Some friends of mine and I were chatting about dating in Toronto the other day, and various opinions were expressed as to why we were all single. I can't remember what was said exactly, but I do remember thinking about it for the rest of the afternoon, and being bothered about not being able to come up with a concrete answer. I then remembered a conversation I had with my father not two Christmases before, about this very same subject.
It became infamously known among my family as Why Is Trev Still Single, or the Saga of the Purple Gravy. It was Christmas Eve a few years ago, and it was just the two of us, and I was making a roast. Now, I had no idea of how to make gravy. This is important to remember. I’d seen my mother do it countless times, but could never remember just what it was exactly that she did. I knew she used the juices from the roast, wine and bit of flour. Hmmm. I had flour, and God knows, we had enough wine to sink the Bismarck. I was sipping mine because I’d read that all the great French chefs sip vermouth when they cook, but I, not being French, and loathing the taste of vermouth, opted for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead.
But the juice? The roast wasn’t tough, but it wasn’t exactly swimming in juices. SO. I put rubber gloves on, washed them thoroughly, picked up the roast, and squeezed into the gravy pan as much juice as I could. Which wasn’t much. So I cut a slash down the middle of the roast and squeezed again. A little more this time. My father was in the living room with his wine and a copy of TIME magazine and had no idea of the I LOVE LUCY cooking shenanigans going on in his kitchen. So I poured in some red wine, and I added the flour, and I went at it with a few flicks of the whisk and...oh, crap. This is all I could remember, and I prayed that it was enough. It probably would have been fine, and I would have just kept at it, except that my father chose at that moment to call out a completely unseen, out of left field question from the living room; “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
At this point, gentle reader, I choked on my wine.
“Whaaaat?” I gasped (my voice rising about two octaves as I said it) while squeezing the roast for the last time. “What kind of question is THAT?” I snapped, (I have a habit of falling into a staccato Bette Davis kind of machine gun firing way of speaking when faced with uncomfortable conversations) sticking my head out of the kitchen, with the roast in my hands.
“Well, your Mother and I have been talking...what the hell are you doing with that roast?” he asked, shocked.
“Never mind. What kind of question is that to ask while I’m trying to make gravy?” I glared at him. He ignored my question, the roast obviously had all of his attention.
“THAT’S how you make gravy? By playing football with a roast?” he asked incredulously. He shook his and sighed, and went back to his magazine. "I hope you WASHED those gloves."
I turned my back on him as haughtily as I could, and stomped back into the kitchen and added some more wine and flour to the mix, forgetting how much I'd already added. I wasn’t really paying attention at this point, as my mind was too rattled by the direction this conversation had taken.
I finished whisking the gravy and went back out and glared at him again, my arms akimbo. “SO. Talk. What kind of a question was that?”
He smiled and snickered at my obvious discomfort. My father, since I was small, took great delight in my hair trigger temper and screaming furies since he alone knew that they never ran very deep. Although they upset many other people, they never did him, since he knew that for me, this was a way of venting, the way my brother played hockey or my mother played tennis, or he played golf. My release was always verbal and usually directed at him, rascal that he was and is.
Warming up to his topic again, he sipped his wine and said, “Well son, frankly, we’re worried that you’re coming up on forty and you’re still alone.”
(I should interject at this point and mention that my father is an Anglophile and one of the last of the Great Victorians. I suspect he and Lytton Strachey would loathe each other on sight, as Strachey was far more modern. My father has referred to my brother and I as "son" since were babies. I don't know if this stems from watching too many Ralph Richardson movies as a youngster, but it has given his speech a curiously affected and archaic aspect in character ever since. Most everybody else I know finds it charming, and it is, really, but I, being an unappreciative child, found it irritating and pompous. At times growing up, I wanted to quiz him to see if he even remembered our names, but then I remembered that he must, as he'd written enough cheques with my name on them to validate that.)
“So what?” I asked, shrugging, playing the belligerent child, “I’ve always been alone. What’s the big deal?”
“It’s not normal.” He shook his head, obviously irritated at my wilfull obtuseness.
“Says who? I think it’s normal. Why should I be shacked up with somebody I don’t love just to satisfy everybody else’s notions of normal?” I challenged. I could feel myself growing tense.
“Everybody else has somebody.” He said smoothly.
“Bully for them. Besides, what are you talking about? You don’t have anybody, and you seem alright to me.” I snapped.
“I was married for forty years.”
I mercifully resisted the obvious rejoinder, “And look how well that turned out.” As that was a little too disrespectful, and unfair, even for me. I knew full well, that my parents’ marriage, although over, was, by all intents and purposes, a very successful marriage, for a very long time. 40 years is nothing to sneeze at. I honestly could attest to that. But, it died, like even the best things do. Attention must be paid, Arthur Miller once wrote, and in this case, it wasn’t paid after awhile, and small cracks became big cracks, until finally the whole thing fell apart. It was a good lesson for me as far as lessons went. It taught me that you cannot take anyone for granted ever in a relationship if you want that relationship to stay healthy, much less survive.
But I hadn’t even ever got that far with anyone, and this was part of what he was addressing. I could tell it concerned him.
I took a breath and tried to give a reasonable answer. “I haven’t met anyone who loved me back the way I loved them. Or I met people who loved me and I didn’t love them. I’m always on the wrong track it seems.” I told him, thinking about it. In a way, it was true too. I was.
“Well, you know if you do meet someone, they’re always welcome here. Your Mother’s too, we’ve discussed that.”
My heart warmed suddenly towards him, as this was lovely to hear, and of course, I knew that already, but it’s always nice to be told. I realized, that this conversation between us would be a very rare occurrence among my friends and their fathers. A lot of them would all be quite jealous I knew. I felt very lucky all of a sudden to have him as my Dad, because I knew I WAS lucky. So many friends of mine I knew, weren’t so fortunate with their fathers, those that still had them.
“Now, let’s say you bring your fella home...” he began, sounding like Jimmy Stewart.
“FELLA?” I interrupted, wondering if he thought I was going to bring home some pipe smoking, Brooks Brothers type with Brill Creemed hair in a double breasted suit and a copy of the New York Times under his arm. On second thought, that didn't sound quite so bad.
“Quit interrupting.” He frowned at me, and up I shut. “Now say you bring SOMEONE home, let’s call him, oh, I don’t know, let's say, Dick.”
“WHAT?” I gasped.
“Dick. You know, short for Richard.” He looked at me, and shook his head. Would I just let him please finish talking, just once?
“Yes, I KNOW what the short form is, but I wouldn’t do that.” I protested.
“Do what?” he looked at me blankly.
“Bring anyone home named Dick.”
“Why not?”
“I just wouldn’t.”
“OK, but just for the sake of argument here, let’s just say you did, and...”
“Dad! Read my lips! I would not date a Dick!”
He paused, and looked at me steadily for a beat. “Are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that?”
I took a deep breath. "Fine. So I'm dating RICHARD and I bring RICHARD home. Then what?"
"That's my point. You haven't brought Richard or ANYBODY home. Ever."
"Well, that's because I obviously haven't met him yet, have I? Waitaminute, who the hell IS this Richard anyway?" I was losing it.
Only my father could do that to me, with his slow, lilting, halting speech, usually reserved for the mentally defective and most of his own relatives. This voice he'd used with me all of my life, all but guaranteed me having a screaming tantrum within two minutes. He never used this tone of voice on my brother or mother, if only because my brother spoke the exact same way he did, so it wasn't necessary, and my mother was a a quick-tempered intuitive genius, so he didn't dare try it with her. With me though, it was easy and irresistible.
"Never mind Richard," he sighed, "Lord, but you're literal. My point is, you're too picky."
"What? What do you mean?" I asked incredulously. "Do you want me to just shack up with some oaf who hasn't the brains God gave cheese? What? Just because according to you, I'm evidently approaching my best before date, I'd better grab some witless gob, so I don't end up alone? Why didn't you tell me this in my twenties instead of letting me go on about independence and freedom of movement and the like if you just thought it was all crap?" I was getting really irate.
"You wouldn't have listened then. You're hardly listening now." he said reasonably.
"I AM TOO LISTENING!!!" I shrieked, not listening. He looked at me, pityingly.
I sat down and took another deep breath. "Fine. So I'm picky. So what?"
He put down his wine and looked at me hard, for a minute. He sighed. "I'm being serious now. Are you listening?"
I shook my head miserably, feeling the way I did when I was eleven and about to be lectured for driving the lawn tractor in the front yard, and breaking the tractor's axel on the only tree in a two acre radius.
He sighed again. "You have a very large chip on your shoulder, and you have a superiority complex that will lead you to ruin if you're not careful. I know you're very well read, and you know a lot, but you don't know everything. You're critical, judgemental, sarcastic and it's next to impossible to get you to listen to anyone else's opinion but your own. You think you can read people at a glance the way your mother can, but you can't. She is....gifted, and while you're very perceptive, you're nowhere near in her league. And I'm telling you now, that if you don't alter yourself before it's too late, it WILL be too late, and you'll end up alone. You're too much like I was, thought I knew everything, and nobody could tell me anything. Well, I didn't listen to your Mother, and look what happened. Oh, it's probably my fault, she begged me to get you out there working as a teenager, being more responsible and less lazy and Lord knows, I probably should have pushed you more. I blew smoke up your ass for years, and told you how smart you were, but I thought I was being supportive, the way my parents never were. I think I pushed you too far the wrong way, and spoiled you rotten as a result, and now it may have made you unbearable for anyone else to deal with."
At that point, something Nora Ephron said in Heartburn flew into my head, "Princes aren't born, they're made."
"Thanks so much." I said. My eyes were stinging. "How nice to know I'm a complete failure in your eyes."
He rolled his eyes as he usually did at my melodramatic speeches.
"Don't be such a melodramatic ass, of course you're not. You're honest, intelligent, generous, responsible, caring, artistically gifted, and you have lots of friends. You're shitty with money, but what the hell, you can't have everything. I'm just saying this because it's all I can see getting in the way of your being happy with somebody. Don't be alone if you can help it. Don't settle for just anyone God knows, but don't let pride get in the way of you being happy either." He laughed suddenly, "You don't want to turn into that old lady with the wedding cake, do you?"
I laughed aloud through my tears at the image. He was referring to Miss Havisham (as played by the great Margaret Leighton) in Great Expectations, the Michael York version we had watched on television years ago, when I was a kid. Burning wedding dresses and screaming old ladies and ruined wedding cakes had given me nightmares for weeks afterwards. I suddenly realized, that no, while I probably wouldn't turn into Miss Havisham, I was acting almost exactly like that hateful Estella, and for no good reason either, except that I thought of myself as being too good for most of the people I met. Pip saved Estella from her own pride in the end, but who was there to save me? Handsome, shaggy blond unselfish British boys were rare if not impossible to find in Toronto. I had a vague feeling that I would have to haul my own white satined ass out of this fix myself. It was a lot to think about.
Screw it. I'd think about it tomorrow, in the words of another doomed literary pain in the ass bitch.
I got up silently and walked back into the kitchen, lost in thought. I poured the gravy into a gravy boat, set the roast onto the carving rack, mashed the potatoes into a large bowl, and set it all down on the lovely dining room table (awash with Christmas decorations all over it) with a huge bowl of green beans, freshly buttered. I went back to the kitchen and emptied the wine bottle into my glass. I then turned towards the living room and bellowed, "DINNER!!"
My father nonchalantly drifted into the dining room, admired the table, gave me his warmest smile and said, “This looks excellent. Fine job, son.” He sat down, and loaded his plate up, and said, “Now don’t get steamed because your mother and I were talking about your love life, or lack thereof. We’re just concerned. It’s what parents do...I could never have had...” and at this he paused, staring at the gravy boat, or rather, INTO the gravy boat.
“Son?” he asked calmly. Too calmly?
“Yeah?” I snarled, chomping on a roll and sounding like Edward G. Robinson with a toothache.
“Why is the gravy purple?” he asked, smiling.
"What?" I asked, unbelieving. I took the gravy boat and looked down into it. It was purple. Or more accurately, bright lavender. I was so preoccupied by what my father had told me that I hadn't even noticed it. Shit. Too much wine and flour had produced a colour they would kill for in an old ladies’ beauty parlour. Margaret Leighton would have LOVED this. This evening was one for the books. Even Chuck D wouldn't have believed it. My father was lecturing me on dating Dicks and Dickens novels and now my gravy had turned purple.
I downed my wine in one gulp, looked over at him and shrugged. "Don't look at me. It's Dick's fault."
