The Dictionary of Failed Relationships

by Meredith Broussard

  Next up was my mother, who raised a glass to Judith, “For lending her infallible culinary skills to this evening’s festivities.” (A classic Mom articulation.) We all here-here’d.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Judith, simpering from behind her wineglass. But you could tell she was pleased. In fact, you got the feeling that she was a little too pleased—that she lived for the tiniest showings of appreciation. There were rumors in my family that my Aunt Judith was the long-suffering mistress of some octogenarian Old Masters dealer. I was still pissed about that whole “sir” business—never mind the “In and Out Burger” recitation— but I was capable of feeling sorry for her, too.

  Which is probably why, a few minutes later, I told her, “Judith—this is, like, the best matzo ball soup I’ve ever had.” (We’d accidentally skipped the stuff at Passover, so we were having it now, six months after the fact. That’s how seriously we took Judaism—not very.)

  “Believe it or not, it’s Wolfgang Puck’s recipe,” she warbled back at me, but loud enough for everyone to hear—and cease their own conversations in the interest of this far more scandalous one. There were huhs, mms. Someone—my mother?—repeated the guy’s name as if it ended with a question mark: “Wolfgang Puck?”

  My nonexistent brother, Ben, piped in with some idiotic “Nothing wrong with Nazi matzo balls” line.

  I guess Judith could dish it out a lot better than she could take it. Her mouth frozen, she looked like she was about to spit her soup clear out of her mouth. Instead, she reached for her water glass and held it to her lips like some kind of protective shield. It was of no use. The Epsteins were off and running, wondering aloud whether (beyond snooze) the next generation of Germans were in denial about the deeds of their jack-booted elders.

  “To be honest,” started up my cousin Delmore, dressed for the occasion in a calico housedress over a pair of tattered blue jeans, “I don’t see how eating ‘Nazi matzo’—to borrow Ben’s expression—is any more or less of a hypocritical gesture than swooning over the peasant bread at some pretentious little Frog restaurant on Bank Street, as my mother and father here are so terribly fond of doing.”

  I let loose a semivoluntary yawn: the Vichy France theme was a perennial with Delmore—as was Uncle Ralph’s display of condescension toward his only son (and chief ideological rival). “I always appreciate hearing your perspective on things, Del,” Ralph bantered. “In fact, I suspect it keeps me young! But I’m afraid I find your position an extremely shortsighted one, not to mention ignorant of major historical develop—”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Delmore shot back, “but I think your ongoing fellatio of the French race is not merely ignorant, but, frankly, a little on the creepola side.”

  “Delly, sweetheart.” It was my aunt Susan’s turn. “Maybe you and Daddy want to take this up after dinner?!” After miraculously surviving Stage-Ten-Million Breast Cancer, she’d given up a going-nowhere fiction-writing career to write inspirational books about surviving cancer. One had even hit the best-seller list. Admiration aside, you had to hate her a little for having such a positive attitude about everything, in particular her son. (One Passover, Delmore had made us all read from some “post-gender” Haggadah; all the mankinds had been changed to humankind.)

  Now he roared back at them, “Actually, Mom, I’d prefer to take it up now! And I’d like to add that the Jews weren’t the only victims of European supremacist ideology. The Gypsies were decimated. Queer populations were virtually eradicated. More recently, the Palestinians . . .”

  “This is exactly what I was talking about,” I whispered in Rob’s ear, while Delmore droned on about the valuable educational services provided by the terrorist organization Hamas—and about how Anwar el-Sadat had been a total sellout to ever recognize the fascist, colonial, police state of Israel. (The rest of the family took a more nuanced view.) In short, nothing new to report at the Epstein family Thanksgiving.

  Except, of course, for Rob being there. “Huh,” he grunted in acknowledgment of my comment, but his thoughts seemed elsewhere—on his turkey leg, I guessed. I had never seen anyone go at a piece of meat with that kind of enthusiasm.

  His turkey leg stripped bare, however, he laid the thing on the side of the plate, reached for his wineglass, took a long, Adam’s apple-y sip from it, and cleared his throat. Then, drowning Delmore out with his best commodity-trader voice, he declared, “Speaking of the Camp David Accords, I’ve always thought Nixon was underrated as a president.”

  Silence. Even Delmore looked stunned. Nixon? Surely, Rob had to be kidding! But no, his face was straight. I wanted to die. Disappointed to find myself still breathing, I opted to choke. Aunt Lila hit me on the back. (Maybe she’d learned how on NPR.) “Do you mean Carter?” asked my father, the Expert on All Things Jewish, displaying, in this case I have to say, admirable restraint. “Carter was the one who brokered peace between Sadat and Begin.”

  My boyfriend seemed unsettled by the news. For a moment or two, he even looked pissed. Finally, he came back with, “Are you sure it wasn’t Nixon?”

  “I’m sure,” said my father.

  More silence.

  “Well, then, what accord was it that Nixon brokered?”

  “I can’t really think of one. Unless you mean his restoration of relations with Communist China.”

  “Maybe that was it,” said Rob, sheepish now. He went back to his dinner.

  I could no longer stand to look at mine. From where I sat, it was one thing to be spouting far-left, anti-Zionist rhetoric like my cousin Delmore, and another to be confusing a benign Southern Baptist liberal such as Jimmy Carter with a disgraced reactionary and notorious anti-Semite. (I couldn’t believe that anyone I knew—let alone regularly slept with—was capable of that kind of gaffe.)

  “Rachel, would you pass the turkey around?” asked my mother in a clipped voice I knew only too well. As if her disappointment in her only daughter was already so extensive as to barely register the addition of a future son-in-law with the mental capacity of a chimpanzee.

  “I’d love to, Mom,” I said, not knowing who I hated more in that moment: my mother for being so critical, or Rob for forcing me to identify with her superior ways (Rob, probably. I was used to my mother).

  Indeed, as much as I had brought Rob home to horrify my parents with his unlearned ways, it had never occurred to me that his ignorance would be of such a magnitude as to succeed in horrifying me, as well.

  The conversation moved on—to the latest Philip Roth novel. Why was the guy so obsessed with sex? And what exactly happened with him and that pretty actress, Claire What-Was-Her-Name, the one who was in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? But the damage had already been done. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my nonexistent brother smirking—the prick.

  After dinner, I tried to talk to Rob about his gaffe in the manner in which my therapist, Carla, had encouraged me to resolve conflict—that is, without accusing anyone of anything, but rather stating my needs and suggesting how they were and were not being met. We went back up to the red room, where we sat on facing beds. “Look, Rob,” I began, “you’re totally entitled to being a moron. But the next time you visit my family, could you do me a favor and do a better job of disguising it?!”

  His mouth flew open; his face turned red. In retrospect, I can’t say I blame him for being offended. “Look, Rachel, I may have gotten my facts wrong at dinner, but I have a fucking M.B.A., unlike you, who never even made it through college. So don’t you be telling me who the dumb one is around here!”

  “Well, at least I know the difference between Nixon and Carter!”

  “Well, at least I treat my guests with respect when they come to dinner at my house!”

  “You don’t have a house, Rob. You live in an ugly little studio in a depressing neighborhood.” (In Battery Park City, actually, and I was exaggerating—it wasn’t so bad.) “And no one ever comes over to dinner at your house, including me, because you don’t even know how to boil water!” />
  I could see the spittle collecting between his incisors. He finally got it out: “Fuck you, Rachel.”

  “No, fuck you, Rob!” I shot back, the words spewing from my mouth as if I’d been waiting my whole life to say them. Maybe I had. Maybe I had never loved Rob Muhlenberg, and he was just the latest in a long line of escape fantasies that had begun with palindromes and continued into poppy seeds. They always worked for a while. The magic inevitably wore off. Maybe there was no escaping who or what I was, and I would never fit in anywhere as well as I did here, among the Epsteins, with their Ph.D.’s and their Provençal hand-towels and everyone peppering their sentences with references to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stanley Fish, and Michel Foucault. Maybe the truth was that I was just as much of a snooty bitch as my mother.

  And maybe the best I could hope for in a mate was someone who would pass scathing judgment on others along with me. “And no one cares about your M.B.A.,” I went on, unable to stop myself. “My father’s right—you’re just a glorified street vendor.” (It happened in all my relationships; one day, my heart just shut off.)

  That’s when he tried to gag me. I couldn’t even breath, let alone repent. Have you ever had your oxygen supply cut off? It’s really scary. OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. I could still breathe through my nose, but Rob wouldn’t get his hand off my mouth, thereby compelling me to pick up the first book I saw, which happened to be An Early View of the Shakers (God only knows who had picked that one up at the local book sale), and swatting him over the head with it as hard as I could. His hands fell away from me, and then he, too, fell—backward onto one of the twin beds, clutching his skull and groaning, “Jesus Christ.” (As if he had anything to do with it.)

  I closed the door behind me and went downstairs.

  I found the bulk of the Epstein clan playing (too many snoozes to count) Botticelli in the family room. (“I’m thinking of a famous artist whose last name starts with D—No, I’m not Degas.”) Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” was playing in the background. I guess not all Wolfgangs were unwelcome in the Epstein household.

  I had never been so happy to volunteer my services in the kitchen.

  My Greenpeace cousin, Matt, and I loaded up the dishwasher. Then we went out on the screened porch and smoked a bowl. The skies had cleared for the moment, but it was so cold out there that our breath was indistinguishable from our smoke. We were both hunched over, hands buried in the sleeves of our jackets and—after the second hit—laughing uproariously. Matt reminisced about the time he was out in Tahoe, when he’d been so fucked up that he’d tried to ski uphill. (He was definitely my favorite cousin.)

  I spent the rest of the evening zoning out in front of the fire with the last of the Château Cos d’Estournel, while my bachelor cousin, Bill—actually my stepcousin, since he was the product of my aunt Lila’s husband Milton’s failed first marriage to a Serb— performed Schubert Lieder (“Mein Fader! Mein Fader!”) in a high-pitched mewl that gave me more insight than I ever needed into what Bill sounded like when he got it on. Meanwhile, at the same hour of the evening, to the best of my knowledge, Rob Muhlenberg and my cousin Delmore could be found playing Mastermind in the coatroom (our version of a TV den, minus the TV), over a couple of beers they’d found in the bottom of the fridge. I know, because I saw them in there on my way back to the kitchen, where I’d gone in search of extant pumpkin pie. (Pot always gave me the munchies.) I guess they were the closest thing to an ally either could find that night. Still, it was hard to imagine what they found to talk about—maybe other than what a bitch I was.

  I had my mother to thank—for possibly the first time in my life—for assigning Rob and me separate beds. Not that I even heard him come in. I was out cold by midnight, drooling on the pillow and dreaming about who knows what.

  By morning, the bump on Rob’s forehead had expanded to the size of a jawbreaker. I could tell it was going to be a fun breakfast. “So, Rob—is there is a domestic explanation for that large tumescence on your forehead?” trilled Aunt Judith, the Nosiest Woman Alive. “Or are we to believe that you snuck off to the local pub last night, after we’d all gone to sleep, and found yourself a country brawl?”

  I held my breath for fear of hearing the words “Actually, your charming niece here,” exiting Rob’s lips.

  To Rob’s credit, however, he wasn’t the type to go around telling everyone everything. “Nah—just a little accident with the wall,” he told her.

  My gratitude for his discretion aside, I would have been just as happy (again, for possibly the first time in my life) to spend an extra day with my family as I was to get back in the car with him. “Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad. Bye, everyone,” I said, feeling inexplicably kindly toward the lot of them, give or take a few exceptions (my brother, Judith, Delmore, my mother, my father, Aunt Lila), as I kissed and waved my way outdoors. We were the first ones to leave. Rob had to get back for work. The commodities exchange apparently stayed open even on holidays.

  It had begun to snow, and for real this time. There wasn’t much accumulation yet, but it was coming down pretty hard. The visibility was about two inches. Rob was leaning over the steering wheel like a student driver. “Shit, this is really bad,” he said, or the equivalent thereof, about five hundred times.

  “Yeah,” I kept saying, thankful for the distraction from our own problems.

  We hit the cat on a two-lane blacktop road outside Pittsfield. It came running out of someone’s driveway—a little gray thing with psychedelic eyes. That’s all I remember. Rob stepped on the brakes, but it was as if the car had a will of its own, and it wanted to go sideways. And we followed—into the other lane, mowing down the thing in the process. We were lucky not to have been killed ourselves. That was my immediate reaction. I felt bad for the cat, of course, but I figured it wasn’t our fault any more than it was the cat’s for running out in front of our car.

  Rob seemed to feel otherwise. “Oh, man,” he kept saying. By this point, he had pulled over to the side of the road. Then he got out, and I followed, though, at that point, I didn’t precisely know what for. (What could we do about it now?)

  It was a winter wonderland out there—everything white, white, and whiter, and the sky indistinguishable from the ground. Plus, windy and freezing. “I’m going to get him,” he said.

  “You’re going to do what?!” I cried. I admit that I just wanted to get back in the car and go back to New York.

  “Get him out of the road, so his owner can give him a proper burial,” he explained in a pedantic tone, as if it were obvious.

  “You could get rabies or something!”

  “Jesus, Rachel, it’s a cat—not a bat!”

  “I’ll watch for traffic,” I mumbled, feeling chastened—even as I suspected, suddenly, that Rob’s prime motivation for stopping was to prove himself the morally superior one of us.

  I watched him walk into the road, grab the lifeless cat by its hind legs, and drag it back to a nearby driveway. From where I stood, it wasn’t even a cat anymore. Or, at least, it didn’t look like a cat. It looked like a bloody rag, and it was dyeing the snow around it a shocking shade of pink. Disgusted, I turned away and started back to the car. But Rob wasn’t finished. “I’m going to ring the doorbell of the house,” he called after me. “You can wait in the car if you want.”

  All I wanted to do was say, “Okay,” and keep walking. But the desire to deprive my boyfriend of his little victory was even stronger than my desire to keep warm. I called back to him, “Wait, I’ll come.” And I did. I followed him up the front path of a small white house with a sloping front porch.

  An elderly lady in a shawl-collar sweater greeted us at the door. Rob did the talking, his eyes downcast. “It must be Belle,” the old woman whispered at the end of his soliloquy, her nearly lashless blue eyes blinking and glistening with fresh tears.

  It had somehow never occurred to me that there might be a human dimension to the story of our roadkill. And now—now—I couldn’t believe how fucked
up it was, or my own blindness in imagining that it was no big deal. Moreover, the thought struck me that Rob’s sense of “doing the right thing” maybe had less to do with showing me up, or even with some self-conscious notion of correctness, than it did with some genuine sense of camaraderie with all the world’s creatures.

  It wasn’t entirely my fault. My family had taught me to be suspicious of tenderness, what with its close links to sentimentality and nostalgia, never mind its diametrical opposition to logic and reason. But what if the Epsteins were the ones missing out? Growing up, I was literally the only person I knew who didn’t have a cat or a dog. We didn’t even have fish! My family didn’t believe in pets. Pets were too cute. Pets weren’t ideological enough. Pets were for the kind of people who got their art on calendars. We had an original Hans Hofmann hanging in the living room.

  It was an hour before we were back on the road. First, we had to wheelbarrow what was left of Belle to an outlying barn. Then, we had to drink tea and look at photographs of Belle in her better days. Rob left his number in case there was “anything more we could do.” The woman assured us that there wasn’t. Eventually, we got back in the car.

  The snow had let up some, so the driving wasn’t quite as treacherous as before. But relations between Rob and me remained strained. We hardly spoke a word until lunch, which we stopped for at a diner off the Taconic. I ordered a turkey club on toasted rye—Rob, a grilled cheese and fries. After the waitress disappeared, Rob turned to me with an accusatory expression, as if the whole thing were my fault (maybe it was), and said, “So, are we going to make up, or what?”