by Iris Smyles
I don’t usually like to drink with the family, because I can’t drink as much as I want. But since I’m still hurting from last night and worried, too, that last night’s whiskey is emanating from my pores, I decide to have just one drink as camouflage. “A little hair of the wolf that mauled me,” I say, pouring myself after everyone else.
My mom eyes me, checking the level on my glass. “She drinks like a Kennedy!” she sighs.
“The swimmer!” I answer, and gesture toward the photo of me in a bathing suit at one of my high school meets, which they’ve framed and arranged next to a pastoral of the Reagan ranch.
“That’s not funny,” my mother says. “That poor girl died under that bridge. You see what happens when you drink?” she warns, referring to the Chappaquiddick scandal, about which I wrote an in-depth report for my seventh-grade social studies class.
My mother declines a glass herself, and my dad repeats an old joke about my mom getting drunk and dancing on the table at the Ground Round when we were kids.
“I never did that,” she says soberly.
My dad laughs. “You ever wonder why we stopped going there?”
“Stop slandering me now. The kids think you’re serious,” she says, before Alistair emerges from his middle-child cloak of invisibility and offers, “You know, Rosie O’Donnell used to perform there.” My mother tells me to set the table.
During dinner the topic shifts to television, to politics, to prices, and then to pain. Neck pain, joint pain, headaches, the works. My mother mentions a lower back pain she had three days ago, and my father explains how he had her roll up a T-shirt and position it beneath the affected area as she slept. “I’m all better!” she says.
“And so’s the pain in my ass,” my dad jibes, throwing a quick eye to my mother, whose shoulder he rubs affectionately.
My mother groans with annoyance, fatigue, and then delight.
I laugh and then sneeze, and my dad suggests I cover my head before I catch cold. Leaving the room, he returns with a T-shirt, which he instructs me to wrap around my head like a turban.
Finishing my one glass of wine, I make a big show of refilling the glass with apple cider.
“Good. Stop drinking now!” my mother says.
“I only had one glass and now I’m having cider!”
“You smell like a hobo,” she says.
“It’s from before. I got a paper cut and Dad poured some Wild Turkey on it.” I lift my hand and flare my bandaged, whiskey-soaked finger. “You’re the wino, Mom. You’re the one not allowed back at Ground Round!”
“Rosie O’Donnell used to perform there,” Alistair pipes in.
“You see what you did, Dad!” my mother says, shooting him a look.
Teddy chews in silence, plotting the rise of the machines.
After dinner my mother shows me a dress she’s bought for my older cousin’s daughter, then looks at me as if to say, When are you going to get married? “Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, holding it against her.
“Beautiful, but a bit small for you, no?”
I return with her to the den, where as a family we’ve begun watching a heartwarming film about Italian immigrants.
“I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart,” Al Pacino says, just as I walk in with the bottle of Wild Turkey. I pour both my brothers and father a glass, but don’t pour one for myself, carefully displaying my self-control.
An hour later The Godfather Part II is over, and my family is yelling at the TV, which they’ve tuned back to Fox News.
“How ’bout we watch this?” I introduce a DVD: Grey Gardens. “It’s a documentary about Jackie Kennedy’s crazy cousins, a mother and daughter, Bouvier Beale, aristocratic beauties living in squalor in an East Hampton mansion. It was made into a Broadway musical,” I say, trying to persuade them. “Like Xanadu.”
I pop in the movie. Annoyed, my brothers head to the basement to watch C-SPAN, leaving my parents and I alone to watch two aging women eat cat food in the corner of a dilapidated mansion. The film opens with a shot of the daughter, Little Edie, fifty years old but strangely childlike, as she stands in an overgrown garden. With something wrapped around her head, she looks almost chic, but finally just crazy.
“What’s she got around her head now?” my mother says in the next scene.
“It looks like a sweater pinned with a brooch,” I say. We continue watching in silence as Little Edie recites Robert Frost poems from memory, as she makes allusions to Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, as she dances around the house, telling of how she could have been a great dancer, of all the men she might have married but didn’t. The mother, Big Edie, speaks glowingly of Little Edie’s poetry, for which she won high school awards. What potential! I squirm in my seat and try not to look at my parents. The rest of the movie passes in a delicate silence.
When it’s over, my parents say nothing. I want to say, “That’s not me. I’m fine! I’m not going to end up eating cat food and dancing around with a sweater on my head, past my prime and full of regrets about never having married!” But I can’t. I can’t. Because I don’t know how to talk to them. I want to reassure them, give them proof that I’m going places, give them evidence that my career is finally taking off. I tell them about a short story I have coming out in a literary magazine this spring—“No, it doesn’t pay anything, but it’s a very important magazine!”
And then I switch tacks. With the T-shirt still wrapped around my head, I jump down from the couch. And standing before them, I offer to show them my Tarantella. A joke, I think. I’m hilarious! But you can’t laugh at your own joke—another catch-22, like my not being able to vote for the repeal of women’s suffrage. So with a straight face, I begin bouncing and twirling around the room, waiting for them to get it, waiting for them to laugh, to join me on the other side of the joke. But my parents’ faces remain frozen in horror. Staring up from the couch, as I hop and spin ecstatically, their worst fears are confirmed—the Democrats have gotten to me.
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Lotos-Eaters”
MENU
YOU NEVER EXPECT A ZOMBIE to lean over and bite you, so you won’t really notice until it’s too late and the zombie apocalypse has already begun. If you noticed, you could easily outwalk one. Just pick up your pace a little, and you’d be fine. The problem is you’re not thinking about zombies. The problem is, some guy shuffles over and you think, Oh, he’s going to ask for directions. He mumbles something, and you think, Oh, he’s probably French. Then he leans in and you lean in to better hear him and maybe take a look at his subway map, and the next thing you know he’s taken a chunk out of your shoulder. That’s how they get you.
With the fast ones, you have a better chance, because if someone starts chasing you, you’ll naturally start to run away. Still, zombies, fast or slow, are determined, and once they see you, that’s it. Nothing stops them. Not fire. Not gunshots (unless you shoot the brain). You could climb up a ladder. Zombies can’t climb ladders. But what happens—movies never address this—when there are no people left? Will the zombies starve? Have a seat? Begin to think perhaps they acted rashly? Become university chairs? Occupy tollbooths?
I went to my aunt Kathryn’s funeral yesterday.
It was agreed I’d take an early train to Long Island and then drive with my parents to the funeral home in New Jersey. Since I had to wake up early, I didn’t go out the night before. It was Friday though, so I drank a six-pack of tallboys in my apartment, after I finished some wine and reread some poems and stories from my favorite books. I like to read the same ones over and over, even though I’ve a pile of library books still to get to.
I often forget to return them on time and end up selling the books I own in order to pay the late fees on what I borrow. I underline phrases in the borrowed ones, too, clues for the person who will find them next on the circulation cart. They will notice what’s important,
how “it doesn’t matter that six is not seven,” how a cab can “yawn to the curb,” how “it is possible to be happy even in a palace.”
At ten, I ordered out for Chinese. I almost never order out; I don’t like strangers knowing where I live and what I eat. But I was tired so I picked up a menu from the pile of menus blocking the front door. When I’m home during the day, I can hear the menus being wedged into the slit between the door and the door frame. I figure I’ll pick them up when they stop coming, but then they never stop coming, so it’s hard to open the door now.
At Penn Station the next day, they charged me too much for a Diet Coke. “Two dollars!” I exclaimed, wiping sleep from my eyes. I paid it anyway. Once they get you underground, they can do whatever they want to you.
On the train, I read three Barthelme stories from a book I haven’t sold yet. My hands were shaking and my heart was racing from the recession of last night’s six-pack, the wine, the 40 oz. I picked up from the deli after that, and a week of so much smiling and laughing.
“Let’s get drunk, let’s get really drunk!” I’d announced to friends on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . each time saying it as if it were a completely novel idea. I can’t go on like this, I thought, looking out the train window, and my heart jumped with the idea that I might be killing myself.
I closed my eyes and reminded myself to breathe. Sometimes I forget to breathe. When I remember I gasp, but sometimes I worry I’m too late and feel like I’m suffocating. I looked out the train window and gasped. It’s hard to sleep because of this. Because when I do, after just a few minutes, I wake up with a violent shake and gasp, as if I hadn’t breathed in a very long time, as if it were possible, probable, to die of forgetting.
In the car on the way out to New Jersey, I tell my parents about all the good things that are happening to me, because I don’t want them to worry. There are never very many good things, so I repeat myself, “Yeah, great news!” worried we’ll run out of conversation.
I read more Barthelme stories in the back seat next to my brother Teddy, who has things to say. I read three or four, and think about the rain and the sky. There is one story about zombies who will weep on you if they catch you. Teddy says that Internet dating is not so bad! Teddy says his company is taking off! Teddy says loudly that the weather is fine!
We talk about politics, but I have nothing to add. Instead, I interject with a passage from my Barthelme book. I read aloud from a story about capitalism: “‘The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude—melancholy sadness—toward it. This attitude is not correct. Fortunately your letter came, at that instant. “Dear Rupert, I love you every day. You are the world, which is life. I love you I adore you I am crazy about you. Love, Marta.” Reading between the lines, I understood your critique of my attitude toward capitalism.’”
The car is silent.
“Socialism is all about the benevolent dictator,” my dad says.
Cousin Thalia and her son Lincoln greet us at the funeral home. Then Aunt Kathryn’s friend Helen arrives and compliments Aunt Kathryn on her dress.
Aunt Kathryn is wearing a pink cardigan with a white scalloped collar. Her skirt is blocked by the closed bottom half of the casket. Her face is still. Her eyelids are still. Her hands don’t fidget. She does not shake.
At Thanksgiving dinner when I was a kid, I could never look at her because her hands shook terribly, and when she’d bring the food to her mouth, her head would shake in the opposite direction. If I’d look, I’d laugh, so I didn’t look.
I hate this room. I hate its flowers. I hate the chairs in small neat rows. I hate looking at someone who doesn’t know they’re being watched. I look at her after trying not to for a long time and see her sitting up suddenly, not shaking at all. Her eyes are wide and she is a zombie who will weep on me.
Thalia’s son Lincoln is five. He smiles and I smile, while Kathryn’s friend Helen takes pictures of the casket. It’s the second funeral for her that day. She gets a close-up. Then she asks us all to pose. “Good, good, a group photo.” We’re all wearing black, and the rooms are covered in dust.
I read two days ago that dust is 90 percent dead skin. I am afraid to sit down here. There is something horrible about the cushions. Helen snaps another of Kathryn in profile, then another straight on. When does she take these pictures out? Does she keep them in her wallet next to photos of grandchildren? Mount them on slides, bring them out over coffee?
The sound of the camera being wound. The flash across my father’s crying face behind the podium, next to Kathryn laid down. She taught him to swim, he says. He was afraid, but she took him out deep, and he was never afraid again. The camera flashes. The priest blinks.
Kathryn took pictures at her husband Manish’s funeral two years ago. Helen wheeled her around to get his face at different angles. “Here, let’s have another one gathered round the body!” My father stops speaking and stands still for a very long time. He looks down, chin shaking, and I don’t know where to look.
After, we went to Friendly’s for dinner and ice cream. We, Helen and Thalia and my parents and us kids, hadn’t seen one another since the last funeral, so it was sort of a special occasion.
I tutored Lincoln in the eating of sundaes and asked if he was worried about having caterpillars instead of eyebrows. I explained about caterpillars cocooning and becoming butterflies. I told him to be careful, that one morning he might wake up and find nothing between his forehead and eyes, but look around the room and see two fluttery things chasing each other in the air. He said it wasn’t true. I advised him just the same, “You should probably sleep with your hands over your forehead. Just in case.”
Lincoln told me secrets, then told me to tell my mother, who sat next to me. “I can’t!” I said, after he finished whispering in my ear. “Then it won’t be a secret!”
He told me that had nothing to do with it.
“The secret is,” I began repeating, “that Lincoln has knuckles on his head, and an apple in his brain, and when he went swimming yesterday, he left his teeth in the pool.”
He laughed and said, “Nooo!” That was no longer the secret. “Nooo, now there is a new one.”
“Tell me!” I insisted, but I had to guess, he said, if I wanted to know.
I fell asleep during the two-hour drive home. It was raining and dark, and Teddy went in the other car; Lincoln needed help with a puzzle. It was decided as we said goodbye that we ought to have Thanksgiving all together this year. “That’s a wonderful idea!” everyone agreed, before making their respective excuses. Helen had another funeral tomorrow. Lincoln and Thalia had to get back to California.
“The pictures!” my mother gasped. “Really!” she said in the car.
“Your mother is becoming such a gossip,” my father said, as I drifted into sleep along the New Jersey Turnpike.
“And Lincoln . . . and Thalia . . . and that Helen with her hair!”
I took the train home that same night and finished reading the Barthelme story about the zombies. I looked away from people when they looked at me, then out the window and then back. I took out my phone, reread a text from a man I dated a year ago. We’d gone to see a horror movie, and then I told him I didn’t love him. I told him over and over again with him beneath me.
I wrote him a message on the train. “I’m on a train nearing New York City. Reading Barthelme stories and looking out the window. One story is about zombies who will weep on you if they catch you. What are you doing? Are you standing under an awning? Has the rain made your pizza wet?”
I got drenched on the walk from the subway to my building. Inside, my apartment was as messy as I’d left it. Dust everywhere. Mine. Ninety percent dead. Living alone is not so easy sometimes, coming home to a room where nothing has changed and everything belongs to you. Sometimes I hide things then put them out of my mind. When I find the stapler behind the couch a month from now, I’ll be surprise
d and feel less lonely.
I got into bed. The rain beat hard at the windows, now and then crashing the screen into its frame, waking me. I gasped. I had forgotten to breathe again.
I dreamed of zombies. They were chasing me, and I couldn’t close the door fast enough. I couldn’t get my hands on the doorknob in time, because my hands were shaking terribly. If you can just close the door, they can’t get you. Zombies can’t open doors. They chased me around the house; it was the house I grew up in, where, for Christmas, I was given a plastic turtle on wheels, a slow thing on a string that I raced through the rooms, past Grandma and Cousin Thalia and Uncle Manish and Aunt Kathryn, who yelled at me to stop as I whizzed by. In my dream, I got so tired and the zombies were so fast. They were small, too, the size of children, but fast. I ran and ran until I was too tired to run anymore. And then I stopped, held out my hand to one, and offered him a bite.
BOOKS XVII–XXIV
What do you want to add?
Value [or] Time[?]
—MTA METRO CARD VENDING MACHINE
Talking
“I WAS HIT IN THE head with a bat,” I told Glen. I’m an excellent conversationalist. “It was an accident when I was five. A neighbor was trying to teach me baseball. I have this small scar under my left eye, see?”
“I can’t see it.”
“Look,” I said, pointing. “It becomes more pronounced if I’ve been crying.”