fiction by kate imbach

Sunday Dinner

As Daniel drove through a tunnel on the Mass Pike, Lauren took advantage of his focus on the darkened road to close her eyes and wish she had not agreed to meet his family. Her longing for them to love her was stronger than any desire she had ever felt for Daniel, but for thirty years, Lauren's father had been her only living relative, and she feared that her familial deficiency would be obvious to Daniel's surplus of parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews.  

"Are you alright?" Daniel asked, and put his hand on her leg.  

The asphalt ahead was a watery gold in the winter sundown. She turned down the heat, unbuttoned her coat.

"How many people will be there tonight, again?" she asked. 

"Ten or twelve or something?" 

She hardened against him, crossed her leg to remove his hand. "How do you not know how many people are in your family?" 

"I don't know if Tim is bringing his kids, they always have sports and friends and stuff these days. Don't be nervous, they're going to love you." 

She could have predicted that he would say exactly those words. 

"They don't bite," she said, before he could. 

Daniel's predictable kindness oppressed her at the same time that it drew her to him, and was why she had agreed to go to dinner. All large, loving, normal families confused her, and put her at a loss over how to act. Her whole life she'd had questions. What did it feel like to have brothers, what made brothers brothers, were there topics you were supposed to address and avoid, and what were they? What was it like to have a mother, what did mothers, in their role as mothers, do? Her preference for alienation over admitting her serious aberrance had held her back from ever asking anyone anything about it. She hoped that if she could hide her tragic boneheadedness about families from Daniel, who threw the dazzling stories of his blood relatives around with no sense of how marvelous it must have been to live a life rich with such happenings—the drunken uncle who inexplicably, in the month of August, sang the chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” at Caroline's christening a full two times before a group of his brothers wrangled him out of the church; the time Andrew was stuck on the runway at Logan in an ice storm for six hours and tried to order thirty Santarpio's pizzas for the entire plane; Daniel's dad trying to order a "regular" coffee in Florence, regular meaning what it meant at Dunkin' Donuts—filter coffee with cream and sugar—she might marry him, and her own life might become less impoverished. 

Apparently confident in Lauren, his family, and the way things would go between them, Daniel reabsorbed himself into driving and NPR. His obliviousness to what she worked so hard to hide, and her effectiveness at hiding it, softened what had hardened in her. She scratched the back of his neck with her nails the way he liked and fantasized about making the drive to his parent's house with rings on their fingers. She imagined that she would find marriage to him satisfying the way that mathematicians found solving problems that take up entire chalkboards satisfying; she could see herself relaxing into the achievement of it, the way it would reflect her skills, natural talents, and persistence back at her.  

Daniel was the one who had put the idea of marriage into her head. Not that he had proposed to her, or even discussed marrying her in particular; they had only been dating for two months. It was more that he had created a new, positive atmosphere of marriage around her with story after story about his family. Daniel's parents, high school sweethearts, had been in true love since nineteen seventy-something. Tim, following directly in his parent's footsteps, had also married his high school sweetheart, Liz, and they had kids young, too in love to hold off on multiplying it. They had been prom king and queen! At twenty-eight years old, Andrew had fallen in love at first sight with Ashley in the ER where she worked as a doctor—he had shown up one day in an ambulance with a broken leg after being partially run over by an ice cream truck. Before hearing these stories and becoming enchanted by the light of admiration in Daniel's eyes as he relayed them, Lauren had figured that all a marriage could really do was lash her to some man she might very well wind up despising. Now, at thirty-five-years-old, it seemed that being lashed to the Holbecks, a family genetically predisposed to love success, would be different, and automatically fix something within her that had broken when she was five. Sometimes complicated problems had simple solutions. 

She certainly questioned this assumption. Did Daniel perhaps not know everything going on inside his brothers’ and parent's marriages, and was he not a little childlike for thinking that he did? Did his family stories suggest a narrowly-lived life, a limited repertoire? Was he boring? But she avoided her concerns adroitly, never came in close contact with them, and, like an Olympic slalom skier zooming past poles, had fallen in love. 

In Wellesley, Daniel turned off the main road into a neighborhood of handsomely-branched, leafless trees and large houses, some mansions, some not quite, and Lauren found herself smack in the middle of her father's favorite hobby; ever since she had been a child he had taken her on drives all over Massachusetts to "look at the houses." She had never comprehended the point, what she was supposed to be looking for, as they drove ten miles per hour past Colonials in Groton or Cape Cods in Rockport, other than to assume that although his commentary stuck to his appreciation for fresh coats of paint, driveway resurfacing jobs, neatly-stacked firewood, and bougainvilleas in bloom, what he was really fantasizing about was the interiors of the homes, about living in some alternate-reality neighborhood where his wife was still alive.  

She looked at the houses. 

"I like that one," she said, for something to say, and pointed to an ivy-wrapped brick mansion with a red door, two chimneys, and a horseshoe driveway. 

"That's the Bradford's," he said. "I played lacrosse with their son Charles—interesting kid, he went to Paris to study art history, he's working at some big museum in Amsterdam now. I could never put that together, he was such a jock." 

"Maybe he was just trying to fit in," she said, and imagined what her life would have been like had she been born Lauren Bradford, Charles' younger sister. She would have wanted to follow him to Paris, and her charmingly over-protective parents would have permitted her to go on the condition that she moved into the high-ceilinged apartment they had bought in the Marais (they were rich enough to afford the Parisian equivalent of their Wellesley mansion for their kids) which Charles shared with his tall, beautiful girlfriend, Gabrielle, who dressed in all black and was cold to everyone except Lauren. Gabrielle would have taught Lauren French and how to cook duck in various ways and held her hand on the street the way European women sometimes did and told her that she felt like a real sister. Once Charles and Gabrielle got engaged they would have fought over whether Lauren should be Charles' female best man or Gabrielle's maid of honor. 

The sound of the blinker tore her away from the fourth arrondissement. 

"Here we are," said Daniel.

His childhood home, up a dormant, landscaped rise, and ten, concrete-capped cobblestone steps from the driveway, was a three-story, white Georgian with black shutters on every window and an American flag hanging from a pole beside the front door. Lauren shared her father's position on flags: what kind of person needed to be reminded of what country they were in every time they came home? Where did they do their grocery shopping, Iraq? 

Fear of the failure to be loved deadened her hand, it lay in her lap and refused to respond to the signals from her brain to open the car door. She wondered whether it might be a relief to sit with Daniel in the car for another few minutes, ask her asinine questions about family, release them from her head for the first time in her life, and admit to him who she was. 

"Ready?" he asked, with a playful half-smile that implied she was in for a real treat. 

She foresaw how telling him the truth would go: he would listen, explain the meaning of brotherhood, the functions of mothers, relay the story of some hilarious, innocuous misunderstanding that had ensued when Tim introduced Liz to the family for the first time, wrap it up with a kiss on the cheek, and tell her there was nothing to worry about. 

"There's nothing to worry about," he said. 

She would never ask him her questions. She wanted to be a person who did not harden and deaden and worry before encountering a family, she wanted to be a member of a family, far more than she wanted anyone to know her.  

In the bright marble-countertoped acreage of the Holbeck kitchen, smelling buttery from the oven and like damp fur from golden retriever lying by the refrigerator, Daniel introduced Lauren to small clusters of his family one by one. His mother, Annette, in a peach-colored sweater set under a spotless, gingham apron, hugged Lauren and said it was so nice to meet her. Annette's attention was dedicated to the bread knife she had set down for the hug, and Lauren had the instinct to leave her alone. Lauren intuited from Annette's poised, army general-like command over the kitchen that she never accepted help with cooking, and was more likely to find offers of help intrusive rather than useful. Regardless, Lauren performed a little pirouette of potential daughter-in-law politeness and asked if she could help with anything. Annette placed a hand on Lauren's upper arm, said she was so sweet for offering but no, of course not, go on, meet everyone else. Daniel's happiness with the first interaction between his girlfriend and mother radiated off of him like heat, and he put his hand on the small of Lauren's back and pointed her in the direction of his brothers. On the way she shook hands with a ten-year-old boy dressed in khakis and a white button-down shirt, as if he were an accountant with an office job. The boy barely registered her through his dedication to his task, retrieving another set of gold-rimmed plates from the china cabinet and setting the dining table in the other room. His obvious need to do a good job made the spaces between her ribs ache. Tim and Andrew, glasses of red wine in their hands, both in V-neck sweaters, one burgundy, one navy blue, asked Lauren what she did for a living, if she had trouble with street parking in her neighborhood, and if Daniel had told her the story about the time a few years ago when he had gotten a roommate off Craigslist, a guy who liked to wear full-body animal suits around their apartment. Daniel would come home from work to a six-foot-two raccoon on the couch watching action movies. The punchline: she hadn't met Daniel on Craigslist, had she? Lauren laughed the way they wanted her to laugh and a headache arrived, like jumper cables clamped behind each eye. The sisters-in-law pulled her away from Daniel, wanting to know where Lauren had grown up, where she had gone to high school, if she wanted more white wine, and where she had gotten her coat, they had seen it when she came in, they loved her coat. Afraid to come across as caring about clothes as much as she did in front of an ER doctor, she lied and said it was from a Boston discount department store. (She had bought it at the designer's boutique in Manhattan at full price.) Liz also asked how Lauren and Daniel had met, and Lauren demurred, saying she would let Daniel explain, since they had met on a dating app, his first words to her had been: "How's your Tuesday?," and when they met for a drink neither of them had fallen in love at first sight. Lauren had no idea how to make the truth into a story that matched up to the rest of the family's fireworks, and Daniel would. 

Lauren could tell from the attentive engagement when she talked that she had made a good first impression on the entire family, that all of them saw her as pretty, smart, funny, and a good match for Daniel. That this awareness did not relieve headache distressed her, distressed the headache itself, and the clamping clamped harder. They were not asking her tough questions, being condescending, rude, or anything else constituting rational reasons to be exhausted by other people. They were not making it hard and she found it hard anyway. She was stuck, uncomprehending, in the middle of the chalkboard. 

"Enough girl talk," Daniel's father, James, said, as he sidled up to her and the sisters-in-law. The gin and tonic in his hand fizzed. 

"Get ready," Liz said. "He's going to take you on a tour of the cheese." 

"Shush," said James. "Liz pretends to be lactose intolerant to get a rise out of me." 

James led Lauren over a cheeseboard that looked like a painting of a medieval feast, with compotes, grapes, berries, dried fruits, and decorative leaves. Each cheese had its own dedicated, walnut-handled knife. James explained the countries of origin of the cheeses, production methodologies, and pointed out interesting aspects of the rinds with his pinkie. 

"She's going to develop lactose intolerance if this takes much longer," Ashley called, from down the kitchen island.  

"I'm an artist and my work is not always appreciated," he said like a man who's in on all of the jokes about him, but Lauren heard an undertone, sensing that what he wanted, what he might not even know he wanted, was for someone to actually see him as an artist. Lauren admired the board with her chin in her hand, as if in an art gallery. 

James hacked off a chunk of Toma Piedmontese with a miniature cleaver and fed it to the dog. 

“Now you're informed enough to make a selection," James said. "Go ahead." 

The blue cheese was untouched, and, figuring that he wouldn't have bought blue cheese if he didn't like it himself, Lauren wondered if she should select it in order communicate her daringness to eat what the rest of the family avoided, a love of all cheeses, and the idea that she could be the daughter-in-law he never had, unlike the two in the kitchen giving him a hard time about his passion. Then she doubted herself, wondered if choosing blue cheese was too obvious, if it would somehow reveal her desperation to be part of the family. A flash of insight eliminated these calculations: James was not the kind of man who gave his dog the worst cheese on the board. 

She went for the Toma Piedmontese. 

“I knew we'd get along,: he said.  

Daniel returned to her side, and without hesitation, without any apparent thought, put blue cheese and fig compote on a cranberry cracker, and ate. She aimed two fingers at her headache by pressing them into the bone underneath her eyebrow and wondered what it would be like to have a father-in-law; she related it to the brief instances when her father had girlfriends. They had all been nice women, nice to her, nice to her dad. And Lauren had been nice too, complimented their casseroles, thanked them for the gifts of makeup and clothes leveled straight at her motherlessness. Her father had never discussed his breakups with her, however Lauren's sensitivity told her that his problem had always been the same, regardless of the woman: none of them were his wife, and he had pretended with each of them until he couldn't stand it anymore. Lauren, who had grown up silently in the passenger seat of a car, had a much higher tolerance for the discomfort of pretending than her father. She would have accepted any of them as a stepmother. 

That was the danger of true love, the rational reason not to look for it, and the fire with which the Holbecks didn't realize they were playing: if you lost it, afterwards there was nothing, no one, and no stories, except those you made up in your head. 

Kate Imbach is an American writer living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Quartz, Amazon Day One, Word Riot, and more. She holds an MFA from the New York University Writer's Workshop in Paris. More at kateimbach.com and @Kate8.