The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  For a moment I thought he’d pursue the matter, nastily, but he just sat there shaking his head and looking depressed. With two fingers he picked up his bottle and waggled it at a passing waiter, who asked, “This your brother, Scott?”

  He nodded. I ordered a beer too, and the waiter went away.

  “So tell me about yourself,” Scott sighed.

  I tried, doing my best to stress the sordid aspects of my life—the drunken blackouts, the verminous duplex, the mossy glasses, the jail in Denton, and so on, but my brother didn’t cheer up or laugh because it wasn’t funny. The fact remained that I was a student at a decent college (as my mother was keen to remind Scott), having the time of my life, and doubtless I struck my brother as the kind of simpering twit who finds his own life so amusing, all the more so in light of his (that is, my) basic contentment. However, another topic of conversation (Mom tells me you’re a busboy again; how’d that happen?) was slow to recommend itself, so I kept prattling until Scott interrupted.

  “How’s Pa?”

  I said our father seemed fine. “In fact,” I added, “never better.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you know, just in good fettle. Fewer worries, I guess.”

  My brother abruptly reared in his seat, raking his eyes over the room until they fell on our waiter. “How’re those beers coming, Phil?”

  The waiter paused with a laden tray. “In a moment, big guy,” he said, with a faint edge to his voice, that of a waiter addressing a busboy. My brother kept his eye on the man until he was certain some positive action was being taken; then he turned back to me.

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” he said.

  “Isn’t what nice?”

  “That Pa’s so cheerful. That he’s so—so peachy-keen.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it certainly is.”

  We sat there glaring at each other. The beers arrived.

  “Will you guys be ordering?” the waiter asked. He clapped his hands, once, twice, at his waist. “Or d’you need a few minutes?” Clap. “Or—”

  “We need a few minutes,” my brother said flatly. The man departed with a worried glance over his shoulder.

  “What’s good here?” I asked Scott.

  “Nothing. Order a hamburger. So does he ever mention me?”

  “Papa? Not much . . . or no, wait, come to think of it, I seem to recall something he said about how you like to tell people you were beaten as a child.”

  There was a pause. A vague look of shame, or something, fluttered around Scott’s face like a skittish bird, then flew away. “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what, he denied it?”

  “It’s not a question of denying it, Scott. He knows what happened. I know what happened. You were spanked a few times. If you want to blame your whole fucked-up life on that, fine, but don’t—”

  “When I was a little boy,” he said, loading the words with poignancy, “he’d make me drop my pants and lie on the bed. Then he’d take off his belt and start lashing the bed with it, just to scare me. When I was four or five years old . . .”

  He went on like that, building to the climax of the actual spanking (or “beating” or “lashing”). His eyes peered at some vision over my left shoulder. I didn’t bother to interrupt.

  “Bravo,” I said when he’d finished, limply clapping my hands.

  Scott swallowed and gave a quick angry laugh. “You better watch your ass, Zwieb.”

  “Or what?”

  He gave me a look of loony menace, as in You’ll see.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Listen: I have the same father and I got the same spankings. The reason he whipped the bed was because half the time he had no intention of whipping us, and it sure as hell didn’t traumatize me. So fuck you if you can’t take a joke. How dare you. You practically ruin the man’s life—”

  “Oh yeah, his life is so—”

  “You ruin both our parents’ lives, and now you—”

  Our waiter was back. “Guys, guys,” he said, frantically patting the air, “keep it down or you’re gonna have to—”

  “Tell him to be quiet,” said Scott with elaborate calm. He crossed his legs and shrugged. “He just went apeshit on me.”

  “Okay, Scott. Just—” The waiter shook his head and walked away.

  Scott watched him go, then leaned as far across the table as possible without leaving his seat. “You better not get me fired, man,” he said.

  I sat there looking at him, my eyelids drooping, as if to suggest that getting fired from his little busboy job was about the best thing that could happen to him, short of dropping dead. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  Appearing to calm down for both of us, Scott crossed his legs again and leaned back, steepling his fingers; then he remarked in a measured tone that I’d never really “gotten” our father. “He’s the Wizard of Oz,” said Scott. “You know?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Smoke and mirrors, Zwieb. The whole persona. The great man in public, you know, the whole facade of wisdom and benevolence. But underneath the whole—the whole illusion—”

  “You mutt,” I said. “You’re a mutt.” Mutt? I don’t know why the word occurred to me, but at any rate I let it sink in. “Mutt. Tell you what, mutt, unless you apologize for everything you’ve said about our father today, I’m leaving.”

  My brother said nothing.

  “So long, mutt.”

  I was halfway up the stairs when I heard a mumbled “Sorry.” I paused to look down at my brother: he was glaring at the table as though in furious pain, as though the word “sorry” had been gouged out of him with a toothpick. I kept going. I was out the door and striding into the parking lot when I heard a rush of footfalls—too late. The impact caused my last swallow of beer to gush out of my stomach; then I was on the asphalt with a sour taste in my mouth.

  Above me I heard a rapid whisper: “Sorry, Zwieb, I just . . .”

  “Get away from me.”

  I stumbled in the direction of my car. At first Scott plucked at me from behind—my elbow, a belt loop, a pocket—saying “please” a lot, and “Zwieb,” but when I kept going he grabbed my shirt collar and yanked. I fell backward out of my polo shirt and landed on the pavement again, absurdly barebacked. I groped for my shirt, but Scott held it out of my reach.

  “You can have it when you—”

  “Keep it.”

  I got to my feet and resumed walking to my car with what I hoped was a kind of dignity, despite my skinny, scuffed-up bare torso. I was conscious of a huddle of witnesses gathering around the exit. For their benefit, no doubt, Scott hugged me almost gently from behind and planted his feet.

  “Zwieb, stop. Goddamn it . . .”

  I waited for him to let go; finally he released me from the bear hug but kept hold of my wrist, deftly transferring my wadded shirt to his left hand as he did so. Once I had an arm free I gave him a glancing blow to the forehead. He glared at me, blinking, but held on. I punched him in the mouth and flailed wildly out of his grasp. He caught up with me a few feet from my car and tackled me to the pavement again. This time he stayed on top and didn’t speak when I told him to get off. I began to yell for help. All my brother’s strength went into holding me there; every few moments he’d let out a wet little pant or a snuffle.

  “Let him up, Scott.”

  “C’mon man, you can’t do this shit here . . .”

  Two big guys in aprons were peeling him off me; our waiter looked on. All three spoke to Scott in low, soothing voices, as if to a hurting child.

  “Just cool it, man. It’s over. Calm down now.”

  “You okay?” one of them asked me.

  On his feet again, my brother was bouncing on his toes with a pathetic swagger. He was trying not to cry, but his nasal voice had a quaver. “I didn’t do anything to him, Phil,” he told our waiter. “You saw! I was just sitting there talking to him, man, and he starts—”

  P
hil the waiter was shaking his head and patting the air. “You don’t have to explain to me, Scott. This is between you and your brother. I just think—”

  “Then he gets up and just leaves me there—”

  Scott’s voice broke and he buried his face in his hands. One of the big guys put an arm around him and gave him a consoling jostle. All three were glancing at me with a curious mixture of sympathy and reproach.

  “He needs to get out of here now,” the waiter told me, “before the manager comes out. Can you give him a ride?”

  I sighed, said sure, and picked my shirt off the pavement where Scott had dropped it. It was ripped at the collar and drooped loosely around my neck, exposing one nipple. My brother wouldn’t uncover his face, so I touched his arm and guided him around to the passenger side of my car. The others were saying “Later, Scott” and “See you tomorrow, man,” in kind voices, waving, before hurrying back to the restaurant.

  Inside the car, my brother gathered his breath with a long sizzling hiss and held it, grimacing, then all at once doubled over sobbing. I drove. I couldn’t bear it. Even now I can’t bear it—the immensity of those minutes.

  At some point I ventured to touch the back of his neck and ask where he lived. He confided the usual terrible address. I parked in an alley behind the place—the worst place yet—and we sat in silence, punctuated by his sniffles. Finally I asked if he was going to be all right.

  “I don’t know,” he said in a hollow whisper. “I don’t know, Zwieb.” He sat there. Sometimes he’d let out a deep sigh, an exhausted whew. “You want to come up?” he asked finally, staring out the window.

  “I’d like to,” I said, “but I can’t. I just don’t have time. Sorry.”

  Scott seemed to accept the lie without bitterness, as if he were grateful I’d spared him the truth—namely that every second in his company was misery.

  “Mind if I just sit here another minute?”

  “Of course not.”

  He looked too tired to cry, but every few seconds the tears would come anyway and he’d grimace with an effort to hold them back. He coughed a number of times and said, “Do you think Papa—” He coughed again. “Do you think Papa will ever want to see me again?”

  I decided to be honest. I said something to this effect: Our father would always forgive him in the end, and that was a pity, because it spared Scott the effort of earning his forgiveness. I told Scott that his life was repulsive (“sorry, but there it is”), that he’d brought nothing but heartache to anyone who’d ever made the mistake of caring for him. I told him that if he couldn’t change he should just keep away. From all of us.

  Somewhere in there Scott began to sob again. He spoke in mournful heaves, barely able to catch his breath: “How can you s-say that? . . . I’m your brother, Zwieb. I luh-love you. I’m your fucking brother . . .”

  I stared out the window at the dreary littered lawns, the rusted monkey bars and scattered backyard crap of that awful neighborhood. All the while my brother was forcing words through his sobs:

  “Look at me . . . my only friends are n-niggers . . . I can barely pay my shit—my shitty rent . . . I’m a fuck—fucking twenty-three-year-old b-busboy . . . I can’t get rid of these fucking pimples . . .”

  I was about to say, as gently as possible, “Scott, whose fault is that?”—when he mentioned the pimples, something I could hardly blame him for. Finally I sighed and said I was sorry, but I had to go. I said I’d call him.

  Scott nodded wearily, dragging a hand over his face. A string of snot stuck to his palm and he flung it out the window. “Promise?” he said.

  “Promise.”

  It was the last I saw of him for a long time.

  part III

  a functioning mediocrity

  After she married my father, Sandra had given up her PR business at Burck’s request, and now busied herself, frantically, with home improvement on a Utopian scale. My own bedroom in the new house was mine for two weeks or so toward the end of that first summer; when I returned for the holidays during my freshman year of college, every trace of my occupancy had been erased—crammed into the attic or thrown away outright—as the room was converted into the master suite and I was consigned to guest quarters, which had the nicely appointed anonymity of a comfortable hotel. “Look what we did with your room!” said Sandra, meaning the guest room, as if I should thank her for such handsome accommodations (as I did), and my crappy belongings be damned.

  An added feature in “my” new bedroom was certainly a plus: a sliding door that opened directly on to the back patio and swimming pool, so I could come and go without calling much attention to myself. This increased my sense of being a lodger as opposed to a family member, and I figured I might as well be a coddled lodger. My sybaritic weekend transit from bedroom to pool and back again, that summer after my freshman year, might have caused a strain if Sandra hadn’t left for Europe in the nick of time. The second summer it did cause a strain—especially since I’d decided to go without a job for the first summer since age thirteen. Sandra is not a lazy woman; indeed she must stay busy at all times lest something inside her tighten and tighten and snap with an all but audible twang. When I returned from the Bahamas (by way of Denton, where I’d explained the car-title discrepancy to the judge and was let off with a modest fine), Sandra was engaged more than ever in turning her—their—at any rate not my—home into a gorgeous but practical retreat from the cares of the world, which entailed her scampering around in shorts giving decorous orders to laborers building fences and landscaping gardens and improving the gazebo and God knows what else. She might have been entirely happy in this, were it not for a certain lone figure in the pool. Watching me there—as she did at longer and more baneful intervals—she would thin her lips and knit her brow, as if I were masturbating instead of reading. The first few times our eyes met I tried smiling benignly, or giving her a little wave, and one day she didn’t smile or wave back. A bad sign, given her usual civility.

  One day she brightly approached me there in the pool. “Blake? Could you come here a minute?”

  She had a job for me. There was a little sward on the side of the house where Sandra envisaged a brick path. Would I mind building it?—in other words (understood but naturally unspoken): Would I mind getting off my dead ass for once and making a little contribution around here?

  Why, not at all! In two days I accomplished the following: filled the bed of a pickup truck with sufficient bricks and concrete to build a twenty-foot brick path as specified, lugged the lot of it around to the side of the house, dug a uniform curving brick-deep ditch (marked off with sticks and string) where indicated, mixed the concrete, laid a three-foot-long pattern of bricks, and presented my work for inspection to Sandra, who (rightly) found it a ghastly botch and advised me to start over with sand rather than concrete; on the second day, then, I broke up the bricks with a sledgehammer, bought many bags of sand (and more bricks), lugged them to the worksite, and started over in a similar, but much neater, sand-based pattern. Sandra liked it. Indeed, she was quite pleasantly startled—or rather (human nature being what it is) a bit nettled, perhaps, to find her worst expectations so lavishly disappointed.

  But I soon endeavored to make it up to her. For a couple of days I continued work on the path, but less and less, laying a few more feet of bricks that third day, maybe a foot or so the fourth, and finally letting day after day pass without so much as a glance in its direction. It was only July, after all: what was the hurry? I had the summer before me. If I’d continued to work at my initial speed, I would have finished in a week, tops, whereupon Sandra would have doubtless found some other project to keep me occupied and out of her pool, where I seemed determined to languish as a kind of Hogarthian portrait of indolence . . . though I didn’t see it that way. On the contrary! I on my raft, reading a book, was nothing less than an Epicurean ideal—a well-contented mind and body—and it wasn’t my fault that Sandra needed to be so busy busy busy every single waking moment
.

  Was it a matter of conscious rebellion on my part? I doubt it. Probably I was just lazy and self-involved and didn’t really see the effect I was having on Sandra, or at any rate thought that if she had a problem with a young man attending to an ambitious reading/tanning program during his summer vacation, well, she needed to get over it. But Sandra took the situation very hard, and our relations never quite recovered. One day in mid-August or so, I was sitting in a breakfast nook whose window fronted my abortive brick path, when I noticed Sandra directing her main factotum, an affable Brit named Ivor, to finish the damn thing already. (Ivor had worked at the Oklahoma City Zoo when I was a kid, and he and Marlies were chums; because she loved animals he’d occasionally given her prairie dogs, chinchillas, sparrow hawks, and the like. He was a small pot-bellied man with a ruddy bearded face that hardly ever frowned. Sandra had appropriated him after he was downsized at the zoo and my mother moved away to Norman.) I hurried outside in my bathrobe.

  “Wait wait wait—! What’s this?”

  “What do you think, Blake?” Sandra stood there with her arms tightly folded. She looked at me with a kind of vague, wondering, thin-lipped smile—perhaps her most hostile expression. “How long were you planning to leave this ditch in my yard?”

  I pointed out that the summer wasn’t over yet, and she told me that either I finish the path—today—or Ivor would. The latter stood crouching over the path, hanging fire, sheepishly turning a brick over and over in his hands.

  I took the brick out of Ivor’s hands and got to work, and I suppose three or four hours later I was done. Just like that. And it looked nice, too; it’s there to this day. But of course it was too late for that to matter, and I couldn’t help feeling a little rueful about how easy it would have been just to finish the job in a timely manner and remain in Sandra’s good graces. But part of me, plainly, didn’t want that. Part of me was taking a stand. The principle in question went something like this: she could purge me from the family by removing most evidence of my existence from her house, but she could not persuade me that there was anything inherently wrong about spending my summer reading in a pool.