I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

by Diana Joseph

  I’ve been on the phone with him for three hours; hanging up is still another hour away. When I tell him, “Travis, you are disgusting,” he sings in a high-pitched voice, “Kinky sex freaks,” then in his regular voice he says he wishes he knew a nice girl, he asks me do I know any nice girls, do I know any nice girls I could introduce him to, any nice girls he could meet?

  Sufficiently Suffonsified

  When I went to Detroit to visit Al’s family, I got a glimpse into what he and I might become, what our future might look like. In it, Al dozes in his La-Z-Boy while I watch made-for-TV movies from mine: I’m especially partial to ones where Melissa Gilbert or Valerie Bertinelli plays a woman who’s been victimized by the patriarchy and how she overcomes that oppression. During commercials, Al snores, and I check out the home shopping on QVC, maybe catch Joan Rivers hawking her line of baubles. When Al wakes up, we chain-smoke, express skepticism about the severity of the other’s back pain, and call up family members to ask how much they pay for goods and services like milk and gasoline and long distance.

  In short, we become my in-laws.

  I didn’t want to go to Detroit.

  Al’s eighty-one-year-old father, Lucky, and seventy-six-year-old stepmother, Karleen, live in a suburb on the east side. Because Al doesn’t seem to understand that the secret to the family visit is staying in a hotel, they provide our accommodations. Their guest room is Al’s childhood bedroom, the place where, according to Al, the magic began.

  It’s fine with me that he wants to visit his folks. I never try to stop him. In his absence, I can keep myself entertained: there are puppet show/craft activities at the public library, for example, and regularly scheduled free lessons on how to tie woolly boogers and sow bugs at Check Your Fly, and the ongoing seventy-five-percent-off sale at the local porn store.

  The first time I ever met Al’s dad was just a day or two after the old man’s heart surgery. Lucky was still in the hospital, recovering, fragile, and pale, when he asked Al to bring him a hand mirror, a hairbrush, and a large chocolate shake from McDonald’s. Vain and sweet-toothed, Lucky was my kind of guy, and later that day, Karleen, his wife, gave me two Xanax, which in my book made her A-okay.

  Lucky had been home from the hospital for less than an hour when he asked if Al and I would do him a favor. The man had survived some intense medical stuff; we were happy to accommodate him. “Anything!” we said.

  He wanted us to buy toilet paper. He was particular about what he wanted—Charmin Plus with Lotion, a twelve-pack—and he was clear about where we were to make this purchase: “I want you to go to the Kmart on Gratiot.”

  There were already three twelve-packs of Charmin Plus with Lotion in the linen closet, and though Al and I agreed that nine rolls for each of us ought to be plenty, we didn’t see anything wrong with humoring him.

  But when I suggested we walk to the little mom-and-pop grocery down the street instead of driving several miles to Kmart, Al said no. He said they probably didn’t carry Charmin Plus with Lotion. When I said we could see if they did, he said why bother, it would be cheaper at Kmart. When I offered to cough up the difference, saying it couldn’t be that much more, and even if it amounted to twenty dollars, I’d be happy to pay it as a way to avoid going to Kmart, Al said thank you, but that would not be necessary.

  “The toilet paper will be purchased at Kmart,” he said. “It’s what my father wants.”

  Such inflexibility from the guy who once went out for a loaf of bread and came home with a two-thousand-dollar acoustic-electric guitar was hard to understand. I asked how would his father know whether we bought the toilet paper at Kmart or Wal-Mart, Target or Meijer. If we heisted a twelve-pack of Charmin Plus with Lotion from a shipment en route to South America or won it in a game of dice from some back-alley pusher, really, how would the old man possibly know, and even if he did discover the truth, so what? It’s not like he could ground us. It’s not like he could take away our phone privileges or deny us the keys to the car for a month.

  Al looked at me sadly. “You were real wild as a teenager, weren’t you?” he said. “I bet you told a lot of lies.” He decided to go to Kmart without me. Like it was a punishment.

  Still, I understood where Al was coming from. Going home means regressing to the boy whose job is to take out the trash or the girl who sets the table. No matter how old you are, home is the place where the grown-ups still get to decide what’s on TV and when it’s lights-out. If they let you borrow the car, they want to know where are you going, when will you be back. Going home means going back in time. It’s not a trip you care to take alone, and anyway, isn’t that the main reason to take a mate? So you have an ally in the civil war against your parents?

  Out-of-town visitors do not justify a deviation from my in-laws’ routine. The last time we were there, Al and I put our suitcase in the guest room, we sat down on the bumpy couch, we watched a movie starring either Melissa Gilbert or Valerie Bertinelli on Lifetime Television. Al’s stepmother immediately returned to the topic she discussed at length the last time I was there: everything she hates about Al’s father.

  “I just don’t know about that man!” Karleen said. She was wearing a pink velour tunic top with dragonflies embroidered around the collar. “I think there’s something wrong with him!” she said. She was talking about the amount of time Lucky spends in the bathroom, which, according to her, is a lot. “Guess what he’s doing in there!” she said.

  We said we couldn’t begin to.

  “Why, he’s primping! He’s combing his hair! Fixing it just so!” she said. “He’s worse than a woman!”

  Karleen also resented that Lucky falls asleep in his La-Z-Boy every night by eight o’clock. “It’s lonely!” she said. “I don’t have anybody to talk to.” She found it irritating that he’s always fussing, obsessively straightening, stacking, tidying, cleaning. Apparently, he scoured the enamel off the bathtub, scrubbed right down to the steel. “What’s wrong with him?” Karleen wanted to know. Then she announced she didn’t believe for a minute that Lucky’s hearing is as bad as he makes it out to be. “Trust me,” she said, “he can hear when he wants to.”

  Lucky was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, nodding like he could indeed hear what his wife had been saying about him, every word of it, and he was smiling like he agreed. “How much was your last electric bill, Allen?” he said, and when Al told him it was one hundred and twenty-nine dollars, Karleen shouted, “IT WAS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE DOLLARS!” and Lucky said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

  Lucky’s hearing loss began with a case of childhood measles, and over the years it’s gotten progressively worse. He’s now ninety percent deaf. About ten years ago, he signed up to learn lip-reading at a local community center, but he only went to a class or two before dropping out. He didn’t say why. Having a conversation with him over the telephone is next to impossible, so Al sometimes writes his father letters, but Lucky doesn’t answer them. It’s like playing catch with someone who won’t toss back the ball. When Al asked him did you get my letters, the old man said he did. Then he asked Al how much does he pay for a pound of hamburger.

  It always catches me by surprise just how much Al and his father are alike. If I want a sneak peek of Al at age eighty, all I have to do is take a look at his old man. Lucky’s ears are big and stick out. His glasses are big and round, his teeth are not his own. Though his appetite is gluttonous, he has always been a slender man. He hitches up his corduroy pants past his navel, then belts them so they stay there, high as if for a flood. He wears his shirts tucked in, his shoes in the house, navy blue cotton pajamas to bed. He’s four inches shorter than he used to be, but Lucky is still a handsome man, blue-eyed and smooth-skinned, proud of his hair, which is thick and full, silvery gray and parted on the right. On top, his hair swirls into two distinct finger waves, like silver surf on a moonlit beach, a stage prop on loan from The Lawrence Welk Show. In his hospital room, any time someone asked him how was he feeling, heart surgery is serious, was
he feeling okay, Lucky would apologize for his hair. “It probably looks just terrible,” he said. “I hate to think how it must look.”

  “The Silver Fox,” Karleen calls him. She rinses her own hair with Miss Clairol #20 Arctic Blonde. Lucky is her second husband; she is his second wife. Though they’ve been married for fifteen years, each plans to be buried next to his or her original spouse. Of her first husband, Karleen says, “He was a decent man and a hard worker. Unlike some people,” she adds, as if to suggest Lucky needs to put down the crack pipe, get off his duff, and hang some drywall, as if she’s forgotten there was an article in the newspaper about how Lucky is a decent man, how he found a purse in the street that contained several hundred dollars, and instead of tossing the purse and sliding the cash into his pocket, instead of thinking of it as free money, Lucky turned it over to the police.

  When I asked Al if he would have done the same, he said probably. But that’s also what he said when I asked him if he’d eat the dog if he was hungry and there was nothing else he could eat, and when I asked him if I died before he did, would he ever have sex again.

  Probably.

  But Lucky doesn’t live in a world of probably. Lucky is all about definitely. You turn in a purse full of money because it’s the right thing to do. You remain married to a woman who berates you, you pay your debt. You don’t look back. You don’t talk about the infant daughter who died, or that you didn’t appreciate your first wife until after she was dead; you don’t mention the grandson who died; you don’t talk about the job you didn’t take or the chance you didn’t take, or any of the ways your life might have been different, better, bigger. Because what good does it do to talk about it?

  What Lucky wants is simple: a glass of milk with his supper, and after supper, he wants a cup of decaf and a piece of pie; and after that, he wants a cigarette. Lucky wants a bowl of ice cream while he’s watching television. He wants for people to be happy, and for people to be nice, and for people to get along. Everyone but Karleen thinks he’s a sweet old guy.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. “Uh-huh.”

  The reason he doesn’t like to talk about the past probably has something to do with how messy it is, how it’s something he can’t disinfect or straighten up or rearrange. A retired school janitor, Lucky wants structure and order and routine. The custodian’s closets and storage rooms at his school were immaculate; he keeps his house just as tidy. No dust, no clutter, nothing out of place.

  “I just can’t stand the mess,” he says, and his son is the same way. Last Christmas morning, I woke up early to the noise of Al running the vacuum cleaner, Al squeaking the mop across the kitchen floor, Al wearing rubber gloves and scouring the sink. Oh my God, I’d said. What is wrong with you? It’s Christmas. Don’t start with the cleaning.

  Karleen patted my hand. “Oh, honey,” she said. “It will only get worse!” She lit up a Virginia Slim 100. With smoke swirling around her face, she looked wise. She also looked pleased, like she was glad to be delivering the bad news. It meant she wasn’t alone. “Just you wait!” she said. Then she described for me my future. It included doilies under the milk jug in the refrigerator and Al hovering outside the bathroom door, wearing a pair of rubber gloves and waiting for me to finish up my business so he could rush in there with a bottle of pine-scented Lysol.

  “If the son is anything like the father,” she said, “your life is not going to be easy.”

  Karleen and I looked at Lucky, asleep in his La-Z-Boy, and in his face, there is Al’s: the rectangular shape, the wide forehead, the blunt chin. Father and son look so much alike, except the son weighs about twenty pounds more. When Al returned to the living room with a piece of pie, Lucky, who hadn’t said much since his inquiry into the price of laundry detergent, said, “My goodness, Allen, you sure are fat. Why are you so fat? I’ve never seen you this fat.”

  After the Melissa Gilbert / Valerie Bertinelli movie, Karleen changed the channel to QVC. The merchandise that can be purchased on that station—the Diamonique tennis bracelets and mock-neck jackets with the metallic-bead detail, the pink palace chandelier earrings (designed by Joan Rivers) and the vanilla-scented battery-operated candles—never fails to amaze me. For a certain segment of the population, QVC is a lot like porn: the soft lights, the hyped-up enthusiasm, the I-got-to-get-me-some-of-that response it provokes in the viewer. Lucky and Karleen watch a lot of QVC.

  But one of them doesn’t stop with watching.

  Karleen has herself a nasty little addiction to buying stuff she will never use. Everyone seems to know about it, but nobody talks about it, about how she ratcheted up forty thousand dollars on their Discover card because she can’t stop herself from dialing the toll-free number and buying whatever. An exercise bike. A wrought-iron umbrella stand. A vehicle snow kit with a heated ice scraper (it plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter), snow brush, and shovel. Her shopping addiction distresses Lucky: Last summer, he fretted silently and to himself about how on earth they’re ever going to pay their Discover card bill, until he ended up in the hospital with shingles—aggravated by stress, the doctor said—but he seems powerless to stop her, while she seems powerless to stop herself. When I suggested to Al that maybe she’s just trying to get his attention, maybe it is lonely when you have no one to talk to, maybe it’s incredibly irritating to open the refrigerator and find that your husband has placed a doily under the milk, he wanted to know was I empathizing with Karleen?

  Whose side was I on?

  While Karleen commented from her easy chair on whether or not she liked a particular product and why or why not, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do: I kissed ass. I smiled, I nodded, I agreed. Lucky, sitting in his easy chair, his feet up and his hands folded across his belly, snoozed.

  But Al sighed. Al stood up, he sat down, he looked around the room. Al looked at his hands, his feet, the space between his feet. He stared into space. When he straightened up a pile of newspaper that was already in a tidy pile, Karleen said, “Look at him. He’s like his father. He can’t sit still. He’s always got to be messing with something. There’s something wrong with both of them.”

  Al said he did not know what a goose-down pillow costs at a store in our town, but the price of the goose-down pillow QVC host Bob Bowersox was pushing seemed like a good deal, though the call-in testimonials seemed too gung-ho to be real. Al looked at his watch, he chewed on his thumbnail. Ten minutes went by, then twenty, then twenty more. Al stood, stretched, groaned, then he shuffled down the hall, first into our room, then toward the bathroom. I heard him brushing his teeth.

  On QVC, a blond former beauty queen prattled on about a velour tunic-and-pants set. This outfit came in five rich, gemlike colors (emerald, sapphire, amethyst, peridot, and ruby). You can wear it anywhere! she chipperly pointed out. How dressy, sassy, and comfy you would be in this outfit, and because of the rhinestones along the neckline and sleeves, how sparkly. It seemed like all of the tunics (V-neck, asymmetrical, crinkle georgette, stretch waffle, chiffon, bell-sleeved, long-sleeved, long-sleeved with side slits, long-sleeved pucker-knit raglan) were decorated (with rhinestone details, beadwork, embroidery, rhinestone snowflakes, dragonfly sparkles, glitter, crotchet trim, scattered rhinestones, faux fur, gold-tone sequins, fairy dust). It seemed like all of the coordinating pants had an elastic waistband. I’d always heard elastic referred to as the devil’s measuring tape, and because I was alone with Al’s parents, and I felt weird and awkward and uncomfortable, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said this.

  “What’s that?” said Lucky, snapping awake.

  “SHE SAYS YOUR SON NEEDS AN ELASTIC WAISTBAND!” Karleen shouted. “BECAUSE HE’S SO FAT!”

  Lucky shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “why he got fat.”

  How many times had Al described this house to me? So many that it felt familiar, I felt like I’d grown up in it, too. There was the kitchen table where, night after night, every night, four-year-old Al spilled
his milk. There was the dining room where nine-year-old Al drew pictures that disturbed his mother because they were pictures of naked ladies with two circles for their breasts, two dots for nipples. There was the spot on the living room floor where ten-year-old Al played with plastic Army guys. I could almost see him setting them up then knocking them down then setting them up again.

  I could hear fifty-five-year-old Al calling to me, urgently stage whispering my name. “C’mere, c’mere, c’mere,” he whispered. He was peeking out from the guest room, the room that used to be his bedroom, the bedroom where fourteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old Al pumped the python, buffed the banana, and played flute solos while thinking about Sophia Loren, imagining himself wooing Sophia Loren, offering her a single red rose, a box of chocolates, his hand, picturing Sophia Loren guiding his hand to her breast (a circle with a dot). His Sophia Loren fantasies were something else I’d heard about a million times before. Al’s old bedroom is now a claustrophobic space with a sleeper sofa and framed photographs of Karleen’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a progression of age that begins at infancy and culminates with high school graduation hangs from floor to ceiling.

  “C’mere, c’mere, c’mere,” Al was whispering. I murmured excuse me to my hosts, who were watching young women model outfits for old women, this time a gingham shirt and capri pants set embroidered with pineapples, ladybugs, daisies, cherries, or palm trees, your choice. As I approached, Al reached out, took my hand, and tugged me into the room.

  “Hello there,” he said. He embraced me then slipped his hand in my shirt and started feeling me up. “Those old people are driving me crazy!” he said. Al said he had a plan. Very soon, we would take the old people out for dinner, somewhere nice, somewhere fun, somewhere where we could have a drink. “You deserve a drink!” he said. “You deserve two drinks!” But first, Al said, before we did anything else, he sort of felt like fooling around. Did I want to fool around? “Come on,” he said, inching one hand up my shirt and the other down my pants. “What do you say? Let’s you and me fool around.”