Pug Hill - Alison Pace [3]
“That’s great,” I say, and I think to myself, not for the first time, Wow, forty years.
“Oh, yes, we’re already really looking forward to it. Mom’s already all caught up in the planning. You know how she loves a project.”
Oh, I know, I think, believe me, I know. “Yes,” I say in lieu of anything that could be construed as hostile.
“Well, Hope,” he says and pauses for a moment, “Mom and I were thinking how nice it would be if, at the party, you made a speech.”
A speech.
I say nothing. I stare blankly ahead of me as the word speech scrapes through my brain like nails on a chalkboard.
Well, Hope, I think to myself, because suddenly all I want in the world is to go back to the part of the conversation where Dad hadn’t said anything about a speech, where he’d only said, Well, Hope. I want to go back to Well, Hope and have something, anything, even something about Darcy come after it.
“I’m sorry?” I say in a last-ditch effort to allow myself to think that I didn’t hear what I thought I just heard, a last-ditch effort to delude myself into believing that this couldn’t really be happening. But, sadly, tragically even, Dad simply says the same thing again.
“Mom and I were thinking how nice it would be for you to make a speech at the party.”
He says it happily, in anticipation, it seems, of all the niceness that will surely be my speech. He says it all just like it’s any other sentence, any other perfectly harmless sentence. He says it all as if what he’s just said won’t, in its own quiet way, kill me.
“A speech?” I ask and the words don’t sound like nails on a chalkboard anymore, now they sound very much like the first two bars of the theme song from Jaws.
Duh-duh!
My heart has stopped beating. I put my hand to my chest. “A speech, yes,” he says it yet again. I listen to the duh-duh! getting louder and louder in the background.
I sit frozen, phone in hand, and along with the music, I listen to this voice in my head: it’s listening to the Jaws music, too, and it’s shouting at me, quite loudly, “Get your drunk, naked ass out of the ocean, you are about to be eaten alive by a motherfucking GREAT WHITE SHARK!”
And then, there is another voice in my head, one that apparently isn’t listening to the music. This one speaks calmly, softly. It says to me, “Look, so you’ve had this one thing, public speaking, that has scared you more than anything else for your entire life. So it’s your Great White Shark, so it’s your BIG SCARY THING, it’s also your parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary.” The voice pauses for a moment, maybe just to be sure that what it has said has sunk in, and then continues, “You love your parents and your dad has asked this important favor of you, and really,” the voice asks me, “who says no to such a request?”
“Really,” it says again, “who?”
I think for a minute that maybe I do, that maybe I am the person who says no to such a request.
The shark is approaching, faster and faster, bigger and bigger, but somehow, I manage to think how saying no would be so ungrateful, so flippant, and so disrespectful of forty years of marriage. Saying no seems kind of hostile and churlish and as right as I want it to be, I know it would be wrong.
“I’d love to, Dad,” I say, and wonder how much time has actually passed.
Dad says, “Wonderful.”
Somehow I refrain from explaining to him that this is all pretty damn far away from wonderful. Instead, I say, “Great,” and then I say, “okay.”
The okay, I know, is more to calm myself than for any other reason.
“Great.”
There is no more Jaws music. The voices in my head, the frantic one, along with the calm, cool, and collected one, have both fallen silent. I listen, helpless, hopeless, alone, as Dad says, “Okay, then, back to work. Love you, Hope. Talk to you soon.”
“Love you, too, Dad. Bye,” I say, and put down the phone. My heart has started beating, though I wonder if it will ever beat in quite the same way again.
I stare blankly at my computer screen. I try to think how long I’ve been trying to prevent this from happening. Ever since Mr. Brogrann’s tenth grade English class,