Jack With a Twist

around, games of Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven began. I can barely remember the details of the evening, though—my only memory being that it was the night that Danny asked me to be his girlfriend. I floated home at the end of the night and walked in the front door just before my curfew.

“Have you seen your mother’s cameo?” my father asked me as I walked in. His eyes burned into me and I could barely meet his eyes.

“No, why?” I answered, my hand instinctively flying to my chest. The cameo was not there.

“It’s missing and your mother is really upset,” he said, looking at me calmly. “If it doesn’t turn up, she’ll be devastated.”

“Guess I should have let you wear it tonight, sweetheart,” my mother said, walking out of the kitchen in her bathrobe. “At least then I’d know where it was.”

My father’s eyes stayed glued upon me as I ran up the stairs quickly. I flew into my room and checked everything I was wearing, shaking my coat and my sweater out, praying that I’d hear a thump on the carpet. The cameo was nowhere to be found. I could hear my parents talking in their bedroom. My father was trying to calm my mother down, but she was inconsolable. It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother cry.

I prayed the whole night through. I don’t even remember ever having gone to sleep. I prayed and prayed with every fiber of my being that I would wake up in the morning and I would find the cameo. I told God that if I found the cameo the next morning, I would never lie to my father again.

The next morning, my prayers were answered—I woke up from the previous day’s horrors as if it were only a bad dream. Danny brought the cameo back, having found it on the floor of the closet in his basement. My mother was thrilled, but my dad wanting to know how the cameo ended up there of all places brought on a whole host of other problems.

I never lied to my father ever again.

“What does your fortune really say, BB?” my father asks, eyes still on me.

“It says: ‘Every exit is an entrance to a new experience.’”

I look down at the fortune and take a big bite of the cookie. My eyes don’t come up to meet those of my parents. Leave it to this seemingly innocuous fortune cookie to make the whole evening explode into a discussion about Jack and me and how I’m ruining my life by not rushing back to him immediately.

When I finally do look up, I see my mother and father looking at each other. Then, in an instant, my mother’s up clearing the table and my father’s washing the dishes in the sink.

“Do you have these under control, honey?” my mother asks my father once she’s done clearing the table. “My show’s coming on.”

“Yes, Mimi,” my father says, giving my mother a tiny peck on the lips before she flits off. “It’s all under control.”

“Let me help you with those, Daddy,” I say, joining my father at the sink.

“I’ve got it,” my father says with a smile. “Why don’t you go and watch TV with Mom?”

“But I want to,” I say, and he regards me, passing me the yellow plastic gloves.

“You rinse off and I’ll load the dishwasher,” he says, “deal?”

“Deal,” I say, and turn the water all the way to as hot as it goes.

“So, do you want to talk about it?” my father asks, waiting for the first dish to load into the dishwasher. The steam begins to rise up from the sink.

“There’s really nothing to talk about,” I say, passing him an appetizer plate. “It’s over. It’s done.”

“Do you really want it to be over, BB? Do you want it to be done?” he says, “I thought that you loved Jack?”

I scrub at a particularly sticky spot of hoison sauce.

“I do,” I say, “it’s just that I don’t even know him any more.”

I pass the dish to my father, only partially clean, and move on to the glasses.

“I don’t think that that’s really true,” my father says, and as I turn to face him, a glass slips out of my hands and crashes into the sink, breaking into pieces.

“Oh, my God,” I say, turning back to the sink and picking up the pieces with my rubber gloves.

“It’s okay, BB,” my father says, his voice low and soft, “it’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say, and I begin to cry.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” my father says, turning me to him so that he can hug me. My face melts into his chest and I begin to cry even harder. He puts his hand on my head and tells me that everything’s going to be okay.

Minutes later, my father’s put up a pot of tea and we’re seated at the kitchen counter, having left the rest of the dishes piled up in the sink.

“It’s just that we’ve been friends for years,” I say, still crying as I speak. “But now all of these things are happening that make me question who he really is.”

“But he wasn’t running around with that Miranda woman you accused him of cheating with,” my father says. The teapot begins to scream and my father goes to pick it up.

“It’s not just that,” I say as my father pours the boiling-hot water into my mug, “It’s other things, too. Like when we went to Tiffany’s to register, and like how he litigated against me. It’s like I’ve been seeing this whole other Jack. A Jack I don’t know at all. A Jack I don’t want to know.”

“That reminds me of something,” my father says, setting the teapot back down on the stove. “There was this Twilight Zone episode that I used to love. I think it was called ‘Button, Button.’ A salesman comes to this couple’s home and leaves them with a machine that has a big red button on top. He tells them that if they press the button, they’ll get a million dollars, but, once the button is pressed, someone in the world—someone who they don’t know—will die. The couple argues about it all night. They could really use the money, but the thought of killing someone, even someone they don’t know, is just too much to bear.

“Finally, they go to bed, but the wife wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t stand it any more. She presses the button. The next morning, she wakes up to find that her husband has died in his sleep. When the salesman returns to give her the money, the woman is furious. She screams at him: ‘I thought you said that someone we didn’t know would die?’ And the salesman responds: ‘Do you think that you really knew your husband?’”

“That’s not how it ended!” my mother yells at us as she comes walking into the kitchen. “And why are there still dishes in my sink?”

“That is how it ended,” my father says, “and we’re just taking a break.”

“Why do you need a break from cleaning dishes for three people?” she says, walking to the sink and rinsing off the remaining dishes and piling them into the dishwasher. “And anyway, that’s not how the story ended.”

“How did it end?” I ask. I’m still unsettled by the ending to the story that my father just offered, and am, therefore, willing to take any challenging interpretation of the story.

“It ended with the guy saying: ‘Now, I will take the box and give it to another couple. A couple who does not know you.’”

“I think you’re mixing up the short story by Richard Matheson,” my father says. “That’s how the short story ended, but not the Twilight Zone episode.”

“Well, I think that you’re the one who’s all mixed up,” my mother says, “what the hell kind of story are you telling her anyway? Don’t you ever want her to get married?”

As my parents bicker in the kitchen where I spent most of my young life, I realize that I want what they have—the kind of relationship that they have. That sort of comfortable, natural relationship where you can bicker and argue and still know that you’d never go to bed mad at each other.

I had that with Jack. But what kind of a relationship can you have with a man you don’t even know?

But that’s what I want. That’s the kind of relationship I’ve waited my whole life for. The comfort, the love, the silly flirtatious bickering after over thirty years together. They’ll probably go back to bed tonight and have sex.

Ew.

But the relationship. That’s what I want for myself. I thought that that was the kind of relationship I had with Jack, but it turns out that I just didn’t know him at all. My father seems to think that you never really know the person you’re with, but I don’t believe that. More importantly, I don’t want that for myself. I want to know, when I