Making Nice

by Matt Sumell

  On Woodlawn we passed the Catalanos’ brick-and-shingle colonial with the white picket fence. The upper left was Jamie’s room, I think, who in the second grade I developed a twenty-year crush on after my hamster Luigi bit her finger with his two long, too-yellow front teeth during a parent-arranged play-date gone bad, Jamie running home, never to return. After high school she vanished, only to reappear at my mother’s funeral a decade and some later, my mouth opening in slack-jawed awe at the surprise minutes before I gave a mean-spirited eulogy that I used as an opportunity to take jabs at not only my mother’s asshole family, but also god, fate, the universe, my brother’s friend Skip for some reason, the priest—who had just announced what a pleasure it was having gotten to know my family over the last month and got my sister’s name wrong in the same sentence, the funeral home, the well-meaning women who said lame things in an attempt to comfort us, the traffic on Sunrise Highway, blue cheese, Republicans, and Omar Minaya, then general manager of the New York Mets. Jamie was gone before I was finished.

  On the left was Tommy Decosta’s, who would eventually pull his police-issued pistol and point it at my face over a drunk misunderstanding on a humid summer night, and who, to my own surprise, I would walk directly toward, screaming.

  We passed the Scheiblers’ white single-story, the quiet couple who never had kids, and then the yellow house where the Gimmlers did and beat them until one day there were moving trucks outside and they were all gone forever.

  Lastly was the McMillans’, a family of right-winger lawn-care nuts I never liked much in the way a kid can not like someone but not know why until they’re older, and then I just felt bad about not liking them when, after the funeral, the Mrs. brought us trays and trays of lasagnas and zitis and casseroles, all of us drinking more than eating anyway.

  Then my brother and I were home.

  * * *

  Before heading inside we checked the bashed-in metal mailbox with no number because checking the bashed-in metal mailbox with no number for mail was exciting even though we never got any, then we walked around the house to the back door. When we reached it I didn’t go in, instead I turned and made for the garage. My brother followed for a ways, then stopped and—just before I rounded the far corner—yelled, “Look! I’m peeing hydrochloric acid!” Yeah-yeah, sure, I said. “No seriously! Look, it’s smoking!”

  The temperature had risen to just above freezing, and the icicles hanging from the garage roof had begun to melt and dripped a straight line of different-sized holes in the snow, and I hovered above them for a second, marveling at them like tiny crop circles. Then I kicked around with my boots till I found the Rheingold cans, picked one up and took my right glove off and pulled the tab. The first sip was slushy and bitter and I retched and spit. The second sip was the same, only I pinched my nose to kill the taste and kept it down.

  I looked toward the house, where through the window I could see my mother cooking dinner, the long twisty cord of the phone stretched across the kitchen as she wooden-spooned something around the hundred-plus-year-old iron pan she’d inherited, the same pan my father would eventually ruin with soap and steel wool, making my mother cry for the thousandth time. Most likely he’d be on the couch in front of the TV in the den—the same couch he’d sleep on for a year and a half after she died—his shirt pocket filled with pretzels he’d snuck in there, a half-completed crossword in his lap. My sister would for sure be upstairs in her room doing who knows what, daydreaming of Bon Jovi probably, and my brother would still be in the hallway, defrosting himself over the radiator, dripping snow while our overweight bulldog Roxy came up wiggling her whole body to greet him, grunting like a pig as she licked the puddles forming at his feet. They were all there and they were waiting for me, and we were going to have dinner together and tell one another stories from our great day.

  But for right then I was still fourteen and drinking my first and then second beer behind the garage, thrilled at this new feeling—a feeling not unlike the slippery happiness of being dragged along by something larger than me—as I watched the house and dreamed of my family inside it. And as if I’d conjured them, there they were in the bay window, all of them, gathering in the dining room for whatever my mother had cooked us for dinner. I watched them and drank, and just as everything was starting to feel soft and warm the wind gusted the snow sideways off the roof and the pine trees and the ground, whirling the world white.

  OK

  This is the one where I AmEx-ed my way from California to Ohio to see Fatlegs after she headfirsted her way into the world and forever ruined Tara’s vagina—that’s what my brother says anyway, and he would know, he’s seen it—me calling her Fatlegs cause she had fat legs and ’cause I’m not clever. When he put her in my arms for the first time I couldn’t help but be amazed at how little she was, and loud, and then I was disgusted when he told me the details of the delivery as he sipped his bottle of Budweiser, me in my head recalling that smart thing a smart person once said about birth: Between shit and piss we are born … but in Latin! “Yep,” I said to myself, then, “Yep, yep, yippeeeeeeeee,” as I pinched her fat legs and poked her tummy and touched her nose before handing her back to my brother and grabbing myself a beer, the first of many that trip, ’cause Fatlegs was something to celebrate and ’cause that visit was followed by another—which is what this is really all about—a four-day reconnaissance mission to 3 Woodlawn Avenue on Long Island to check how bad things had gotten with my father.

  Bad.

  I stood there wondering mostly about the toaster, unplugged and finger-smudged and tipped over on the old mail– and crumb-covered counter, both slots duct-taped shut for a reason or reasons I couldn’t figure. I gave up to consider the microwave, its once-white touch pad brown with index-finger grime, the handle a few shades darker, a wire coat hanger dangling from it, displaying a half dozen different rubber bands and a Looney Tunes necktie. It was his Christmas one, Bugs Bunny busting out of a gift box holding a candy-cane-colored carrot and looking that look he looks before he asks that thing he asks, and me in my head again answering that I have no idea what’s up, because I didn’t. It was ninety-something and humid, seven and some months since last December when we all got together at my sister’s place and ate pot cookies and drove through the car wash three times until Dad thought he was having a heart attack. We were headed to the hospital but got hamburgers instead.

  I put my bags down to scratch my itching ankles, the fleas pinging and ponging off them as I dirty-looked the three U.S. Postal baskets under the table on the filthy floor, the first filled with newspapers and crossword books, another with electrical cables and old batteries, the third with empty bottles of diet cola and cranberry juice. I worried about his urethra while getting hypnotized by the refrigerator-freezer, the only clean-looking thing around, now magnet-and-picture-less. I supposed he was trying to forget us, and I supposed I was there to remind him.

  But he was at work for another hour or so, so I double-timed it up the stairs and into the bathroom where I found Steve on top of the toilet tank, skinny and unmoving and staring into the corner at something only he could see, a yellowed flea collar too tight around his narrow neck. He was relatively new, a supposed-to-be-low-maintenance pet my brother rescued to keep our father company and help him along. I cat-called him like psssssswssswssssss, hi Steve, hey boy, then reached out to pet him but he got all puffed up and hissy and clawed the air near my hand like an asshole, so I called him an asshole and a fuckface and tried to pet him again, because now it was a thing between us, a competition, a cat-petting one. “I’m gonna fuckin’ pet you, dude,” I said. But this time he bolted off the tank and into the tub where he stood his ground, high-pitch-noising at me and shadowboxing the air whenever I got too close. “OK, you little jerk,” I said. Then I turned on the shower.

  Would anyone believe me if I said that didn’t work, that he didn’t leave? Because that’s what I’m saying: that didn’t work and he didn’t leave. He only flinched a lit
tle and blinked a lot at the offending water, and I was frightened by this wet thing looking at me all mad and drippy. I’d never seen a cat do anything like that before, and I tried to imagine what exactly has to happen to a cat to make it behave this way. I don’t know, and am disappointed in my brain’s failure to conjure anything except the memory of my father crawling around in his purple underwear the night my mother died, one-legged and drunk as hell as he made his sad and slow way across the floor to the bathroom.

  What my brain could do though was realize just how skinny Steve was now that he was wet, really skinny, and I prodded him with the business end of the toilet plunger to scoot him to the far end of the tub, then stripped down and climbed in with him, at the opposite end, to cool down and think, and the first thing I thought was how much I hated the second shower curtain.

  The reason there were two: some years back, like twelve years back, water started coming through the hallway ceiling below. My father put a second shower curtain against the wall and over the window as a stopgap, he said, until he could get the rotting wood windowsill replaced and the tub re-caulked. Only he never did. There was a great deal of infighting about it until he agreed to hire somebody, only he kept putting it off by not being around when the guy showed up.

  The guy finally got his chance some Sunday by dropping by unexpectedly after the ten o’clock at St. John’s the Episcopal, his entire family in tow. My father told me he looked out the window and saw three Mexican women and an unidentified dude eating corn while four kids took one-a-time turns jumping off the porch and throwing pinecones at a fifth. I was just happy to hear it was being fixed, only to discover on my next visit home it wasn’t. My father didn’t pay the guy to replace the caulking or the sill. He paid him to install a suspended ceiling under the damaged one in the hall, the foam-tile kind with the drop-down metal grid you see in dentists’ offices and commercial properties.

  “That way when the water leaks I can just replace the tiles,” is what he told us.

  The second shower curtain was a reminder of all that, and by default a reminder of all the other repair jobs he fucked up or sabotaged; the end table propped up with a tennis ball on a Snapple bottle, the vise grips for a sink hot-water handle, the boats he left to leaf litter and long winters. And it was this, the boats he neglected to winterize—leaving two to ice over and sink and another’s engine block to crack—that injured me more than anything. My happiest years were the ones I spent on those boats, dicking around the river with pals or zipping across the flat and glassy bay at five a.m. to surf the sandbar off Sunken Forest before the wind got on it, then foot-clamming for lunch. There were fishing trips and camping trips and rides up the river at night just for the hell of it, all of us young and tan and fit and figuring it out over beers we’d stolen from our parents’ garages and refrigerator crisper drawers. The rest was ahead of us.

  And standing there in the middle of The Rest—naked, flea-bitten, and motherless in a dirty shower in a dirty house getting dirty-looked at by a fucked-up cat—I blamed him. Or blamed him partly anyway. Some of this, I was sure of it, was his fault.

  After all it was all his, and he did with it as he pleased. But that was the thing—this didn’t please him. This was surrender. After Mom died he’d simply given up on most things. Still, it was never mine, so what right did I have to be angry?

  But I was, and it was the second shower curtain that reminded me that I was, and it was the second shower curtain that reminded me that whatever little I managed to accomplish here was going to come at great personal cost. It reminded me that this was going to be difficult.

  I pushed it aside to look through the shampoos on the rotting sill, grabbed a bottle of dandruff stuff, and squirted some onto Steve’s head who meowed but that’s all when I did so, then soaped myself up with it and little by little turned the hot water completely off until my dick got small and Steve started shivering. I stepped out refreshed and shook my way into my shorts and opted to air-dry outside, away from the fleas, where I found and pulled an unbroken plastic patio chair into the garage and sat there in the middle of boxes and bikes and boat parts, that outboard engine with the spider web for a gas cap, and listened to the neighbor’s sprinklers tick their afternoon semicircles around the lawn while I waited for my father to get home from work some forty minutes later. His car, a new Toyota hybrid, already had a magic-markered skull and crossbones on the front bumper and a zip tie holding something in place. He stepped out and groaned his way to standing, smaller and frailer than ever—his denim shirt two sizes too big and his loose pants belted and suspendered—and more ridiculous thanks to a new yellow-and-gray toupee on top of his head. I hugged him and told him he looked great, and he told me I looked grumpy and gay and asked what I was doing in the garage.

  “You got fleas, man. You need an exterminator in there,” I said, thumb-pointing at the house. There was a short back-and-forth about it that ended with him saying he’d just bomb ’em again.

  “With what?”

  “With a flea fogga,” he said.

  I tried to explain that that doesn’t work, obviously, and that if he did set one off we’d need to be gone for like five hours. He had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Because it’s poison, dude,” I said. “You can’t breathe that stuff.” My eyes ran zigzags over him as I waited for a response that never came, eventually settling on a speck of sauce on his shirt. Then I knew. “You have. You’ve been breathing that stuff.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It says on the can it’s fine.” Then he shook his head and started toward the house, more wobble in his walk than I remembered, stopping halfway across the patio and turning around. “I don’t want anyone in the house…”

  “And why’s that?” I said.

  “’Cause then I gotta clean it.”

  “I’ll clean it,” I said. “Problem solved.”

  “No one goes in there!” he yelled, and stalked off toward the back door screaming at me to leave him alone and let him die already, a tactic I’ve been familiar with since junior high when me and my brother would go out for fast food with him Wednesday nights and listen to him bitch about our mother being a bitch. Still, his life now seemed so depressing I was starting to believe he actually did want to die, because I probably would, and I followed him into the kitchen and asked if he was still taking his antidepressants. He wasn’t, he said, because they made him tired.

  “You know dead is like being super tired forever, right?”

  “Dead is like being left alone forever,” he said.

  “OK, sure. But I’m your son and I love you and I’m not gonna leave you alone, and if you don’t hire a fuckin’ exterminator I’m gonna keep you on life support for a decade and invite people over to the house every day. Friends, enemies, the fuckin’ mailman … I’ll put up a sign in 7-Eleven that says, Hey, Everybody, come over. And when everybody comes over, you know what they’ll see? They’ll see a very clean house and another sign with the word asshole on it, with an arrow pointing to your fuckin’ face, and next to that I’ll hang a picture of your actual asshole—’cause I’ll be able to take one when you’re in your coma—and then we’ll all play a game of Photo Hunt that no one will win because they won’t see a fuckin’ difference you asshole.”

  “I don’t want strangers in here!”

  “I realize that,” I said, and watched him dig through his pockets and drop pennies into a margarine container filled with coins and old keys, the old keys bothering me in a way I have trouble articulating. Not then but weeks later I would tell this to my sister and wonder aloud if it’s possible to reverse-engineer locks for them, and Jackie would say I don’t know but art can be a version of that; the painstaking process of building highly complex mechanisms for otherwise useless keys from our pasts.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t nice. I’m trying really hard to be nice and help you out here, and I’m trying even harder to not punch your head off, but it’s difficult bec
ause I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing, you dumb dick.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he said, the opening of his victim monologue. “I can’t do anything right, everything’s my fault…”

  “Yes! It is! This is your mess. You made it. And now you have a granddaughter. Do you think AJ’s ever going to bring Fatlegs here to see you? ’Cause he won’t. ’Cause it’s disgusting and flea-infested ’cause you put a fuckin’ flea collar on Steve, and no one’s used those since 1987 so I’m pretty sure he’s retarded now. His brain’s broken, like yours. You need to get Frontline or Advantage or something.”

  He stuck his middle finger in my face and left it there and said, “Where do you get it?”

  I stuck my middle finger in his face and left it there and said, “A pet store.”

  “OK. Let’s go to a pet store.”

  “Great. Let’s go to a pet store.”

  “Great.”

  “Great.”

  And we dropped our middle fingers and went to a pet store but it wasn’t great, the whole there-and-back arguing over whether or not country music is for white people with patriotism problems, stopping only once and briefly to regard a curious piece of roadkill in the middle of Montauk Highway. The body of the bird—I assume it was a crow—was not there, most likely on the front grille of a car in someone’s driveway or dragged off by a raccoon or possum or some other urban scavenger, in any case, gone. One wing was all that remained, ripped from the bird on impact and sent spinning down to the concrete, where it lay glued to the ground by some yellowish-white tissue. With every eastbound car it flapped up, every westbound one down—up and down and up and down—and as I craned my neck to watch it go it seemed somehow alive, like it was trying to achieve lift. That or waving like a trained seal.

  My father was nineteen when he lost his leg in a motorcycle wreck in Charleston, South Carolina. That was his word, lost, as if it was something that could be found and recovered. Growing up I liked to imagine his disembodied leg on a beach somewhere, tanned toes wiggling in the sandy foam. I even went as far as to write it letters on occasion, the usual stuff, family updates and childhood triumphs—I hit the game winning double; I punched Brian Kalinski in the face between classes and got suspended; I fingered Marisa Muller in the bushes at Bay Road—each one stuffed in an envelope addressed LEG, Charleston, South Carolina, with proper postage but no return address. It had been about fifteen years, maybe more, but there in the car I considered writing it again to say hi.