Memoir of the Sunday Brunch

by Julia Pandl

  JUST A YEAR and a half later, on a sticky July night, they decided to move again. My mother finally accepted the fact that we were not moving back to Milwaukee. “But,” she declared between drags of her cigarette, “if I have to live out here, I’m finding a house that I like.”

  The nerve.

  So every Saturday during the fall of eighth grade, my dad and I loaded up the contents of the garage, the attic, and the wood pile from underneath the basement stairs, and drove another five miles north to Oostburg, population 1,647, home of the Flying Dutchmen, the name given the local high school athletic team. It was Cedar Grove all over again, except Oostburg had a corner tap.

  Since we were moving only five miles up the beach, I thought they’d let me stay at my still relatively new school in Cedar Grove.

  “Nope,” my mother said. “You’re switching to Oostburg after Christmas break.”

  “What?” Her words collided wildly in my brain. I had an awful taste in my mouth, like I had actually taken a bite of the bullshit sandwich she had just served.

  “There’s no bus to Cedar Grove, and I’m not driving you every day.”

  “What!” I buckled to the floor, driving my fists one after another into the carpeting. “Dad! Dad can take me to school. All you have to do is pick me up!” I sobbed. Sand and dog hair clung to my cheek. I saw a lonely Cheeto lost under the coffee table.

  “No. It’ll be easier this way.”

  “Easier for who? Easier for you! You only care about yourself. I can’t believe this shit.”

  “Listen, Lady Jane . . .”

  “Lady Jane” meant serious trouble. Lady Jane only came around when family heirlooms were accidentally dropped down the basement stairs, lady-head dimes were spent on Lemonheads and Mike and Ikes at the drugstore, and Dutch elm disease fungicides were ingested. Lady Jane usually received a swift slap across the face and a bar of Ivory soap to the molars.

  “I mean it,” she said. “This is not your decision.”

  I picked myself up, shuffled to my bedroom, and slammed the door.

  I reached into my stockpile of rebellious behavior, growing smaller by the day, and pulled out the silent treatment. I didn’t stand a chance against Lady Jane, but the idea of surrender made my ears ring and my chest tighten.

  Terry would say, “I need you to do me a favor and pack up the cabinets down in the family room.”

  Favor! Favor! Pack your own damn cabinets.

  Then she’d say, “I mean it. We’re moving, missy, whether you like it or not, so snap out of it!”

  Four months of this did nothing. The movers arrived the day after Thanksgiving. I lay on the couch, rigid as a fence post, and watched them dismantle my world—again. My chest heaved under the weight of my parents’ meanness. I fired murderous looks at my mother, wishing she’d take one to the heart, grab her chest, and fall all over me in a flood of tears. Instead, she stood at the dining room table, smoked cigarettes, and told the movers to be careful with the Wedgwood lamp. A cloud of gray smoke mingled with the dust and sunlight over my head. I remember thinking my death would serve her right.

  Begging my father to intercede on my behalf did nothing. Impervious to my tears, he knew an every-man-for-himself battle when he saw one—we all did. Delirious in my disbelief and due to switch schools the day after Christmas break, I decided to petition the Lord and received a disgustingly pustulant case of strep throat. Thanks much, Jesus. Even that didn’t work; my mother assumed I was faking—which, in her defense, I usually was—and sent me to school anyway.

  Terry and George had weathered the teenage storm eight times. They had the flashlights, the blankets, and the AAA membership; hell, they even had chains on the tires. At thirteen, like it or not, I was not in the driver’s seat, I was along for the ride. And no way was I going to skid off the path. Come home late or not at all? Child’s play. Drink beer or smoke pot? Give me a break. Set fire to the garage or the house? It had all been done at least once before, if not six or seven times. Short of becoming a cocaine-using arsonist-hooker, there was nothing I could do to appear sufficiently damaged.

  Thus, I was doomed to be the new kid yet again.

  I PRAY THAT our system of streamlining kids in the public schools has improved since that first day I spent at Oostburg Middle School. What a circus. I started in the middle of the school year, and the strep was so bad I could barely talk, so the guidance counselor put me in the LD classroom. Back then, any kind of learning, emotional, or physical disability was labeled LD. I had no idea what it meant, but after a couple of hours, I figured naughty was as good a definition as any.

  Kids threw whatever happened to be in their hands: gum, paper, pens, and every now and then, coins. One girl, a tiny bit of a thing with stringy blond hair and a budding case of acne, sprang up from her seat for no apparent reason and then sat back down again. She did this over and over, like a jack-in-the-box. And I watched the guy next to me carefully shear off the edge of his desk with a hunting knife longer than my arm. Departmentalization had not reached the LD kids at Oostburg Middle School, so all classes took place in the same room, where nothing could be heard, much less learned, owing to the constant chaotic chatter.

  The teacher, Mr. Janacus, also the eighth-grade basketball coach, had a front butt and boobs bigger than my mother’s. I gave him the nickname Dr. J. He stood in front of the class, attempting to explain polygons while digging out his earwax with the lead of his mechanical pencil. I looked over at hunting-knife guy, started to open my mouth to crack a joke—something about “pick me a winner” or “digging for gold”—and then decided against it. I suspected there was a divergence between hunting-knife guy’s sense of humor and mine. I sat back and settled into the loneliness of having a wisecrack and no one to share it with.

  Later, jack-in-the-box girl came over and showed me two pictures. “Which one is a triangle, and which one is a circle?” She asked.

  “What?” I shook my head, hoping I had misunderstood.

  “Which one is a triangle, and which one is a circle?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  I decided enough was enough. I looked over at Dr. J, seated at his desk, waved my hand, and tried to say, “Excuse me, Mr. Janacus, I don’t belong in here,” but nothing came out. My own voice had abandoned me. I panicked, and the wheels—the ones that kept my emotions from veering into hysteria—came off. Should I grab the hunting knife and shear off my own head? That would teach them.

  I had a brain trapped inside a body, inside a room, inside a house, inside a town, and it knew the difference between a fucking triangle and a fucking circle.

  I pushed the girl out of the way with my desk, got up, and walked to Dr. J’s desk, placing one foot carefully in front of the other.

  We’re moving, whether you like it or not.

  This is the way the ball bounces.

  Where’s your money?

  You’re coming to work the brunch with me tomorrow.

  This is not your decision.

  He sat, his fleshy breasts resting on his desk calendar and neatly hiding the last two weeks of January, eyeballing the waxy beige fruits of his labor on the tip of his pencil. Then it happened. Perhaps it was the fever, perhaps it was the Holy Spirit, could have been the boobs; I can’t tell you, but I smiled. It was an inside smile, big, toothy, and soulful. Survival somehow made sense to me then. A fish out of water, I suddenly figured out how to breathe and found my voice. I looked Dr. J in the eye, stared down at his pencil, licked my lips, winked, and said, “You gonna eat that?”

  3

  Driving Lessons

  Eventually, the house in Oostburg felt like home. Its previous owner had called it Cedar Dune because of the tall cedars in the back and the sand dunes out front. But we called it the lake house or the Oostburg house, as if we had other homes, in Galway and Martha’s Vineyard.

  Ours was the fourth house on Sandwood Lane, a dusty macadam under a canopy of birch, maple, ash, and beech, al
l stretching for a better view of Lake Michigan. The road opened into a small clearing with a patch of wiry grass the size of a cocktail napkin. Alongside the flagstone grew a thicket of aggressive ferns that come mid-July were tall enough to tickle my underarms. The place was a breeding ground for every creeping, stinging thing known to man.

  My father’s “workshop” was in the back too, attached to the garage. Since George didn’t “work” in the handy-around-the-house sense of the word, not long after we moved in, the workshop turned into a basement, an attic, a second refrigerator, and a really cheap liquor store. George futzed around out there, drinking Manhattans and inventing truly frightening ways to murder the squirrels and raccoons.

  Inside the house there were two levels, up and down. The dining room, living room and my parents’ bedroom were up. Downstairs had two bedrooms (mine and the dorm-type room—the one with the four single beds, two cribs, and fireplace that we never used), George’s office, and a “plant room.” Nothing ever grew in the plant room after we moved in. There were grow lights, but we only flipped them on when we needed to find a bottle of the really good wine.

  My room was directly below Terry and George’s. Every night I heard them shuffling around, shifting and settling. I heard my mother draw the curtains, brass rings gliding across an iron rod. I heard my father drop his book on the floor and sixty seconds later begin to snore. They passed each other in the night, on their way to and from the bathroom. And in the morning, before the clanging of the dishwasher, I heard them mumbling. Sometimes I’d pull the covers over my nose, look up at the ceiling—more knotty pine—and wonder what they were talking about.

  Terry kept house, quit smoking, took up knitting, quit smoking, and took up knitting again. She watched The Young and the Restless; Murder, She Wrote; and Matlock religiously. I went to school and made friends, again. George went to and from work, and as I had started doing shortly before we moved there, on Sundays I went with him.

  SLEEPING WAS MY thing. Honestly, it still is. Most days I wake up thinking about when I can get back in bed. Since no one seemed to mind, when I was young I embraced a lovely two-nap-a-day style. It didn’t last long, though. Kindergarten came along when I was four, so I had to cut back to one long post–Mr. Rogers siesta. In high school I had an eleven thirty curfew that I missed only once, and that was because of an unfortunate run-in with the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department. In college I never once pulled an all-nighter, not even in a bar. If my homework wasn’t done by ten thirty, I just didn’t do it. Age has changed nothing. I have excused myself to go to the bathroom at hundreds of parties, grabbed my coat, walked out the door, and gone straight home to bed. If the pope were saying midnight Mass in my living room . . . well, you get the idea.

  So my new Sunday mornings were just . . . brutal. Saturday night parties were tainted because I knew 6 a.m. and the Sunday brunch were just around the corner. Every week, come hell or high water, George pounded down the stairs, slapping his bare belly, burst into my room, and whipped open the curtains, singing, “Rise and shine, daylight in the swamps.” Then he started in with the Bee routine, pinching and buzzing, until I didn’t know whether to cry or kick him in the head. Getting up was the only way to make it stop.

  It was summer. I sat defiantly at the kitchen table. George had cranked the windows open, letting a warm breeze tiptoe through the screens. He wasn’t careful about the way he dug his spoon into his grapefruit half, yet each section separated easily and popped up, perfect and juicy. He sucked it into his mouth and went on reading the National Catholic Reporter. Grapefruit. I hated grapefruit. It looked so deliciously sweet and tasty, especially when he sprinkled sugar on it. But it had bitterness too, hidden in each plump little bulb, a bitterness that made my tongue curl up into the back of my throat. I wanted to like it; I still want to like it, and every now and then I try it again, only to kick myself for knowing better.

  On those mornings, I sat, arms folded across my chest, and silently ran through my stockpile of nondescript illnesses, wondering which one might save me from brunch and let me go back to bed: sore throat, stomachache, earache. The problem was that the same illnesses that got me out of school were never enough to get me out of work. Terry fell for anything because she wanted someone to hang out with. My father, on the other hand, needed physical evidence of disease and/or dismemberment. If I said I had an ear infection, doctor’s note be damned, I needed to prove it with blood coming out of one, if not both, ears. I’m not talking about a trickle either. I had to be losing blood, from one orifice or another, at an alarming rate. Puncture wounds did not qualify.

  I had settled into the new house and new school just fine, but occasionally the trip into Milwaukee and the restaurant left me with a heavy heart. At fourteen, those forty miles might as well have been forty thousand. The drive home was the worst. It was like having to leave my home on Prospect and my friends again and again, week after week.

  I believe on my parents’ wedding day, just after they took their vows and agreed to accept children lovingly, the priest looked at my father and said, “And will you, George, always agree to drive the shittiest car in the house?” It’s the only explanation for the fact that, try as he might to ride to and from work in luxury, my dad always ended up tooling around in some dirty, rusted-out tin-can Toyota with a 180,000 miles on it, and the kids ended up driving the Audi with the leather interior, cruise control, power windows, and sunroof. “It’s safer this way,” my mother would say, and so George was stuck with the car that had no handle on the driver’s-side door.

  Before climbing in, I swept newspapers, muffin wrappers, and bottle caps off the passenger’s seat. It smelled like a bag of dead kittens was somewhere in the back. Could have been rotten bratwursts—whatever it was had hair on it.

  “What is that smell?” I asked, pinching my nose.

  “What smell? I don’t smell anything.” George smiled at my discomfort as he started the car and headed down the gravel road.

  “God, it smells like something died in here, Dad.”

  He chuckled. “Hee, hee, hee.” Offending us in the olfactory department gave my father great pleasure. His nose could not register mustard gas, so he marveled at our sensitive abilities, as if being able to smell a rotten egg was unusual. He constantly stuck one thing after another in our faces and said, “Does this smell bad to you?” We were all under some perverse obligation to smell it too, even though we knew we might pass out and die.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said, laughing as I hung my head out the window.

  We pulled onto the freeway. My father was “that guy” behind the wheel. He drove exactly twelve miles an hour under the speed limit at all times and always stayed in the passing lane because it was “less bumpy.” He never checked his blind spot. He left his blinker on for extended periods of time. And occasionally, in an effort to save gas, he coasted until the car damn near came to a complete stop before again pressing the accelerator. He got the finger a lot.

  I crossed my arms, lay my head against the window, counted silos, and wondered if it was going to rain or if the cows were just really tired.

  “You want to listen to a tape?” he asked.

  “No, Dad. God.”

  The radio was not allowed. According to George, it was all “noise.” Once in a while we listened to tapes of his choosing: bird calls, sermons from the apostle Paul, or conversational Spanish.

  “What are you thinking?”

  I closed my eyes and let out a faint whine. We played this game every Sunday. He had yet to win.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, Dad, nothing.” I rolled my eyes and sighed. His cheerfulness on Sunday mornings made my temples throb.

  “How can you be thinking nothing? Your mind is a complete blank? There’s absolutely nothing there?”

  “Yeah, Dad, there is absolutely nothing there. It’s just a white sheet of paper.” With a picture of me strangling you, I mused.<
br />
  “Amazing! I don’t understand how you can possibly be thinking nothing. There must be something.”

  “No, Dad, trust me. There’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? Amazing.”

  “Nope.”

  This went on for five or ten miles before we fell into a peaceful silence.

  “What time do you think it’ll be on the clock when we get there?” he asked when we reached Port Washington, the halfway point. Game number two. At Brown Deer Road, where we exited to go to the restaurant, a digital clock hung outside the bank on the corner. So from twenty miles away we estimated the time to the minute. The winner was whoever guessed closest without going over. The prize was satisfaction.

  I checked the clock on the dashboard and, knowing it was wrong, asked, “What time does your watch say?”

  “Seven twenty-seven.”

  Who doesn’t like a word problem first thing Sunday morning? Figuring he was going twelve miles an hour under the speed limit and we were roughly nineteen miles away, I guessed, “Seven fifty-one.”

  “I’ll say seven fifty-five.”

  “Are you sure you want to go that late, Dad? You can’t cheat and start coasting on the freeway, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ll stick with seven fifty-five.”

  I won. We pulled off the freeway at exactly 7:49 a.m. I actually smiled, so I guess he won too.

  It was a typical clicking, twitching, and bulging Sunday, except that I got to “run” the buffet. The novelty of working the brunch had dried up and disappeared as quickly as the sausage burn scab on my thigh. In addition to picking up cigarette butts, peeling shrimp by the trainload, and doing pancakes, the brunch provided hundreds of other monumentally tedious, disgusting, and exhausting tasks. Everything had to be done dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of times: eggs cracked, melons peeled, bacon cooked, juices poured. Depending on how busy it was, or how slow you worked, any given task could reduce your frontal lobe to the size of a mustard seed.

  Running the buffet was one of the few exceptions. It was as monotonous as every other job, sure, but it came with autonomy. Basically I watched, and when the trays holding scrambled eggs, whitefish, sausage, bacon, egg noodles, and tenderloin tips started to look empty, I ran to the kitchen and brought out more. The timing was key. Bringing the food out too early or too late, or bringing out a stack of plates that were anything short of scorching, could cause a sudden onset of convulsions in George.