“I say something wrong?”
I shake my head. “It’s just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”
Horry nods sagely. “Welcome to my world.” He fishes around in his pockets for a moment, spilling some loose change onto his seat before pulling out a sloppily rolled joint, which he lights from the dying embers of his cigarette. He inhales deeply and then offers me the joint, still hold
ing his breath.
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“None for me, thanks,” I say.
He shrugs and lets the smoke dance around his open mouth. “Helps me keep my head right,” he says. “Sometimes, when I feel a seizure com
ing on, this kind of heads it off at the pass.”
“Won’t your mom smell that?”
“What’s she going to do, ground me?”
His voice is suddenly, uncharacteristically belligerent, and I get the sense that Linda asking me to pick him up was a salvo in a long-standing battle between mother and son.
“Everything okay with you, Horry?”
“Everything is swell.”
He swings the blunt my way.
“I have to drive,” I say.
He shrugs and takes another long drag. “More for me.”
Chapter 9
9:05 p.m.
The shiva is still in full swing when I return to the living room.
“Judd!” my mother shouts as I’m trying to slink quietly back to my seat. Every eye in the room finds me. “Where were you?”
“I just needed to get some air,” I mutter, sliding back down into my shiva chair.
“You remember Betty Allison?” she says, indicating the birdlike woman sitting on the chair directly in front of me. The shiva chairs, by design, are lower than the chairs of the visitors, and so my view tends to be up the nostrils and skirts of the people seated directly in front of me.
“Sure,” I say. “How are you, Mrs. Allison?”
“I’m so sorry about your father.”
“Th
anks.”
“Betty’s daughter Hannah was divorced last year,” my mother says brightly, like she’s delivering a nugget of particularly good news.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
Betty nods. “He was addicted to Internet porn.”
“It happens,” I say.
“Judd’s wife was cheating on him.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom!”
“What? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
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There are about twenty other people in the room, talking to my siblings or each other, and I can feel all their heads turning to us like a stadium wave. In the third grade, I briefl y suffered from the paranoid delusion that when I went to the bathroom during class, the blackboard became a television screen and my entire class watched me piss. Th at’s
what this feels like.
“Hannah and her son are here visiting for the summer,” Mom says, undeterred. “I thought it might be nice for you two to catch up, that’s all.”
In the first grade, Hannah Allison was immortalized in an inane jump-rope song the girls sang during recess to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”
Hannah Allison, Hannah Allison / Two first names, two first names / You can call her Hannah / You can call her Allison / What a shame, two fi rst names. Hannah cried about the song, there was a meeting between her parents and the principal, and the song was banned from the school
yard. Like all banned songs, it became an instant underground classic and continued to haunt Hannah until her peers outgrew jump rope in favor of Run-Catch-Kiss. Beyond that, I remembered a small, mousy girl with bushy eyebrows and glasses.
“I’m sure Hannah has her own problems,” I say, hoping my mother will see the murder in my eyes.
“Nonsense,” Betty says. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from an old friend.”
Betty and my mother smile conspiratorially at each other and I can hear the telepathy buzzing between them. Her husband was addicted to porn, his wife screwed around . . . it’s perfect!
“I’m not ready to start dating anytime soon,” I say.
“No one said anything about dating,” my mother says.
“That’s right,” Betty agrees. “Just a friendly phone call. Maybe a cup of coff ee.”
They both look at me expectantly. I am conscious of Phillip’s elbow in my ribs, his low, steady chuckle. I’ve got six more days of this, and if I
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don’t nip it in the bud, my mother will be trumpeting my situation to the entire community.
“The thing is, I enjoy some good Internet porn myself, every now and then,” I say.
“Judd!” my mother gasps, horrifi ed.
“Some of it is done very tastefully. And especially now, being single and all. It’s a great resource.”
Phillip bursts out laughing. Betty Allison’s face turns red, and my mother sits back in her chair, defeated. Hannah Allison and her two fi rst names have been wiped off the board.
“He’s just being funny,” Mom says weakly.
“I would have to disagree,” Betty says.
Phillip is laughing so hard that tears stream down his face as he slides down in his shiva chair. Everyone in the room looks at him, hor
rified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tearstreaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate. 10:30 p.m.
The last visitors have finally left. You can feel the house exhaling, returning to its normal proportions. After my shabby behavior toward Betty Allison, Linda began quietly shooing out the guests, her voice soft but unyielding as she told them that we’d been through a long and emo
tional day.
Unbeknownst to me, the sleeping arrangements were decided while I was out earlier. Wendy has pretty much taken over the upstairs, com
mandeering Phillip’s room for the baby’s Portacrib, her own old bed
room for Ryan and Cole, and the guest room for her and Barry. Phillip and Tracy are on the sofa bed in the den behind the kitchen. Paul and 78
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Alice have unceremoniously taken my childhood bedroom, which is where I always stayed when I visited with Jen. But now, being the lone single sibling, I have been relegated to the basement, which seems to be the default for me these days.
As kids, Paul and I shared a room until he sprouted pubic hair and moved down to the basement, where the hiss and clank of the boiler would drown out his Led Zeppelin, his phone calls with girlfriends, and his ever busier masturbation schedule. Paul had been allowed to furnish the basement as he saw fit, which is why the sofa bed cannot be fully opened without hitting the corner of the Ping-Pong table, which is itself positioned against a support column, so whether it’s a game of PingPong or a good night’s sleep you’re after, you’re going to be shit out of luck.
11:06 p.m.
Death is exhausting. Whether it’s from the trauma of burying my father or from spending the entire day in close proximity to my family, I barely have the energy to take my pants off before collapsing on the mostly opened sofa bed, my legs tilted upward toward the Ping-Pong table. There, beneath the house, in the oblong shadow cast by the single naked lightbulb, I can feel the panic rising, the sense that I’m disappear
ing. A few miles away, my father is buried in a grassy bluff overlooking the tangle of blacktop where the interstate and thruway intersect. We are both underground, both gone from the world. At least his legs are fully extended.
I turn on my cell phone. As expected, there’s a new voice mail from Jen. She’s been calling me every day for the last few weeks, determined to achieve some level of amicability and open communication to facili
tate a quick and peaceful divorce
and so that she can believe she’s been
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forgiven. She always cared a little too much about being liked, and the guilt over her betrayal isn’t nearly as upsetting to her as the fact that I now despise her. I’ve taken to keeping my phone off and not returning her calls. I am still perfecting the art of hating her, and until I’ve got it down, I don’t feel ready to engage. This infuriates her, and so she tries every possible approach to draw me out: contrite, dispassionate, tearful, philosophical, plaintive, and witty. Sometimes I play her messages, left over the course of weeks, all in a row, listening to the erratic swing of her tone between each beep. Tonight she actually descends into something of a rage, telling me I can’t keep avoiding her, threatening to empty our joint checking account if I don’t return her call by tomorrow. No doubt she’d like to be divorced by the time she and Wade have their baby. I especially like today’s voice mail, because she’s shouting at me like I’m standing right there in front of her, like it’s an actual conversation. Still, just to be safe, first thing tomorrow I’ll run out to the bank and with
draw the bulk of what’s left in our checking account. It was around twenty-two thousand dollars last time I checked, although the balance has probably fallen a bit since then. I have a feeling her next voice mail will break new ground.
Thursday
Chapter 10
Ihave a recurring dream in which I’m walking down the street, all foot
loose and fancy-free, when I look down and realize that beneath my pants, one of my legs is actually a prosthesis, molded plastic and rubber with a steel core. And then I remember, with a sinking feeling, that my leg had been amputated from the knee down a few years back. I had simply forgotten. The way you can forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life but, of course, can’t. In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget. So I’m walking, usually out on Route 120 in Elmsbrook, past the crappy strip malls, the mini golf, the discount chains, and the themed restaurants, when I suddenly remember that I lost my leg a few years ago, maybe cancer, maybe a car accident, what
ever. The point is, I have this fake leg clamped to my thigh, chafi ng at my knee where my calf used to descend. And when I remember that I’m an amputee, I experience this moment of abject horror when I realize that when I get home I will have to take off the leg to go to sleep and I can’t remember ever having done that before, but I must do it every night, and how do I pee, and who will ever want to have sex with me, and how the hell did this even happen anyway? And that’s when I will myself awake, and I lie there in bed, sweaty and trembling, running my hands up and down both legs, just making sure. Then I get up to go to the bathroom, even if I don’t have to, and the cold bathroom tiles against my heels are like fi nding fifty bucks in a jacket pocket from last fall. 84
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These are the rare moments when it actually still feels good to be me. And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn’t it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there’s a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children’s light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it’s my own. 7:43 a.m.
There is nothing more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options. But this morning I can hear the low groan of the fl oorboards above me, the rhythmic creak of the sofa bed in the den—Phillip and Tracy enjoying some early morning, pre-shiva coitus—and my options are whittled down to none. I can hear Tracy’s muffl
ed voice groaning
something over and over again as they gather momentum. Th e fi rst
song that comes to mind is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and I hum it loudly to drown out the muffled cries and grunts seeping through the ceiling as I flee to the linoleum safety of the closet-sized bathroom. I’m still pissing when I reach the home of the brave, so I loudly hum the theme to Star Trek in a continuous loop until I’ve washed my hands and brushed my teeth. When I emerge, the noise has subsided,
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and my mother is sitting on the edge of my bed in the kind of short, satin bathrobe you’d want to see on your twenty-three-year-old girlfriend.
“Sleep well?” she says.
“Not really.”
Upstairs the creaking begins again. Mom looks up at the ceiling and smiles at me. “That boy,” she says, shaking her head fondly. “Tracy must be forty-five if she’s a day. Obviously, he’s working through some mother issues.” She leans forward, and the satin lapels of her robe spread, reveal
ing the large D cups she had installed about fifteen years ago. She’d dis
covered a lump that turned out to be benign and somehow converted the experience into an excuse to upgrade her breasts. She hasn’t worn a bra since.
“Mom!” I say, looking away. “Cover up, will you?”
She looks down, lovingly surveying the promontories of her ageinappropriate breasts like she would an infant grandchild, before un
hurriedly refastening her robe. “You were always something of a prude,”
she says.
“It’s a mystery to me why anyone in this house might have mother issues.”
“They’re breasts, Judd. The same ones you suckled at.”
“Those are something other than breasts.”
“Your father didn’t see it that way. When we made love, he used to love to—”
“Shut up, Mom!”
“Why is it so hard for you to accept that your mother is a sexual be
ing? Do you think you were immaculately conceived? I should think it would make you happy that your father and I were still fucking.”
Yes. That’s what she said. My mother is a sixty-three-year-old best
selling author with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Pamela Anderson’s 86
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breasts, who talks about fucking her late husband like she’s discussing current events.
“Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that that was a remotely normal thing to say to your son. It still doesn’t mean I want to hear the intimate details of your sex life.”
“Judd. I’m your mother, and I love you.” That’s what she always says, what she advises the millions of mothers who read Cradle and All to say, just before eviscerating or emasculating their off spring. Th e next
word is always “but.” According to Doctor Hillary Foxman, the patron saint of frustrated mothers, this is called softening, rendering the child receptive to correction. What I’ve learned, after nine years of marital spats, is that everything before the “but” is bullshit.
“But,” she says, “your sorrow has become malignant.”
I nod slowly, as if considering her words. “Thanks, Mom. Th at wasn’t
even the slightest bit helpful.”
She shrugs and pulls herself up off the bed, stopping at the foot of the stairs to consider me. Dust mites dance in the sunlight pouring down from the opened door upstairs, and I can see the bags under her eyes, the gray roots at her scalp, and the acute sadness in her eyes as she looks at me. Somewhere in there, underneath those ridiculous breasts and the psychobabble, is a real mother, hurting for her child, and for reasons I probably couldn’t begin to explain without years of therapy, her pain fills me with a quiet, relentless rage.
“I miss your father,” she says.
“Do you?”
“I missed him while he was still alive.”
She nods. “He was never comfortable expressing himself. But he loved you very much.”
“Not like he loved you.”
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She smiles and massages the back of her neck. Upstairs, Phillip and Tracy have finally, mercifully finished, and a welcome quiet fi lls the room.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t have your old room,” she says. “I thought Paul and Alice could use some privacy. They’ve been trying to conceive, you know.”
“Wendy mentioned something.”
“That sofa bed is fine for sleeping, but it’s simply not built for pro
creation. The springs creak like a couple of fighting cats. You can hear it throughout the house.”
“I don’t suppose I can stop you from telling me why you know that.”
“Your father and I made love on every bed in this house.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, I found an ovulation test kit in the wastebasket in the hall bathroom, so I’m thinking these are key nights for Alice.”
Mom never had any use for discretion, never even had the sense to fake it. She habitually went through our drawers and coat pockets, in
spected our sheets, listened in on our phone calls, and read Wendy’s diary so often that we started composing entries just for her to fi nd. Mr. Jorgenson, my phys ed teacher, still says I can’t call him Ed, even after I had a three-way with him and Mike Stedman, who swears the whole genital herpes thing was just a nasty rumor started by his ex-girlfriend who was pissed at him for sleeping with me and Ed.
Liz Coltrane gave me these awesome pills that make you vomit after every meal, so I don’t have to use my finger anymore. It’s much more civilized, and I can finally grow my nails again. Th in
and manicured! Win-win!
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I know incest is wrong. I just figured I’d do it once to see what all the fuss was about. But now Paul wants to do it with me all the time and it’s starting to get creepy. It would have been so much easier with Judd, if only he wasn’t gay.
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