A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  “Let’s sit though. My little brother’s home!”

  They sat down on the high-backed couch. Oscar slung a slice of cold pizza onto a paper plate.

  “We’ve barely talked. How are you handling it?” she said. “You’ve caught me at a moment when my tear tanks are empty, but don’t let me fool you, I’m a wreck.”

  “Where are the kids?”

  “With John, at the movies.”

  Grace’s three pregnancies had done nothing to diminish her beauty. She had stayed with the Midwest and the Midwest had stayed with her, in her sandy hair and freckles and features made for gazing at a distant horizon, in the set of her jaw and the way she kept one bent wrist to her hip when she stood.

  “I don’t know,” Oscar said. “It’s tough to say what’s normal, right? Assuming that a mother’s death is one of the hardest things you’ve got to go though, then I’m probably doing just about normal, given that I feel run-over, panicky, and a brand-new type of alone, when I allow myself to feel anything at all.”

  Gracie made a face. It did not matter that Oscar had been bad about returning her calls. She knew him too well.

  “Oh, Oscar. You can just say you’re sad, and I can hug you, like this.”

  She came across the couch and hugged him again. This was something she had picked up somewhere, this ease with physical affection and comfort, and Oscar was glad that it had made a foothold in their family, even if he wasn’t quite as receptive to it as he wished he could be.

  He spoke into her shoulder, hugging her back around her rib cage. “I can’t believe she’s gone. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Totally.”

  “This blows!”

  “Yeah. I already miss her so much.”

  They stayed like this. Oscar tried to disengage, but she held firm, and he recommitted.

  Oscar had always been bad at talking to his sister. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to connect with her, but a four-year age difference meant that he had always looked up to her too much to ever really consider her a true peer. Most of his memories of her were images of idol worship: a crack shot with their father’s .22 (and later, the .308) when Oscar was still upset by the recoil, an excellent student when Oscar was still frustrated by his inability to memorize his times tables, starting point guard on the girl’s basketball team when Oscar’s body was still thin and undeveloped. And then by the time he hit high school, she had already moved out, decamping on a bus to New York City the morning after a titanic fight with their father over some trivial issue that had been lost to time, taking with her the money that she had saved from working in a frozen yogurt store.

  In New York she found work as a waitress and a dog walker. She lived in the East Village and dated a series of bohemian men whose art projects and punk bands she would describe to Oscar in emails and clandestine phone calls. Her parents gave her more space than either she or Oscar had expected, either out of resignation or (he had hoped) a more parentally skillful maneuver of letting her work out a year of wanderlust in the hopes that she would return home and go to college, preferably somewhere close by.

  But she was still on the east coast five years later when Oscar, in his own watered-down version of rebellion, went off to a fancy liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, rather than the nearby state university. This “rebellion” was of course rebellion in name only, and in fact not even in name but only in Oscar’s head, as it was funded by the very monarchs who were being rebelled against and who made much less issue than they had right to of the fact that it would cost them about four times as much to send their child off a thousand miles to a town so liberal that it seemed at times like a cautionary tale in a right-wing chain letter. (It had been rumored that the chamber of commerce had in fact once issued a letter to Strategic Command informing them that in the case of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, American missiles were not permitted to use the town’s airspace.)

  Oscar realized now that on some level he had wanted to follow his sister, even if he only made it to the same coast.

  He went to visit her during fall break of his freshman year of college. Her apartment, a studio over a tattoo parlor, was so jammed with books and hookahs and her friends’ surprisingly good art that it seemed as if she had lived an entirely new, full life in the last five years. They ate dinner standing up in the kitchen of a Turkish restaurant where she knew the cook and went to a punk show on the Bowery to see a local band she liked. (A year later, they were famous.) Then they got drunk on cheap beers at a bar where one of the few things he remembered was one of her friends, a beautiful girl in a purple leather jacket, throwing her arm around his shoulder and asking, “Is this the little Boat?” and that when he tried to kiss her later that night, her refusal was totally cool and not damaging to his ego in the least. When he and his sister finally stumbled home, the sun was coming up over the East River.

  It was one of the most fun nights of his life, but deep down he felt a bit like a fringe member of a rock star’s entourage. This was not to say that Gracie treated him brusquely; in fact she was delighted to see him and include him in her life after so much time apart. It was just that her life was so cool, so underpinned with a bold recklessness that was entirely inaccessible to him, how could he ever be a substantial part of it?

  That would be the first and last time he ever got to visit her in New York. In the spring, for reasons that she never fully made clear to him, she finally did what her parents had assumed she would do, only four years late: she went home. She dumped the graphic designer she was seeing, sold off everything that was too large to fit into her two duffel bags, got back on the bus, and for the first time, went home. She got an apartment a few miles from her parents and a job as a receptionist in a real estate office, but wasn’t there for more than a year before she was engaged to John, whom she met while he was angling to buy a plot of land on which to build a strip mall, and they started having kids. That was nine years ago.

  Oscar knew that it was wrong, unfair, and a little mean for him to think that her return from New York had made her life smaller or less meaningful. But for some reason her homecoming had disappointed him. Now when Oscar thought about her life, he was filled with sadness that he did not endorse, because to do so would imply that the life she could have lived, a life filled with loudness and color and invigorating danger, would somehow be preferable to the life of prairie home companionship that she was living now, which he was not ready to admit.

  “If you can believe it, there’s actually another shitty thing we need to talk about,” Oscar said.

  “Oh?” Gracie said.

  Oscar’s shoulders slumped down into the couch. He hesitated to begin. “I hate how sure I am that Dad didn’t tell you anything about this.”

  “Oh yeah, the frigging Hawaii thing? Let’s talk about this. They just told me they wanted to take more vacation.”

  “Well, not quite.”

  Oscar explained to her, clearly but as quickly as he could in order to get it over with, how their parents had given basically all of their money, over a series of secret trips across the Pacific, to a self-anointed guru who specialized in some sort of quasi-philosophical apologism that Oscar was still trying to figure out.

  As he spoke, he saw the news begin to settle into her face, and he looked away. When he was done, her eyes were wet, and she looked stunned, but also something further.

  “Oscar, I... I guess I don’t know how to react. A guru? And hold on, when you say all their money...”

  “I’m pretty sure I mean it. I have no idea what Dad’s going to do,” Oscar said. “Not to pry, but is John seeing any income from that apartment development yet?”

  Gracie stood up and went back to the kitchen. When Oscar followed her, she was standing at the sink with her back to him, wringing a dry dish towel in her hands. After a moment she set it on the counter in a puddle of soapy water.


  “Ah...” Her voice wavered, almost like a laugh. “I was hoping to not tell you this until later. I guess I need to admit to myself that it’s true. But John and I—we—things have gotten...well, things are not great. I mean, it’s very bad. Over, really.” Gracie worried at the cross around her neck. “It started with the crash. All these properties just went straight to shit. We started fighting. I should have told you.”

  She was crying now.

  “I’m so sorry to hear this,” Oscar said.

  “I wish I didn’t have to tell you under these circumstances!” she cry-laughed.

  “Are you going to be okay?” He went to her, didn’t hug her, but stood near.

  “These things happen,” she said, wiping away a thin tear with the heel of her hand. She hiccuped once, something a bit like a sob. “We were so happy! We were so damn happy at the start you wouldn’t believe it. I can still remember what it felt like. And then somehow things changed, and I hid from it, and it grew in the darkness and then one day I wake up and look around and I just go, oh my God, no, how can this be my life?”

  Oscar put a hand on her back, avoided her eyes. “Gracie, it’s not—I have faith we can come out of this all right.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll live. The kids will live, too, although I’m so worried about them. It’s just that I had allowed myself to hope that I might be getting some help with maybe at least the legal bills.”

  Oscar found that all he could say was “I’m so sorry.” He said it a few times.

  7

  The funeral took place in the church in which Oscar had been baptized. John and Grace sat with their three kids in between them. Oscar had shaken John’s hand and, after an exchange of condolences, talked about baseball as if he knew nothing about the divorce grinding its way to finality.

  The church was almost half-filled, which Oscar was glad to see, given the lack of extant Boatwrights. One row was occupied by the high school English department, and another with Mrs. Boatwright’s students, the boys in ill-fitting suits, the girls in sundresses and black flip-flops, trying to keep it together under the dual stresses of the death of a maternal figure and the shattering of their specific reality. Your teacher doesn’t die. Your grandmother dies.

  Lee sat next to Oscar in his dark suit. On Lee’s other side were men from the Knights of Columbus, an organization that contained the entirety of Lee’s friends, and their wives. Oscar remembered most of these men from his youth, smoking cigarettes at backyard barbecues and complaining about the demands of their particular trade.

  Oscar hadn’t been sure if his sister’s children, ages eight, seven, and five, were old enough to appreciate the gravity of what was going on, but now he was shamed with the obviousness of his answer—they bawled, gripping each other and the arms of their parents. They had loved their grandmother, who doted on them and made sure they knew that she loved them. Oscar, sitting behind them, rubbed their backs and shoulders, leaned over to wipe their running noses with Kleenex, and told himself he was going to be more present in their lives going forward.

  At one point Lee got up and read a passage selected for him by the priest. Oscar read a selection as well, peering up only twice through the scrim of exhausted sadness that had settled over his eyes to look at the people assembled. In order to deliver the words without blubbering, he spent the first half of the mass cranking his emotions down into a smaller and smaller area that he felt behind his sternum and attempting to completely ignore what was going on. Much later, lying on his father’s couch trying to get to sleep, Oscar would realize with aching regret that he had done too well at this and that he had not cried at all.

  Toward the end of the proceedings, Lee went back up to speak. His remarks were so brief that it appeared as if he had decided at the last minute to edit and condense something longer that he had wished to say.

  “My wife—” he said, his voice breaking up slightly and then reforming “—Delia, who I loved very much, felt the world too fully. It hurt her for a long time, and then it killed her. Amen.”

  Too short to be called a eulogy.

  Oscar caught the priest, a man whom the Boatwrights had known for years, glance up at Lee with a look of annoyance, perhaps for the errant “amen,” perhaps for the inglorious sentiment.

  A special piece of religious cloth was arranged over the casket, and the priest sprinkled it with holy water. At the proper time, Oscar, along with his father, John, two Knights, and two men from the funeral parlor, took hold of the casket and walked it down the aisle to the waiting hearse. A sad hymn was played, which Oscar recalled from the past although he could not remember the words.

  * * *

  Later, at the gravesite, Oscar felt that under the cover of the melodrama it would be appropriate to talk about large things that otherwise might go unspoken for another decade.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said to Gracie, who stood next to him with her children on her other side, as they all watched the shiny black casket lower into the dirty maw. His sequestered sadness had begun to return to him in a trickle, but he wished he could gather it all at once, because here was the time to really feel something, to have a good cry, instead of alone in an airplane bathroom on the way back west, but he supposed you didn’t get to choose these things.

  His sister gave him a look as if to say, now?

  “I never figured it out. Why did you leave New York? What made you come back?”

  Grace smiled with half her mouth. She nodded toward the direction of the casket. “She told me that once you moved out, she couldn’t bear being alone. She said it was killing her to have none of her children around. I believed her.”

  8

  Oscar is five years old. He can reach the top shelf of the refrigerator, but only if he stands on the vegetable drawer, which he has been told repeatedly not to do. His is a world of eye-level doorknobs and unseen countertops and furniture that he can fit his body under entirely, like the couch, which, when he is under it, feels like his own personal cave, among the coins and paperclips and forgotten toy cars like lost treasure.

  It is late August, although he doesn’t need or care to know this; summer vacation, his first, has been going on for so long that it’s hard to recall the person he was when it began. He knows what letters are but can’t yet read, and when his parents speak to each other using only letters, he knows that they are discussing something that he is not meant to understand. When outside of the house, he navigates the world attached to the hand of an adult, his arm bending upward as if holding an umbrella, but today he is home and there are no adults around. Oscar’s sister is in the basement watching TV. His father is out working. His mother is in her room.

  Oscar loves his mother very much and wants to make her happy. She is tired, and so she is resting, and has in fact been resting for two days. When Oscar is tired from too much play, he likes to have a snack, which gives him the energy to go back out and play some more, and so he decides that he will bring his mother a snack. Bringing her a snack will have the added effect of proving that he is no longer a baby and can be trusted with more difficult tasks, like for starters that he should be allowed to drink from glasses instead of plastic cups at the dinner table.

  But he is smart enough not to overreach. He knows that he can’t cook, and so after a quick perusal of the pantry, he decides that he will bring his mother a bowl of cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios specifically, a personal favorite of his. The combination of the discrete elements of bowl, spoon, Cheerios, and milk represents a medium level of difficulty, harder than a Jello Snack Pack and easier than anything involving heat, but he is up to the task.

  And lo! An auspicious start! A bowl is already down from the cupboard. In fact it is the same bowl that Oscar himself had as recently as three hours ago eaten Honey Nut Cheerios out of, and therefore doesn’t need washing. He goes into the drawer to get his mother a spoon, as the spoon that is currently stickin
g out of the bowl is a Ghostbusters spoon with a picture of Slimer on the handle, which is only for kids, and in fact only for Oscar.

  He has to go up on his tiptoes to get down the box of Honey Nut Cheerios, and the box falls off the shelf and onto the kitchen floor, but it doesn’t spill. He opens the tab on the box and unfurls the plastic bag within and then begins to pour, but never having done it before, he is not sure of the proper amount, and so he pours until cereal is level with the top of the bowl, which seems reasonable.

  Happy with how easy this is proving, he opens the fridge, stands up on the vegetable drawer, and reaches up for the jug of milk, but he is surprised by its weight, which seems entirely unbelievable considering that his father can open and pour it with one hand while reading the paper with the other, and the jug plunges down and glugs itself empty onto the linoleum, while Oscar stands and watches from his perch.

  This is bad, Oscar thinks, but not bad enough to entirely derail the original mission. He can still bring his mother the snack and come back to clean up the mess long before anyone finds out.

  He considers salvaging some of the milk from the puddle on the floor but decides that there won’t be enough. He considers just bringing her a bowl of dry cereal, but that seems silly, and so he decides to use water instead, which he knows is a bit unorthodox (he has never had his cereal with water) but at least better than dry, logically speaking. He opens the cold faucet and checks with his finger that it is at least as cold as the milk would have been, and then fills the bowl until a few Cheerios float off into the sink.

  Slowly he begins the walk out of the kitchen, across the dining and living rooms, and up the stairs to his parents’ room. He watches the bowl with monkish focus, making sure not to jostle it. He doesn’t spill a drop.