Dating Tips for the Unemployed

by Iris Smyles

  I lie down beneath the Abdominizer—a device my dad bought when he couldn’t sleep—and position the Whoopee Cushion beneath me. I set it off as I do a sit-up and look. Neither of them reacts.

  I watch Captain Kirk perspire as he surveys the grounds of an alien planet, trying to ascertain if its inhabitants will be friendly.

  “Alistair! Alistair!”

  Alistair opens his eyes, then closes them again.

  I stand up and start explaining the rules of Awakenings to him. The game’s based on the movie with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, which is based on the book by Oliver Sacks, which is based on real people who fell victim to a plague of “sleeping sickness” just before the Great Depression. In the movie, there’s a scene where Dr. Sacks, played by Robin Williams, throws baseballs at his patients, who’ve been catatonic for decades and discovers that they are all really good at baseball. Though their faces and bodies don’t change at all, when the balls come whizzing toward them, their hands shoot up, and they catch them with miraculous dexterity.

  I take Alistair’s socks, which he’s discarded by the side of the couch, and roll them into a ball. Then I go to the other side of the room and take aim. A sock hits him in the face.

  “What the fuck, Iris!” he says, blinking.

  “It was an accident! I thought you were awake!” I squeal, and beat it back up the stairs.

  Reappearing in the living room, I find my dad watching a program on suspension bridges, and my mom standing nearby, telling him to turn off the TV and cut the meat.

  “Just a minute.”

  We stare at the TV in silence.

  “. . . Most people don’t realize that the horizontal cables on the Brooklyn Bridge serve no physical purpose, but are merely decorative . . .”

  “When’s dinner?” I interrupt, raising a hand capped by five finger puppets. “The beasts are getting hungry,” I announce, motioning toward my hand.

  “I’m waiting for your dad to cut the meat,” my mom says irritably.

  “The show’s almost over. My god, you have no patience!”

  With my free hand I struggle to keep the snarling, snapping monsters from devouring me. “Back, beasts! Back!”

  Coffee

  “Oh, these kids,” my mother says, looking at my two older brothers and me—bald, balder, and hung-over; ages thirty-one, thirty, and twenty-five, respectively. “Are we ever gonna see any grandchildren?” She shakes her head and blows on her coffee.

  “I was thinking I might sponsor a child,” Alistair says, yawning, referring to the TV infomercial his unconscious, blue-green brain accidentally absorbed earlier.

  “We’ve given up on you two,” my father says, motioning to the sloppy pair next to me. “You’re our last hope, Iris.”

  “I could get knocked up, no problem. I mean, I wasn’t planning on going out tonight, but if that’s what it’ll take to finally make you proud of me . . .”

  “Oh, now, don’t joke like that,” my mom says. “First you need to get married.” She takes a sip. “You’re too picky,” she says, looking at the three of us, slack-jawed and bleary-eyed from hours of VH1’s I Love the ’80s or, in Teddy’s case, C-SPAN marathons in the basement. “No one is ever good enough for you!”

  “I’m a Twixter,” Alistair offers sprightly, as an all-purpose explanation for the twelfth time that day. Last week he napped in front of an episode of 20/20 that described “a new generation.”

  “You are not! I’m a Twixter. You’re a Gen Xer,” I shoot back, restarting our argument from lunch. I saw the same episode.

  “You’re wrong,” Teddy says, lifting his eyes briefly. “You’re both idiots.”

  “Anyway, you need to hurry, Iris. You don’t have forever.”

  My dad reaches for Teddy’s cannoli.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he yells, roused from his cup. “You already had two!”

  “Tax,” my father explains.

  “You can’t keep any food near him,” Teddy complains. “It’s like the event horizon; if anything gets within a certain proximity, he just sucks it up like a black hole!”

  “God, you’re so mean to your old man. You know I’m not gonna be around forever.”

  “Here,” my mother says, offering Teddy her pastry. “Have this one.”

  The Fourth Dimension

  “Is it cold in here?” my father asks before layering on a fourth pair of glasses.

  Teddy sits beside him and draws a diagram of the sixth dimension—a fold.

  “Can you stop breathing like that?” Alistair snaps from his end of the table. He’s cranky, having just woken up from a particularly challenging nap—“I’m mastering string theory.”

  “Look,” Teddy says to my father. “Since the ten dimensions are layered on top of each other, if we could travel through the sixth dimension, we could theoretically travel through time.”

  “Quick question,” I interject. “Which is more realistic: Back to the Future or The Terminator?”

  “Neither.”

  “I mean, in Back to the Future, Marty is forbidden from changing the past for fear of altering the future and thus upsetting the space-time continuum. Time travel in Back to the Future is treated as unnatural. In Terminator though, John Connor’s best friend in the future is sent back in time expressly to change the past, and during this time he impregnates John Connor’s mother with John Connor, making him his best friend’s dad, implying that time travel is actually a natural part of human evolution.”

  “That’s interesting,” my dad says.

  “Like Planet of the Apes!” Alistair adds. “Is Dr. Zira hot for an ape? I’ve seen the movie a zillion times, and I still can’t tell.”

  “‘Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape,’” I say, in my best Charlton Heston.

  “‘The question is not so much where we are, as when we are,’” Alistair answers.

  “Do you mind holding off on your stupidity so I can finish explaining the ten dimensions to Dad?”

  I shrug, collect my cold cup of coffee, and drift over to Mom, who’s chopping vegetables on the kitchen island.

  I lean down and rest my chin in my hands.

  “Anything wrong?” she asks.

  “I was thinking, maybe it’s time to take down that picture of Ezbon.” I motion toward the refrigerator, where there is an eight-by-ten photo of my ex-boyfriend’s dog.

  “But he’s so cute!” my mother says.

  “You can tell he sees a squirrel!” Alistair calls out. He took the photo himself and developed it in three alternate sizes on his Epson.

  “But if it bothers you, sweetie . . .” my mom trails off.

  “It’s just—” I feel my voice start to shake.

  “What, now you hate dogs, Iris?” Teddy breaks in. “What kind of horrible person hates dogs?!” he says, looking around to gather our parents’ agreement. “And she’s your favorite!”

  “We love all you kids equally,” my father says automatically.

  “‘Some apes, it seems, are more equal than others,’” Alistair interjects, raising an eyebrow, before opening a fun-size Snickers bar and arranging it beside two others on a Smurf-themed birthday party plate.

  My mom goes to the refrigerator and untacks the photo from the Botero magnet I gave her last year on Mother’s Day—a fat woman in a negligee, lying in bed eating a piece of cake. She puts it in a drawer. In its place, she hangs a photo of Ronald Reagan on his ranch. The sun is setting in the background as Reagan, in a cowboy shirt, stares off into the distance.

  “You can’t perceive the upper dimensions from the lower dimensions,” Teddy goes on. I open a cabinet, count five glasses, and start setting the table.

  Dinner

  Alistair is on the verge of purchasing a new apartment.

  “Of course, it doesn’t have a dishwasher,” my mother says, serving the mashed potatoes. “But you can put one in.”

  “Yeah, Alistair,” I say, thinking of the mess awaiting me at home. “Yo
u’ll definitely need a dishwasher.”

  “Or you can just get married,” my father adds thoughtfully. “Women are even better than machines.” My father begins a retching sound from the back of his throat and pulls out a bay leaf. “Your mother’s trying to kill me,” he announces.

  Dessert

  I finish reading aloud from Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches by Ronald Reagan, my last Father’s Day gift, and my mother calls my brothers into the kitchen for dessert.

  “My hands are warm. Can I put them in your ice cream?” Alistair says, reaching toward my bowl.

  “Quit it!”

  “Just for a second!”

  “Quit it!”

  “Oh, these kids,” my mom sighs. “When are they going to grow up?”

  Before my brother has a chance to explain again that he’s a Twixter, the phone rings.

  We all look at each other, frightened by the possibility of it being any number of our insane relatives. According to my father, “Insanity doesn’t run in our family; it gallops.”

  “Should I answer it?” my mother asks.

  My father waves her away. “Let the machine get it.”

  The ringing stops. A short silence. Then a long beep. “Theodore, happy birthday!” says my great-aunt Agnes.

  “No shit!” my father says. “Is today my birthday?”

  The rest of us shrug.

  “Wow,” I say. “Happy birthday, Dad. How old are you?”

  “Uh, let me see . . . sixty-nine, I think.”

  “Weren’t you sixty-nine last year?”

  “No, I think I was sixty-eight,” he says, furrowing his brow. “Get the calculator!”

  My mom’s already picked up the phone. “Theodore, Agnes wants to talk to you,” she says, handing him the phone.

  “When I think about it,” Alistair says to himself, “I’ve never NOT been tired.”

  “Shhhhh,” my mother whispers. “Your dad’s on the phone.”

  My brothers and I retreat into the living room.

  After ten minutes my father walks in to find Teddy lying lazily before the TV—a rerun of Doctor Who in black-and-white—and me playing with a Whoopee Cushion, squeezing it lightly beside Alistair’s ear while he tries to nap. I apologize after each sound effect. “Sorry.” Squeeze. “Oooh, sorry.” Squeeze. “Did I do that?” Squeeze. “Must have been something I ate.” “Sorry!” “Sorry!” Alistair swats me away without opening his eyes. I pause, wait for him to nod off again, then bring it back to his ear and gently squeeze. “No apologies.” Squeeze. “Never say die.” Squeeze—I look up.

  “I can’t believe it,” my dad says, interrupting my symphony. He walks in front of the TV to get our attention. Alistair sits up.

  “It turns out I’m only sixty-seven.” He puffs his chest proudly. “Agnes did the math!”

  “Isn’t that something,” my mother says, rushing to his side. She gives him a kiss on the cheek, then pats down the unruly gray wisps that make up his hair. She smiles. “And for two years now, you thought you were sixty-nine!”

  I whispered, “I am too young,”

  And then, “I am old enough”;

  Wherefore I threw a penny

  To find out if I might love.

  —W. B. YEATS, “Brown Penny”

  The Moon and the Stars

  I WAS IN GREECE for the summer and telling my Greek boyfriend Nicos about my exciting life back in New York, about Epstein my guard-plant and Herbert my stuffed animal—a medium-size golden Labrador my friend Reggie won for me in Coney Island.

  “Reggie won Herbert in a shooting gallery. I’d been carrying him under my arm awhile when Reggie fetched me a plastic bag from one of the boardwalk shops to lessen my load. Then Reggie was telling me something or other, but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. All I could think about was how Herbert might not be able to breathe inside the bag. You’re not supposed to put someone’s head in a plastic bag! I tried to suppress the thought, knowing intellectually that stuffed animals don’t require oxygen, but couldn’t shake the idea and, after a few minutes, started to gasp in sympathy, like when you watch an underwater scene in a movie and unconsciously hold your breath.

  “So, after a few minutes, I took Herbert out of the bag, apologized to him profusely, and spent the rest of the day feeling bad about what I’d done. Reggie tried to console me; he even bought me a beer at one of the boardwalk cafés. But I was beyond consolation, and it took five more beers and a couple of shots of whiskey before I started to feel even a little bit better. Reggie said I was being ridiculous. ‘Think about it from his perspective,’ I said. ‘It’s a stuffed animal!’ Reggie reminded me. ‘With a name!’ I reminded him. ‘How would you feel if someone put you in a plastic bag?’ When I got home, I sat Herbert by the window in my apartment so he could look out. He’s been with me ever since. I don’t know what I’ll do when he gets old. How can you throw something out when it has a face and a name?

  “Coming here for the month, I worried about leaving Herbert and Epstein alone for so long. I arranged for Reggie to stop by once a week to water Epstein and say hello to Herbert, but still. On the flight over, it was hard to shake the idea of their succumbing to loneliness.”

  Nicos exhaled a long plume of smoke and passed me the joint. It was about midnight and we were alone at the beach. “You think too much,” he said.

  “People tell me that all the time. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.” I took a hit and handed the joint back. I looked out over my knees at the dark sea, calm and shining under the moonlight.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the light of the moon reflected on the water, a rippling line that began on the horizon and ended where we sat. “Why do you think the moon chose us?” he asked, and then motioned to another couple farther down the beach—“And not them?”

  “Do you think they’re having the same conversation over there?”

  “You mean, are they saying, ‘Why did the moon choose them’”—he smiled—‘‘‘and not us?’”

  “Maybe the moon is a slut, Nicos, and she goes with everyone,” I said, adopting the Greek style of assigning gender to objects. We’d talked about this earlier—“Why is a table masculine and a chair feminine?” I’d asked. “Why am I a man and you a woman?” he answered.

  “Impossible,” he said definitively. “The moon is a man.”

  “Well, what if the moon is a cad, then?”

  “The moon is not a cad, Iris!” he said, taking me in his arms. “The moon loves us,” he said, and kissed me.

  It was August and I had been dating Nicos for nearly a month. I was living in my family’s summer home at the edge of a small coastal village where I’ve spent most of my summers growing up. Though I already knew most everyone in town, Nicos I’d only just met, as he’d spent his previous summers elsewhere, careful to avoid inveiglement in his parents’ business, a colony of rooms for rent at the edge of town.

  It was at a seaside café owned by our mutual friend Dimitri where we finally met; we were sitting together at Dimitri’s table, talking to Dimitri, but not each other. Dimitri had just taken off to greet some new customers when I addressed Nicos for the first time. “What happened to your shoes?” I asked.

  “I don’t like,” he said, rubbing his bare feet together. “Is summer,” he explained, then looked out at the sea, as if it had taken them.

  He wore round John Lennon–style glasses, had dark eyes and long, thick, dark curly hair with a single dreadlock playing among the strands, which he usually wore pulled back into a low ponytail. He was tall, handsome, and remote. I asked him another question.

  He told me about his studies, how he’d spent the last few winters in Germany, where he was studying accounting, though he wasn’t sure anymore if he wanted to be an accountant. He said he was tired from work, managing the rooms his parents owned, that this summer he never had time for himself, but when he did, he took long walks. “Yes,” I said, “I think I saw you yesterday afternoon near my house. I was on a
hammock when you walked by. You must say hello the next time you pass.”

  Twenty-four to my twenty-six, Nicos liked classic rock and tying friendship bracelets from string, one of which he gave to me the day after we met. I was napping again in the hammock my father had tied between two poplars, and when I woke up I found a heavy stone, around which was tied a blue-and-green bracelet. He didn’t want to wake me, he said when I saw him in the village later that night; I looked so peaceful.

  He had a tattoo on each of his calves. On one was a skull lit from within by flames, and on the other, an angel in medieval armor who looked just like him—dark eyes; long, thick, dark curly hair; a square jaw—sat with his arms folded and his head tilted meditatively. Two large wings sprung up behind him. He said the tattoos were for balance. He said it was coincidental that the angel in any way resembled him, suggesting perhaps that that’s just what angels look like—him.

  He rolled his own cigarettes and kept the tobacco and papers in a fanny pack, which he slung over his arm or across his chest like a purse, a style that, on him, seemed very manly. He had a manly swagger, was proud of being Greek, and was, despite his hippie affectations, deeply old-fashioned. He believed women should be free with their bodies; they should go topless and have sex and get tattoos, but they should also do the dishes and laundry and only care for one man. He hoped to marry someday, far down the road, someone like his mother who was good with embroidery and cooking, and friendship bracelets of course. But not yet.

  The day after we met, Nicos invited me to dinner. On the back of his motorcycle, we drove high into the mountain, to a restaurant nestled under a trellis threaded with grapevines through which we glimpsed the moon. It was quiet, more romantic than the noisy restaurants in the village down below, which were always flooded with tourists. He said hello to the proprietor, whom he knew, and nodded agreeably toward a group seated at the next table.