,” he tells Tina, and I wonder why she doesn’t already know. “Which cities are you traveling to again?”
“Paris, Brussels, and then three weeks at the Donegal Colony for Young Artists, and then Florence, and then London, and then home,” I recite.
“An artists’ colony!” Tina practically yelps. “That’s a big deal, Nora!”
I start liking her a little more.
Dad gives me a squeeze. “You have more talent in your little finger than I have in my entire body. Must have gotten it all from the Robert Parker genes.”
Just then, a woman in a dress like a big-top tent begins to tear up at Tina’s elbow, and the two of them screech and hug and Dad gives me a look that seems to say, Women, right? We share a smile, and we don’t talk anymore about Mom, because he and I both realize he should be worrying about cutting the cake, and giving a speech, and moving from Chicago to Arizona.
He doesn’t need to worry anymore about the sad, bitter divorced woman who just became exclusively my problem.