Die Lorelai
opening excerpt
The beat of my heart is hard, harder than the black slab serif, blank space stark. Brutal bullets break down Dad’s life. Brown for undergrad, McGill for the PhD. Then a string of adjunct jobs. A gap. One more job.
Dad had cloistered himself in his office, penning an exquisitely nuanced argument for The Sackville Journal of Gender and Culture on the need for men to make an equal contribution at home. The coffee cups crowded his desk, pale brown circles staining the overflowing paper alongside red slashes and scribbles. Downstairs, Mom scrubbed, stirred, and imposed order. An imperfect marriage of theory and practice is by no means unknown in the history of ideas, a recurring hurdle for revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. I understood, and thought everyone did, until late one night when I was coming back from the bathroom.
“I didn’t sign up to be a single mother.” A frigid pause. “Get it together! They accepted it — publish and move on.”
“I just don’t know if it’s intersectional enough. I don’t know—” Dad’s voice broke. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
He killed himself four days later.
The morning after I found him, Mom furiously cleaned, steam and sweat sheening her forehead. Then, slamming a dish, she told Sylvia and me to get in the car. Her voice rose as she rambled about how she’d clawed her way into the middle class and would make sure — damn sure — we didn’t slip out of it, because we were survivors, we were masters of our fate.
“You’re not the kind of girls who fall over in a stiff breeze,” she said, knuckling the wheel. “We will never surrender!”
I could see my own breath in fragile puffs in front of me. There was something so gentle about the way the heat faded. Nothing seemed easier than surrender. On Church Street, Mom suddenly pulled the car to the side of the road, almost striking a snowbank as we slid to a stop. She left the car without even glancing back at us. Sylvia’s eyes sought mine, red and swollen.
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