Till Death Do Us Part
By Leslie Pietrzyk
I’m meeting my stupid father “pre-performance” at the Kennedy Center bar on April 15. Which happens to be his wedding anniversary to my stupid mother. I know, who gets married on tax day? Who meets their kid on his wedding anniversary? They’re not married now, but still. I’m supposed to be there at 6 pm sharp. That’s how he still talks, like he’s a hundred-and-ten years old, like people say “sharp” every two seconds. I don’t even know what show we’re seeing, ballet or symphony or whatever. He brings the tickets.
I shoot for 6:15. He’ll be late. Plus, it’s a bar and I know I look like I’m at leasteighteen, but I’m fifteen, and sometimes people act like I’m a child and sometimes I catch grown-up men staring like they want to hike my skirt with one hand and fuck me, like they’re imagining no underwear in the way. Anyway, either makes sitting around a bar waiting for his entrance exactly what I’m not in the mood for.
He’s always late. He’s a very important man in Washington, DC, always “running behind,” with some assistant whose whole job is texting bullshit about how late he’ll be. Delete.
I’m supposed to take a taxi but obviously that fare’s in my pocket and I’m riding Metro and the free shuttle bus from Foggy Bottom. My income’s gonna tank the minute someone on his staff explains Uber. Once a month I meet my dad at the Kennedy Center because, he says, culture will be my savior, and because he likes people seeing me with him, people seeing him “culture me up.” Honestly, I think he pretends I’m his date or something super-uniquely insane like that. I don’t say this because of course I’m not stupid.
So, at 6:15 I’m on the elevator with a flock of lady tourists wearing what my dad might declare their “so-called finery” — fake-leather high heels with rolls of foot fat spilling over the sides; shiny, thick-fabric skirts that are too tight but also too baggy; wire-wrapped polished purple stone earrings from a spin-rack at a bad mountain town gift shop — and it practically damages my eyes looking at them. But no floor numbers to watch lighting up above since this elevator only goes one place, to the roof level where both restaurants are, the fancy one, where I’m headed, and the one where you pile crap on a plastic tray, which guess who will be going there? So I close my…
