by Lou Cove
“I’m fucked.”
“You’re all muscle, no lungs,” Papa tells him. “You need to change your workout. Less iron, more running. Condition yourself for the long haul. Endurance! Come on, let’s get a schvitz.”
“Oh! It’s so humiliatin’! I feel like a Samsonite after the Steelers give it a good wailing…”
“Yeah, only you didn’t hold up as well as those pretty suitcases in the commercials,” Papa digs just a bit more before climbing the stairs to the locker room.
*
I stuff my comics and clothes in Papa’s locker and wrap a scratchy Y towel around my waist. They’re already in the steam room, so I pry the heavy metal door open and the heat is so strong it makes me swallow and hold my breath.
“I should be hearing about that grant any day now. Get you on staff, earning your keep.” Papa’s there, somewhere deep in the steam. I try to call to them but when I open my mouth the air blasts my tongue. I turn to leave.
“Jefe, I’m honored.”
“But you can’t fuck my secretary.”
I decide to stay, invisible in the scalding mist.
“Because…?”
“Because? Do I really need to tell you because? You really think you’re that different?”
“I’m a human being. You’re a human being. You have the niños. Makes it more complicated, I know. But if we’re being honest with each other, then it’s not so complex. It’s being human.”
“Oh,” Papa’s voice cuts the heavy mist. “It’s clearly not complicated for Carly.”
“She’s going to be a sex therapist. She understands.”
“Understands that you’re a selfish prick. That you can’t keep it in your pants, even on your honeymoon. And you can’t keep quiet about it, either.”
Papa’s words cut, and the anger in his voice twists my stomach into knots.
“That’s the voice of your father, man. This is a different time. This is our generation. I can’t hide anything from her. I love her.”
“If you love her, you protect her. You don’t cheat on her. And if you do, you don’t tell her.”
“Wow. Where do I start with that? Everything you just said is based on false assumptions. First: It’s not cheating. We committed to each other, to be together, yes, but also to have an open marriage. We acknowledge that we’re human beings with human desires, not to deny our natural instincts. That’s why Carly is a part of any exploring I do—not in the bed, necessarily, but in the setup and arrangements. Second: We don’t lie about it. I don’t know how to be anything but honest, especially with Carly. I can’t hold all that shit inside. I don’t know how anyone could. One day of deception and I’m a mess. Two days, and I’m on a collision course for the cuckoo’s nest. How can I do that to the woman I love?”
“You just do, you asshole,” Papa says angrily. The verbal shrapnel makes me flinch. “You don’t rope her into it. You carry your own water. Every time you get a hard-on for another woman you don’t tell your wife. All that’s going to do is hurt her. Carry your water. You don’t talk about it unless it’s going to affect the relationship, permanently. That’s when you need to bring it up.”
“Well, that’s how they used to do it. And how did that go? Repressed masturbators and guys sneaking around on women they say they love. And then everyone ends up divorced or, worse, in separate beds. We do it differently. We tell each other the truth.”
Papa snickers. “You know what?”
“What?”
“You’re stupid.”
I let loose a desperate pant in the heat of the steam. “Lou?” Papa calls. I don’t answer, willing my invisibility powers into action. He pauses, sighs. “Did it ever occur to you that you could just be monogamous? Is that even on your groovy radar screen?”
“You know what monogamy is?” Howie asks in the fog. “Monogamy is racism.”
“Ha!”
“I’m not joking. It’s a moralistic, puritanical, fabricated judgment of our nature. And it’s a violation of our human rights. We’re trying to cure it.”
Papa laughs for a long time. “You know how long I’ve been married?” he asks when he catches his breath.
“Ten years?”
“Fifteen.”
“Beautiful.”
Isn’t it?
“You want to know what marriage looks like after fifteen years?”
The heat of the schvitz closes on me, but I want to hear more. I try to hold my breath against this scalding air.
“Never mind. I don’t need to talk about it. You can judge for yourself.”
“Maybe you should,” Howie proposes, spinning my heart in my chest round the other way. I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.
“Maybe. But I carry my water. It’s what we have to do.”
“Do we?” Howie asks.
“Well, I do.” Papa pauses. “Your revolution is a lot harder to support. Plus, it’s a lot harder when I have your wife living with me. Takes a lot of the fun out of it when she shows up at the table looking like she’s sitting shiva.”
The steam is crushing me. I grab for the door and escape to the cool BO of the locker room. My arms and legs are bright red, my throat scorched. My chest constricts, asthma attack looming, even with no dogs in sight. Slipping on the tiled floor, I make for the stairs down to the pool, skip the mandatory shower, and jump in the deep end.
The water is a reverse shock, the exact opposite of the schvitz. My body convulses once, marrow solidifying, and then a second time when my superheated balls recoil at the new exposure as the towel falls away, surfacing in a nappy white swirl among the Sunday morning lady lap swimmers. A whistle shrills and echoes off the walls of the pool room. “ADULT SWIM!” the lifeguard shouts. “Outofthepool!”
The lady lappers have stopped and are bobbing around me like wet raccoons in goggles and rubber caps.
“Come on!” one of them screeches.
Slowly I let my body slip under the surface. Opening my eyes I see the metal ladder, a few feet away through the rippling ice blue. I try to swim the gap, insides still on fire, skin shivering. But my lungs give out a few feet shy and I surface again.
“I said outofthepool!”
I dog-paddle a few more feet, reach for the ladder and try to close my ears and my mind to the gasps and cries that follow my naked ass into the stairwell and up to the locker room, invisible no more.
Curls, Crowds, and Other Thanksgiving Arrivals
“I want you all to go into the basement. Now.”
Mama’s tone is unmistakable. An octave below eruption. We have worn out her welcome in the kitchen. Thanksgiving is bearing down and my father is nowhere to be found. We’re well accustomed to the long workdays and overnight business trips, but this is a holiday. It’s becoming harder to hold him still and get a bit of what I need. But what is that, anyway? Hugs? I’m too old now.
I grab David by his little hand and we hurry down to the basement, where all there is to do is listen to Godspell, Paul McCartney and Wings, and Disco Duck on the plastic portable turntable.
“Howie said he’d jump out the window if he heard that song again,” I warn my sister as she flips the 45 from the A side, Disco Duck (part one), to the B, Disco Duck (part two). Damn you Rick Dees and your Cast of Idiots.
“Well, he’s on the third floor. He can’t hear,” she says.
David rides a green plastic Inchworm around the basement until he tumbles into the cordwood piled near the back.
“I want Mama…” he sobs. Sure, I want to tell him, we all want Mama. He was a baby when we lived in Manhattan. Mama worked, but she was home when she was home back then. In this mess of a mansion, she’s always here, but never settled. As little as we got of her back then, David gets less now. His solution is to always stay close to my parents, snuggled under dinner and coffee tables, sleeping at the bottom of the stairs just outside the dining room door—close enough that he is not quite alone, but not so close to the adult realm that he’ll be picked up and pu
t away for the night. His method seems to work.
“Come on, buddy. I’ll take you for a ride.” I kneel down and curve my back so he can climb on, the way Papa does. His little hands grab my collarbone, wet cheek against my neck. “Let’s go to Fahntasy Island!”
“Hey, who’s hiding down here? We have a big Thanksgiving dinner happening on Chestnut Street!” the real Papa says as he trots down the basement stairs.
“Peter?” Mama’s voice, muffled by the long dark of the dumbwaiter shaft.
“One sec!”
“Papa!” Amanda runs to the base of the stairs to meet him. “David fell over and … What happened to your hair?”
“Do you like it? Raphael did it.”
“Who’s Raphael?” Amanda asks.
“It’s curly.” David points over my shoulder at the exploded Brillo pad on my father’s head.
His hair has been transformed, from a familiar hippie helmet to a tight chocolate-brown poodle shag.
“It’s like Arnold Horshack and Juan Epstein had a baby,” I whisper, mortified.
“It’s called a perm. Short for permanent. Raphael! Come down and meet the kids.”
“Is it … permanent?” Amanda tests.
A tall man—dark skin, long curly hair—clomps down behind my father.
“Hay-lo,” his accent is doubly foreign here in our basement. “I am so pleased to meet you.”
“Raphael is my hairdresser. Though that doesn’t do him justice. Artist is more like it. He suggested I do something different for a change.”
“I hurt my foot,” says David, kicking his right leg forward along my ribs.
“Ooh,” Papa soothes. “Let me kiss it.”
“My grandmother, she put—how you say?—pepper pods on my injuries and they go away,” Raphael smiles hugely while saying this.
“We could try that!” Papa’s so cheerful for someone who looks like he was just electrocuted. “But Raphael, I want you to try my hummus.”
“Why’d you…?” I nod at my father’s hair as David slides off my back.
“Change of pace. Can’t let things get boring.” Papa picks my brother up, inspecting his little body for cuts and abrasions. Poodle hair notwithstanding, he is talented when it comes to tenderness. He just doesn’t do it as much as I wish he would.
Amanda and I stay below, huddled by the dumbwaiter where Mama’s voice is clearest. “Where have you been? You’ve been gone ALL afternoon? I did the stuffing, the turkey, the celery root, everything…” Pause. “What did you do to your hair?” Amanda looks at me, bug-eyed.
“You like?”
“His face? Perfect for this! I tell him so,” Raphael says happily.
“Hello? Who are you?” Mama tries and fails to sound friendly.
“Raphael. I told you. He’s from Havana, by way of Miami. Real success story, his business.”
“Well…” Mama says slowly, “I’m so glad you stopped by. I’ve just got so much to do and, Peter, I could really use your help.”
“I’ve invited Raphael for dinner. We’ve got space.”
It’s not unusual for Papa to spike the social punch bowl with unexpected dinner guests, but Thanksgiving seems a bridge too far. Our move to the North Shore marks the first time we aren’t celebrating at Grandma Wini’s house, where the guest list would typically be us, Grandma and Gramps, Aunt Leslie, Uncle Rick, and Cousin Greg, with the Freedmans making their annual pilgrimage up Rockaway Ave for pie and rocky roads at a predetermined time. That’s it.
“Peter, you know I love spontaneity,” she says, but it doesn’t sound loving. “Any other night, this would be different. But we’ve got eighteen people coming, including Glovey, and the table’s not even set.”
“Right, I’m on that,” Papa says, a snap in his voice. “But I promised Raphael his first taste of hummus. Let me just whip up a quick batch.”
“Peter!”
“I’ll set the table. You don’t need to do anything else. Why don’t you go upstairs and rest? Take a break and save your energy for tonight.”
Mama erupts. “I DON’T WANT TO REST. I WANT TO COOK DINNER. AND I WANT YOUR HELP!”
“Mount Vesuvius,” I whisper. Amanda giggles, then catches herself.
The front door slams and Uncle Rick calls from the foyer before the argument can intensify. “Pete? Phyl? We’re early!”
Papa shouts back, “Welcome! Rick, Les, meet Raphael—he’s in the living room and he’s the best hairdresser on the North Shore. Make him a drink and help yourselves!”
“Oh, is this the Cuban Cutter guy? How ya doin’, amigo? I’m having rum, Pete. You want one?”
“I’m very well, thank you. You are Peter’s … er … brother?”
“Great!” Papa shouts over the drone as his new Cuisinart whips garlic, lemon, chickpeas, and tahini. The sound is like fertilizer for the blooming cacophony. “Ice is in the bar. How’d Marblehead do, Rick?”
“I’m his brother-in-law,” Rick says. Then louder, to Papa: “Swampscott killed ’em, twenty-five to six. Massacre. And it was wicked cold. We left early.”
Unlike Papa, who can’t stop moving, his sister Leslie and her husband Rick are “Marblehead forever,” never having lived more than four miles from Grandma Wini and Grandpa Sam. Uncle Rick went into the Navy when he turned eighteen, got some tattoos, lived on a submarine, and learned electrical engineering. Now he works at the Sylvania plant in Salem, making lightbulbs. Leslie, for her part, is full of enthusiasm for everyone she meets: first to laugh, last to leave, rarely without a smoke.
Cousin Greg calls from the top of the basement stairs and we come up to meet him as Grandma and Gramps trundle in, along with my parents’ friends, Steve and Enid Freedman and their kids Matty and Rebecca.
Steve is in the wine business. A “connoisseur,” Papa says. He grew up on Rockaway Ave, two blocks down the tree-lined street from Papa. Like my father, he moved to New York to make it big. And like Papa, he’s found his way back home. Steve is by far the tallest Jewish guy I’ve ever met.
Enid is my mother’s best friend. She’s the prettiest and kindest of all the moms, though lately she spends most of her visits whispering mysteriously in the corner with Mama.
All the guests are carrying bowls, Pyrex plates, square ceramic dishes covered with foil and plastic wrap. I swoon at the once-a-year scent of sweet potato and marshmallow. Special food, but normal food, made from Grandma’s Joy of Cooking, not Papa’s Cuisine Gourmande.
“It was a disaster, Pete,” Steve shouts over the tumult.
“You’re all fair-weather fans,” Gramps huffs, hanging his coat on the iron tree in the front hall, then helping Grandma with hers.
“Hello, my loves!” Grandma Wini coos, pulling a wrinkled tissue from her sweater sleeve and dabbing at her runny nose.
“And you’re the worst of all, Pete,” Gramps says to my father, his son, who is sprinting through the dining room to greet them. “Who skips the biggest rivalry of the year? What happened to loyalty?”
Suddenly the bustle of everyone arriving, greeting, shedding coats, and stomping boots falls silent. They’ve caught sight of my father’s new hair.
“Jesus, I guess loyalty put its finger in a light socket,” Steve laughs.
“Peter?” Grandma Wini’s face takes on a rare expression, disdain, stretched and distorted by a cringe of horror and the competing impulse to always, always smile.
Papa grins broadly, thrusts out his arms, and flutters his jazz hands. “Ta-da!”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Uncle Rick coughs on his icy rum and soda, spilling a bit of Papa’s as he hands it to him.
“What happened to your dad’s hair?” Matty leans in to me and whispers.
“Meet the maestro, everybody. Raphael’s a master with shears.”
“And cuter than Warren Beatty.” Frank appears in the doorway between the dining room and the front hall.
“Hel-lo! I’ll take a shampoo, love.” Aunt Leslie giggles, pushing through the crowd to hug F
rank.
“Such a fag hag,” Frank pecks her on the cheek. “And look at you, Peter. Aren’t you just one … singular sensation!”
Papa waves it all away, impervious as always to jabs.
“Well, I think you can pull off anything,” Enid says softly, kissing my father on the cheek.
“He looks like Richard Dreyfuss,” Aunt Leslie offers, arm around Frank. She towers over his round, furry frame.
“He looks like Richard Pryor,” Rick says.
“Gene Wilder with a mustache?” Steve offers.
“He is a beautiful man with brave hair,” says Raphael, trying to end the debate.
“Brave is one word for it.”
“Ricky!”
“What? I’m not the one who got a Bozo do.”
“You’re just jealous,” Papa laughs, brushing the conversation off, kissing his mother, patting Gramps on the back, Steve on the cheek, and each kid on the tush. “Hold on. I just made some hummus. Let me grab it and then I want to play you something.”
“Who makes hummus for Thanksgiving?” Gramps asks no one in particular.
“He was going to make Cornish game hen instead of turkey,” Mama sighs, pushing hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “But I told him you wouldn’t eat it, Sam.”
“Thank you, Sweetie,” Gramps kisses Mama on the cheek.
“You sure Pete’s not a fag?” Uncle Rick elbows Frank.
“Sweetie,” Frank tugs coyly on Rick’s Abe Lincoln beard, “you should have seen him in the fraternity. He’s a man’s man.”
Leslie lets loose a cheery, phlegmy, ciggy-butt laugh.
Everyone circles Mama for hugs but she waves them off. “I’m a mess. We’re a little behind and I need to change my clothes. Maybe everyone can go into the living room? The fire should be nice and warm.” Then to Enid, who has lined up alongside her: “Everything OK? Want to come up with me?” Enid nods and the two slowly climb the stairs to the second floor, Mama a step ahead and pausing for Enid every few stairs as the rest of the guests move along as instructed.
“Got any new albums, Pete?” Rick shouts as he flips the thick metal toggle to the Marantz. The heart of Papa’s massive stereo system, along with his prodigious record collection, takes up an entire wall in the pool room. There’s a fire burning here, too, along with the one in the adjacent living room where most of the family is gathering.
