Bridge of Sighs

daughter what she’d learned about men, maybe Sarah might be spared some heartache. Sarah’s long suit—as she knew better than anyone—was her lack of experience. She needed to talk about a boy she’d only just met and knew nothing about, beyond what her boyfriend had told her. But that wasn’t all. She would also have liked to discuss Lou and what wasn’t happening between them, about how his respect for her seemed to preclude much in the way of passion before marriage. In fact she would’ve liked to talk about boys in general, and what sort her mother imagined her falling in love with. She’d gotten explicit advice from her father, who claimed to know exactly the kind of boy who would make her happy. He’d explained more than once how things would go. She’d meet her future husband at Columbia, probably during her junior year. He’d most likely be a graduate student, probably in English. They’d wait for her to finish her degree, then marry and live for a year in graduate student housing before getting a small apartment in Park Slope, which was safe and nice and more affordable than Manhattan. Sarah’s husband would be ambitious, a young man with aspirations that were alien to Thomaston. Sure, it was hard for her to understand all this now, but in the end
she’d be glad she waited.
That was the point her father wanted to stress.
    Sarah saw flaws in this blueprint, though she never told him so. First, it shortchanged boys like Lou Lynch and Bobby Marconi, and maybe even places like Thomaston, New York. After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island. The other problem was that he seemed to be confusing her life with his own. That is, the boy/man he envisioned her marrying was a better companion for him than for her. She’d made the mistake, last summer, of sharing her father’s advice with her mother, who immediately launched into one of her riffs.
    As an English major, she predicted, Sarah’s future husband would be not only a brilliant scholar, but also that rarer breed, a genuine arbiter of taste, which would manifest itself primarily in an unbounded appreciation of her father’s work. He might even make his reputation by writing about her father’s novel, which by then would have been published to glowing reviews and perhaps a prize, but which Sarah’s future husband thought deserved an even wider audience. Of course a man of such literary discernment would have a half-completed novel in his own desk drawer, and with trepidation he would eventually show this to her father, who would offer the kind of knowing criticism that can only come from a practitioner. Such advice would be difficult to implement because it would go straight to the heart of the matter, but in the fullness of time her husband’s book would be completely revised, and Sarah’s father would recommend it to his editor. This would lead the younger man to the most difficult decision of his life—whether to dedicate the book to his loving wife, the painter Sarah Berg (who’d of course kept her maiden name), or to his wife’s father, without whom, etc., etc. As her mother riffed, Sarah had called penalty flag after penalty, but she was having too much fun to quit, and Sarah secretly had to admit that her father’s scenario for her future probably wasn’t so very different from her mother’s satire of it.
    The problem was that her mother had little to offer beyond parody. She was both specific and thorough when advising her daughter about what to avoid in men, but seemingly uninterested in the subject of what she
should
be looking for. Her commandments all took the form of “Thou Shalt Not.” Her own vision of her daughter’s future was so vague as to appear thoughtless. She wouldn’t rule out Thomaston as a source for a future husband, but she conceded it was possible her father might be right—“Even a blind sow finds an acorn now and again.” Five-yard penalty—that she’d meet someone in college. Wasn’t it possible she’d already met him in Lou Lynch? Her mother had left Thomaston long before Sarah started dating, but she knew the Lynch family and thought they were nice enough. She had considered it odd that people didn’t take more note of Mrs. Lynch, who