The Best of Me

by David Sedaris

  -fucked-up

  Check your ass later.

  Then there’s:

  Tiffany,

  I’m looking forward to getting high with you this summer.

  Tiffany,

  Call me sometime this summer and we’ll go out and get blitzed.

  A few weeks after these messages were written, Tiffany ran away and was subsequently sent to a disciplinary institution in Maine called Élan. According to what she told us later, it was a horrible place. She returned home in 1980, having spent two years there, and from that point on none of us can recall a conversation in which she did not mention it. She blamed the family for sending her off, but we, her siblings, had nothing to do with it. Paul, for instance, was ten when she left. I was twenty-one. For a year, I sent her monthly letters. Then she wrote and told me to stop. As for my parents, there were only so many times they could apologize. “We had other kids,” they said in their defense. “You think we could let the world stop on account of any one of you?”

  We were at the beach for three days before Lisa and our father, who is now ninety, joined us. Being on the island meant missing the spinning classes he takes in Raleigh, so I found a fitness center not far from the rental cottage, and every afternoon he and I would spend some time there. On the way over we’d talk to each other, but as soon as we mounted our stationary bikes we’d each retreat into our own thoughts. It was a small place, not very lively. A mute television oversaw the room, tuned to the Weather Channel and reminding us that there’s always a catastrophe somewhere or other, always someone flooded from his home or running for his life from a funnel-shaped cloud. Toward the end of the week, I came upon my father in Amy’s room, sifting through the photos that Tiffany had destroyed. In his hand was a fragment of my mother’s head with a patch of blue sky behind her. Under what circumstances had this been ripped up? I wondered. It seemed such a melodramatic gesture, like throwing a glass against a wall. Something someone in a movie would do.

  “Just awful,” my father whispered. “A person’s life reduced to one lousy box.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Actually there are two of them.”

  He corrected himself. “Two lousy boxes.”

  One afternoon on Emerald Isle, we all rode to the Food Lion for groceries. I was in the produce department, looking at red onions, when my brother sneaked up from behind and let loose with a loud “Achoo,” this while whipping a bouquet of wet parsley through the air. I felt the spray on the back of my neck and froze, thinking a very sick stranger had just sneezed on me. It’s a neat trick, but he also doused the Indian woman who was standing to my left. She was wearing a blood-colored sari, so she got it on her bare arm as well as her neck and the lower part of her back.

  “Sorry, man,” Paul said when she turned around, horrified. “I was just playing a joke on my brother.”

  The woman had many thin bracelets on, and they jangled as she brushed her hand against the back of her head.

  “You called her ‘man,’” I said to him after she walked off.

  “For real?” he asked.

  Amy mimicked him perfectly. “For real?”

  Over the phone, my brother, like me, is often mistaken for a woman. As we continued shopping, he told us that his van had recently broken down and that when he called for a tow truck the dispatcher said, “We’ll be right out, sweetie.” He lowered a watermelon into the cart and turned to his daughter. “Maddy’s got a daddy who talks like a lady, but she don’t care, do she?”

  Giggling, she punched him in the stomach, and I was struck by how comfortable the two of them are with each other. Our father was a figure of authority, while Paul is more of a playmate.

  When we went to the beach as children, on or about the fourth day, our father would say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to buy a cottage down here?” We’d get our hopes up, and then he would bring practical concerns into it. They weren’t petty—buying a house that will eventually get blown away by a hurricane probably isn’t the best way to spend your money—but still we wanted one desperately. I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and that it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it. Thus it was that on Wednesday morning, midway through our vacation, Hugh and I contacted a real estate agent named Phyllis, who took us around to look at available properties. On Friday afternoon, we made an offer on an oceanfront cottage not far from the one we were renting, and before sunset our bid was accepted. I made the announcement at the dinner table and got the reaction I had expected.

  “Now, wait a minute,” my father said. “You need to think clearly here.”

  “I already have,” I told him.

  “OK, then, how old is the roof? How many times has it been replaced in the last ten years?”

  “When can we move in?” Gretchen asked.

  Lisa wanted to know if she could bring her dogs, and Amy asked what the house was named.

  “Right now it’s called Fantastic Place,” I told her, “but we’re going to change it.” I used to think the ideal name for a beach house was the Ship Shape. Now, though, I had a better idea. “We’re going to call it the Sea Section.”

  My father put down his hamburger. “Oh no, you’re not.”

  “But it’s perfect,” I argued. “The name’s supposed to be beachy, and if it’s a pun, all the better.”

  I brought up a cottage we’d seen earlier in the day called Dune Our Thing, and my father winced. “How about naming it Tiffany?” he said.

  Our silence translated to: Let’s pretend we didn’t hear that.

  He picked his hamburger back up. “I think it’s a great idea. The perfect way to pay our respects.”

  “If that’s the case we could name it after Mom,” I told him. “Or half after Tiffany and half after Mom. But it’s a house, not a tombstone, and it wouldn’t fit in with the names of the other houses.”

  “Aw, baloney,” my father said. “Fitting in—that’s not who we are. That’s not what we’re about.”

  Paul interrupted to nominate the Conch Sucker.

  Amy’s suggestion had the word “Seaman” in it, and Gretchen’s was even dirtier.

  “What’s wrong with the name it already has?” Lisa asked.

  “No, no, no,” my father said, forgetting, I think, that this wasn’t his decision. A few days later, after the buyer’s remorse had kicked in, I’d wonder if I hadn’t bought the house as a way of saying, See, it’s just that easy. No hemming and hawing. No asking to look at the septic tank. Rather, you make your family happy and iron out the details later.

  The cottage we bought is two stories tall and was built in 1978. It’s on proper stilts and has two rear decks, one above the other, overlooking the ocean. It was rented to vacationers until late September, but Phyllis allowed us to drop by and show it to the family the following morning, after we checked out of the house we’d been staying in. A place always looks different—worse, most often—after you’ve made the commitment to buy it, so while the others raced up and down the stairs, claiming their future bedrooms, I held my nose to a vent and caught a whiff of mildew. The sale included the furniture, so I also made an inventory of the Barcaloungers and massive TVs I would eventually be getting rid of, along with the shell-patterned bedspreads and cushions with anchors on them. “For our beach house, I want to have a train theme,” I announced. “Trains on the curtains, trains on the towels—we’re going to go all out.”

  “Oh brother,” my father moaned.

  We sketched a plan to return for Thanksgiving, and after saying good-bye to one another, my family splintered into groups and headed off to our respective homes. There’d been a breeze at the beach house, but once we left the island the air grew still. As the heat intensified, so did the general feeling of depression. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the road back to Raleigh took us past Smithfield and a billboard on the outskirts of town that read WELCOME TO KLAN COUNTRY. This time we took a different
route, one my brother recommended. Hugh drove, and my father sat beside him. I slumped down in the backseat next to Amy, and every time I raised my head, I’d see the same soybean field or low-slung cinder-block building we’d seemingly passed twenty minutes earlier.

  We’d been on the road for a little more than an hour when we stopped at a farmers’ market. Inside an open-air pavilion, a woman offered complimentary plates of hummus served with a corn and black-bean salad, so we each accepted one and took seats on a bench. Twenty years earlier, the most a place like this might have offered was fried okra. Now there was organic coffee and artisanal goat cheese. Above our heads hung a sign that read WHISPERING DOVE RANCH, and just as I thought that we might be anywhere, I noticed that the music piped through the speakers was Christian—the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome.

  Hugh brought my father a plastic cup of water. “You OK, Lou?”

  “Fine,” my father answered.

  “Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?

  “I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

  At the far end of the parking lot was a stand selling reptiles. In giant tanks were two pythons, each as big around as a fire hose. The heat seemed to suit them, and I watched as they raised their heads, testing the screened ceilings. Beside the snakes was a low pen corralling an alligator with its mouth banded shut. It wasn’t full-grown but perhaps an adolescent, around three feet long and grumpy-looking. A girl had stuck her arm through the wire and was stroking the thing’s back while it glared, seething. “I’d like to buy everything here just so I could kill it,” I said.

  My father mopped his forehead with a Kleenex. “I’m with you, brother.”

  When we were young and would set off for the beach, I’d look out the window at all the landmarks we drove by—the Purina silo on the south side of Raleigh, the Klan billboard—knowing that when we passed them a week later, I’d be miserable. Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different. “What time is it?” I asked Amy.

  And instead of saying “Who cares?” she snapped, “You tell me. You’re the one with a watch on.”

  At the airport a few hours later, I picked sand from my pockets and thought of our final moments at the beach house I’d bought. I was on the front porch with Phyllis, who had just locked the door, and we turned to see the others in the driveway below us. “So is that one of your sisters?” she asked, pointing to Gretchen.

  “It is,” I said. “And so are the two women standing on either side of her.”

  “Then you’ve got your brother,” she observed. “That makes five—wow. Now, that’s a big family.”

  I looked at the sunbaked cars we would soon be climbing into—furnaces, every one of them—and said, “Yes. It certainly is.”

  A House Divided

  Because I’d accumulated so many miles, they bumped me to first class on the flight from Atlanta to Raleigh. I had assumed that our plane would be on the small side, but instead, owing to Thanksgiving and the great number of travelers, it was full-size. I was seated in the second row, in front of a woman who looked to be in her early sixties and was letting her hair fade from dyed red to gray. After she’d settled in she started a conversation with the fellow beside her. That’s how I learned that she lived in Costa Rica. “It’s on account of my husband,” she said. “He’s military, well, retired military, though you never really leave the Marine Corps, do you?”

  She started explaining what had taken her from North Carolina to Central America, but then the flight attendant came to take a drink order from the guy next to me, and I missed it. Just as I was tuning back in, a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.”

  Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. You people are on your own, I thought, knowing that if anything bad did happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck. I had passed judgment, so fate would force me to eat my words.

  After we took off from Atlanta I pulled out my notebook, half making a list of things we’d need for Thanksgiving and half listening to the woman behind me, who continued to talk throughout the entire flight. I guessed she was drinking, though I could have been wrong. Perhaps she was always this loud and adamant. “I never said I’d spend the rest of my life there, that’s not what I meant at all.”

  It was dark by the time we landed in Raleigh, and as we taxied to the gate, one of the flight attendants made an announcement. The “remain seated until the fasten seat belt sign has been turned off” part was to be expected, but then she added that we had some very special passengers on board.

  Oh no, I thought. Please don’t embarrass me. I was just wondering who the other important person might be when she said, “With us today is the outstanding soccer team from…” She named a high school in the Triangle Area and concluded with, “Let’s give them all a great big hand!”

  The woman behind me whooped and cheered, and when no one joined her, she raised her voice, shouting, “You people are…assholes! I mean, what the hell, you can’t even applaud for your own teenagers?”

  I’d meant to but figured the team was back in coach. They wouldn’t have heard me one way or the other, so what difference did it make?

  “Pathetic,” the woman spat. “Too wrapped up in your…smartphones and iPads to congratulate a group of high school athletes.”

  You couldn’t say she hadn’t nailed us. Still I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing. It’s so funny to be called an asshole by someone who doesn’t know you, but then again knows you so perfectly.

  “See that woman?” I said to Hugh when he met me at the baggage claim a few minutes later.

  I told him what had happened on the plane, and he folded his arms across his chest, the way he always does before lecturing me. “She was right, you know. You should have applauded.”

  “We’ve been apart for two months,” I reminded him. “Would it kill you to take my side in this?”

  He apologized, but after I’d wrestled my bag off the carousel and we’d started toward the parking lot, he added quietly, but not so quietly that I couldn’t hear him, “You really should have clapped.”

  From the airport we drove to my brother Paul’s. There we met up with my sister Gretchen, who had a cast on her right forearm and held it aloft, like someone perpetually being sworn in. “It helps ease the pain,” she explained.

  I hadn’t seen Gretchen since the previous spring and was startled by her appearance. For as long as I could remember she’d worn her hair long, and though it still fell to below her shoulder blades in the back, the top was now cropped and stood from the crown of her head like the fur of a graying German shepherd. Odder still, she had a sun visor on. “Since when have you had this mullet?” I asked.

  Only when she lifted it off did I realize she was wearing a cap, the sort sold in joke shops. “The hair is attached to the top of it.
See? I got it at the beach last month.”

  I hadn’t been to our house on Emerald Isle—the Sea Section—since we’d bought it five months earlier, though Hugh had. He’d flown over in late September to start making improvements. Gretchen joined him for a few days shortly before Halloween and fell into a rut while walking on the beach. That’s how she broke her arm. “Can you believe it?” she asked. “No one has worse luck than me.”

  When there’s no traffic, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Raleigh to Emerald Isle. We left at around eight p.m., and on the way, I asked Gretchen about her job. She works as a horticulturalist for the city of Raleigh and had recently discovered a campsite in one of its larger parks. That’s common enough, but this one was occupied by someone we once knew. His name was familiar, but I couldn’t picture his face until Gretchen put him in context. “He used to come over to the house and hang out with Mom.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  Kids like to believe that their parents will get lonely after they leave the house, but I think my mother actually did. She delighted in her children and always enjoyed talking to our friends and the people we were going out with. “Why don’t you invite Jeff to dinner?” I remember her asking Gretchen one night in the late seventies.

  “Because we broke up a month ago and I’ve been in my room crying ever since?”

  “Well, he still needs to eat,” my mother said.

  The fellow who wound up living in a city park—Kevin, I’ll call him—started dropping by in the early eighties. His parents and mine owned some rental property together, and over the years both he and I performed odd jobs there. I remembered him as directionless and guessed from what my sister told me that he pretty much stayed that way. Still, it seemed incredible to me that something like this could happen, for we were middle-class and I’d been raised to believe that our social status inoculated us against severe misfortune. A person might be broke from time to time—who wasn’t?—but you could never be poor the way that actual poor people were: poor with lice and missing teeth. Your genes would reject it. Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn’t your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet? Then there’d be friends, hopefully ones who went to college and might at the very least view you as a project, the thing they’d renovate after the kitchen was finished.