Answer

Answer

SOME THINGS YOU NEVER TELL. Those things are real secrets, unless you can’t stand not telling them anymore, in which case you let them fly, they become ex-secrets, and the chips fall where they may. What about things you’ve told to some people but haven’t told to others? Are those things semi-secrets? And what do you call things you’ve simply forgotten to mention at all? What if they never come up in family conversations while one person is standing over the stove stirring the chili, someone else is setting the table in the dining room, another person is pouring the water, and someone else is still down in the family room, thumbs flying over the Xbox controller?

At the dinner table one evening I was spinning some story from my distant murky past and I slipped in the phrase “my wife.” She was only part of the yarn, but make no mistake—every other word in the story evaporated instantly. Silence entered the room from the ceiling and settled slowly over us like a sheet. “My wife” clearly meant some other wife. Someone not sitting at the table with us at that moment. Someone else.

Our son and our daughter were staring at me, utensils poised above plates. A green bean fell from Parker’s fork. And I wasn’t surprised that he was the one who finally lifted the sheet of silence–even at age 12, he was already the most direct among us. “You mean you were married before?” he asked, eyes the size of his salad plate. It was like I had just told them my real name was Clark Kent and I had some interesting underwear beneath my flannel shirt and jeans. Or that I was secretly president of the United States. (They probably would have shrieked, “Thank God! We thought it was Bush!”)

My wife, my current wife, my second wife, my now-and-forever wife, sat frozen, eyes locked on our children, motionless as a heron standing in the silent water, watching for ripples.

“Yes,” I said. “I was married before.”

Car tires whooshed across the wet pavement out on Santa Fe Avenue.

Who would speak next? What would he or she say?

I heard the mantel clock ticking in the living room.

The youngest person at the table was once again the first to speak. Parker could have asked when all this happened, and where, and with whom. What was her name? What did she look like? Those may have been the questions my wife, my second wife, my current wife, my now-and-forever wife, asked when I first told her, not long after we met. It was so long ago, I don’t even remember (although there’s a good chance she does). But what goes through the mind of a boy who is on the cusp of adolescence at the moment he hears this news about his father for the first time?

This is what Parker chose to ask: “Do you have any other children?”

The mantel clock was still ticking in the living room. The green bean sat on Parker’s plate atop the mashed potatoes. Allison, four years older than Parker, looked straight at me, silent, which is always true of her when she’s thinking, when she’s ahead of the game, which she almost always is.

I had no idea exactly what a 16-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy would feel after hearing for the first time that they have siblings they’ve never met. Eventually, they might feel curiosity. Eventually, they might want to meet the kids with whom they share a parent. But that’s not what they’re feeling the first moment they realize they might not be the only colts in the corral, at least not based on the expressions I saw on Allison’s and Parker’s faces in the long moments while they waited for my response to Parker’s question and the mantel clock continued to tick in the living room. I looked across the table and told them the truth: “No, you’re my only children.”

The subject didn’t come up again for another 10 years. No one consciously avoided it, at least I don’t think anyone did. But we were all occupied with stirring the chili, setting the table, pouring the water, and pounding the video-game remote down in the family room. Then one Saturday afternoon, I picked Parker up at the San Francisco airport. He was back from New York, on vacation from college. He was soon to graduate, and the car conversation turned philosophical, about the future, and about the past. We were all the way up Buchanan, about to cross San Pablo, when he brought up my first marriage. And his questions were a whole lot different than they’d been 10 years before.

Unlike that Saturday I brought Parker home from the airport, on the night I told my secret at the dining-room table our children probably hadn’t been thinking that their parents had lives before they had kids. They probably hadn’t been thinking about the interesting red and blue underwear that could be hiding under their dad’s flannel shirt and jeans. But that’s just a guess, and maybe I’m underestimating them (again). I do know this: I’ll remember the relief that eventually flooded their faces the night I told them my secret until I’ve leapt my last tall building in a single bound.

————
Robert Menzimer is executive director of the nonprofit WriterCoach Connection program, which trains community volunteers as writer coaches for students in East Bay public-school classrooms. He is also a freelance writer, editor, and English and writing tutor. He and his wife live in Albany and their children, all two of them, have grown and flown.

Click here to go back to the main feature page.

Faces of the East Bay