For some reason my brother drove. He’d recently bought (with my father’s help) a big tan Oldsmobile that rumbled with a kind of elderly resolve when Scott stepped on the gas. His old twill cap, I noticed, had somehow survived New York, and he’d adjust the bill with a little flourish each time we slowly gathered speed after a stoplight. An aspect of my brother’s evolving, quasi-adult persona was a heavy pair of horn-rim glasses that lent him a kind of comic dignity; he’d been a little nearsighted since his early teens, though he’d usually worn contacts to spare his then-handsome face. Now, with his cap and glasses and trench coat, his smile of vague importance as he chauffeured us to Norman, he gave me the sense of playing a minor role in a costume farce.
My mother and Scott brought out, if not exactly the worst, the weirdest in each other. Starved for love, Scott would follow her around her tiny condo, her little garden, finding excuses to hug and kiss and caress her. I suppose my mother did her best to reciprocate, but she wasn’t a patient woman, and Scott was pathetic in a thousand ways. Besides, she was trying to cook, and Scott would hover and hover around her tiny kitchen until she groaned with exasperation. “Scott, will you get outta here?” she’d finally explode, waving her wooden spoon and bugging her eyes. And Scott would join me on the couch and sullenly sip his beer, his umpteenth strong German beer, which seeped from his eyes and pores while he nursed this latest hurt. Perhaps he’d comfort himself with one of my mother’s cats, and here again Scott demanded more from the world than it was ever prepared to give him. Because I ignored the cats they vastly preferred me to Scott, and would writhe free of his clutches and seek refuge in my indifferent lap. Whereupon Scott would sigh and waver to his feet for still another beer. “Another?” roared my mother, snapping it out of his hand and returning it to the fridge. “Not until you’ve eaten something!” On and on they’d argue over a beer and its many implications. Since the result was always the same—Scott would not stop until he got his beer (though maybe he’d consent to “eat something”)—I found Marlies’s tenacity at least as loony as his.
At this point I’d retreat to my mother’s bedroom, where she kept a piano she’d acquired to make me feel more at home during my rare visits (with the result that I played piano rather than talk to her). I relished my solitude while it lasted. Once the argument had petered out in the other room, my brother would join me there at the piano, or rather stand behind me and knead my shoulder with one hand while he held his hard-won beer with the other. He cherished dreams of becoming a rock star—all that bouncing around on his toes was, I believe, by way of regaling a phantom audience. The vocal style he most emulated was that of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. I could almost stand hearing “Stille Nacht” sung in a nasal falsetto, ditto having my shoulder patted and prodded and probed, but the combination was unsettling, and soon I’d have to end our recital. I would either go for a walk before dinner (the environs included a parking lot and university golf course), watch a bit more TV, or pretend to take a long shit. The last was the only definitely private activity, so there I’d sit while a cat pawed under the door as if begging me to rescue her from Scott.
Dinner was served late in the afternoon. Scott would take his place at the table and survey the victuals with a look of tipsy discernment, then raise a glass to the chef. Their latest brawl momentarily forgotten, Marlies would return the tribute with a kind of sad, proprietary smile, suggesting that Scott was a pain in the ass, all right, but a gracious young man and her own son for better or worse. We’d eat. There was a pork roast, say, with crispy skin and scarlet flesh just so; lovely sweetbreads of an ideal chewiness, never mushy, cooked with mushrooms in a wine sauce; new potatoes and red cabbage and brussels sprouts and a cauliflower steeped in mock hollandaise. My brother would chew each morsel of meat with endless care (eyes fixed on the middle distance), then fastidiously remove the residual fat from his mouth and place it aside, for all to see, on a little plate he’d fetched for that purpose. When I asked him about it—this novel quirk—he explained with old arrogance that he’d rather not die of congestive heart failure, thanks. I was about to ask whether he followed the same procedure when eating in public, and (if so) whether he’d ever been denounced as a repulsive idiot, but my mother derailed me by leaning forward on her fists and hissing “Oh Scott, you’re so full of shit.”
After the plates were cleared and the snarling subsided, we decided to go see a movie, a comedy. We had a long night ahead of us, and the thought of spending it, just we three, in that little condo was out of the question. Also it would force my brother to sober up a bit. We wanted to laugh and forget ourselves, however briefly, and few things are more depressing than being thwarted in this simple wish. My brother sprawled between us stinking of beer, not just refusing to laugh but sighing and smacking his lips and scratching his balls (inside the pants), so that a number of people got up and moved. When we got home again and Scott discovered we were out of beer, he started on the Scotch.
At some point he lurched into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and began picking his face. He still had a lot of pimples, the kind that swell beneath the skin and really explode when given a good hard squeeze. Scott kept the door open so he could talk to us the whole time: “You’d think by now this shit would go away . . . How’m I ever gonna get laid? . . .”
This went on for almost an hour. At some point my mother asked me, in an urgent whisper, if I wanted to go to midnight mass. I did. Scott heard the sounds of our departure, the zippered coats and jingling keys, and stuck his puckered bleeding face out the door. “Oh,” he said, when Marlies explained where we were going. “Save me a wafer.”
We hadn’t been to church together, my mother and I, since eight years before, when we’d attended midnight mass in Germany with my devout grandparents. Now the place felt like true sanctuary. We arrived early and sang carols with the rest of that wonderfully normal congregation. Marlies embarrassed me by singing in German, or, in the case of “Adeste Fidelis,” the original Latin (she deplored the decadent reforms of Vatican Council II). Later, when the priest read the Christmas story, I heard a wet sniffle and knew my mother was letting out the tears she’d held back all day. Finally we went home and found Scott passed out on his stomach by the fireplace, hands tucked under his crotch for warmth like a little boy.
THE NEXT DAY he was churlish with hangover, humiliated after waking up in a dark room with his pimply cheek pressed against the bricks. It didn’t help that my mother nagged him ceaselessly, threatening to banish him from the condo until he’d cleaned up his act. Then Scott lost his temper and told her that she of all people should talk! I think he called her a cunt at some point (the word was such a normal part of Scott’s vocabulary that it didn’t really convey the usual nastiness). As ever, of course, Marlies went on giving as good as she got, all to no purpose. I might have tried walking back to my father’s house in Oklahoma City had it not been for my mother’s boyfriend, Dave—the baby-faced grad student—who joined us for brunch that day. Because his own youth had been somewhat troubled, and because he adored my mother, Dave took special pains to be nice to Scott, and that alone made the rest of the afternoon bearable.
There was one last argument in the parking lot as we were leaving. A few minutes before, my mother had caught Scott sneaking a slug of Scotch on the back porch; he said it was hair of the dog and he’d only had the one, but my mother said it didn’t matter—one was all it took!—and demanded he hand over his car keys so I could drive us home. Naturally my brother refused and would go on refusing until the Last Trump, but Marlies stood there berating him all the same and poking her hand out (“Scott: Give . . . me . . . the keys!”) for a long, long time. Dave stood there holding a camera my mother had asked him to fetch, and finally ended the dispute by snapping a close-up of mother and son in midwrangle. A moment later he took the posed version: my mother standing between us, wan but smiling, vaguely exultant at the prospect of our departure. “Christmas 1980” was her simple but pregnant gloss in t
he photo album.
From my mother’s condo to my father’s doorstep took about forty-five minutes in normal traffic, but Scott made it in less than half an hour amid holiday congestion on the interstate. He roared out of my mother’s presence and bore down on any motorist who hindered his speed, however innocently; their eyes bugged in their mirrors as they caught sight of the behatted madman in their wake. Scott’s only reply to my occasional protests (“Fuck! . . . Fuck! . . . Slow down, you crazy fucking asshole!”) was to go faster, or rather flex his foot against the already floored gas pedal. Finally we parted without a word in my father’s driveway, Scott pausing just long enough for me to step clear.
Burck answered the chain-locked front door in his bathrobe. Flushed and apologetic, he asked me to take a walk, please, and come back in an hour or so.
SHORTLY AFTER MANDY’S return to Scotland, my father began (actually resumed) seeing a woman more or less his own age, Sandra, and soon they decided to marry. Mandy dwindled away amid a welter of tearful transatlantic phone calls, and within a couple of months our lives were entirely different.
Sandra was the antithesis of my mother—they despised each other—and for my father that, I dare say, was the point. Twenty years before, my grandmother and Aunt Kay had thrown a welcoming soirée in Vinita for Burcky’s pigtailed, inexplicably German, and quite pregnant bride, who endured perhaps five minutes of polite chitchat with the local hausfrauen before planting herself in front of the TV and watching Bonanza. Sandra wouldn’t have done that. Indeed, Sandra would have shared the other ladies’ consternation in spades, given that she herself was the favorite daughter of Garden City, Kansas, which is perhaps best known for (a) being near Holcomb of In Cold Blood fame (Sandra had known the Clutters well) and (b) having the World’s Largest Outdoor Municipal Concrete Swimming Pool, which we duly visited, en famille, during our one and only trip to Sandra’s hometown. Like my father, Sandra had somewhat transcended her origins: the prettiest girl in her class at Garden City High, and one of the smartest, she’d been Miss Fort Hays State in college and then survived a ghastly first marriage to the local It Boy, a charming narcissist who gave her two gorgeous children: a girl, Kelli, and a son, Aaron, two and eight years younger than I.
Sandra’s ménage moved into our house well before the wedding, and forced me to alter those habits that had evolved as a matter of having the place to myself so much. No more lingering bowel movements; now that I shared a bathroom with Kelli, who looked as though she excreted marshmallows, I set my alarm early so I could finish my business in good time and leave the place ventilated once my future stepsister awoke to the song “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, as she did every wholesome morning for the six months or so before I left for college. In general I had to be less selfish. The little boy, Aaron, was not taking the change well and was often found weeping under somebody’s bed; what with his mother at work (public relations) and sister off cheerleading or whatever, it was up to me to coax him out and put him on my knee until he dried up.
Sandra and her children made me feel a bit Caliban-like. Sandra was lovely in a brittle, porcelain sort of way, her strawberry blond hair stylishly coiffed, her frantic smile dissembling some pretty complicated emotional weather. Aaron resembled his mother to an almost unsettling degree, what with his big lashy eyes and rosy cheeks and snub nose (when he went bald at an early age, the effect was that of a depilated Kewpie doll), whereas Kelli was a bosomy, nonbrittle confection of both parents. Back then my stepsiblings seemed not only comelier than I but somewhat sweeter and saner too. A decided liability was my drinking. One memorable evening I was the big loser of a chugging contest, after which I perversely insisted that my friends take me home. This they did, dragging me past the startled eyes of Sandra and her children—Burck too—like a baggy old cadaver crossing the set of Ozzie and Harriet.
But if I was Caliban, what did that make my brother? And what would these überkinder make of him? My own feeling was that we should put off that final merging of our families as long as possible—at least until Scott’s face cleared up and he made the leap to solid citizenhood that one waited for like the spark from heaven. But no. Shortly before the wedding, Scott came to dinner so he could meet his future stepfamily. It could have gone worse. I’m sure that Sandra, determined to help my father by helping his older son, had said something to her kids beforehand, since they twinkled around Scott like social workers in the presence of a promising welfare mother.
“I’ve eaten there,” Kelli gushed, when Scott mentioned his present place of employment. “Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s like the best restaurant in town!”
“Was it fun living in New York?” asked eager Aaron at some point, whereupon his mother broke into a bright smile and said (not for the first time) how wonderful it was to be together like this, together at last.
Scott was on his best behavior—that is, a tad creepy but in control, a stylized version of a Nice Young Man. He was careful to enunciate in a way that erased most traces of the slight nasal slur, or blur, the slight drunken quality that had crept into his speech even when sober. When spoken to, he focused on the speaker with walleyed intensity, and toward Kelli, of course, he was courtly to a fault. At such times Scott seemed to sense his old handsomeness like a phantom limb.
After dinner he drew me aside for a private conference. I knew exactly what was coming.
“Have you seen her naked, Zwieb?”
I replied primly—as if the thought had never so much as cast a fluttering shadow across my sun-brightened mind—that she was our sister for Christ’s sake.
“Stepsister,” my brother corrected me. “And they’re not married yet.” This established, he asked me again if I’d seen her naked, and I said that I hadn’t.
SANDRA AND BURCK were married on Good Friday in our living room. A friend of my father presided, a short Polish man who was the most liberal justice on the state supreme court; he seemed very fond of my father, touched to see him so happy, and his voice trembled with old-world sentiment as he performed the ceremony. We children and Oma from Vinita were the only witnesses, and I was the only one who didn’t cry a little. I’d volunteered to play Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” at the end, and I stood there worrying about that. My brother’s face shined with tears and sebaceous oil. He was wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie he’d borrowed from our father—come to think of it, that was another reason I was preoccupied: I couldn’t help wishing Scott had borrowed a jacket too. Sandra and her children had such impeccable fashion sense, and here was my brother looking like an assistant manager at Walmart.
My father was too distracted with happiness to take much notice of my conduct at the crowded reception afterward. While a jazz band played and our guests danced or milled around the caterer’s banquet and bar stations, I sat with friends at a table in the farthest corner of our backyard and got plastered. I’d just bounced a quarter into a plastic cup of champagne when Scott summoned me to the opposite side of the yard, where our family was gathering for a photo. He lingered a moment to chat with my friends, most of whom hadn’t seen him since high school, and I remember my peevish embarrassment over his bad haircut, complexion, short-sleeved shirt, and slightly off-kilter manner. I was not having fun. I felt like the family pariah. After the ceremony everyone had marched out of the house and left me there, smugly playing Mendelssohn, a random showoff who wasn’t trying hard enough to be a good son and brother. Scott, on the other hand, was embraced by all as a kind of philanthropic project, a lovable freak who would prosper in the bosom of a proper family. In that photo we took on the lawn, he occupies the filial place of honor between my father and Oma, while I stand apart with my hands plunged in the pockets of a khaki suit: a tipsy fop at a bus stop. A few minutes later I slipped away with friends to attend Good Friday mass, where I threw up in the vestry. I’d consoled myself that year by becoming a Catholic—more a matter of fitting in with friends, and distancing myself from family, than of spiritual comfort o
r moral aspiration. In any case it didn’t last.
THAT FALL I left for Tulane—a random, even feckless, choice on my part. I knew nobody in New Orleans. I’d submitted one of those “common” applications, and rather than bother with the multiple essays required by better schools (Northwestern, Reed), I figured What the hell when Tulane accepted me early. My roommate was a Dutch exchange student named Koenraad van Ginkel, who rarely left our room at Phelps House except to attend meetings of the Karate Club, and who was so broke he ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and would often use my architect’s desk lamp by twisting it around on its bolted mount and training it on his side of the room. My other suitemates were almost as hopeless: a furry little dese-and-dose guy from Long Island who strutted around in his underwear; two pals from Hollywood, Florida, who wore matching shark-tooth jewelry; a depressive stoner whose dark room leaked a steady stream of dope smoke into our common bathroom. With the exception of Koenraad and me, just about everyone in Phelps was Jewish; ditto the girls in Butler, across the street. Jewlane, some called it. I wasn’t anti-Semitic as far as I knew, but then I hadn’t known a lot of Jews in Oklahoma, and hence their sudden abundance in college seemed another feature of my overall alienation. At a dorm party that first week I said as much to a couple of good old boys from Memphis, Marlon and Andy, the “Starr brothers,” who were actually first cousins and the only congenial people I’d met so far: “I dunno,” I said, when asked whether I’d checked out the “talent” yet. “Seems all the girls here are Jewish.” Marlon and Andy looked at each other. “Well,” said Marlon, “that’s not really a problem for Andy and me, since we’re Jewish too.” Mortified, I spluttered some kind of idiotic disclaimer that I refuse to remember, such is my lingering trauma. And the following year—in atonement, I like to think—I made a big stink among my Waspy fraternity brothers, demanding we give a bid to Jim Gold from Oklahoma City (one of Kelli’s friends), who became my “little brother” and later CEO of Bergdorf’s.
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Page 8
