Free The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth Page A

that make him suitable for my mom. And the short thing is onlysuitable from his perspective, because she doesn’t even like short men; she likes tall men, just like everybody else.” I can get away with this because of the precise averageness of my height. “She once said that short men get offended when she doesn’t want to go out with them, like it’s her responsibility to help them breed more short people so that the inability to reach things on high shelves will survive to the next generation.
    “Anyway: the guy is apparently completely charmless. He drives her home from the date, and he invites himself in for coffee—as in, literally, he says,
May I come inside for a cup of coffee
? And it’s this incredibly complicated moment for my mom, because on the one hand she knows just as well as any other television-watching adult what
coffee
is a euphemism for, but she really wants to be polite—she’s a very polite person—and it wouldn’t be polite to refuse a cup of coffee to someone who’s just bought you dinner. It’s like she’s trapped in the semantic gap between the literal and the figurative meanings of the word
coffee
. And in the end, she just doesn’t have the vocabulary to say no—it’s not in her social-behavior repertoire. So they go inside the house, and my mom puts some coffee on and sits down very deliberately in the armchair rather than on the couch next to the guy, and they sit there and wait for the coffee to percolate. And just as she’s getting up to pour the coffee, my dad’s car pulls up outside, and he gets out in his undershirt.”
    “Whoa!” Maya says.
    “See, after the divorce my mom continued doing my dad’s laundry for a while.”
    “Get out.”
    “I swear to God.”
    “After they were
divorced
?”
    “She’s a soft touch,” I say. “He moved into this place without a washer and dryer, and he would bring over his laundry when he dropped me off on Sunday nights. She only did it a couple timesbefore she told him to do his own goddamn laundry.” Years later I discovered that there were indeed a washer and dryer in the basement of my dad’s building, but I don’t get into this, because my father and his character flaws are not the point of the story. “So my mom is asking this guy how he takes his coffee when my dad walks in in his undershirt—you know, like a wifebeater? He’s spilled a bunch of tomato sauce on his shirt, and he doesn’t have anything else to wear to the class he’s teaching tomorrow.” I have fabricated this explanation—in fact I have no idea why my dad came over to pick up the laundry instead of waiting until Sunday when he’d be there anyway. Was he really wearing his undershirt? That’s how I remember it, but it’s possible that I’ve added that detail when telling the story on some previous occasion. It gives the scene more color, though. “He had called my mom, and she’d said he could let himself in and pick up the laundry, which my mom had folded for him and left in a plastic laundry basket. So my dad lets himself in, and this guy, my mom’s date, sees my dad come in the door in his wifebeater and says,
What the hell is going on here
?
    “My dad, I should point out, is not tough, but he’s big, and he could probably fit this guy in his stomach. He’s going over to the guy to introduce himself, and the guy looks at my mom and says,
I don’t know what kind of sick arrangement you people have, but I want no part of it
! and walks straight out the door.”
    Maya laughs at the punch line, but she seems to recognize that the story is not, ultimately, a comedy. She asks a bunch of questions about my parents, which reduce to
Is he really that clueless
? and
Does she ever stand up for herself
? My answers hint at something I realize I want her to know: I’m self-invented; I had no one to learn from. This may be why I told the story in the first place.
    When she’s out of questions, she sets up an anecdote of her own. “OK, I’ve