Two of Cups

Two of Cups Playlist

The Two of Cups is about partnership, love, and romance. In a reading about relationships, the two of cups positively indicates equality and harmony in love. It’s the kind of card I would have wished for in every draw if I had been a Tarot girly as a youth.

I’ve always been boy crazy. My first real crush was on a boy named Tripp (third in a dynasty, Connecticut). I still remember the day in third grade when the crush began — Tripp asked me if we could walk to the bus together. We did, and that was the extent of the love affair, but the fact that he chose me for this bus walk was magical and significant enough to sustain my fantasy for the next three years.

Each crush I threw myself into was accompanied by a new phase of my identity — when I loved D, I embraced my intelligence and self-identified as a nerd. When I pined for G, I fancied myself a folk singer. G taught me how to smoke a cigarette in a parking lot behind the Rite Aid, and afterward, he told me I was okay at it, but “just don’t do that in front of anyone you’re trying to impress.” When E asked me to climb on a roof with him during at a cast party in college, I was sure this was my moment. I confessed the crush; he told me he loved me, but not like that. I think I get a pass for getting the wrong idea – who makes somebody climb on a roof to reject them?!?

During one of our senior grad parties, I ended up drunk and sobbing in a bush, and slept in the back of my friend’s car with the windows open, rain smacking me in the face, while the boy I liked made out with someone else. Before college, my love life was completely unrequited. I worried I was unlovable, or just so desperately uncool and try-hard that the thought of dating me hadn’t occurred to anyone.

In high school, I longed for a big reveal. You know what I’m talking about — the moment where the weird girl takes off her thick glasses and everybody is suddenly struck by her beauty. In my big reveal fantasy, I would sing a song in front of the school, and then, as if by magic, every boy would be powerlessly infatuated with me. It probably goes without saying, but… this didn’t happen (also, my voice is nothing to write home about, unfortunately).

When I met Zack, I told him all about what a moony-eyed freak I was in high school, how desperately I'd wanted a boyfriend, and how concretely I did not have one. Zack was surprised (which was insanely hot of him), and contended that had we been in high school together, he would have loved me. I promise you, he would not have. My husband was cool in high school. He had a shaved head and he painted his fingernails and carried a purse and I would have loved him and he would have thought I was a narc. It's good he's six years older and we met in Los Angeles when I had calmed down a little (not much, but a little).

I can trace much of my fixation on partnership to the partnership I was modeled: my parents and iconic lovebirds: Rob and June Clark. As you’re about to find out, my parents met when they were thirteen. No wonder I felt like a spinster freak when I hadn’t been kissed at fourteen. 

My parents’ marriage is pretty great. What the kids might refer to as “goals.” Because they grew up together, it’s hard to imagine them apart. When I rolled up to high school and didn’t immediately find my person, it was a little unsettling for me. Now I realize how insane it is that they found each other so young and how it's even crazier that they somehow still love each other.  

I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with my parents, who tried to get me to remove the story about my dad’s LSD trip, to which I said, “No, that’s the best part.” Enjoy!

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Enjoy!

Eliza: Okay? First question, who's your favorite child?

Dad: That's an interesting question.

Eliza: I'm just kidding. You don't have to answer that. You guys have been married for how long? How many years?

Dad: It’ll be forty-seven years next May.

Mom: No, forty-seven already. Forty-eight next May.

Eliza: Wow!

Dad: Yeah, wow.

Eliza: Tell me the story of how you met.

Dad: You tell that story…

Mom: We met…

Dad: So in the fall of 1968 at Taft, we had formal sit down meals and you’d have to wear coat and tie, and all the teachers would have to come and be the head of the table. The students would have clearing responsibilities and bringing the food responsibilities… it was the worst. So at the end of the day we had to get all dressed up and these poor teachers would have to come. June’s dad and mom would head a table up [my grandfather was the business manager at Taft, also the boarding school I attended for high school] and occasionally June would come. So I think we might have met under those circumstances briefly.

Mom: But then we did a play. What was the play?

Dad: It was Rain Man? What’s the play? You know, about them trying to make rain out in Oklahoma? You would know that play.

Eliza:  I don't know that play, but it's definitely not Rain Man, which is a movie starring Dustin Hoffman.

Mom: Rain Maker!

Dad: Rain Maker!

Eliza: Okay.

Dad: So your mom auditioned for a role in that. And I auditioned for a role in it, and we were cast as the young in-love couple out in Oklahoma. We got to hold hands and act. We were acting, but we were holding hands. 

Eliza: What grade were you in?

Dad: We were both freshmen.

Eliza: But Mom didn’t go to Taft yet. They would let random girls be in plays?

Dad: They needed people. They needed girls for the girls parts, so sometimes there would be girls from St. Margaret’s, or faculty kids or whatever.

Eliza: Who was a better actor?

Mom: Between the two of us?

Eliza: Yeah.

Dad: I think it was probably me.

Eliza: Huh!

Mom: I remember meeting him in the back of Bingham Auditorium. I was sitting at movies with somebody, I can't remember who. And I remember you sort of putting your arms up over seat and looking down and talking to whoever I was with. That's when I met you. 

Dad: What were you doing in the back row of the auditorium? What were you two doing back there? Why would you be sitting in the back row…

Mom: To see who was coming and going.

Dad: On the other hand, I was probably trying to look down your blouse.

Eliza: Oh, my God, Dad! So when did you become an official couple?

Mom: That's a good question. You asked me to a dance after we were in the play. But some other guy had asked me to the dance first. He asked me if I had a date to the dance, and I was waiting for Rob to ask me, but he didn’t ask me until the following day. I didn’t know what to say. He said, “Will you go with me?” And so I was like, “I guess, sure.” And then Rob asked me the next day, but my mom said I couldn't go with Rob if I’d said yes to the other guy. I either had to go with the first guy or just cancel altogether. So I ended up cancelling and going to a slumber party at my math teacher’s house.

Eliza: I’m sorry, what?

Dad: Things were different in those days. 

Mom: I mean, my teacher was a woman. There were about ten of us.

Eliza: Did this math teacher have a child, or she just enjoyed having students over to sleep at her house?

Dad: There were boarding students at St. Margaret’s. So it was more like a dorm slumber party.

Eliza: Okay you scared me there.

Mom: Anyway, we started dating. We dated a little bit freshman year, and he invited me to go to this fancy party in the spring.

Dad: Capers. It was a formal party for members of the Lawn Club. Like, a society party, a formal dance.

Eliza: Were you a member of the Lawn Club?

Dad: Well, we were. My family was.

Mom: That’s where your mom's funeral is going to be. Or the luncheon, rather.

Eliza: Well, you’re my mother...

Mom: You know what I mean. Your grandmother’s memorial service luncheon.

Dad: I forgot. Mom came to New Haven and and stayed in the Silliman college guest suite, and then we went to the Lawn Club for Capers.

Mom: I got lost in the house. The person who stayed in that room the week before me was Gerald Ford and Betty Ford… It was this big, huge bedroom.

Dad: I managed to intimidate Mom with my opulent home.

Eliza: Cause you grew up at Yale, your father was a professor, so you lived in a big huge house provided by the college. Did you break-up at all during high school?

Dad: We did. 

Mom: We didn't break up. We just kind of drifted apart. 

Dad: Your mom wanted to play the field and I was just sort of moaning around. We did break up for a while after freshman year, but when Mom came back to Taft as a senior, we picked it back up again.

Eliza: Right. And that was the year that Mom was actually a student at Taft. In the first class of girls. 1972.

Dad: So, she came back, and we did another play where we were cast as young lovers. A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum?

Mom: No. I was not cast in that.

Dad: I can't remember. I do remember that I was the lead in a play, and I was horrible. Just horrible.

Mom: I guess that makes me the better actor of the two of us.

Eliza: Why were you bad?

Dad: First of all, the play was bad. And I didn’t bring anything to make it better. I just wanted it to be over. It was so painful. Anyway, Mom and I began to sneak around Taft to see each other as much as we could.

Eliza: Can you each talk about separately about what your parents’ relationships were like?  What was modeled for you in terms of a romantic relationship?

Dad: My parents were incredibly romantic. They knew how to have fun. I mean, they just had fun all the time. That was my model. You've experienced some of that with your grandparents... and they knew to have fun with their children. They had a lot of children. They played sports together, they teased each other, they partied together, they traveled together, and they were very loyal to one another, and very protective of each other, particularly with the horde of children they had, who could be incredibly difficult. The word “rude” might come to mind. I would call them pretty romantic.

Mom: My parents were too.

Dad: Your parents were cute together.

Mom: My dad lost his mom young which was right about the time that my mom and Dad met. My mom was beautiful. Like Rob’s mother, Annie, my mother was also a model in Chicago.

Eliza: Wow! Models on both sides of the family. I love that for us.

Mom: Dad went off to the Naval Academy, and Mom went to some dances. They met in Chicago and then the war was going on.

Dad: It was an exciting time for them… I mean, my mom and dad too… with the war, going off to war and they had a lot of adventures. My mom was a beautiful woman, and she dated a lot of hot-shit, cool, interesting man. She dated my dad’s friend, and then he introduced her to Dad. She made the circuit, you know. Went to a lot of fancy parties and cotillions.

Mom: My dad was in the Navy. They got married at Annapolis, and they would have big Navy parties where the men would dress up in their whites and stuff, it was quite a time…

Dad: Like a scene from Pearl Harbor.

Mom: Speaking of which, that's where my dad was stationed. Dad was on the USS Oklahoma, which went down at Pearl Harbor. He lost a lot of his friends. He had just transferred out to go to grad school in civil engineering—

Dad: June's dad was an Irish tenor, and he sang and they liked to throw parties. They would have cocktail parties where everyone would sing. It was a great time actually, for that generation. They had a lot of fun. They all smoked like chimneys. No sex, though, or so they claim.

Eliza: Grandma Annie and Eli didn't claim that, did they?

Dad: Yes, they did.

Eliza: I call bullshit.

Dad: They were flying back from Indianapolis when my dad proposed to my mom, and she accepted, much to his shock. He was a little dweeb. He was a really little guy, not so much small, but slight. Really intelligent, but not a big athlete or anything like that. He didn't think she'd accept because she had met all these high powered people, but she accepted, and he almost crashed the plane. They had to land in Pennsylvania and stay in a motel because of bad weather. We, as kids, would always tease them. After he had proposed and she accepted, we were sure they must have consummated the relationship.

Eliza: I'm sure they had sex way before that.

Dad: They deny it, they totally deny it.

Eliza: Okay.

Dad: My mom denied it…

Mom: …which is funny, because before we were married, we stopped and stayed with your great-grandmother, Rob’s grandmother and Annie’s mom, Katy, in Indianapolis. We stayed in the guest room together.  She was pretty progressive. That was a long time ago. Fifty years ago, and she gave us the bedroom. She didn’t make us sleep apart.

Eliza: Did you guys wait until you were married to have sex?

Dad: Oh, yes.

Mom: We take the 5th on that.

Eliza: I don’t believe you.

Dad: I waited till she was at least legal.

Eliza: I don’t even believe that, to be honest with you. But you guys were the same age so it's fine. You got married the week Dad graduated from college—

Dad: I really wanted all my friends in college to come to the wedding. We graduated on Monday, and we got married that following Saturday, and everybody hung out in New Haven and waited for the wedding. So we had a lot of my college buddies there.

Eliza: Why did you get married so young?

Dad: We were in love.

Mom: We just couldn't imagine…

Eliza: Sure. But I mean, that is super young. Did other people you knew get married at twenty-two years old?

Dad: Well, Jeff and Leslie Crawford, my roommate and his wife. They had met the year before, and they got married. We got married in May, and they got married in December, so there were a few people, but I would say pretty much all of the other close friends I had at Yale waited a few years.

Eliza: Do you think getting married that young had anything to do with Mom's super Catholic parents, or was it just that you really wanted to get married when you were twenty-two?

Dad: That's an interesting question. I think we were kind of oblivious to those feelings. But you're right. It would have been awkward. For instance, we got engaged the year before to make it legitimate that we were gonna be basically living together. My whole senior year, we were engaged, and your mom had an engagement ring. There probably was some… I don't think we talked about or articulated… but we were probably influenced by the fact that your parents would not have approved us cohabitating without being married.

Eliza: Sounds like that might have had something to do with it.

Mom: I remember being in Lake Placid. It was your freshman year, and I was skating in Lake Placid. I remember Rob visiting me and having him say something like, “Well, when we have kids some day…” And that was like four years before we got engaged. We just always assumed we'd always be together. We had a lot of fun together. We had a plan.

Dad: The other aspect of that is that after I graduated I was gonna go and teach New Canaan Country School, and June was gonna be teaching at the Winter Club, and we would have been living together. It might have been a little awkward for those institutions to have us unmarried.

Eliza: I appreciate your concern for institutions.

Mom: But also Sally, Dad’s grandmother, had gotten a ring from from her mom that had three diamonds. She knew that Rob and I were love, and so she took apart the ring and gave one diamond to Rob. All of a sudden we had a ring. 

Dad: Well, that is true. We hadn't really considered getting married because we didn't have two nickels to rub together. So when Sally gave me the ring, I said, Wow, now I have a really nice engagement ring. It was actually just the diamond. So I had it set but once I had that diamond ring, it was burning a hole in my pocket. So I used it to get engaged.

Eliza: How did you ask Mom to marry you?

Dad: We made reservations at Mory’s and we know the very table we were sitting at, even to this day. Everybody around us clapped and cheered.

Eliza: I like that the Whiffenpoofs were a crucial part of your engagement.

Mom: They sang to us. Dad got on one knee, and all of a sudden there was silence around the room, and then everybody started cheering and singing.

Eliza: Cute. Okay, so Mom, what's your favorite thing about Dad?

Mom: Oh, gosh! Everything!

Eliza: That's not an answer.

Dad: My ears.

Eliza: Get your hands off of him. Just answer the question.

Mom: He's kind. He’s generous, we don’t argue, we’re on the same page. He's handsome, and he takes really good care of me. We have fun together.

Eliza: What about you, Dad? What are your favorite things about Mom?

Dad: She's a little crazy.

Eliza: Oh, that's your favorite thing?

Dad: No, but I like that she's spontaneous, and she's interested in everything. She’s accommodating to my being a know-it-all and she's accommodating to my storytelling. And, of course she's beautiful, she's always been beautiful. Hot, I think, would be the word to use. It’s been fun. We’ve had a great run.

Mom: We have wonderful children and fabulous grandchildren and in-laws.

Eliza: In what ways do you guys think you have changed over the course of your relationship?

Dad: Physically? Spiritually? Emotionally?

Eliza: I mean, everybody knows that people age, so not physically, no. I just think part of a successful long term partnership is the ability to change, to grow and stretch your wings. I'm sure you guys are not the same people you were when you were fourteen, right?

Dad:  I think that we came to a real realization that there's a lot of work involved in a marriage,  you really gotta work at it, and you gotta be committed to it.

Mom: We trust each other. There's no jealousy. He can go off and do his thing, and I can do my thing, and then we get together and have more things to talk about. Sometimes we’ll travel separately — I was just in Europe.

Dad: Very early on, we talked about the idea that in order to have a happy relationship and marriage, both people have to be happy in their personal life. You have to accommodate the other person being happy.

Mom: I think it's hard to have a good relationship if both people aren’t happy and comfortable with themselves. So we've worked at that. I mean, we allow each other to be the people that we are. And we work to help each other when things are tough, and enable one another to find ways to be happy with ourselves.

Eliza: What was the most difficult era of your partnership?

Mom: Well, when he had a tumor in his lung and I thought he was going to die. He's had a million strange illnesses.

Dad: Money is always difficult in in relationships. When we bought our house we had no money, I mean, literally we had no money, and I think that would be our most difficult time. At the end of the eighties and early nineties, when the building trades really went under, and my business wasn’t working, and I had a lot of debt. We were really scrabbling to survive just to pay bills, and…

Eliza: And you had two little kids.

Dad: Two little kids, and people chasing me for money. That was a difficult time. And it was stressful. And it's going back to the whole thing about being a happy person. If you have one person incredibly stressed out by whatever it might be, it's gonna put a strain and a stress on a relationship or a marriage. So I think for me, it would have been right before we bought the house when we had financial difficulty, and then I made a decision to change jobs and do something else. That was a stressful time. 

Mom: But we were strong with each other. And we had kids that were fun. 

Dad: We muddled through, and we had people around us who helped us. Both of our parents helped us get through that whole situation. We could not have bought this house without my parents, June's parents, and our children, who were successful actors.

Eliza: The other day Toby asked me if it was hard to have children, and of course I said, No, it's the joy of my life. But that’s a lie, because it is really hard. I mean, wasn't it hard? You guys had a pretty… It was a pretty small house, Spencer and I are only two years apart. So you had little kids.

Mom: Well, you know it's funny. I think in a lot of ways when things were hard for us, you guys made it better.

Dad: Honestly, you and Spencer got along so well. That's why we're so thrilled that Graeme and Toby get along so well.  Graeme is a big part of that, because she is so tolerant of Toby, and doesn't react in a bad way when he’s a pain. I look at people who have children that just don't get along and are fighting constantly, and it makes life difficult. You guys were so close and got along so well. It brought real joy to us at a tough time.  Well, and also, your mother is so good at it. Quite honestly, I'm not as good at it, but she was really good at it, and really enjoyed it. And I think if you enjoy it and you're good at it, it isn't that difficult. 

Mom: And we had amazing neighbors with grandchildren, and they’d have you over on Sunday mornings for pancakes so we could sleep. And my brother Madigan, and his wife, Ann, helped us immensely. We couldn't have survived without them.

Dad:  Children are great audiences. I mean, like you can do no wrong. I could tell a story that anybody else would think is inane, and you’d think it was the greatest thing.

Eliza: You definitely took advantage of that, didn't you?

Mom: We had fun! We’d set up tents and sleep in the kitchen… 

Dad: It is a fearful time, having children, because you never know whether you're doing it right. You never know whether you've made a mistake. You never know whether something's gonna come back and bite you later on. You worry terribly about having a teenager or even a twenty-year-old. You worry about drugs. You worry about cars. I mean, there's a lot of worries about having children, but we had fun having children. It's fun.

Eliza: You gave me a very successful drug talk. It didn't save me from my predilection for alcohol, but it did save me from doing cocaine, which I've never done.

Dad: I’ve never done a psychedelic. Oh, I have. Once.

Eliza: You definitely have, because that was part of your drug talk. You told me about a bad LSD trip.

Dad: Oh yes. Big Daddy…

Eliza: What?

Dad: That was one of the things that occurred during that whole event. It was bad, it was really bad, that trip. So bad, it was the first and only time I ever did it. So it was a beautiful fall day many years before we had kids. All the foliage was freaking me out, so my best friend, Lee, brought me inside and walked me around our little cottage in Ponus Ridge, and he would touch things of mine and go: Oh, look at this! I really love this, is this yours? Oh, I love this. We were really sweating at that point. He took me up to my bureau and said, Hey, let's let's put on some clean clothes, and he’s opening my drawers saying, Oh, this is a really nice t-shirt. This is a cool T-shirt. Let's put this on. And in my drawer was a rolled up anaconda snake skin that my grandmother had given me. It was long, like 10 feet long. Lee picks it up and he’s like, Wow! Look at this thing! This is cool! So he hands it to me, and I put it around myself, you know, like a bandolero, and I was thundering on my chest going: Big Daddy! At that point, he got me into a good place and I was off and running. I was like this is the coolest. This is so cool, this is so much fun, you know, it's a shame it's gonna end. Now, we're maybe an hour and a half in, and he goes: End? It’s just begun. And for the next, I don’t know, ten hours, I was high on LSD.

Eliza: That doesn’t sound like too bad of a trip, to be honest.

Dad: Well, that first hour and a half was incredibly horrible. It's one of the worst experiences of my whole life.  I don't know where it would have taken me if my friend hadn't talked me back down off the cliff. I never did it again. But, I digress.

Eliza: You can't resist psychedelics. You just have to go with it. Or so I've heard.

Mom: I don't think my mind could handle that.

Dad: Yeah, no, Mom can’t take a psychedelic.

Eliza: I think you'd like it, Mom.

Dad: I think it would be crazy.

Eliza: We should all do a mushroom trip together. I think that would be a good activity as a family.

Mom: I don't think...

Eliza: Well, we can table that for now, circle back another time. Anyway, how do you guys negotiate the shitty, banal domestic shit that has to get taken care of when you’re sharing a life? How do you decide who does what?

Dad: We've always been really good at being a team when it comes to things that nobody really likes to do. Everybody cleans, everybody does laundry, everybody cooks.

Eliza: Everybody cooks?

Dad: Well, not anymore. But you know, when we first… well, I guess I was always the primary  cook because I like to do it. 

Mom: Also I burned everything. 

Dad: When Mom would set off the the smoke detector, you and Spencer would yell, “Dinner's ready!” 

Mom: There’s no saying who does what, it's just things that need to get done get done, because we just do them.

Eliza: I think that's actually rare, especially for people in your generation, to have an equitable division of domestic labor. Dad does a lot of stuff around the house, and so do you.

Dad: A lot of that is work related. Mom would get up at five in the morning, and then often work till nine at night. She had breaks during the day, where she could be with family for two or three hours. I would come home from work at 4:30, and then I would feed you guys and put you to bed. We got into the pattern of everybody has to do everything because we won't survive if we don't.

Eliza: I think that’s a good way of doing things.

Dad: You can't have resentment about having to do something that you don't want to do, even something you think maybe you shouldn't do. Just do it and be done with it. Resentment is wasted negative energy.

Eliza: What is the secret to a long-term partnership?

Dad: A pulse.

Eliza: I like that you're cracking yourself up.

Dad: That's a pretty funny joke.

Eliza: It was okay.

Dad: Luck. Is there a lot of luck involved? Maybe. I don't know. I mean, we've been very lucky. 

Mom: We really have been very lucky. We both think positively. And if somebody's down. We get them back up again.

Eliza: Sometimes by sheer force of will.

Dad: Well, and sometimes our children will get us up. You've got me all up now. That fact that I don't have Wi-fi in the house is pissing the shit out of me, but now I’m in a pretty good mood.

Eliza: You're welcome.

Dad: This is my 4th Zoom Meeting today. 

Eliza: That’s awful. I’ll let you go soon. I love you guys.

Mom: We love you.

Eliza: Is there anything else you want to talk about?

Dad: Well, there’s all sorts of little funny, funky things that affect relationships. Religion is a funny topic in a marriage.

Eliza: Tell me about that.

Dad: That would be an area where I really pulled your mom along to the idea that, y’know, maybe there isn't a God. You get one life and you only live it once.

Eliza: I remember when I was like twelve or thirteen, I came home from school one day and watched this episode of Oprah about miracles. I remember this so distinctly. Some guy was talking about how he had never been able to speak, had never spoken out loud or something. And then, one day, he was reading from the Bible, and suddenly he was able to speak. And I found myself really moved by this story and I told you about it, Dad, and you said well, that sounds like a con artist. I got really, really, really mad about it. I was really mad at you. That kind of seeing-red, pre-teen anger. I was just furious and felt like you weren’t listening and you didn’t get it. And I remember talking to Mom about it, and Mom confessed to me that she believed in God, and that blew my fucking mind.

Dad: It’s blowing my mind right now. Religion is the hard part for me, because there is a higher power. 

Mom: Some people call it God. Some people call it nature. Just go out to a garden, and… it’s pretty amazing, you know, that’s when I have a profound appreciation of life. Holding a child, or those moments of grace where you feel like there must be something out there. I mean, who knows what it is but organized religion does do a lot of good in terms of taking care of people, making people think about other people.

Dad: I guess. 

Eliza: It also does a lot of molesting, wars, and theft.

Dad: Organized religion is also really thinking a lot about women these days, really helping them out. I’m being sarcastic.

Eliza: I know you are. I know you and I also live in the reality that you live in. So, when you met Zack, or when you met Abby… What impact do you think your marriage had on me and Spencer and the partners we chose?

Dad: Well, I'm enthralled by you guys living so close to one another. That's a really special thing. What was the question again?

Mom: I remember you telling me about Zack. But then, when we finally met him, we were down in Soho, and you guys were walking ahead of us, and you had such a little spring in your step, a little wiggle like little puppies. It was so cute.

Dad: Again, I tend to be a sort of a big personality sometimes…

Eliza: What?!

Dad: Your mom is constantly telling me to behave, and not to scare anybody off. I tried to be careful. I always tried to be careful around relationships that you both were in. I didn’t want to be the wacky father that drove somebody off. We knew right away that Zack was special to you, and he immediately became special to us because he was special to you. 

Eliza: And what about Abby?

Dad: Abby was cool because she pushed Spencer off for so long. When they finally began to really date, it made her even more interesting.  Above and beyond her being beautiful and intelligent… She also had, you know, basically said to Spencer: I'm not gonna date you. He clearly was very interested and told us he had met somebody. We were interested because she was such an enigma.

Eliza: And Zack is an enigma in another way.

Dad: Well, everyone has their own personalities. And Zack is a private person. He likes his own time, so good for him. Whereas me, you can read me. The cover of my book is open all the time.

Eliza: Same. I mean, one time Mom said to me, you know you don't have to tell everyone everything you're thinking all the time, you could be a little more mysterious.

Dad: That's like the blind leading the blind.

Eliza: It was good advice, but I never took it.

Dad: That's an unusual pearl of wisdom from your mom.

Eliza: I think she was trying to save me from from being her. But unfortunately, the pull was too strong. Do you guys have any other little pearls of wisdom you wanna share?

Dad: What was the card again?

Eliza: 2 of cups, which is about partnership and romance.

Dad: I'm not really good at romance. I have to sort of find other ways to please your mom, cook a good meal, or—

Mom: Oh, my God! Every single week, when he goes to the grocery store, he always brings me flowers.

Dad: Well, in the winter, when she doesn't have flowers in the garden, I buy her flowers every time I grocery shop. Gotta have flowers in the house. So I guess that's romantic.

Mom: Very romantic.

Eliza: I love you guys so much. Thank you for doing this.

Mom: I hope we were articulate enough for you.

Eliza: You're perfect.