Sleep Talkin' Man by Karen Slavick-Lennard Page A

lifetimes ago.
    It was two weeks later, during his second visit to the States, that Adam next mentioned our future marriage. This time I responded shyly with something like, “That … could … maybe … happen.” Adam is a guy who can spot an opportunity. In that moment, he got down on one knee, took my hand, and asked me to marry him. Well, first he had to brush some popcorn and candy wrappers out of the way, seeing as we were sitting in a Brooklyn movie theatre waiting for
Juno
to start. It may not have been every girl’s romantic dream, but for me it was perfect.
    I didn’t feel like I could truly get engaged without my parents ever having met the man in question, so we decided that we were engaged to be engaged and thus, to fully win my hand, Adam fearlessly, and awkwardly, faced each of my familymembers, one at a time. We scheduled a trip down to New Jersey.
    First stop: Dad’s house. My father lives in my South Jersey hometown, on a little body of water that, when I was a kid, was referred to as “the sandwash” and was where teenagers went to have sex and do drugs. Now, “Shadow Lake” is the idyllic setting for a handful of upper middle-class homes of doctors and lawyers.
    It was a crisp Saturday afternoon, the day after we arrived. At this point, we had been there less than twenty-four hours, eight of which had been spent sleeping. So Adam had racked up, let’s say, ten hours getting to know my Dad. The lake was frozen, and Adam and I were down on the jetty skipping rocks across the ice when my dad wandered down with some stale bagels to feed the ducks (given the passion that the Shadow Lake birds habitually show for bagels, I’m convinced they’re Jewish ducks). Since we were just a few hours shy of leaving, it seemed like the right time for me to make myself scarce so that the men could talk.
    As Adam tells it, they had been tearing off piecesof bagel and tossing them onto the ice for a while when he took a deep breath and said, “Skip, there is something I want to ask you. I would like to—”
    â€œYes!” my father jumped in with alarming eagerness, “You can marry my daughter!”
    Adam, who had prepared himself for a serious moment, was flustered. “Oh, uh, well, OK then,” he said, and took his bear hug like a man.
    Having now covered the principal topic at hand, neither of them had any idea what was supposed to happen next. So, they went back to tossing bits of bagel to the ducks. The problem with this course of action was that the ducks had never, in fact, come to the jetty at all. So there they were, a man and his future son-in-law, loitering awkwardly in the middle of an ever-increasing semicircle of baked goods, desperately wishing that the woman they both loved would come back and rescue them.
    I, having never been in this situation, was feeling extremely shy, and had taken to hiding in the house. Adam and I had never discussed what was supposed to happen after he asked, and I had no intention of going back out and risk interruptingthe manly heart-to-heart that I assumed must define such occasions.
    To their credit, they stuck it out until not a crumb of bagel was left in the bag. They gazed a few moments longer across the expanse of bagel lumps until Dad said, “Hmmm. I guess she’s not coming back.” And they trudged back up to the house.
    Next, we drove up to my mom’s in central Jersey. Again, we gave it about two meals’ worth of getting-to-know-you time before Adam brought up our future plans. Luckily, two meals gets you surprisingly far in getting to know my mom. She’s immediately familiar and welcoming, the kind of parent that all of her teenage kids’ friends called “Mom.” Even so, it’s nerve wracking to put in a request for marriage on first meeting with any parent. Sunday afternoon rolled around, and Adam knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. My mother was