“It’s art,” Louise said, firmly. She pulled her cigarettes and matches from her skirt pocket. When Louise held the lit match to the cigarette in her mouth, the flame quivered like a strobe light. Emery watched it, thought about strobe lights, thought about his mom, and decided that now was not the time to ask if he could have a strobe light in his room.
A passel of relatives showed up at the ranch on the final night of the family’s visit. Many of the men were similarly named, as if there were only four names in the world and each one had to make the name his own: Jimmy-Scott, Jimmy, Jim-Jim, James-Ray, Ray-Boy, Ray, and James. There were women who had names that Emery guessed were nicknames, none of them seeming to reference any given name: Sis, Lennie, Flossy, and Skipper. Anna claimed she remembered everyone. Portia remembered all the odd-named relatives from the last visit. Emery’s most acute memory was of the one aunt who was so fat Emery imagined her flesh layered like the wooden, colored stacking rings he’d had as an even smaller kid. Most of the relatives poked at or hugged the kids with genuine, enthusiastic affection of the sort Emery had expected from his grandparents.
On the basement floor of the house was a bar with two sets of double glass doors that opened up to a patio and a steep uphill of grass. This wasn’t a bar like neighbors and friends often had in the rumpus rooms of their California houses: a small stainless steel sink with a mini fridge tucked beside it; two or three barstools facing the mirror above the sink. This was a bar like the ones on TV where the sheriff hangs out with townspeople. Wood shavings were scattered across the flagstone floor. Neon beer signs hung over the glossed, wooden bar that ran long enough to hold ten stools. Three different beers poured from a tap, and there was a full glass-shelved wall of what looked like a hundred different liquors. The cash register sat at the end of the bar—Otto punched in random keys and let the drawer shoot out making a noise that sounded like coins hitting bells. Six high tables were arranged in two rows across the room. In the center of every table was a bowl of peanuts and a thick two-sided menu that listed drinks on one side and food on the other. There were no prices on the menu, but the bar’s name was written in bold black letters across the top: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. There was even a neon Open and Closed sign in the window with a small off/on switch by each word.
Louise laughed uproariously with all her cousins and aunts and uncles. It was clear that even though Billie and Otto hadn’t had much use for their spare child, the rest of the family adored her. Buzzy nursed a beer and wandered from group to group. He gave people healthy back slaps and seemed to puff up a bit, like a pigeon, as he listened to stories of rifles backfiring, a golf ball nailing a bird and knocking it dead and, then, The Stinkies.
A Stinky was what all the married, male relatives in Vermont called their girlfriends. Of course, everyone at the party insisted that they were content with their wives and they themselves didn’t have Stinkies. The Stinkies who were mentioned were always those of whoever was missing from the party. Portia and Anna remembered hearing about Stinkies five years earlier. Portia leaned into Emery’s ear and explained that the last time they were here everyone was talking about Jimmy-Don’s Stinky, as Jimmy-Don and his wife Vicky had been vacationing in South Carolina at the time. Jimmy-Don’s Stinky was mad, Otto had told the crowd, because Jimmy-Don didn’t take her to South Carolina instead of his wife. And now, here was Jimmy-Don, regaling the crowd with a story of absentee Uncle Linus’s Stinky. Anna and Portia moved in closer to hear. Jimmy-Don was on a stool at a table and the crowd was two-deep in a circle around him.
“This girl must be six feet tall,” Jimmy-Don said, raising his hand so it was even with the top of his own head. “She’s got hair down to her ass and fingernails like a fucking eagle—” The crowd laughed. “So Linus comes home the other day with fucking bloody zebra stripes on his back—” Jimmy-Don shouted so even people at the table beside him could hear. “And Sharon says, ‘Linus, what the hell happened to your back?’ He told her he’d been golfing, see?”
“He WAS golfing,” Uncle James shouted from another table. “He was with me, I swear!” James put a bulky arm around his wife and a roaring laughter ensued. Emery was fairly certain that Uncle James was making this up. But he wasn’t worried about that—he was trying to figure out how the bloody zebra stripes got on Linus’ back.
“Of course he was with you!” Jimmy-Don said. “So Sharon asks what happened, and what does the fucker say?”
“I was hit in the back with a rake!” someone shouted from the bar.
“I was fucking a sewer grate!” Otto yelled from behind the bar. Emery flinched at the F-word. These people cussed as much as his parents!
The laughter was so thick, Jimmy-Don had to pause before finishing. “He says, ‘You did that to me!’ ” Laughter rang out like a sonic boom. Jimmy-Don continued, “And Sharon says, ‘What do you mean I did that to you?’ Sharon with her stubby fingers, says this. So he says, ‘Last night, after all that goddamned scotch, you did this to me when we were making love—” The term making love threw the crowd into hysterics. Emery knew what it meant, but he had no idea why it was funny. “And, guess what?” Jimmy-Don waited until everyone had silenced enough to hear him. “She had had so much fucking scotch the night before she didn’t even know that Linus had fallen asleep on the sofa watching TV that night and had never even come to bed! And now she thinks she’s some kind of tiger between the sheets!”
Jimmy-Don’s last lines brought a rousing round of applause. Then Uncle Jim-Jim started up with another story about Linus’s Stinky.
Emery could see that there were two types of people in this side of his family: the ones who told the stories and the ones who laughed at the stories. No one had a normal conversation where you might tell someone how you were, or discuss what you had been doing. And they teased, too. They teased abundantly, the way his parents and Portia kissed him (Anna refused to touch him), teasing as an endless source of affection. Emery decided that if you got teased, or if they told you a story, it meant you were a part of the family. He was glad that two different people had told him stories: one about the guy at Aunt Sis’s office who died on the toilet, and one about Uncle James’s nipple getting rubbed off on an innertube when he was nine years old.
Food was brought out on great big serving platters that were set on top of the bar. A stack of paper plates and plastic forks and knives were at one end and everyone lined up and went down the bar, like a buffet, gathering up all they could pile on a plate without it dipping down heavy and wet in the middle. The line moved slowly as most people ordered a drink from Otto or Uncle James, who tended bar together. When the girls and Emery finally made it to the food, Emery found it strangely comforting to see that everything that was on the menu had been brought out: chicken wings, tater tots, green salad, three-bean salad, coleslaw, hot dogs, and barbeque potato chips. There was something about his grandmother, her stringiness and upright posture, her empty white kitchen, and the way she had patted his back when they first arrived, that made Emery believe she had nothing to do with feeding the crowd.
“Who made all this?” Emery asked Louise, when she stopped by the table where her three kids sat eating.
“Your aunts,” Louise said. “Billie will only cook for Otto and Otto doesn’t cook.”
“And our aunts happened to make everything that’s on the menu?” Emery asked.
“No!” Louise laughed. “They make the same greasy food for every party—so Otto had that printed on the menu knowing that no one would ever bring anything different.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun to feed them California food,” Portia said. “We could make them tacos or falafels.” The most popular fast food in Santa Barbara was from the falafel stand where people lined up to pay a dollar for a fried chick-pea patty in pita bread. Emery loved falafels.
“You hate falafels,” Anna said, to Portia.
“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to watch everyone eat them? They wouldn’t even know how to pick them up,” Portia
said.
“You’re so nasty,” Anna said. “This is our family. Why would you want to shock them with falafels?”
“Do you think Otto told everyone that you’re in dummy school?” Emery asked. Portia shrugged.
“Probably,” Anna said. “But that’s what she deserves for wanting to feed them falafels just to freak them out.”
“I just want to show them how different we are,” Portia said.
“I’m not different,” Anna said. “I’m exactly like them.” And Emery thought that she was sort of right. Anna was the one who never told anyone she was Jewish. And she didn’t like to be touched and often paid Emery a quarter to sit at least one cushion away from her on the couch. She knew the exact acreage of Fulton Ranch (5,476) and at least three times Emery heard her say that she wished Buzzy were a little more like Otto: outdoorsy, sporty, not a complainer. And she was planning to go to college in Vermont, as she thought the whole state suited her better than New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut, where Buzzy had suggested she go to college. Even the boys Anna talked about seemed to be more like Otto than Buzzy: Johnny Brownstein, who played baseball and was a waiter at the Charter House steak house; Kirk Nintzel, whom Anna told Emery he should grow up to be. Kirk was president of the Key Club, had been voted Luscious Lester, and had a football scholarship to USC. Surely neither of those guys would go to the falafel stand.
The party had thinned out and calmed. A few people, including Buzzy and Louise, had gone out in the rowboats. In what Emery thought was one of the coolest things he’d ever seen, Uncle Ray-Boy had tried to do a wheelie on the lawn mower and flipped it, rolling down the hill toward the lake. Uncle Ray-Boy and the lawnmower both survived.
Anna and Portia were standing at an empty bar table eating peanuts. Emery was hovering nearby, hiding himself from Otto, who had publically called him Sissy Boy at least three times in the last hour. Emery thought that if only his grandfather could see the singing and dancing extravaganza of the Corny Kids Variety Show, he’d never call Emery a sissy again.
Otto was behind the bar. Uncle Jimmy-Don was holding court at a bar table nearby. In a moment of silence Otto lifted his scotch glass and shouted out across the room, “Jimmy-Don, did you see the tits on these girls?”
Portia looked from Emery, who was staring at her with his mouth in a hard O, to her grandfather, to her uncle. Anna turned away, as if she were examining the horizon out the glass door. Jimmy-Don lifted his drink and winked toward Anna and Portia.
“Can you believe the tits on these girls, Jimmy-Don!” Otto shouted, louder.
Jimmy-Don laughed. “Yeah, Otto, you got some pretty granddaughters with mighty big tits.”
Then Otto looked at Anna and Portia, pointed at them with his drink, and asked, “Do all the girls in California have tits like that?”
“Uh . . .” Anna said. Emery had never seen his sisters like this: silenced as if they’d had thick blankets thrown over their heads, their bodies as stiff and still as if they’d been left in a snowstorm while sleeping in the back of a convertible.
Emery put his hand on Portia’s leg and leaned out to face Otto. “Hey Otto!” he shouted. Everyone looked at him. “YOU’RE A FUCKER!”
Emery grabbed Portia’s hand, Portia grabbed Anna’s hand, and the three of them ran out of the bar and up the hill screaming with laughter. When they could no longer hear the roaring hysterics from the bar, they dropped hands and collapsed onto the grass looking down at the bar. Emery lay back and kicked his feet in the air. He was laughing so hard that he was losing sound. Every time Anna and Portia looked at him, they laughed harder. It was a spiraling laugh-chain that didn’t let up for minutes. Eventually they had to look away from each other so they could turn the laugh-motor off long enough to return to the party.
By the time the kids got back to the bar, most people had left and their parents had returned from the lake. Louise smiled when her children walked in. Buzzy looked up from the bowl of peanuts he was hunched over and grinned. Otto wasn’t around but Billie was washing glasses behind the bar.
“I hear you called your grandfather a fucker,” Buzzy said.
Emery looked over at Billie and saw that she was smiling. Her smile warmed him like drinking cocoa did—he could feel it in his belly, feel things changing inside him.
“Yeah.” Emery sidled next to Buzzy, who rubbed his hair and kissed him on the top of his head. Louise beamed down at Emery.
Emery had never before felt so proud.
The next day, as they were driving to Maine to visit Louise’s best friend from college, Portia retold the story of Emery’s calling Otto a fucker. Emery laughed so hard his eyes closed up into little slits of eyelashes. He loved hearing the story as if it were an episode of a TV show—he loved seeing himself as the mighty, brave, and fierce character Portia created.
“Tell it again,” Emery said, when he had finally stopped laughing.
“Don’t you dare tell it again,” Anna said. In spite of her joy at the moment of Emery’s rebellion, she seemed to be sticking to her fantasy of Otto as the guy Buzzy should try to be.
“Well, what if I only tell the part about Otto telling everyone to look at our tits?”
“Don’t say that word!” Anna said.
“You sound like your brother now!” Louise said.
“Tits is not such a bad word,” Buzzy said. “You just don’t want to hear it coming out of your grandfather’s mouth.”
“Tits!” Emery said, laughing. Now that the language hatch had been opened, Emery was flinging bad words hither and yon. He was batting them around like crumpled paper balls. Yes, indeed, it felt good to act out, to break free from the restraints of public order.
“Well, at least he didn’t call them oranges,” Louise said.
“Do we have to keep talking about this?” Anna asked.
“What do you mean, ‘oranges’?” Portia asked. Emery scooted up from the center of the seat so his head was leaning into the front seat between Buzzy and Louise.
“When I started puberty, Otto kept a running track of my breast size and that’s all he ever said to me. ‘Ach, you got little grapes there, Louise!’ Then, ‘Ach, look at her strawberries popping out!’ Then, ‘Ach, the girl’s got plums in her shirt!’ ”
“Wait!” Portia said. “Don’t tell me the next one, let me guess . . . nectarines?”
“Gross. Will you shut up?” Anna asked.
“I love nectarines,” Emery said.
“No, we didn’t eat nectarines,” Louise said. “I think it went from plums to oranges and then it was oranges until I left for college.” Louise laughed.
“I think Anna’s are more grapefruits than oranges,” Portia said. Emery turned around and looked at his sister.
“You people are sick.” Anna turned toward the window, her back to the family.
“We’re not sick,” Emery said. “We’re funny.”
“No, you’re sick!” Anna turned to Emery with wet eyes. “Sickness runs in this family, like freckles and wide feet. None of this is funny. It’s plain, pathetic sick.”
“Fucking sick,” Emery said, with a sly smile. And everyone but Anna, of course, laughed.
Chapter 9
Day Five
They have been watching cartoons for at least an hour every night after dinner. Emery is a television producer; before he flew home for the heart attack, he was developing a new cartoon series. He is searching for animators, so he watches the most popular shows to see what works. Everyone watches with him. They are so compelled that they don’t talk unless the commercials are running. Emery has seen all the shows many times; he has a television in his office that has been tuned to cartoons for the past six months. When a cartoon starts, he sings along with the opening song. Often, when Emery is watching cartoons, he imagines himself sitting with his and Alejandro’s kid. He doesn’t care if they have a boy or a girl; he just wants a kid with a sense of humor. A kid who can appreciate a good cartoon. And a kid who will love roller coasters
. He and Alejandro both still love roller coasters; it was one of the first things they talked about when they met.
It is the evening of Day Five. Emery has promised Alejandro that he will ask his sisters for the eggs tonight. He imagines tossing confetti in the air as he throws out the question.
“Alejandro!” Emery calls toward the kitchen. “Will you come in here?”
By the time Alejandro joins them in the TV room, the show is back on. Emery will ask his sisters during a commercial.
They are watching Pickle Man-Boy. The animation alone makes them laugh: one guy has a nose hanging down like a penis in the middle of his face. Alejandro, who is sitting between Anna and Portia, allows Lefty, the cat, to crawl across his shoulders, but the cat continually runs his tail across Alejandro’s eyes, and he is trying to watch the show. Emery picks up the cat and settles with him on the floor beside the big cushioned chair where Buzzy sits. The dogs have joined the group, too. They lie on the floor between the chintz couch and the oak blanket box that serves as a coffee table. Like a litter of puppies, everyone is huddled, it seems, into the smallest possible area.
“I don’t get this,” Buzzy says during a commercial. “Is he a pickle?”
“It’s Pickle Man-Boy,” Emery says. “He’s a cucumber who lives in a saltwater pond.” Emery’s stomach bumps around as he prepares to ask the question. In order to give eggs, one of his sisters will have to take shots that will at first put her in menopause, followed by other shots that will cause hyperovulation. It’s uncomfortable, there are some health risks, and it fucks up the balance of your hormones for a couple of months. Emery imagines it’s like sitting on a teeter-totter, a flying/falling sensation that lasts for weeks.
“So is he pickled yet?” Buzzy asks.
“He’s Pickle MAN-BOY,” Anna says. She has always had little tolerance for questions. As a kid, Emery would save up his questions until Portia got home from school.
Drinking Closer to Home Page 11