My daughter eloped.

 

It runs in the family.

 

What can you expect from a girl born of parents married in a barn? A hand-made replica of an Eighteenth-Century Dutch barn, but a barn, nonetheless. My father built it after his massive cow barn burned to the ground. He couldn’t stand being without a barn: after all, it was a farm and what is a farm without a barn? My daughter was with us in that barn, that December day, and, obviously, picking up those unconventional vibes, as my soon-to-be wife was pregnant and round as a pickle barrel draped in beige lace. My wedding day, it was warm in the morning and I played nine holes of golf, but by the time my musical sister, Deb, tapped out the last wedding piece on the portable electric organ in the corner of the two-inch-thick pine plank barn floor, it was freezing and everyone shivered as we made our way to my father’s 200-year-old farmhouse for food and drink. It never went above freezing again that winter, not until March. Remember the winter everyone had ice jam damage on their ceilings from leaky roofs caused by gutters that never melted?

 

My other sister, baby sister Beck, eloped. Oh yes, she eloped good.

 

After she finished her physical therapy studies, my little sister took a job near Pittsburgh and met this guy, a big guy with curly hair, and none of us knew him. It was night. I was at home. My parents were in bed. The phone rang. My mother got up and answered the rotary phone on the blanket chest along the south wall of the upstairs bedroom. In those days, most people got out of bed to answer the phone -- the underlying psychology registering that it was too decadent, or too bourgeois, or too something, to talk on the phone while lying in bed, unless, of course, you were an invalid. From the window, she could see in the moonlight, the shadow of the big, darkened barn across the yard, the thick ivy hanging above the haymow doors.

 

“Hello,” my mother answered. She listened. My father could hear a voice he thought he recognized on the other end of the line.

 

Click. My mother hung up.

 

“Who was that?” my father asked from his bed. (They had separate beds.)

 

“It was Becky,” my mother said, sitting on the edge of her mattress.

 

“Well, what did she say?” my father asked, curiously, impatiently. 

 

“She said she got married,” my mother said, lighting a Camel.

 

“And what? You hung up?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You hung up on her?”

 

“Yes,” my mother said, looking at the moonlight on the crocheted rug.

 

“But why?”

 

There was no answer. The room remained unlit, quiet.

“Why,” he asked again.

 

“I was afraid of what I might say. I was afraid I might say something I could never take back,” my mother said. She smoked in the tempered dark.

 

In time, after a recess, after composure and breathing, rather, smoking, my mother called her back. She could feel her daughter’s tears through the phone line.

 

When my daughter eloped, we had warning. She told us ahead of time. We knew the guy. He’d been home, here. They’d had time together. I won’t go into their privacy. Like me, my daughter is very private, private, at least, until she isn’t. She’s a writer. Published short stories. Keeps things in her head until it’s formulated as art. They went to City Hall. A friend as photographer. Later that weekend after we, the parents, were allowed to join, I bought everyone lunch under the Manhattan Bridge on the Brooklyn side. They’re from Minnesota. I never knew anyone from Minnesota. 

 

She’s a Brooklyn girl now. With country ways and city ways, and she will begin her first real job, teaching English Comp, at City Tech in a few weeks. Is that too many commas? LOL. She would have an opinion. “City Tech?” I said, “sounds like a good title for a novel.” Shades of Ferlinghetti.

 

How can a father be so proud? Not to mention she probably saved me fifty grand.