Page 480 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
entirely the case early on, and, when Phyllis’s relationship with Tom Osterman became serious, it was hard for Rachel to keep it from me.
One morning, while we were emptying the dishwasher, she turned to me and very earnestly and with a tone of great concern said, out of nowhere, “You must be very angry at Pearl.” I had no idea whom or what she was referring to, so I asked. It was at that point that I was told that Pearl, someone whom I think I had never met, had fixed Phyllis up with Tom. (I still don’t know who Pearl was or how Phyllis knew her.) Undoubtedly, Rachel was somewhat disturbed by the fact of Phyllis’s new relationship. To the extent that she was hoping for a return to older times, Tom’s presence on the scene was clearly problematic. When she pressed me on the subject, I had to explain once again that Mommy and Daddy had decided to have their own lives, that that didn’t mean that we loved Rachel any less, that we both loved Rachel very much, and that, in the end, everything would be okay. Rachel naturally would ask the unanswerable and in her way force me to reconcile the fact that Phyllis and I both loved her with the fact that our breakup was so pain- ful for our little girl. As children know, there is no satisfactory way to reply to that. All I could do was to mumble a response and to try to conceal my sorrow.
I don’t want to give the impression that Rachel and I spent most of our time together in front of the dishwasher, but a similar event, prob- ably a year or so later, had the same backdrop. This time we were loading the machine when my little girl stared at the upper rack and then pulled out a used coffee mug. “Daddy,” she said in all earnestness and showing some degree of bewilderment, “isn’t that lipstick on the coffee cup? Why is there lipstick on the cup?” Three possible responses were all that occurred to the potentially sputtering former moot court champion: (a) “Well, sweetheart, Daddy has become a transsexual”; (b) “Daddy has taken up finger painting”; and (c) “That’s not a cup, damn it. It’s not lipstick either. And you’re not Rachel.” For obvious reasons, some form of honesty became my preferred approach. Thus it was that we had our first serious discussion about dating—Daddy’s version of dating, that is.
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