Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  Her family was just a tad different than mine. To begin with, they were from the South. Well, they lived on the border of Kentucky and Ohio, so officially that’s not really the southern United States. It’s more like southern hell. The Johnsons exhibited none of the repressed neuroses, disappointment, and sense of unfulfilled expectations that dominated the Heller household. They had slightly lower expectations for their lives. Medical school was not an option, for instance; their hopes for the future were more along the lines of not marrying an actual first cousin. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. To be fair, those were my expectations, partly due to my own prejudice, having read the book and seen the movie To Kill a Mockingbird a total of at least thirty times, as well as having obsessed about the woman who washes the car in Cool Hand Luke since I was able to operate a videotape player and make the direct connection between her and my erection. But it was undeniably true that Anna’s family’s personal interactions were played out on a stage that had very little in common with mine. Or with Anna. Anna wasn’t just the only member of her family to leave the fold, she was the first one to move farther than a mile away from her parents’ house. One of her sisters—she had three as well as three brothers—had briefly fled to a college nearly three hours away but had been whisked back home very quickly after it was discovered that her female born-again roommate was actually a black male coke dealer.

  Anna was the oldest of the seven children. Next in line—I was forced to memorize everyone’s name and age before we made the trip—was Horace, who hadn’t gone to college or done anything else, as near as I could tell. At age twenty-six, he still lived at home, and his life seemed to revolve around beer, guns (or deadly weapons of any kind—if it were possible to keep hydrogen bombs under his bed, there’s no question that he would have stashed them away for the Armageddon he knew was coming), cars, and God, in that exact order.

  “How is this possible?” I asked Anna soon after we arrived. I’d just been exposed to Horace for the first time; he’d asked me if I wanted to go to the dump with him to shoot refrigerators. I checked with Anna to make sure that “refrigerator” wasn’t a code word for “Jew,” and she assured me it wasn’t. Horace simply liked to spend his afternoons at the dump, firing away at old freezers to watch what happened when the Freon exploded. And believe me on this, what happened was the same exact thing every time: It exploded. Despite Anna’s insistence that I’d be safe, I took a pass.

  Next in line was Emily, twenty-four. She was married to a CPA who worshipped Ronald Reagan, even though he’d been born after Reagan had seen his last day in the Oval Office. The CPA’s name was Roger, and as near as I could tell, the only thing Emily worshipped was Roger’s money, of which there was quite a bit. She also clearly had a fondness for turtles—or, rather, turtle replicas—because her entire split-level house was filled with porcelain turtles, oil paintings of turtles, and fluffy turtle pillows.

  Rhonda, twenty-two, was the sister who had escaped briefly before being reeled back in. She lived at home, in a small room over the garage. She didn’t have a job yet, and her defining characteristic was that she was bored: with her family, with any form of current event, with any type of discussion, and, I suppose, with life. Her only form of exercise seemed to be rolling her eyes to indicate how bored she was, as if no one could have picked up on that fact without her help.

  We were visiting because Anna had decided it was time. But the catalyst for the trip was her brother Dean, the next sibling in line. Ostensibly, we were there for his wedding. Dean was nineteen, and Leonica, his bride, was a thirty-four-year-old dentist’s receptionist from Ohio. They had met three months earlier when Dean went on a bender and one evening broke into the dentist’s office to try to steal the nitrous oxide dispenser. Leonica was working late, called the police, and had him arrested. He couldn’t afford bail and was so broke when he got out of jail, ten days later, that he went back to the dentist’s office to see if Leonica could loan him some money. She refused, but since he couldn’t afford to stay anyplace that had an actual roof, she took him in. One thing led to another—although I made a point of never asking what any of those things actually were—and now we were at the wedding, along with Leonica’s twin fourteen-year-old children and her just-released-from-rehab mother.

  Lawrence was sixteen and in high school. His main claim to fame, according to family chatter, was that he was a fantastic football player who, if life were fair, would be getting a college scholarship and a shot at a pro career. Except for one small detail: The life-not-being-fair part was that Lawrence stood five feet four inches tall. He was tough as nails but had a much better shot at riding a Kentucky Derby winner than running for a touchdown in the Sugar Bowl. As a result, he had a perpetual hangdog look. I would have expected him to be angry or bitter or on the road to early alcoholism. Instead, he just seemed resigned to a deep understanding that before his life had begun, his dream was already over.

  Deirdre, the last-born sibling, was fourteen years of age, pretty as a picture, and full of life. She had Anna’s genes. She was smart and ambitious and liked to talk about books and movies and whatever anyone else wanted to discuss. She was desperate to come see New York, and she was already talking about going to a college where she could spend her junior year in France so she could learn French and experience Paris. But she was also already being smothered by her parents. If she offered an opinion, her mother would almost immediately point out that she didn’t have any idea what she was talking about; how could she, since she was so young and not that smart? If she asked her father a question, he would answer in one or two words and then return to whatever world he inhabited inside his own head. The big question was whether Deirdre could escape her parents’ clutches and become a full-fledged human being. It would unquestionably be a fight to the death, and after that weekend I gave her a fifty-fifty chance.

  How can I put this delicately? Well, if you put every member of Anna’s family together, they were like a super-fucked-up, real-life version of the family in Everybody Loves Raymond. Except without the sense of humor. That’s about as delicate as I can be.

  * * *

  Anna and I had been married for four years by then, so I’d known her for five, and this was my first exposure of any kind to her clan. It was also the first time Anna had seen them since the day she’d gone away to Brown, in Rhode Island.

  She’d left home at eighteen, so it had now been a decade since she’d run. In those ten years, she’d lost any trace of a regional accent, become about as well educated as a person could be (ask her anything, on any subject, from astronomy to Zaire, and she could spout explanations, analysis, and history without blinking an eye), launched a career as a successful interior designer, developed an almost eerie natural sophistication (even in her early twenties she’d had a great palate for food and wine and a natural fashion sense that often turned strangers’ heads on the street), and come to exude an even eerier sense of calm and self-confidence. On the surface, she was the perfect example of how to escape one’s family’s tentacles without being scarred for life. Seeing those tentacles up close and feeling them wrap around me for a mere forty-eight hours, I was awed by her accomplishment. And staggered by her apparent lack of anxiety about stepping back into their clutches.

  If Anna felt anything about her family, it was guilt over deserting her youngest siblings; she knew she had left them to her father’s disinterest and her mother’s voraciousness and thus, she felt, to their doom. So after keeping Dean’s wedding invitation to herself for over a week, she’d mentioned it right after our impromptu chat about potential Heller-Johnson offspring. In the days leading up to our trip, I didn’t see one twitch or hear one stutter. But by then she’d begun peeling away some of the layers of her past, and I knew she could not be as untouched by the experience as she seemed. I decided to make it my job to find the tender spots.

  Within days, she became seriously annoyed by my frequent expressions of admiration for her nonneurotic behavior and my si
multaneous insistence on poking and probing to get to the bottom of it. In keeping with my chosen profession, I was indeed a poker and prober. I believed in preventive medicine. My need to find out what caused cats to develop progressive retinal atrophy and make them less inclined to go outdoors at night was no different than my insistence on discovering how in hell my lovely wife could stand to be in the same room as Ruby, her terrifying mother.

  I asked Anna this question after her mother—five foot five; late forties (she’d had Anna when she was almost a baby herself); thick, black hair that was vaguely Medusa-like; large, surprisingly firm breasts; a scary, gummy smile that revealed protruding teeth and a nasty heart—asked me to get some cooking oil off a high shelf in her pantry the morning of the wedding. As I stretched up to grab the bottle, Ruby crushed her body against mine, grabbed my testicles with one hand and my ass with the other, and asked if I found her attractive. I suppose I didn’t handle this as well as I might have. I yelped in terror and waved my hands as if I’d been stung by a five-foot-five-inch bee, managing to knock at least half the cans and bottles off the pantry shelves. The clamor was about a 6.4 on the Richter scale.

  I did my best to stroll casually back to the living room and then tell Anna what had happened, although I don’t think I needed to. The look on her face showed me I hadn’t reported anything surprising.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” I asked.

  “My mother is a deeply disturbed woman.”

  “Her nails left indentations in my balls!”

  “She’s mentally ill. I mean really, seriously, mentally ill.”

  “More details, please.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “I know. But tell me anyway. This is one of those key marital compromises. Your refusal to talk running smack up against my insatiable desire to hear. It’s like one of those immovable objects meeting an irresistible force—”

  “I get it,” she said. “I get it.”

  I stayed silent, refusing to back down. She let out an exasperated sigh—although I also sensed some vague relief under the annoyance—and we went outside to sit in her parents’ backyard. The wedding party was being held at their house, which resembled an early 1960s bomb shelter. I half-expected Bay of Pigs headlines to be plastered all over the bathroom walls. And yes, I know I sound like one, but I’m really not a snob. Well, okay, I am a snob—but only in the good sense, meaning I couldn’t care less about class or money or race or religion. I do care about taste and quality and thoughtfulness and compassion. The house where Anna grew up and the family from which she’d escaped had none of those things. The home in which she was raised made Graceland look like the Morgan Library, and the most thoughtful thing I heard all weekend was that “Jews are funny” (although it wasn’t too thoughtful because I’m pretty sure the speaker, Dean’s lovely new bride, was referring to Whoopi Goldberg). As we sat in the untended yard, I wondered how a simple, small patch of land could look shabby and lifeless, but this one did; the evening’s shadows provided a welcome dab of contour and life. And after just a brief glimpse of the forces that had done their best to shape her, I also wondered how Anna could so definitively be the embodiment of all the things I admired and cherished in life.

  We sat in silence for a while, a silence that I thought was comfortable. It was broken when Anna began to quietly cry. Chalk up another point to my lack of sensitivity when it came to human connections.

  “Hey,” I said. “This isn’t a crying conversation. There’s nothing bad. I just want to know more about you, now that I see the monsters in real life flesh and blood.”

  “I know,” she said. “This is embarrassing.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s normal. Well, okay, it’s not totally normal. But I think it’s probably not as weird as you think it is.”

  “It’s just so depressing,” Anna said. “The way they live. The way they think. The things they care about. The things they don’t care about. Their friends. Oh my god, their friends. Did you meet my dad’s friend who owns the diaper delivery service? We talked about stains for half an hour.”

  “Was Horace always this into weaponry?”

  “What? Yeah, I guess so.”

  “He told me he didn’t know how I could live in New York.”

  “How come?”

  “Because we’re not allowed to have automatic weapons. We’re not even allowed to have semiautomatics.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him it was hard, but that we muddled through.”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  “Nothing. I think he thought ‘muddled’ was Yiddish or something, so he didn’t feel he had to respond.”

  “You’re not exactly helping the situation, you know. This isn’t making me feel a lot better.”

  “It shouldn’t depress you, Anna. You got out.”

  “I know. But you never get completely out.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She shook her head. “No. Some of it stays with you. In you.”

  “No, it doesn’t. At least it doesn’t have to. They’re not you. They’re not even a real part of you. They’re part of your past, that’s all.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You just think that somehow there’s a chance you’ll have to come back. That’s what’s depressing you. But you won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that would be bad. And I’d never let anything bad happen to you.” I knew she’d openly ridicule this grandiose statement, so I immediately followed it up with: “And the only way you’d ever wind up back here is if you came with me, because we’re together forever, so you couldn’t come without me, and there’s no fucking way I’d ever come here again, except for a quick stop at that breakfast place that had fried pancakes.”

  She reached for my hand, and I let her take it.

  “Although now that I think about it,” I said, “your mom is actually pretty attractive.”

  She smiled for a fleeting second, then took an affectionate swing at my arm. “You know what my first memory is?”

  I shook my head.

  “My mother, telling me how sick she was and that it was my fault.”

  “How old were you?”

  Anna shrugged. “I don’t know. Three. Four. Five. She used to pull me into a room so no one else could hear and she’d talk to me, her tone nice and kind of sweet, and she’d say stuff like ‘I’ve been sick ever since I gave birth to you’ and ‘Your father cheats on me. I’d leave him but I could never get another man because of you. Who’d marry me knowing that you’d have to come along with me?’ That’s what she did to me. To my brothers, she used to say things like ‘You have to choose who you love more, me or your father.’ They’d start crying and she’d say, ‘Well, you better choose me ’cause when he leaves us, he’s not gonna want you.’”

  “What’d she do to your sisters?”

  “Nothing. Well … not much. Emily was like a doll. She used to dress her up in these beautiful clothes, and comb her hair all day long, and tell her how lovely she was. She used to say things like ‘You’re more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe. You’re going to marry a prince, maybe even a king.’ I swear to god. I don’t know about Deirdre. She was so little when I left, four or five. My guess is she’s spent the last ten years telling Dee that she’s not smart enough to leave home, and that if she ever does, strangers will do horrible things to her.”

  “Jesus. What the hell was your father doing the whole time?”

  “Tuning out. Disappearing. He basically didn’t want anything to do with us. He’d shtup her every so often and she’d get pregnant, and I guess somehow that got him off the hook. Once the next kid arrived, he’d just kind of disappear again. Not disappear disappear. He’d be here. But he was off somewhere in his head. He didn’t want to know about any problems. He just wanted to be left alone.”

  “I don’t know if this is the time to bring this up, b
ut it gets me really hot when you say things like shtup.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Oy gevalt.”

  “What?”

  “Does that get you hot, too?”

  I half-nodded, half-shrugged. “So-so. Not as much as shtup.”

  “How about ‘gefilte fish’?”

  “No. Whatever the opposite of hot is, that’s what ‘gefilte fish’ does for me. You want flaccid, start talking ‘gefilte fish’ and ‘knish.’”

  “Mishpocheh?”

  “Oh my god, yes. I don’t even know what it means, but hearing you say it definitely gets me hot. How do you know Mishpocheh?”

  “I know many things, my child.” She smiled. “Mishpocheh. Vey iz mir. Tsuris. Are you totally turned on?”

  “Major boner,” I assured her. “But I feel really guilty about it.”

  I leaned over and kissed her, and the kiss turned into a long one. Anna slowly guided me down to the grass, and somehow I ended up on top of her. It was sexy, but actually it was more comforting than sexy. It was almost like we were teenagers, making out on her parents’ lawn. For a moment I thought we were going to make love right there in some strange defiance of all the craziness inside the house. It was tempting, but we were married people. If we wanted to, we could just get up, go to our motel room half a mile away, and screw our brains out. We didn’t have to define ourselves by our defiance of her family, but for those twenty minutes or so, it was more erotic to act as if we did.

  And it was also sexier to talk than to make love right then. It was perhaps the most intimate moment we’d ever spent.

  “By the time I was ten, my mom was always sick,” Anna said quietly. “Every single day, I’d have to fix the other kids’ lunches and diaper the baby ’cause she was too sick to move.”