by Odie Lindsey
I’m a number-pattern guy. I never thought about that story structure until she noticed it. But she’s dead-on. That’s the way they all play out. Friends is wrapping. One quick knockout after the last commercial, then the preview of the next episode. I’m thinking maybe Wolfgang Puck. I don’t know.
“Wolfgang Puck?” I ask.
“Okay,” Shea says.
“Skipping Jessie?”
“I don’t care, you decide.”
“Microwave or oven?” “Microwave—oven takes too long.” “Yeah.” “Honey, will you grab your card so we can order the literature chair at the break?” “You sure? I mean . . .” “We’ll get the miles.” “That make you happy?” “Yes!”
She loves me, she really does. I love her, really do. We love each other. Truly. Honestly. More than most. I’ll bet our lives on that.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you back,” she says. And we both know it’s not television.
And my god, fat Monica cut off Chandler’s toe at their Thanksgiving, only instead of sending the detached digit to the hospital to be sewn back on, she mistakenly sent a baby carrot that had fallen on the floor beside it! I’ll pop in a pizza but hold off on the tape until the local news comes on. “Let’s give Jessie another chance?” “Okay.” “The chair comes to $2,304.50, including ship.” “Let’s see, 2-3-0-4-5. You know, February 30 is almost like saying March 2.” “You’re cheating!” she shrieks. “Feb. 30 doesn’t exist!” “I know, babe,” I say, “But that’s how it came to me. February 30, 1945. So, anyway, whose birthday?” “What?” “Come on. Work with me, silly. Who’s birthday is March 2, 1945?” “My mother!”
Give Jessie another try and wine, and then Frasier. Slice off a toe like a bloody baby carrot. I can hear the wet knife. Can feel the wet knife. Jesus, I still have to check the email. Amazing how consuming the Internet’s becoming. The chair is 5-4-3-2 then 0, missing 1. Just like Shea and I. March 2 is the day that Gulf War combat formally ended. Took 100 hours, on a 24-hour news cycle. Anyway, I’ll log to email after Frasier, at the start of the Seinfeld tape. It’s the one where Jerry dates a woman called “Man Hands” anyway, so I know how it starts.
Pickle
SYCORAX? TODAY?
Yes, even today, my brother plays a song featuring Sycorax, an eerie, operatic soprano, which is why it’s so difficult to be around him and Janine. As the clarinet snakes from the Wi-Fi jukebox, the few forlorn men at the bar peer up from their drinks. With the rise of the orchestral chorus they sigh, or pick at scabrous ears and necks, then resume a silent perturbation.
And I tell you there is nothing like chasing your father’s funeral in a drop-ceiling honky-tonk, midday in Nashville, alongside agitated siblings and exit-ramp panhandlers . . . listening to German opera.
Danny walks back from the jukebox barking like Hitler. “Brenne Laterne! Nahe und ferne dammere auf!” I’m so tired of these roles. I only want to focus on what’s happening here, to try and salvage something between the three of us. I love these people. Dad is dead.
“I recall this ditty,” our sister, Janine, says, the strings and soprano wailing. She turns to Danny. “Dad playin’ all that Teutonic hostile stuff while y’all worked out in the garage, right?”
“Wagner,” he says. “Spohr, and whatever. I hear it every time I exercise.”
“Guys?” I ask. “Please?”
She rolls her eyes. Danny’s jaw flexes.
Okay, I get it. I’ll grant that Colonel Dad was a little freaky with the competition stuff, a bit too Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. But it’s not supposed to be like this today. Not between us.
“You know,” I say to Danny, “I was so jealous of that. I always wished you guys would ask me to join you on the weight bench.”
Danny nods, looks away.
Considering my brother’s starched broadcloth shirt, and his lust to both embody and destroy convention, I can’t help but mumble, “That painful to win so many trophies, Danny? Life so bad out in chichi Belle Meade?”
Janine turns to me. “What’d you say, baby? Wait. Don’t answer, I don’t wanna know.” She wags the empty pretzel bowl at the bartender and starts to giggle. “Oh, god, do y’all remember the Chex Mix thing?” Her eyes dart to Danny and she covers her mouth, as if to take the question back. “Danny, sorry. Just slipped out.”
“Jesus, sis, no worries,” he says. “That was like thirty years ago!”
“Still,” she says. “I can’t believe he made you eat Chex Mix, every meal for a week, after I dropped a bowl of it into the furnace return. I swear, Dad making us suffer for each other’s mistakes was, like, evil genius.”
“Nah,” Danny says. “It was just an old Basic Training trick. They were mostly just old Basic Training tricks brought home.”
I look to the muted television above. Spies Like Us is on. Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. I have seen this movie a hundred times in my forty-two years. Despite our father’s having been the self-proclaimed “Baddest Lurp to Ever Sling a CAR-15” in Vietnam, it is this film, alongside The Hunt for Red October, that bookends my understanding of the Cold War.
“Frank’s the reason,” Janine tells me. “You act like nobody’s to blame, Bobby. Like we should just be sad. But dead or no, Frank’s still responsible for all our crap.”
“Frank” means our father; this “crap” means her marriages.
She continues, “Somehow, I thought it would stop today. Visualized, you know, the three of us holding on to each other, like, letting go? But it didn’t. It won’t.”
On the television, Chevy Chase performs his patented physical and facial comedy.
Janine is hung up on the moms that blotted her childhood. She chooses to forget that growing up we watched Caddyshack like fifty times, nuzzled up on a pillow pile on the floor in the den, everybody calling out the zingers, Dad impersonating Rodney Dangerfield, Danny steamrolling the heck out of Janine and me . . . all of us laughing our faces off.
“I remember when I got my first period . . .” she says.
I’ve heard her stories so many times.
“. . . and Dad told creepy Uncle Pete.”
Dad had to hear them too, whenever we all got together.
“I mean, Uncle-friggin’-Pete, for chrissake! You believe that? Like, he wasn’t even our uncle! He was a retired Drill Sergeant of female troops. Whose insistence was on observation and reprimand.”
The past is a rerun, Janine. We must try and fast forward.
“I showered in my underwear for, like, a year.”
Tell it to your new shrink. Or to Ellen, or Judge Judy.
Danny leans in to her, says, “I know, sis, I know.” His right hand rattles the keys in his suit pants, while the left lovingly pats Janine’s back. He whispers something in her ear, and she shakes her head, mouthing, It’s okay, I’m all right. Danny then orders an Amstel, and marches it into the bathroom.
I take a deep, calm breath. “Dad’s dead, Janine. We need to find something.”
“You’re lucky,” she answers, her lousy breath on my face. “Know what I thought about today, Bobby? I mean, baby?”
“Shhh. I’m right here, sis. What?”
She leans in, whispers, “Sometimes I’m glad. Sometimes I’m jealous that Pickle died.”
This is unacceptable. With her mention of our baby sister I can’t help the thought of slapping Janine. I grind my teeth, then turn back to the television. Try to conjure something joyful.
Janine and I learned to ride a bike together, out at Percy Warner Park. The sunshine was spectacular, was white and blue and everywhere—only not in your eyes. White-blue sky, and she had white plastic tassels on her handlebars and a pink frame with periwinkle flowers on the white chain guard. I had a red, chromey Schwinn. And Dad and Danny took us to the top of this small grassy hillock and had us mount our bikes, side by side. The two of them held us upright, and kept telling us to calm down, to trust them, and that we didn’t need any pansy training wheels. They then c
ounted down together, Three-two-one—push!
Rushing down that slope, gravity took care of balance, and gave Janine and me confidence as we pedaled through the free fall. By the time we hit the bottom of the hill we knew how to ride. We pedaled out and into the open field, intuitively peeling off into separate circles, me to the left and Janine to the right, our tires matting down an infinity sign in the grass, in and out of each other’s vision as Dad and Danny cheered from above. I can’t remember who collapsed first, but at some point Janine and I simply stopped pedaling, slowed, and finally flopped with our bikes into the thick grass. (We didn’t know how to brake!) Dad and Danny clapped as they lumbered down the hill to hug us.
“Come on, sis,” I say now, wishing Dad hadn’t been too cheap to buy a video camera. Evidence of that bike ride, of the good times, would’ve fixed all of us. As is, it’s as if her memory has crushed out the love.
“Don’t ‘Come on’ me,” she says. “You don’t know what it was like to be a girl in a military dictatorship.”
My barstool scrapes the linoleum as I get up to go find my brother.
THE men’s room is white-tiled and pungent. Danny urinates while glugging the Amstel, gently rocking back and forth.
“Can I talk to you, Danny?”
He doesn’t answer, but only wobbles, back, forth, his Armani belt clattering. He suckles the bottle, nipple-like, his piss traversing the mouth of the urinal.
“Danny?”
“Mmm,” he grunts, peering sideways at me. His eyes are those of a cow trapped in a railcar. He won’t take the bottle from his lips to speak. He can’t.
“DANNY?”
He gurgles, pees, grunts—but won’t stop. The way he rocks brings to mind a show I watched about Hasidic Jews praying at that Wall.
“You’re off, man,” I say, and then wash my hands and stare at the mirror.
WIFE after wife had nice bits to say about Dad at the memorial. Wife after wife, all women whom I’d only caught wisps of, being the baby and all, got up and noted their remembrances.
A) Danny’s mom, Marie, noted that Dad “was so dedicated to his work.” She has that raspy Memphis drawl.
B) “I remember when he surprised me with our dream house,” said Janine’s mom, Betsy, from beneath a veil of fly-screen lace.
C) Elaine—my birth mom—said, “I don’t think I found Frank’s heart, until little Pickle died.”
I don’t suppose I knew anything until little Pickle died. I was four and a half, and she had been the baby. Incredible: She would grab my thumb all the time, just grasp my thumb with her tidbit fingers. Danny would laugh at this and call me Fonzie, and I’d say, “Ayyyy.” Everywhere we went people would swoon and tickle her, down in her stroller.
After the memorial, Elaine (C) came over to chat with me. “Hope I didn’t disappoint you there, kiddo,” she said, her smile now hatched by the drag of a million cigarettes.
“I’m not sure I follow,” I answered. “I thought you were great.”
“Oh, you know. The ‘not finding Frank’s heart’ comment? Guess I got caught up in the chance at one last dig.”
We stared at each other. “Oh!” I said. “‘Heartless Frank!’ Got it. No, no problem, Elaine. This is a hard day for everybody.”
“Huh.” She squinted, and briefly cocked her head. “Anyway, you look good, Bobby. You good?”
“I think so.”
“Good,” she said. “See you graveside.”
I smiled as Elaine then seeped back into the Land of the Lost, her heels clicking the funeral home marble. This was, and is, just fine. I’m at peace with our relationship being not so very. From what I hear, over and over, Danny and Janine didn’t give great ratings to the various women who dabbled in their childhoods.
MY list: Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Both Jo and Blair in The Facts of Life. Wonder Woman. Chubby Tiffany-Amber Thiessen—with a secondary nod to the rest of the girls on the original Beverly Hills, 90210. Annie Hall. Vanna White. Showtime or Cinemax after ten p.m. in the old days. Nerdy Velma from Scooby-Doo. Audrey Hepburn. The woman from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The vast majority of Eastern European female tennis players. Nicole Eggert, circa Charles in Charge, no later. Mrs. Huxtable on Cosby. Girl #3 in the “Urban Rebounder” infomercial. Madeleine Stowe, Ellen DeGeneres. Jaclyn Smith in Charlie’s Angels. Daisy Duke. Vanessa Williams. Both Barbarella and Hanoi Jane. The gal from Footloose (back then, not now, not the goddamned remake). Susan Sarandon. Christina Ricci. Bette Davis. Jenna Bush. Never Katie Couric, sorry. Always—I mean any hour of any day—both Pam and Sissy from Urban Cowboy.
DANNY says he has to make a call. He pulls his BlackBerry out, but also walks to an old phone booth at the end of the bar. Janine orders another whiskey sour, then explains that she has no control over the “testing” of her current husband, Jeremy.
“It started out solid,” she says. “Like the rest.”
“Janine,” I respond. “You’ve got to let—”
“I really loved him. You know I did, right?”
“You’re too—”
“I think I still do. Plus, the twins.” She grips her new drink. “The twins helped for a while.”
Help or no, regardless, now, she’s fallen back into the same old cycle. She sleeps around, religiously, throwing the litter of her liaisons in Jeremy’s face, straight lie to sext to the Plan B boxes in the bathroom trash can, if only for the very necessary reason of making him prove how much he loves her. Prove that he would never leave her, never screw around or keep secrets.
“Funny thing is,” she says, “Jeremy’s the only one that’s hung in there!” Her laugh sounds like a metal rake on asphalt. “I almost hate him for being so wonderful to me!”
“That’s because you’re an ass, Janine. Period!” I can’t help but yell at her. Her negativity is just too much.
“An ass? An ass, Bobby?” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. “What do you know about anything?”
“I know that some of us need to just get over it.”
“Over it?” she asks. “You were never under it, sweetheart. You never even got near it.” She pauses for a moment, then. “Dammit, Bobby! I . . . I prayed to that man for guidance.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t—”
“In high school, I prayed to Dad to help me. To save me from myself. All I ever got back was, ‘Janine, go help your mother.’ Which was hilarious, since my ‘mother’ at that time was Huong Hiêú. She was twenty-two!”
“So he was a jerk sometimes,” I say, quashing the impulse to yell out, Order up! our joke about the fact that Dad ordered Huong Hiêú from a catalog.
“A jerk?” she mocks loudly. “Dad made Huong Hiêú tutor me in wifedom, Bobby. She had me stroke the veggies before stir-frying them, then whipped me with kitchenware if I complained.” She glares at me. “A jerk, Bobby?”
Order up! is also what Dad would yell to Huong Hiêú when he was hungry.
“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hand up to stop her. “Gotcha. Bad word choice. But how could I not get it, Janine? Where do you think I was? We lived in the same house.”
“I have no idea where you were,” she says. “The only time I ever saw you cry was when he tried to turn off your ABC Afterschool Special.”
At the other end of the bar, Danny hangs up both phones—cell in right ear, pay phone in left—and bolts back over. He asks what’s going on, and then he and Janine have another moment where they gaze into each other’s eyes and, as always, share some exclusive understanding. Woe. I look to the television.
A few minutes later, Danny admits that Dad bought him a hooker when he was in high school. Janine gasps and Danny swears it’s true, explaining that it happened after he lost at state, junior year. He says Dad told him his cock was too big for his jock, and then dragged him down to some Asian joint on Nolensville Road. Janine’s face gets long and slick and pouty, and she says, Oh, Danny, I’m sorry, because she’s the one person who’s never seen any of the
nine million shows where Coming of Age is something a man can share with his son.
“Yeah, it was terrible, sort of,” he says. “But maybe not—I don’t know. Anyway, the point is that it was a onetime deal. Dad never counted on how much it would cost!”
At this, the three of us laugh until we can’t breathe. I finally yell out, “Order up!” and we fall into hysteria, remembering Dad’s international calls to Huong Hiêú’s mail-order bride company, demanding a refund of his six thousand USD.
“The best part was that the company didn’t understand his Vietnamese!” Janine exclaims.
“He stomped around like an infant, spewing babble,” Danny howls. “Trying to reclaim authority over the country that made him impotent!”
Now this is real-deal joy.
Minutes later, Danny catches his breath. “What about you, pal?” he asks me. “Gotta girlfriend?”
