The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  “Sorry, Zwieb,” he said, “but I couldn’t wait any longer. Gotta get some PT in.”

  “By all means.”

  He counted fifty, flourished a hand, and trotted out the door. I smelled coffee and found my mother in the kitchen feeding her cats—or rather opening cans and mixing wet food with dry, though no cats appeared. In the past they’d always swarmed purring around her legs, all seven or eight of them (with more outside), rushing into the kitchen at the first click of the can opener.

  “Where are they?” I asked. “Where’s Sam and Sophie and—”

  I realized I hadn’t seen a single cat since I’d arrived. But here was my mother feeding them.

  She shook her head. “They’re hiding. They won’t come out until Scott’s been gone a while. I think he did something to them.” She gave a gusty sigh.

  “Poor sweetie.”

  “At first I had to make excuses to get him out of the house so they’d eat. ‘Scott, have you weeded the garden yet?’ Something like that. But then he got so goddamn lazy I couldn’t ask him to do anything, so I just said ‘Scott, get outta here! The cats need to eat!’ ” Marlies’s cats were the love of her life. Her frown trembled with a tough look; she was trying not to cry. “And he said ‘Let ’em eat, then.’ And I said ‘Don’t gimme that, buster. You know they won’t eat around you.’ And he gives me this innocent look: ‘Why not?’ ‘Because,’ I said”—she leveled a spatula at my face as if I were Scott—“ ‘they hate you!’” She nodded with satisfaction. “Son of a bitch.”

  After the cats were fed, or rather the food was laid out, my mother cooked breakfast and we took our plates into the living room. On the table I noticed the Modern Library edition of A Fan’s Notes that I’d sent Scott for his birthday the year before last. I’d inscribed the flyleaf as follows: “There’s a little Exley in all of us (though more in some than others). Happy 37th! Love, Z.” I asked my mother if she wanted me to read to her, and she nodded at the ceiling. She was lying on the couch with a plate propped on her belly. A cat appeared out of nowhere and began lapping up her egg yolk; my mother did nothing to stop him. She stroked the cat gratefully and shut her eyes. The cat moved on to her sausage. Other cats had begun swishing furtively into the kitchen. I was reading to my mother when suddenly the cats scattered and the screen door whacked shut: Scott. He stood at the head of the couch and placed a cold hand on my mother’s cheek. She looked too tired to recoil. He gestured for me to keep reading and listened with a little smile, tracing a finger over his muscular chest. I read another page or so from the first chapter, all about the events leading up to the narrator’s latest alcoholic collapse. My brother laughed wheezily. Exley had just taken an oblivious piss in the middle of the street when my mother announced: “Stop. I don’t like this man.” She took our plates to the kitchen and began washing up.

  “That’s great, Zwieb,” Scott remarked. “I mean it’s not only entertaining but the guy has a real ear for language. Every sentence is kind of”—he paused for the right word—“lapidary.”

  I nodded. “But you’ve already read it, right? At least this chapter?”

  He shook his head with a little moonbeam smile.

  “But I don’t get it, Scott. This is practically the story of your life! And if you agree it’s entertaining and well-written—‘lapidary,’ no less—then why the hell don’t you read it?” I laughed. “I mean why not? Seriously.”

  But he only shrugged, smiling, and left to take a shower. The point was this: he knew a well-turned phrase when he heard it, his critical-aesthetic faculties were intact more or less, but his book-reading days were over. It would no more occur to him to read a book—literature anyway: a nonutile work of fiction—than it would to get a job, and that was simply that.

  MY MOTHER AND I spent the second day of my visit running errands. Over breakfast Scott had babbled on about his lawsuit (he expected that damages would run in the millions), and now he asked to come along, but my mother put her foot down.

  “I want to spend time with your brother,” she snapped. “Alone.”

  Scott narrowed his eyes at the TV and forced a little smirk. When sober he picked his battles, and for her part my mother became her old bullying self, venting the bitterness she’d bottled up while he was drunk and abusive. This, in turn, made Scott all the more abusive once he was drunk again. It was easy to see where things were heading.

  “So when’s he moving out?” I asked in the car.

  My mother, who’d just started to relax a little, got an almost frantic look. “I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk about it! It’s Christmas! Can’t we just be pleasant for an hour or so!”

  I found a radio station playing Muzak carols and we stopped talking.

  I often think my mother is happiest when she’s grocery shopping, and the half hour or so we spent trawling the aisles at Albertson’s was pretty much the high point of our holiday. My mother likes to kvetch at the butchers, whom she knows by name: “Paul! Where’re those lamb kidneys you were going to save me!” Or: “You call that a hock? I want a big one!” And Paul (or whoever) would smile in a silly-me sort of way and fetch what she’d asked for. I imagine if I ever addressed a butcher like that he’d sink a cleaver in my head, but it was okay in her case. She was the eccentric German lady, a little spot of color in their workaday lives.

  “What shall we have?” she asked me, rhetorically, rubbing her palms as she surveyed the meat bins. “A lovely duck?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Pick one.”

  I picked a duck. My mother batted it out of my hands.

  “No-oo! You call that a duck?” She grabbed a proper duck and dragged the cart along. Whenever we shopped I’d make a show of pushing the cart while my mother bustled in front yanking it this way and that; if I let go, she’d snap, “Push the cart! Do I have to do everything?”

  “What about herring?” she asked. “You want some herring?”

  “Herring?”

  She put a jar of pickled herring in the cart. “For herring salad, dummy.”

  “Right.”

  I was happy to play the dummy, the doormat, happy to see my mother enjoying herself.

  Next we went to Barnes & Noble to finish our Christmas shopping; it was cold enough to leave the groceries out in the car. I bought Scott a couple of videos: some sort of rockumentary and Annie Hall, the high points of which he’d once recited at the dinner table twenty years before (while implying how stoned he’d been during the movie, the better for us to admire his talent for retention). As a stocking stuffer I also picked up a little one-dollar Penguin minipaperback of Chekhov’s long story “The Black Monk.” Scott wouldn’t read it, of course, but I looked forward to letting him know it was about a young lunatic whose only reasons for living are his delusions of grandeur: “His ‘black monk’ is a bit like your ‘lawsuit,’ ” I’d explain, since I still thought the key to my brother’s better self was his sense of humor.

  It was late afternoon by the time we got back, and I was surprised to find Scott only a little sodden. His face was oily with the few beers he’d drunk, but he still smelled of soap and his eyes were clear. I was about to commend him for his restraint when he waved me into his room.

  “Zwieb,” he said in a stage whisper. “There’s no liquor in the house.”

  “Well,” I said, “but that’s part of the deal. You’re not supposed to have liquor, right?”

  My poor mother, I thought. In order to reform a lunatic she’d sacrificed one of the great comforts of her life (and mine), the nightly cocktails. Another comfort was her cats. That left gardening, grocery shopping, and cooking.

  “It’s her house,” I added.

  He socked me playfully in the arm. “C’mon, Zwieb! It’s Christmas! Don’t you want a cocktail?”

  What it amounted to was this: he was driving to the liquor store one way or the other, and it would look better if he did so at least partly on my behalf. Two against one. I told him he was ca
ptain of his soul, a middle-aged man with a car, and if he wanted to go to the liquor store I couldn’t stop him. As for our mother, what could she do?

  “Fuck right!”

  He wasn’t whispering anymore, provoked by my “middle-aged man with a car” crack. A minute later he whacked out the door, tripping a bit on the ice when my mother called, “Scott, where are you going?” He didn’t answer.

  “He’s off to the liquor store,” I said, and she sagged against the wall. Such was her despair that she didn’t bother to berate me for failing to talk him out of it.

  AS IT HAPPENED Marlies had some brandy stashed away, and as soon as Scott’s car had sizzled into the distance she asked me to retrieve the bottle. She stayed put in the kitchen. Once the drinks were poured she staggered to the breakfast bar and we stood slumped on either side, talking and drinking. I told her the situation was bad, worse than I’d expected, and she agreed with a heavy nod. She wanted to be rid of him but didn’t quite know how to go about it. She admitted she was a little frightened of him, which meant she was terrified. He seemed capable of anything. She told me other things he’d said and done in the two months he’d been there, none so bad as kneeing her in the groin (she showed me part of a hideous bruise on her inner thigh) but ominous in terms of their escalating audacity.

  After a while we noticed the time and agreed Scott had been delayed. It didn’t take more than forty-five minutes or so to drive to the liquor store and back, even in this weather.

  “Maybe he’s dead or injured,” I said wistfully.

  “Unkraut vergeht nicht,” my mother sighed, as ever, whereupon the phone rang. We knew it was Scott. I think we even knew why. This had been going on for almost a quarter of a century, after all.

  Sure enough he’d wrecked his car.

  “How bad is it?” my mother asked, and by the way she winced I knew Scott’s reply had been abusive. It was bad; the poor old car was history. The word “fuck” squawked out of the receiver at intervals. My mother went on questioning him with a sort of meek Socratic irony.

  “Whose fault is it? . . . Are you okay? . . . Are the police there? . . . Are you drunk?”

  Alas, he was sober more or less, and the liquor he’d bought at the store was still unopened, which meant he wouldn’t be arrested on the spot. In fact he’d only gotten a ticket for reckless driving, and what’s more the obliging policemen were going to bring him back to us safe and sound.

  ALL TOO SHORTLY thereafter, Scott banged through the door lugging a large plastic storage bin he’d kept in the trunk of his BMW—an essential item from the days when he’d lived out of his car. But his car was no more. What was left was the bin, which clanked and tinkled as he laid it heavily on the kitchen floor. It was full of clothes and the bottles he’d bought at the liquor store. Brazenly he uncapped a liter of Jim Beam and took a lavish swig. “Ahhh!” he said, and belched.

  “Scott, you can’t drink that in here!”

  My mother.

  “Yeah, Scott,” I said, “drink it outside.”

  Nobody laughed. With one bloodshot eye on both of us, he took another swig and belched again. I thought of the time twenty years ago when my father had brought him back, bandanna and all, from the police station. Here was the same swollen face, the same pathetic swagger, the same defiant self-pity vis-à-vis a world that refused to cut him a break.

  My mother took a different tack. With a sort of censure-free eagerness, she asked my brother to explain, in detail, what had happened exactly, as though he were a famous raconteur and we were his audience, all agog.

  “What the fuck difference does it make?” he said, but with a little coaxing he admitted that the motorist in front of him had seen fit to stop at a yellow light, while he, Scott, had kept going. The fucking ice and so forth.

  “Is he all right?” my mother asked.

  Scott closed his eyes, stock-still with exquisite patience. “Who?”

  “The man in the other car!”

  Scott said the woman was fine, though he would have preferred to “maim the cunt.” He laughed at his own ugliness. Not for the first time he seemed intrigued by the duality of his own nature—that he could be a good Christian (as he still considered himself) on the one hand and say things like “maim the cunt” on the other. He added that he’d like to get all such cunts off the roads. For good.

  “That would leave the roads to yourself,” I observed, “and people like yourself.”

  Marlies, perhaps to distract him, pointed out that the woman had probably sustained some degree of whiplash and would almost certainly sue. She noted as much with a kind of ponderous objectivity. It was a very German thing to say: actions have consequences; if you suck your thumb the tailor will cut it off, etc. Scott let it be known that he didn’t give a fuck what either woman—my mother or the motorist—said or did.

  Then they resumed wrangling over whether Scott had any right to drink liquor in my mother’s house. Scott’s position was that life was one fucking thing after another, and now he’d lost his car, a car that had served him faithfully for six years, and by God in light of all that he was going to get drunk tonight and nobody was going to stop him.

  Made sense to me. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to the other room and watch TV. Scott, I don’t give a fuck if you drink yourself to death, but could you do it in your own room and quietly, please? And Ma. Give it a rest already. I mean really, who the fuck cares?”

  Neither replied. They were waiting for me to leave. They still had a lot to say to each other, and I had no part in that conversation. I was an outsider; I didn’t grasp the principles at stake, and they weren’t going to explain them to me.

  LATER I LAY awake in the dark, an iron poker within reach under the couch. A faint light from my brother’s room was visible in the hall. Every half hour or so the following would occur: my mother would pad lightly through the living room, so not to wake me, and turn down the thermostat in the hall; my brother, drunk, kept turning it up to eighty or so. Then she’d open my brother’s door—quietly—and hiss at him to leave the thermostat alone and go to sleep already. Scott would remonstrate after a fashion. This would go on for maybe five minutes; then my mother would return to her room. Moments later Scott would turn up the thermostat again, the vents would roar, and my mother would pad lightly through the living room again.

  At one point I distinctly heard my brother say, “You touch that thermostat again I’m gonna fuckin kill you.”

  The tension must have overwhelmed me, because I fell asleep after that. My mother woke me in the morning. She was kneeling beside the couch.

  “Now that his car’s gone he’ll never leave!” she said in a gaspy hysterical whisper. “You have to tell him to go! You have to get him out of here!”

  I was struck by the contrast between her mad tenacity the night before—her refusal to relinquish the thermostat prerogative—and her utter helplessness now. She was done in. She was like the proverbial frog in the skillet that doesn’t jump because the heat is turned up slowly, slowly, until the frog dies.

  “So what finally happened with the thermostat?” I asked.

  She shot an anxious glance over her shoulder. Beckoned me into the hall. Scott’s door was slightly ajar. She pushed it aside—a chilly whiff of bourbon and body odor ensued—and there was Scott, naked, in a shivering fetal lump beside a floor vent. My mother had outlasted him re the thermostat, a Pyrrhic victory to be sure: he’d passed out before he could kill her. She closed the door and tugged me into the kitchen.

  “What am I gonna do?” she asked.

  I’d given this a lot of thought the night before, while I lay in the dark listening to the same argument (more or less: the thermostat was just the latest MacGuffin) they’d been having since Scott was thirteen or so. I reminded my mother that she was supposed to take me into town that day so I could rent a car and drive to Oklahoma City and see some friends; instead we’d go to the police station and arrange for Scott’s removal from the premises.


  My mother looked doubtful. “You mean have him arrested?”

  “Well, if that’s what it takes, sure.”

  “No, sweetie.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that. It’s Christmas.”

  “He threatened to kill you last night! He will kill you.” Her head was still wagging faintly, so I slung my bolt. “Think of your cats.”

  About an hour later I heard Scott stirring and caught a glimpse of him as he slipped out the door and hurried into the bathroom. His face was set with a kind of petulant dignity; he was no longer naked. Rather he wore one of the ankle-length Wee Willie Winkie nightshirts he’d affected ever since his teen years—the bedtime equivalent of his trench coats and caps. He took a long shower, rushed back to his room with eyes averted (petulantly), and finally emerged wearing a respectable sweater and slacks. He took his place behind my mother in the kitchen and waited to be noticed; my mother went on chopping onions. At last he spoke with a fussy little clearing of his throat:

  “I apologize for whatever inconvenience my behavior might have caused you last night. I suppose I was feeling, you know, distressed, given the fact that I’d lost the one possession that matters to me in the whole world, but I guess that’s no reason to, ah, to inflict my bad fortune on others. So I hope we can put this behind us and enjoy our Christmas.”

  The speech—nine parts self-pity and one part sarcastic contrition—was not apt to move even the softest heart to forgiveness, and my mother was not moved. I did notice, however, a slight flicker of guilt around her mouth, but she visibly toughened as she considered her cats.

  “What d’you want for breakfast?” she said in a neutral voice. Scott answered and seemed about to resume the speech, but my mother sighed in a let’s-just-forget-it sort of way, and Scott seemed glad enough to leave her. I received him in the manner of a bantering little bro’ in some suburban sitcom.

  “Hey, Slick! How’s the morning head?”

  Scott seemed relieved, if a bit warily so, and made some bantering reply. Somewhere in the midst of our bantering I noticed the poker peeking out from under the couch and pushed it out of sight with my foot.