Dandy Dad
Sophia Laurenzi
Word Count 1078
My father was the only dad in town who wore scarves. But as a child, I never noticed—his expansive collection of dress shirts outshone his accessories. When his famous tomato sauce erupted from the stove onto one of his tailored lavender button-down shirts, he already had another one ironed and ready to wear.
“Oh, shit!” he’d exclaim. “I mean, shoot! I’ll be right back. Sophia, stir the sauce!”
Not once did I consider that my father was gay. But when he came out to fifteen-year-old me and my thirteen-year-old brother, I can’t say I was shocked. I don’t intend to perpetuate stereotypes and antiquated ideas of sexuality, but I could see how the man who grew distressed over the textural flaws in our Venetian plaster walls and played only two songs on the piano— “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”—was possibly not, and had never been, a straight one. As my high-school boyfriend reminded me when I shared the news, “Well, he does wear scarves.”
“Dad and I are getting a divorce,” my mother told us. “And he is going to tell you why.”
We all sat close in the family room of what had been my parents’ dream home. They saw past the bland facade of suburban sameness and, year by year, added landscaping, garden paths, and details like beveled garage doors to give character to every brick. My parents always shared a love of making things beautiful. All their efforts, though, could not cover the rumblings of truth breaking through gold-framed oil paintings and silk damask curtains: my father was gay, and their marriage was over.
Before he came out, I knew my father as meticulous but warm, wound tight but hilarious. He filled rooms with laughter but hated to smile in photos. He would be gone for days on business trips and for weeks getting treatment for depressive episodes. I didn’t understand his depression, I didn’t understand how he was color-blind but could assemble the perfect outfit, but I did understand his love. It spilled through effusive toasts and radiated out of the hours he crouched beside my efforts to play a painfully tiny violin, his eyes completely focused on the “Hot Cross Buns” sheet music.
In the first days of their divorce, my parents insisted that we would always be a family. Even as my father learned what it meant to be an openly gay man and my mother juggled grief with betrayal and self-discovery, they tried to keep their word. We celebrated birthdays together. On Christmas Eve, my father joined my mother’s family as usual. He unwrapped his gift from my mother and erupted in his cascading guffaw: two pairs of elegant designer socks, each with a single, striking question mark knit into its design. My mother had already started belly-laughing before he untied the ribbon.
It felt like my father had finally let out a breath he’d been holding for forty-four years. Most things about him didn’t change. He still hated costumes and he insisted that the living room furniture be arranged in perfect formation. But he didn’t have to be perfect anymore. The buttoned-up exterior I knew from my early childhood cracked off in bits and pieces, until my father became the resident over-sharer of the condo he’d moved into a few minutes from my mother.
He transformed into one of the only adults I knew who was willing to admit they were wrong about things, to apologize, and to share his real-time reflections as he learned. He finally owned up to the secret car-cigarettes he’d smoked for years. He shared some of the pain he’d felt from depression and anxiety with my brother and I, and told us it was always ok to ask for help.
As he watched me fill my high-school weekends with work and extracurriculars that lasted from before the sun rose till after it set, he said, “I was always like that. I couldn’t wait to be an adult. When I was in high school, I wanted to be in college. When I was in college, I wanted to graduate and get a job. But you have your whole life for that. I wish I’d been more present with wherever I was.”
When I first heard him say those words, I was intent on continuing to fulfill my role as the oldest daughter who excelled at everything, including fixing the people around me. I had learned to fixate on my mother’s face after my father got treatment for depression, monitoring her for the signs of distress I must have missed with him. When my parents divorced, the first thing I did was insist on a 50/50 custody agreement. I didn’t want to lose either of them, but even more than that, I couldn’t bear to hurt them more than they were already hurting.
Their pain was palpable. The effort to maintain old family traditions and camaraderie in the first year of their separation buckled under the strain of the emotional and logistical nightmare that is divorce. Within a few years, my parents mostly spoke to each other through their attorneys. As with everything, they had tried to make a heart-wrenching rupture look beautiful. But at first, all they did was gloss over the devastation and confusion. It didn’t take long for the veneer to crack.
Out of the divorce, I got two flawed parents who set out to evolve. My father, in particular, pushed himself onto the wilder and freer trail of his gay identity. He couldn’t cover this with a coat of fresh paint or change into a crisp, unstained shirt. For the first time, he had to live with the mess.
And I had to see that messiness meant being human. I needed an imperfect parent to show me that life comes with pain, disappointment, crumples, stains, and endless mistakes. That wasn’t what I got from my straight father, who criticized every wrinkle and out of place hair. My gay father still couldn’t help himself from commenting on every wrinkle and out of place hair. But he whipped out one of his multiple irons, showed me a trick to getting out sleeve creases, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Nobody really knows what they’re doing, anyway,” he said. It was something I never heard in the picturesque first fifteen years of my life. But because it came from the mouth of my gay father, squeezing an ironing board into the hallway of his post-divorce condo, I could finally believe his words. And I am freer for it.