“I’m not ready to start dating anytime soon,” I say.
“No one said anything about dating,” my mother says.
“That’s right,” Betty agrees. “Just a friendly phone call. Maybe a cup of coffee.”
They both look at me expectantly. I am conscious of Phillip’s elbow in my ribs, his low, steady chuckle. I’ve got six more days of this, and if I don’t nip it in the bud, my mother will be trumpeting my situation to the entire community.
“The thing is, I enjoy some good Internet porn myself, every now and then,” I say.
“Judd!” my mother gasps, horrified.
“Some of it is done very tastefully. And especially now, being single and all. It’s a great resource.”
Phillip bursts out laughing. Betty Allison’s face turns red, and my mother sits back in her chair, defeated. Hannah Allison and her two first names have been wiped off the board.
“He’s just being funny,” Mom says weakly.
“I would have to disagree,” Betty says.
Phillip is laughing so hard that tears stream down his face as he slides down in his shiva chair. Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate.
10:30 p.m.
THE LAST VISITORS have finally left. You can feel the house exhaling, returning to its normal proportions. After my shabby behavior toward Betty Allison, Linda began quietly shooing out the guests, her voice soft but unyielding as she told them that we’d been through a long and emotional day.
Unbeknownst to me, the sleeping arrangements were decided while I was out earlier. Wendy has pretty much taken over the upstairs, commandeering Phillip’s room for the baby’s Portacrib, her own old bedroom for Ryan and Cole, and the guest room for her and Barry. Phillip and Tracy are on the sofa bed in the den behind the kitchen. Paul and Alice have unceremoniously taken my childhood bedroom, which is where I always stayed when I visited with Jen. But now, being the lone single sibling, I have been relegated to the basement, which seems to be the default for me these days.
As kids, Paul and I shared a room until he sprouted pubic hair and moved down to the basement, where the hiss and clank of the boiler would drown out his Led Zeppelin, his phone calls with girlfriends, and his ever busier masturbation schedule. Paul had been allowed to furnish the basement as he saw fit, which is why the sofa bed cannot be fully opened without hitting the corner of the Ping-Pong table, which is itself positioned against a support column, so whether it’s a game of Ping-Pong or a good night’s sleep you’re after, you’re going to be shit out of luck.
11:06 p.m.
DEATH IS EXHAUSTING. Whether it’s from the trauma of burying my father or from spending the entire day in close proximity to my family, I barely have the energy to take my pants off before collapsing on the mostly opened sofa bed, my legs tilted upward toward the Ping-Pong table. There, beneath the house, in the oblong shadow cast by the single naked lightbulb, I can feel the panic rising, the sense that I’m disappearing. A few miles away, my father is buried in a grassy bluff overlooking the tangle of blacktop where the interstate and thruway intersect. We are both underground, both gone from the world. At least his legs are fully extended.
I turn on my cell phone. As expected, there’s a new voice mail from Jen. She’s been calling me every day for the last few weeks, determined to achieve some level of amicability and open communication to facilitate a quick and peaceful divorce and so that she can believe she’s been forgiven. She always cared a little too much about being liked, and the guilt over her betrayal isn’t nearly as upsetting to her as the fact that I now despise her. I’ve taken to keeping my phone off and not returning her calls. I am still perfecting the art of hating her, and until I’ve got it down, I don’t feel ready to engage. This infuriates her, and so she tries every possible approach to draw me out: contrite, dispassionate, tearful, philosophical, plaintive, and witty. Sometimes I play her messages, left over the course of weeks, all in a row, listening to the erratic swing of her tone between each beep. Tonight she actually descends into something of a rage, telling me I can’t keep avoiding her, threatening to empty our joint checking account if I don’t return her call by tomorrow. No doubt she’d like to be divorced by the time she and Wade have their baby. I especially like today’s voice mail, because she’s shouting at me like I’m standing right there in front of her, like it’s an actual conversation. Still, just to be safe, first thing tomorrow I’ll run out to the bank and withdraw the bulk of what’s left in our checking account. It was around twenty-two thousand dollars last time I checked, although the balance has probably fallen a bit since then. I have a feeling her next voice mail will break new ground.
Thursday
Chapter 10
I have a recurring dream in which I’m walking down the street, all footloose and fancy-free, when I look down and realize that beneath my pants, one of my legs is actually a prosthesis, molded plastic and rubber with a steel core. And then I remember, with a sinking feeling, that my leg had been amputated from the knee down a few years back. I had simply forgotten. The way you can forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life but, of course, can’t. In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget. So I’m walking, usually out on Route 120 in Elmsbrook, past the crappy strip malls, the mini golf, the discount chains, and the themed restaurants, when I suddenly remember that I lost my leg a few years ago, maybe cancer, maybe a car accident, whatever. The point is, I have this fake leg clamped to my thigh, chafing at my knee where my calf used to descend. And when I remember that I’m an amputee, I experience this moment of abject horror when I realize that when I get home I will have to take off the leg to go to sleep and I can’t remember ever having done that before, but I must do it every night, and how do I pee, and who will ever want to have sex with me, and how the hell did this even happen anyway? And that’s when I will myself awake, and I lie there in bed, sweaty and trembling, running my hands up and down both legs, just making sure. Then I get up to go to the bathroom, even if I don’t have to, and the cold bathroom tiles against my heels are like finding fifty bucks in a jacket pocket from last fall.
These are the rare moments when it actually still feels good to be me.
And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn’t it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there’s a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children’s light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it’s my own.
7:43 a.m.
THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.
But this morning I can hear the low groan of the floorboards above me, the rhythmic creak of the sofa bed in the den—Phillip and Tracy enjoying some early morning, pre-shiva coitus—and my options are whittled down to none. I can hear Tracy’s muffled voice groaning something over and over again as they gather momentum. The first song that comes to mind is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and I hum it loudly to drown out the muffled cries and grunts seeping through the ceiling as I flee to the linoleum safety of the closet-sized bathroom. I’m still pissing when I reach the home of the brave, so I loudly hum the theme to Star Trek in a continuous loop until I’ve washed my hands and brushed my teeth. When I emerge, the noise has subsided, and my mother is sitting on the edge of
my bed in the kind of short, satin bathrobe you’d want to see on your twenty-three-year-old girlfriend.
“Sleep well?” she says.
“Not really.”
Upstairs the creaking begins again. Mom looks up at the ceiling and smiles at me. “That boy,” she says, shaking her head fondly. “Tracy must be forty-five if she’s a day. Obviously, he’s working through some mother issues.” She leans forward, and the satin lapels of her robe spread, revealing the large D cups she had installed about fifteen years ago. She’d discovered a lump that turned out to be benign and somehow converted the experience into an excuse to upgrade her breasts. She hasn’t worn a bra since.
“Mom!” I say, looking away. “Cover up, will you?”
She looks down, lovingly surveying the promontories of her age-inappropriate breasts like she would an infant grandchild, before unhurriedly refastening her robe. “You were always something of a prude,” she says.
“It’s a mystery to me why anyone in this house might have mother issues.”
“They’re breasts, Judd. The same ones you suckled at.”
“Those are something other than breasts.”
“Your father didn’t see it that way. When we made love, he used to love to—”
“Shut up, Mom!”
“Why is it so hard for you to accept that your mother is a sexual being? Do you think you were immaculately conceived? I should think it would make you happy that your father and I were still fucking.”
Yes. That’s what she said. My mother is a sixty-three-year-old bestselling author with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Pamela Anderson’s breasts, who talks about fucking her late husband like she’s discussing current events.
“Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that that was a remotely normal thing to say to your son. It still doesn’t mean I want to hear the intimate details of your sex life.”
“Judd. I’m your mother, and I love you.” That’s what she always says, what she advises the millions of mothers who read Cradle and All to say, just before eviscerating or emasculating their offspring. The next word is always “but.” According to Doctor Hillary Foxman, the patron saint of frustrated mothers, this is called softening, rendering the child receptive to correction. What I’ve learned, after nine years of marital spats, is that everything before the “but” is bullshit.
“But,” she says, “your sorrow has become malignant.”
I nod slowly, as if considering her words. “Thanks, Mom. That wasn’t even the slightest bit helpful.”
She shrugs and pulls herself up off the bed, stopping at the foot of the stairs to consider me. Dust mites dance in the sunlight pouring down from the opened door upstairs, and I can see the bags under her eyes, the gray roots at her scalp, and the acute sadness in her eyes as she looks at me. Somewhere in there, underneath those ridiculous breasts and the psychobabble, is a real mother, hurting for her child, and for reasons I probably couldn’t begin to explain without years of therapy, her pain fills me with a quiet, relentless rage.
“I miss your father,” she says.
“I miss him too.”
“Do you?”
“I missed him while he was still alive.”
She nods. “He was never comfortable expressing himself. But he loved you very much.”
“Not like he loved you.”
She smiles and massages the back of her neck. Upstairs, Phillip and Tracy have finally, mercifully finished, and a welcome quiet fills the room.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t have your old room,” she says. “I thought Paul and Alice could use some privacy. They’ve been trying to conceive, you know.”
“Wendy mentioned something.”
“That sofa bed is fine for sleeping, but it’s simply not built for procreation. The springs creak like a couple of fighting cats. You can hear it throughout the house.”
“I don’t suppose I can stop you from telling me why you know that.”
“Your father and I made love on every bed in this house.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, I found an ovulation test kit in the wastebasket in the hall bathroom, so I’m thinking these are key nights for Alice.”
Mom never had any use for discretion, never even had the sense to fake it. She habitually went through our drawers and coat pockets, inspected our sheets, listened in on our phone calls, and read Wendy’s diary so often that we started composing entries just for her to find.
Mr. Jorgenson, my phys ed teacher, still says I can’t call him Ed, even after I had a three-way with him and Mike Stedman, who swears the whole genital herpes thing was just a nasty rumor started by his ex-girlfriend who was pissed at him for sleeping with me and Ed.
Liz Coltrane gave me these awesome pills that make you vomit after every meal, so I don’t have to use my finger anymore. It’s much more civilized, and I can finally grow my nails again. Thin and manicured! Win-win!
I know incest is wrong. I just figured I’d do it once to see what all the fuss was about. But now Paul wants to do it with me all the time and it’s starting to get creepy. It would have been so much easier with Judd, if only he wasn’t gay.
Mom believed that intrafamily secrets were unhealthy, and because of that, we spent the better part of our childhood lying our asses off to her.
When I was twelve years old, she unceremoniously handed me a tube of KY Jelly and said that she could tell from the laundry that I’d begun masturbating, and this would increase my pleasure and prevent chafing, and if I had any questions, I should feel free to come to her. My siblings did joyous spit takes into their bowls of chicken soup, and my father grunted disapprovingly and said, “Jesus, Hill!” He uttered those two words so often that for a long time I thought Jesus’s last name was actually Hill. In this particular case, I was unsure if it was masturbation my father condemned or the relative merits of discussing it over Friday-night dinner. I fled upstairs to sulk and didn’t stop hating her even after discovering, a short while later, to my eternal chagrin, that she’d been right about the lube.
Chapter 11
8:25 a.m.
A shower in the morning is an imperative for the Foxman men, whose bed-head is legendary in this region. Our pillow-bent curls, sculpted by scalp oils, stand up in large, coiled clumps, making us look like electrocuted cartoon characters. The problem is that the water boiler cannot accommodate so many showers at the same time, and within minutes, the water goes from hot, to lukewarm, to chilled. Adding to the confusion, Tracy and Alice are both blow-drying their hair while Wendy is microwaving frozen waffles for the kids, so the circuit breakers trip, knocking out half the power in the house, including the basement lights.
You would think the home of a former electrician would be wired better, but it’s a classic case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot. Having been in the “trade,” as he called it, Dad was much too stubborn to spend money on electricians. He did everything himself, refusing to file any work he did with the city, which saved him the trouble of having to bring things up to code. Having spent years laboring under the restrictions of the power company, he took a certain pride in outwitting them in his own home. He was always fishing lines through the walls, splicing and rewiring, creating a dense maze of circuitry behind our walls to the point where even he lost track of where everything went. The house gradually became something of an electrical puzzle, with too many lines on overburdened fuses and patchwork wiring that doesn’t always hold up. Slamming the doors of certain rooms can actually turn off the lights, and there are extra wall switches everywhere, some redundant and some that do nothing, so it always takes a few tries for the uninitiated to turn on or off the light they want. When he had central air installed a few years ago, he was supposed to upgrade the house from two hundred to four hundred amps, but that would have involved filing with the power company, so instead, he rewired the electric panels in the basement to make room for the compressor and air handlers. As a result, the house is more than a little electrically
temperamental, and Mom always jokes that one day she’ll flip a switch and the house will explode. Until then, the circuit breakers will bravely go on tripping to protect the overloaded wires.
I rush through my shower, cold and blind and cursing a blue streak, then step shivering into the basement, where I find Alice in a white bathrobe, fiddling with the electric panel in the sparse morning light filtering down from upstairs.
“Hey,” she says when she sees me. “I’m sorry to invade your space like this.”
It’s the invading of my old bedroom upstairs that she should be apologizing for, but I just say it’s fine, suddenly self-conscious. The last time Alice saw me undressed was in this very room, several lifetimes ago. I looked better shirtless then, although I’m sure she did too. Time hasn’t necessarily been unkind to us, but it hasn’t gone out of its way either. And for the last two months, I’ve been living on a diet of delivered pizza and fried Chinese takeout. I suck in my gut and fold my arms strategically below my chest.
“I can’t find the switch,” she says.
I stand dripping beside her, studying the circuit panel. It’s too dark to see the little orange tab that shows on a tripped fuse, so I run my hand down the line of switches until I feel one that has more give than the others. “It’s this one,” I say, flipping the switch. The lights flicker back on at exactly the same instant my towel falls. “Whoops!” I say, doubling over to catch it and pull it back up to my waist. “Sorry about that.”
Alice smiles as I fumble with my towel. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she says, heading back upstairs; a rare lighthearted moment for Alice, which, if nothing else, confirms for me that I’m the only Foxman brother who didn’t get any last night.
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel Page 8
