He drops the meat and returns to his broccoli, his spinach. His mustache twitches.
For a moment, no one says anything. I take a sip of water.
“I don’t know how, but I’m going to get that woman,” Chip says.
“Get her what?” I ask.
“You are such an asshole,” Elissa says. “Reverse discrimination? What a joke.”
My father digs into the folds of his bathrobe. His hand emerges gripping the gun. Very casually, he places it on the table and looks around the dining room at us all. We look at the gun.
“I tire of the train story,” he says slowly.
The words hang there. Once, he rode a camel and saw the pyramids.
“If that’s loaded,” our mother says, “I’m going to be really pissed.”
My mother is mostly a mild-mannered woman. However, on occasion, owing to some highly capricious Italian lineage, she has been known to “fly off the handle,” as my father likes to put it. I watch her stare at the gun. I wonder if this is one of those times.
After dinner I smoke a joint in the third-floor bathroom. Blow the smoke out the window. I get my daily dose of Internet porn. My room is sparse. One wall of shelving houses my record collection. Shelves on a second wall are filled with books, half of which I have never read. There are lots of posters.
I fall asleep. I dream that the molecules of my body become unhinged and drift apart, scattered by the wind, and because of this, in my dream, I am unable to go to work.
THE YEARS ROLL BY. They have been rolling by. I can trace my life (all twenty-four years of it) and see how I’ve come to the place I’m at now. It mostly feels arbitrary, as if every choice was made randomly, or without regard for the consequences. Or even realizing there would be consequences. Truthfully, I might not even have the fortitude to change anything if ever given the chance to do it over again.
I attended a small, extremely expensive, Jesuit-run liberal arts university in Connecticut, whose name is not worth mentioning. I majored in film, graduated in four years, and had little to speak of in the way of life experience.
Unequipped to face the real world postcollege, I bought myself two more years by enrolling in an MFA film-studies program at another very expensive liberal arts university, this time in Boston. Unfortunately, I hated the city, hated the assholes in my program, and hated the professors. John Galkin was the head of the department. His big claim to fame was that he once wrote a screenplay for a notoriously panned modernization of Moby-Dick, which starred George Hamilton and was set on a yacht in 1970s Florida. Galkin and I got off on the wrong foot when I insulted his taste in classic cinema by announcing to our class that I found Citizen Kane boring. Later in the semester we butted heads again when he handed me back a forty-page term paper and told me I had a week to rewrite it or he was going to fail me. “You use too many commas,” he said. “This is unacceptable.” With one foot already out the door, I sat on the paper for the week and handed it back unchanged, not one comma removed. He gave me an A–, which confirmed my suspicions that he was just handing out grades. I started to spend a lot of time riding the T around the city, listening to hardcore punk on my Walkman.
I took the train home to Sleepy Hollow that year to see my family for Thanksgiving. Chip was finishing his MBA at UConn in Storrs, Connecticut. Elissa was a junior at Sleepy Hollow High and had just been suspended for throwing paint on the principal’s fur coat.
When I returned to Boston, the first snowfall of the year was blanketing New England. As my train approached the city and the skyline came into view, I began to feel an inexplicable anxiety about what I had decided to do with my life. I went to a few more classes, mostly just sitting with my notebook closed, daydreaming. I wrote a letter to my parents telling them I was dropping out of school. I dropped out of school. Most of my loans were not refunded, leaving me with even more tuition debt. I spent the last of my money wandering around Harvard Square harassing street performers and buying records. I ran out of money. I had no job, nor a desire to get one. I sublet my Boston room, packed up my record collection, and returned, dejected, to my childhood home, a failure.
Back in my parents’ house, it wasn’t long before I started acting like my high school self. I did nothing, just sat around the house moaning. I drove around till all hours, listening to music and smoking weed with my best friend, Wally Czerkowski (who was also jobless and living at home). I cloistered myself in my room and watched movies until my eyeballs hurt. “Get a job,” my mother told me on a daily basis. After two weeks, completely fed up with my idleness, she contacted a friend and finagled a job for me at the John W. Manley School for Autistic Children. I began work as a teaching assistant. I was shown the basics of applied behavior analysis, a form of early childhood intervention similar to training a dog by way of migraine-inducing repetition. As I started my new job, Chip finished his degree. Added it to his wall of accolades. He had a job at a prominent Manhattan bank lined up months before he finished school. My brother can be summed up thus: type A to the extreme, vain, egotistical, money hungry, tasteless, insecure, vapid, demanding, yet somehow a lovable, charismatic rascal. If I’m honest, I’d say I possess a lot of these characteristics as well, I just don’t have his drive to succeed, which makes for an unfortunate combination.
My father’s decline began around the same time—with intense back pain he could not get rid of. He was working in the yard one Sunday and had to stop because of the discomfort. From there, it all happened fast. Tentatively diagnosed with a herniated disk, he underwent a series of MRIs. The MRIs revealed a lesion on his spine. An oncologist told us it was multiple myeloma. None of us had ever heard of it. Within twenty-four hours he was radiated and simultaneously started on chemotherapy protocol. Three weeks later he was home. His hair began to thin, then fall out. Soon after that, my mother scheduled the first of many “wellness sessions” with Brigitte. The S’s made their first appearance in our house. Chip moved back home to be with our father.
That was six months ago. I am still here. In this house. We are all here.
<< 4 >>
I am reading an article in the local newspaper about America’s weight problem. I learn the average woman is a size 14.
Through the open window in my bedroom I hear loud splattering noises coming from the backyard, the sound of hissing air. It’s Thursday evening. I didn’t think anyone was home. I was enjoying a moment of solitude. I had made secret plans to screen a videotape Wally had lent me of a Japanese guy challenging a grizzly bear to a hot dog-eating contest. I drop the newspaper and get up off the floor to see what the racket is.
A committee somewhere has declared Sleepy Hollow to be Tree City USA, and I live on what can only be described as Tree Street USA. Towering oaks, gray birches, and elms ring our property. At the edge of the yard, near the wood fence demarcating what we own from what the Hansons own, stand two life-size cardboard cutouts, sparkling in the gathering dusk. One is a picture of Elissa. She is smiling. The other is me. A photo taken two years ago. I am in my college graduation gown. I am not smiling. These giant photographs are remnants from Chip’s twenty-seventh birthday party. He insisted on having one made for all of us. Even our grandmother.
The sound of paintballs and compressed carbon dioxide ripples out again and I see a splatter of green explode across the crotch of my cardboard cutout.
When we moved here fourteen years ago the entire house was blue. Every room a different shade. The stairs covered in blue carpet. The garage stood in teal glory. The wood siding an enchanting cerulean. The banisters were robin’s egg. All the toilets: periwinkle. Now only the downstairs bathroom and the garage remain blue. My room had been the cats’ room. Ms. Schaffer, the old lady who lived here before us, had a dozen cats and she let them pee everywhere. To this day we have not been able to get rid of the smell from all that cat urine.
I walk into my brother’s bedroom and find him and our father giggling, leaning out an open window firing paintball guns down into t
he backyard.
“I have got to get out of this house,” I say.
“You and me both,” my father says.
“You’ve got paint in your mustache,” I say, pointing.
“Did I get it?” he asks, rubbing his face with his free hand.
“I thought you two were going to the grocery store,” I say.
“We don’t take orders from your mother anymore,” our father says. “Plus, this is therapeutic for me.”
“Who told you that?”
“I told myself,” he says, cinching the belt on his bathrobe tighter. I turn to my brother.
“Can you please throw those things away?” I ask, indicating the cutouts. “It’s eerie.”
“We have to keep them. For nostalgia. We’ll look back at these times and laugh,” Chip says. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean them,” he adds.
“You’re too kind,” I say.
Chip fires another volley of paintballs. His cell phone is on the bed and suddenly it comes to life, emitting an electronic squeal that sounds like a monkey wielding a machine gun through static distortion. He has one of those phones with a built-in walkie-talkie feature. I don’t know what people call this feature because I’ve never bothered to find out. But I do know that it enables my brother to be in constant contact with the Algonquin Round Table of intellectuals he calls friends. This phone, or at least the walkie-talkie part of it, makes a harsh, fuzzy squelch every time it’s activated. It is the bane of my existence. One of the banes anyway.
“What is the point of that goddamn phone? Why do you need to be able to walkie-talkie people?”
“What phone?” he asks. A gold chain around his neck reads “Gangsta.”
“Can you not act like a complete shithead?”
“I resent that,” he says. “Have you taken a shower recently?” he asks, changing the subject.
“I’m talking about the phone. The annoying phone,” I say, but I check my armpits anyway.
My father closes one of his eyes and aims. He fires. I see my cutout head turn green.
“I need to take at least two showers a day,” Chip goes on. “When I get up in the morning. Definitely when I get back from the gym, and usually I take one before bed.”
“I’m well aware of your two-hour, prebed beauty process.”
“Have you noticed how much our family sweats?” he asks me. Our father nods in agreement. “Have you seen Dad after he’s been on the treadmill? Or Mom when she carries in the groceries?”
“Mom sweats carrying in the groceries because you never help her.”
He stops for a minute to take off the wife beater he’s wearing. “They’re not my groceries.”
“You eat them,” I say.
“Touché.” He turns away from me at this point and examines his neck muscles in the mirror, scrunching his face up in a ridiculous way designed, I imagine, to impressively flex certain muscles. I study him. As usual, I am at a complete loss. For the moment, he has forgotten about the cell phone, about showers and sweating. He turns to face me and flexes again, pivoting on one knee, holding his arms in an S shape. I can’t help but smile.
“Look at this!” he calls out. “Look at this!” He strains to bring up the bulges of his arms and back, to justify all the time he spends at the gym. “Dad and I are going to loosen up and listen to some dance music,” he says. “You should unwind with us.”
“I hate that fucking phone,” I say. I leave the room.
I’m not even two steps away when the music begins to blast, rattling the light fixtures in the hallway.
THE TRUTH IS, I don’t help with the groceries either.
She’s in the kitchen. At the table.
Like me, she’s plagued by bills, by thoughts of How much is left? and Can we make this work?
An accordion file has exploded its contents around her. She looks small, engulfed in all that paper. Her hand on her forehead, her reading glasses at the edge of her nose.
I take a glass out of the cupboard and fill it with orange juice to the point where even one more drop will cause an overflow. I waddle over to the table, careful not to spill. I sit sipping loudly. No hands. I just lean into it. Maybe now is the right time to ask her about Pam Kittredge.
“When taking care of your father finally kills me,” my mother says, “you can save money on a coffin. Just wrap me in all this bullshit.” She pushes a stack of what looks like hospital bills out of her way.
“It’s grim,” I say.
“You have no idea.” A little laugh gives way to the waterworks. I’m used to it by now. He cries during Law & Order, she cries crunching the numbers.
“Mom.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Have you been house hunting?” I say, surprised at my own bluntness.
She picks up her head to look at me and I feel like a child. Why did I pour so much orange juice?
“Why are you asking me that?” she says.
“I need to move out,” I say.
“Oh God, Calvin.” She stands. “Don’t start.” She leaves the bills and goes to the cabinet where all of his prescription bottles are housed in a large wicker bread basket. She begins to organize tomorrow’s doses. “Between your brother’s overcompensating. Your sister acting like your sister. And your father”—here she pauses—“painting this house with the brush of depression, I cannot deal. There’s no money for you. The money is running out for all of us.”
“Mom.”
“I see the future. It’s me, here, alone. With him. And it won’t be him that dies. He’ll be fine. He’ll live. It’ll be me that dies. It’ll be me the cancer kills.”
“Mom, this isn’t the conversation I wanted to have,” I say. “I’m not his wife.”
“You’re not,” she says.
“The woman showed me some apartments,” I say. “She said she’d taken you to look at houses.”
She is crying again. Opening bottles and crying. Dropping pills into little plastic cases and crying. Her back to me.
“Six months at forty percent. And every doctor in that goddamn city ordering more tests and different drugs. I’ve fallen behind.”
“What does that mean?”
“On our mortgage payments.”
“How far behind?” I ask.
“It’s bad.”
“Have you missed a payment?”
“Not yet,” she says. “But if he doesn’t go back to work or if something doesn’t change, it’s in foreclosure before the end of the year.”
“You’re joking,” I say, but then she is looking at me and I know. She wipes her nose, and as quickly as she started crying, she stops. The anger flickers across her face and is gone. She takes the pill cases and puts them on top of the fridge. Morning, lunch, dinner, bedtime. The cycle of his days.
I dump the rest of my orange juice into the sink and stand looking out the window at the garage. She comes back to the table, to the papers.
“Who else knows?” I ask.
“Chip knows a little,” she says. “Don’t say anything yet,” she adds. “I was getting ready to tell everyone anyway. It’s not like anything’s set in stone. I’m just trying to keep every base covered.”
Part of me wants to run to the hatchback and drive. Pick up Wally, get high, listen to music, and just drive.
I GO TO my bedroom. I open the notebook. I write:
I had a parakeet when I was in the eighth grade. He was a small blue-feathered thing, a smattering of black spots around his chest.
I forget exactly how I acquired the bird. I think it was a birthday present or something. At the time, I was really into reading fantasy novels. The Dragonlance series was my all-time favorite. Epic tales about elves and wizards battling dragons and the forces of evil, nonsense like that. I recently encountered a dusty copy of one of those books while looking for some records in the attic and reread the first few pages. I cringed and tried to convince myself that
reading Dragonlance was not the sole reason I remained a virgin until nineteen.
When I got the parakeet I immediately gave it the name Tanis. Tanis was one of the main characters in the Dragonlance saga. He was half-elf, which meant of course his mother had been an elf, his father a human (or maybe it was the other way around). Their passionate union had created Tanis: half-elf, half-man. The tragic nature of Tanis’s existence lay in the fact that he was a bastard. He was alone. Accepted by neither mankind nor elfkind. An outsider forever. I identified with him. Not the bastard part, the outsider part. We kept Tanis in a corner of the living room. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the only grandparent I have who’s still alive, cared for him.
“Tanis?” she asked, dumping a handful of sunflower seeds into the parakeet’s cage. “What kind of a name is Tanis?”
“He was a great warrior,” I explained. “But he had trouble finding true love.”
“That’s no name for a little bird,” my grandmother said, frowning, rattling Tanis’s cage with her finger. “A little cute birdie like this. I’ll call him Pretty Boy. Won’t I, Pretty Boy?”
She nodded her head and whistled a song to Tanis.
The bird chirped and bounced around on its perch.
“I don’t think Tanis likes being called Pretty Boy,” I said.
“Nonsense,” my grandmother said.
From then on she called Tanis Pretty Boy. I tried to get her to stop, but it was no use. She spent so much time with the bird, feeding him, washing his cage, changing the newspaper when he crapped all over it. She talked to him like you talk to a baby. “Hellooooo, Pretty Boy,” she’d say in this insane high-pitched voice. “How is my little Pretty Boy today?” The bird would peep and explode shit onto the Arts and Leisure section. “That’s right! Little Pretty Boy is hungry, isn’t he?” And so forth.
Rather quickly I lost interest in Tanis Half-Elven. I had other things to worry about. Pornography was rapidly becoming my favorite activity.
One day I came home from school and found Tanis at the bottom of his cage. He had died. There was mottling on his head and the majority of his feathers had fallen out. Some rare disease, my parents speculated.
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac Page 3