But I lied because I was embarrassed. Whenever I tried to explain what my dad did, people, even children, would get a funny polite stare on their faces and say, “Oh, how interesting,” then avoid me as much as they could after that, the same way you see people kind of step aside when funny-looking Hasidic Jews in hats, long coats, and beards come walking down the street, as if they didn’t want to catch something, as if they might wake up in a long coat with weird ringlets of hair hanging down the side of their heads and all kinds of stuff strapped to their foreheads, if they got too close.

Just like Peter denying Christ, I lied to Jennifer because I wanted her to like me. I said, “He teaches.” Which was almost true in a way, but it’s what’s in the heart that counts, and I knew Jennifer wasn’t thinking that Dad taught the Bible, the Calvinist principles of the doctrine of Total Depravity, and Calvin’s Institutes to lost Roman Catholics.

To say “teaching” was a good lie. Teaching sounded boring, so I didn’t get asked more detailed questions. No one cares where somebody teaches. Once I had told a boy I met that my dad was a doctor, and his mother overheard. She had asked me where he practiced. I said in a hospital in Philadelphia. She said she had a brother who was also a doctor in Philadelphia and maybe Dad knew him, which hospital was Dad at? That’s when I decided that I would always say he was a teacher. And if they asked where, I’d say he taught at the American School in Geneva. But no one ever asked.