Historical Fiction

(Postcard via The Vintage Plum Shop)

The inestimable Christine Fernsebner Eslao recently observed that my parents' courtship sounds like a pitch for an indie romantic comedy.

My immediate reaction was, "What? No!" because I don't associate my parents with the words "indie," "romantic" or "comedy." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that she was more right than she knew.

The context for Christine's comment was the cheap-ass but heartfelt gift I got my parents for Christmas last year: a vintage postcard of the Chappaquiddick Ferry (above). When my parents met in 1965, my dad owned the ferry. (He bought it in 1962, according to this comprehensive history.) Mom would pack a dinner, bring it down to the ferry, and their dates would be eating together as Dad drove the ferry on the five minute loop across Edgartown Harbor. (This is the whole ride, with a cameo by Dad Razor and a cooing Baby Razor.)

But the story really starts with a broken engagement. When my mother was 24, she dumped the IBM engineer she was planning to marry. The most I've ever managed to get out of her on the subject is, "I just realized I didn't want to marry him." There's got to be more to it than that, because breaking off an engagement in 1964 when you were in your mid-twenties was pretty damn ballsy. But trying to get a story out of my mother is impossible, so my whole idea of her history is pieced together from random comments she's made over the years.

So in 1964, my mother was working as an x-ray tech and living with her family--her parents and seven younger siblings. As far as I can tell, once she realized the engagement wasn't going to work out, she started looking for other ways to get the hell out of Rhode Island. She took a job at Martha's Vineyard Hospital because it provided housing. She didn't even know MV was an island.

The housing was a cottage on the hospital grounds. She told me once that she'd work all day and if it hadn't been for her friends, she would have gone straight home and never gone out. But she had two friends who would drag her out, one kinda slutty and one gay (her telling me about having the concept of homosexuality explained to her, an extremely sheltered Catholic girl, was hilarious.) Yes, that's right--my mother actually had stereotypical rom com sidekicks. She smoked, but never at work, so she'd go all day without a cigarette, then smoke a pack a night. She promised my father she'd quit by the wedding and ended up "quitting" on her wedding day. She snuck cigarettes from the photographer and hid behind the reception hall smoking them.

Mom met Dad at The Lamp Post, the only bar open on MV in the winter. She thought he was kind of full of himself. I'm sure she was right. Dad had also recently broken off an engagement. Well, he didn't; his fiancee did. And no one has ever told me that story, so your guess is as good as mine. But apparently the gossip was unfavorable, because everyone told my mom not to date him.

Dad, in an attempt to seem virtuous, invited my mom to church as a first date. And now I have to admit that I couldn't write this rom com, because neither of them has ever told me how they fell in love. I should ask, but both of them are excellent at dodging anything involving emotional content and I suspect the answer would be, "Oh, you know, in the usual way."

I'll leave you with my last scene from The Story of Mom and Dad, as told by my mother. Their first apartment, underneath Al's Package Store. It's New Year's Day, closer to breakfast than midnight, and Dad is frying bacon. Their kitchen is so small that when a slice is done, Dad's just tossing it over his shoulder to the plate on the opposite counter, right behind him. In the movie, the last shot would be my mother, drink in hand, smiling indulgently at him. In real life? She yelled at him not to get grease on the cabinets.