Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  “So, um. Just um —” Mr. B finally asserted himself. Lazar snapped out of the movie of his life and into some other dude’s movie where nobody was going to die of fright, although they might succumb to the decaffeinated drip drip drip of boredom. Stale coffee was the top note of Mr. B’s terrible breath, but there was also bouquet of tuna fish sandwich in there, and the remnants of however many cigarettes had lived and died in his airways between homeroom and fourth period spare.

  “So any time you want to, em. Or just, um…” Mr. B trailed off. “Mmmm?” He beamed at Lazar hopefully.

  God, he was such a cretin. Lazar grinned right back, showing all his teeth: “Right on, Mr. B. Cool beans.” Any time I want to talk about my lousy father and my zombie mother and my crazy brother I will come and breathe in your stinky breath, he did not say.

  “What?” went Mr. B, startled.

  Oh, okay. So perhaps he did say it. Whoops! Lazar had been losing control lately because:

  The circumstances.

  The dog keeps eating his homework.

  Actually, come to think of it, he’s in perfect control. Crisis brings out the best in some people (a.k.a. Lazar Binder, boy wonder).

  Control is bullshit, anyway. For example, Mr. B is shortly going to lose control and disappear right out of the story. Lazar is getting bored with that chucklehead. Goodbye, Bubel!

  Some days Lazar shuttled so swiftly between his comic book superhero powers of control and the apocalyptic chaos of his life’s lack of control that he got motion sick. He suddenly remembered one of his dad’s favourite jokes: This guy lent his friend a kettle but when his friend returned the kettle, it was broken. “What gives?” said the kettle’s owner. His friend replied:

  What kettle?

  That kettle was broken to begin with.

  You never lent me a kettle.

  I returned that kettle in perfect condition.

  Although Lazar’s dad loved jokes, he couldn’t remember any of them except for the kettle joke. In Lazar’s opinion, his dad was a consummate master of the lost art of lame joke telling. But despite his hard-won status as the world’s worst comedian on account of being terrible at beginnings and forgetful of endings, Max could still crack himself up with his rare brand of corny meta-humour. Just thinking about those jokes made him lean back in his grimy, dad-smelling La-Z-Boy recliner and smile fondly, like a harmless loon on revved-up loon tablets.

  Here are some of the late Max Binder’s favourite jokes:

  To get to the other side!

  One to hold the light bulb steady and the other six to turn the room around.

  Not so fast, Private Schwartz.

  Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!

  Here are some of the things Lazar’s dad said while trying to tell a joke from beginning to end:

  Wait, have I mentioned they were in a bar at the time?

  Okay, let’s go back a bit. I need to fill in some stuff.

  Did I say Irish? I meant Polish.

  Here’s where it gets a bit tricky, so concentrate.

  And here are some of the things that Lazar’s dad said after he finished telling one of his jokes:

  Think about it: a chicken!

  Think about it: a light bulb!

  Pretty sick, eh? The part where he —

  Dwowning — I’m dwowning! Get it?

  A couple of months after the accident, Sams made a list of all their dad’s jokes. Except for the kettle joke it was a list of punchlines. Fifty-seven punchlines in order of importance, Sams said. As usual, Lazar didn’t have a clue. But Sams went ahead and put the list up on the fridge, held in place by their World Vision child. All that evening he kept yelling out numbers, until Maggie finally joined in, the two of them sounding like bingo callers at the Legion Hall.

  “Fourteen!” Lazar shouted finally (“Seven ate nine!”). Sams and Maggie gazed at him sadly.

  “Twenty-one!” he tried. “Fifty-two!” “Thirty-eight!”

  “Kiddo,” Maggie said, “you need to work on your delivery.” Then the two of them — Beavis and Butt-Head — yukked it up for about an hour because “You need to work on your delivery” was actually one of his dad’s all-time favourite punchlines. Who the hell knows which number.

  After Lazar’s failure in the humour department, Maggie went into a coincidental decline. In other words, not his fault (“I returned that kettle in perfect condition”). When her bereavement leave ended, she began going into work so early in the morning that she was gone before the school bus came.

  “Gotta hit the dusty trail, kid,” she’d say out of the corner of her mouth.

  Lazar had no idea why she was pretending to be a cowboy. It remained an intriguing question though, and one to be filed under “Who the Hell Knows?” Most evenings she didn’t get back until long after they would’ve eaten supper if anyone had bothered to make it. The status at the Binder residence was pretty much delivery or die.

  “Pizza or fried chicken? Your call, boys,” read the note his mom left on the kitchen counter every morning, along with a twenty and some finicky wrapped toothpicks whose meaning was difficult to interpret. They might have been her way of saying, I love you, or Watch out for food in your teeth. They might have meant, Take care of the details, or Don’t sweat the small stuff. The fact was those darn toothpicks expressed everything and nothing at all. As with most things in his life, Lazar just didn’t have a clue.

  To tell the truth his mom had always been a lousy cook and the only two people who seemed to enjoy her Signature Tuna Casserole with Potato Chip Topping were Bernie (who sometimes ate dinner with the Binders when her parents were at odds) and his dad.

  “Lord, Maggie, you are a marvel,” Max would say, sighing and shaking his head over her Shake and Bake Chicken Surprise. As if to say, I wish I knew how you manage to achieve such an even crumble. As if to say, Moist and tender on the inside but golden crisp on the outside. As if to say, There is more than one surprise in Chicken Surprise and not the least of it is you.

  Seven minutes. Seven minutes — Lazar timed her once — was all it took for his mom to rustle up one of her Chicken Surprises, the surprise being tomato soup sometimes and onion soup at other times. But mostly it was the surprise of managing to produce his dad’s undying admiration, in under ten minutes, by the simple trick of ripping open a couple of boxes and yanking around a Ziploc bag. Et voilà!

  She was always on the phone in those days, yakking to her girlfriends about her job and making fun of Shapiro, her patriarchal son-of-a-bitch pissant boss at the Riverview News where she was an assistant copy editor as well as the advice columnist and writer of the monthly slice-of-life column. This last was a creative channel for her spleen, Max used to say. She’d been trying to break into features for some time, though, and back when the Binder family was merely peculiar rather than disastrous, rather than shocking, rather than pathetic, she’d been agitating to write her own copy. So far she’d pitched a series of local business features, any number of human interest stories, and an investigative feature about a human rights group who were proposing to drag the Red River in the summer.

  “Okay,” said her patriarchal son-of-a-bitch pissant boss, “restaurant reviews it is.” Maggie said her boss was just trying to psych her out and ordered Lazar to quit laughing. “You don’t have to be a chicken to appreciate a good omelet, n’est ce pas?” was her point.

  In fact that’s exactly what she wanted to call her column, You Don’t Have to Be a Chicken, but naturally her boss said, “No way, Maggie, how much space do you think I have for a headline?” According to Lazar’s mom, her patriarchal son-of-a-bitch pissant boss had some suggestions of his own:

  Yum Yum

  Yum! Yum!

  Good Food

  Foodie Goodie

  To which she replied:

 
Am I reviewing food or opera?

  Punctuation can’t save you, Dumb! Dumb!

  Bad Idea.

  So I’ll be specializing in all-day Chinese buffets, then?

  God, you are such a cretin, she didn’t say to her boss and then, what the hell, did.

  That’s when he told her to “Get lost fancy-pants,” which made Maggie howl with girlish glee on the phone to her friends and then again later over family dinner and her version of Pineapple Chicken Surprise. “We ran out of pineapple chunks so I used Cheez Whiz — surprise!” His mom should have called it Pineapple Chicken Shock, thought Lazar after taking a bite. Maggie was still laughing so hard that she almost forgot to tell them she had just one night to pitch a name for her non-existent column. Otherwise, no go, kiddo — she was back to her red pen, her dangling widows and lonely orphans.

  “Way to bury the lede, sweetheart,” Max told her.

  The thing about Lazar’s mom was that she was funny and digressive as hell, she smelled good, and she loved basketball (NBA, college, high school, even kids shooting hoops in the back lane). Naturally she expected Lazar to share her ardent interest. He’d have preferred her to take a direct interest in him but he instinctively understood the roundabout routes that families have to travel just to stay in one place. The other thing about his mom was that she needed input. So then the Binder family had to put their heads together and come up with some suggestions for the name of her column. Maggie scribbled them on her grocery pad, one after the other, no matter how dumb they sounded, which in Max’s case was considerable. The dumbness, that is.

  “A Moveable Feast,” Max offered. “Gatsby’s Party,” “Mm, La Madeleine.”

  “And who is Madeleine?” Maggie snapped right back.

  Lazar’s dad fell right into the trap, explaining that a madeleine was a French cookie with an amazing smell that reminded Marcel Proust of his childhood, over the course of seven volumes and thousands of pages. You could tell that Sams was quite taken with the idea of this cookie-sniffing French dude because his eyes brightened as if he was already figuring out where to score this madeleine-huff. Maggie was still going on at Max since he’d implied that she didn’t know what a madeleine was, which made him the most condescending prick she’d ever come across. And, as she’d spent most of the morning veiling her insults in strained pleasantries to her patriarchal son-of-a-bitch pissant boss, that was really saying something.

  “Think, people,” she urged.

  They all thought some more, the Binders sinking into deep cogitation. Maggie clicked her pen, then her cigarette lighter, and finally one of her clip-on earrings. Sams gnawed on his cuticle and Lazar ran his fingers compulsively over an archipelago of acne that had risen to the surface of his chin, wondering (again) why all his growth hormones went into pimple production rather than the breadth of his shoulders or the depth of his voice. As for Max, he slowly chewed his way through another helping of Pineapple Chicken Surprise seeming, for the first time, to register surprise at the absence of pineapple chunks in the Cheeto dust–orange sauce. He appeared deeply interested, as if he was on the verge of working out the solution to a complicated language problem: the surprise inherent to Pineapple Chicken Surprise is the ratio of pineapple to chicken-Cheez Whiz. Which is to say unequal at best. Which is to say dicey vis-à-vis pineapple representation. Which is to say none at all.

  Ergo: Surprise!

  Therefore the name did not have to say it all. Au contraire.

  “What about Au Contraire?” Max suggested.

  “And why?” snapped Maggie, but she wasn’t really mad. Lazar’s mom didn’t mind being called contrary or perverse or even hardhearted (she was). What she minded was being called pretty (again, she was), or nice (she wasn’t, at all), or well-­mannered (not even close), a problem only for her poor deluded husband who clearly believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Rose of Sharon, he called her, Star of My Firmament, Peg of My Heart. Lazar’s dad used to sing these lame-assed songs every morning while he shaved. “January Girls” and “Xmas in February” and “April Love.” Belting them out in the bathroom mirror, a song for every month of the year. If his dad was alive today he’d be singing “Maggie May,” gelling his hair into Rod Stewart spikes, and gravelling up his voice. Wake up (mwah) Maggie I think I got something to say to you (mwah). The kissing sounds were his own invention.

  Lazar didn’t know anything about being married and sure, music had changed in the last hundred years since his dad was young, but “January Girls” and “April Love” and “Maggie May” were the reasons that he and Sams plugged in their ear buds early and turned up their music loud.

  The thing about his mom being pretty was something that other people said. He didn’t have an opinion on the subject because:

  She’s his mom, so.

  He never looks at her.

  If he thought she was pretty he’d have to put out his eyes, so Oedipus-wise he’s just going with popular opinion here.

  That’s all.

  Max used to steal all his lines from The Goon Show and his moves from Benny Hill. God help them, but he’d crack up Lazar’s mom with his fake cockney accent. Sometimes he’d even chase her around the kitchen with a frozen fish fillet stuffed down his pants. Lazar remembered those times — the fish fillet beginning to thaw, his dad’s fly blooming a dark stain, his mom holding herself and yelling that she was going to pee, oh god. Some chick in an old song that Bernie used to play on guitar said you don’t know what you got till it’s gone they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. But Lazar knew. Kind of. Mostly.

  That was all before, though. Before his mom threw his dad’s computer out the second floor window and it smashed to pieces on the sidewalk. Before she packed all his clothes into boxes for the Salvation Army to collect and got a guy to come and haul away his dad’s recliner. Before she instructed his department head to donate all his books to deserving students — or undeserving ones for that matter. Illiterate football louts or gumsnapping coeds: anyone, anyone, she didn’t want to know (Lazar heard her yelling on the phone). Before she threw all his papers in the recycling bin: files and folders and every loose piece of scribbled-on paper cluttering his desk. Before she locked the door of his home office, the tiny room beneath the eaves, and tossed the key into the garbage where Lazar retrieved it because you never know. Having the key to his father’s office jingling about in his pocket made Lazar feel closer to his dad in an odd way but more distant from his grief-stricken, slightly deranged mom. Them’s the breaks, kid, his dad would have said with one of his wide, goofy grins. You win some, you lose some.

  Max might have said those things but it was a cinch he didn’t believe them. His dad used to say that the Binders were the luckiest unlucky family he knew: unlucky because of poor Sams, lucky because of everything else. They were the Binders (four against the world!) and they lived on the Street of Flowers. Magnolia Street, he meant, that exotic flowering plant nestled between rows of earnest local tree-streets — Elm, Oak, Ash, and Birch. Nobody knew why Magnolia Street had been named so absurdly, but naturally Max took it as one more sign of exceptional good fortune.

  His mom would probably have put it the opposite way: they were the unluckiest lucky family that she knew. They both had the same reasons in mind but Maggie’s way sounded sarcastic and a little forlorn, as if they’d somehow had the luck rubbed off them. Max’s version, on the other hand, didn’t sound sad at all. Starting off with luck was like hitting the genetic jackpot: being born with perfect pitch or athletic ability or a natural immunity to mosquito bites. Beginner’s luck wasn’t a fluke; it was collateral.

  The difference was that Max believed in luck. In fact he believed in it more than he believed in God, country, country music, gravity, academic freedom, or good intentions. (Not more than love, though, never more than love.) The problem was that he only believed in one kind of luck (good) and not
the other kind (bad). “Lord, Max,” Maggie would say, “haven’t you ever lost a coin toss?” Then Max would get quite dreamy eyed telling her about all the coin tosses he’d won. His dad was the only person Lazar knew who got excited when the phone rang in the middle of the night. His mom always blanched and went, Sams! His gran and Imee straight off thought that someone had died, and Lazar himself assumed that one of his deadbeat friends had gotten drunk and was phoning to shoot the 3 a.m. breeze.

  “Who the hell would be phoning you at three in the morning?” Maggie would ask, watching her crestfallen husband replace the receiver on a wrong number from Kyoto. But they all knew the answer: it was the lottery. Max was certain that a congratulatory bureaucrat from the Liquor and Lotteries Commission was on the line, phoning to tell him he’d just won a million bucks.

  Here are some of the reasons that this could never happen:

  No one phones to tell you that you’ve won the lottery. They just don’t.

  Nobody actually wins the lottery. Lazar has looked it up and the odds aren’t good.

  Maggie’s crummy attitude is the antidote to any good luck that might be floating about.

  Max has never bought a lottery ticket in his life.

  But his dad’s hopefulness buoyed the Binder family, made them feel special and, yes, lucky. It would be years before Lazar would realize that the song Bernie used to sing in her deep, tuneful voice was a melancholy song, a song about living in a fool’s paradise which was still a paradise because at least it wasn’t the parking lot that it was one day destined to become.