This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  “My God, I’m fat,” Wendy says, looking through pictures of starving starlets.

  “You just had a baby, give yourself a break.”

  “I had a baby seven months ago. I’ve been dieting and running every day, and everything in my strike zone still feels like the blob. I won’t even change in front of Barry.”

  “I feel like I’ve put on some weight myself,” I say, biting into a marzipan-coated petit four.

  She looks me over critically. “You are looking a little soft in the middle there. You may want to watch that. After all, you’re going to be getting naked in front of new women now.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

  Wendy laughs. “Jen had an incredible body. I would kill for her legs. And tits. And ass. I hope you’re not holding out for another one like that. They’re few and far between, and they generally don’t put out for unemployed divorcees with no abs.”

  “Well, you know my motto. If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.”

  “Mommy!” Ryan calls. “Watch me.”

  “Okay, honey,” Wendy says absently, still looking down at the magazine. “Well, we can only hope that this pregnancy will leave Jen with stretch marks and a belly flap. No mother should have a stomach that flat. It’s just unfair.”

  “I saw Penny today.”

  Wendy puts down the magazine. “Penny Moore? How’d she look?”

  “I don’t know. She looked good.”

  “Is she married? Divorced? Kids? What?”

  “She’s not married. She teaches skating and works evenings at the store.”

  “Our store? She worked for Dad?”

  “Yup.”

  “So, Penny Moore is going to be your rebound. That’s fantastic.”

  “No. I just ran into her.”

  “Serves her right after the way she led you on in high school.”

  “She didn’t lead me on and she’s not going to be my anything. She’s just an old friend.”

  “She cock-teased you for your entire senior year. And if she didn’t mean anything, then why did you mention it?”

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  “I’m your sister, Judd. You don’t make conversation with your sister. You wanted to say her name.”

  “And now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Oh, grow up. Your wife left you and you haven’t had sex in forever. You’ve got a kid coming, and God only knows what kind of mess that’s going to be. That pregnancy may be the best thing that ever happened to you, but it’s a ticking clock. You’ve got six months or so to get your shit together, to be ready to be a father and start caring for someone other than yourself. If I were you, I’d quit beating around the bush. You like Penny, admit you like her and go for it. Maybe you get somewhere with her, or maybe you get rejected. Either way, you get something.”

  “I’ve been married for almost ten years. I’m out of practice.”

  “No offense, little brother, but you didn’t exactly have mad skills back in the day.”

  “Thanks for the confidence boost.”

  “I’m just being honest.”

  Horry emerges at the back door, sucking on an apple core. “Your uncle Stan is here. Your mom wants you back in your little chairs.”

  “Kill me now,” Wendy says. “Please.” She tries to stand up, but her foot slides on the magazine, and she lets out a startled shriek as she loses her balance and falls into the pool. I jump to my feet, but before I can get moving, Horry comes tearing down the lawn and, after just a few long strides, executes a long racing dive into the pool. He resurfaces and swims over to where Wendy is coughing and sputtering, her sundress pooling around her like a tent. Ryan stands on the side of the pool, terrified. Cole floats and sings to himself in the shallow end, oblivious.

  “You okay?” Horry says.

  “Yeah,” Wendy says, somewhat nonplussed as he pulls her into a lifesaver’s hold. He swims her over to the side so she can grab on to the ladder. “Oh, Horry, you jumped in with all your clothes.”

  “So did you,” he says. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe I did that. I’m such a cow.”

  “You’re not a cow,” Horry says, pulling the hair off her face. “You’re my sunflower.”

  She smiles tenderly at him and briefly touches his face. “I remember.”

  “You’re not a cow,” he says again, treading water slowly away from her. “And he should be better to you.”

  “Thank you,” she says softly as Horry turns and swims toward the shallow end.

  “You all wet,” Cole says to him as he arrives at the stairs.

  “That’s right, little man.”

  “You play with me now?”

  “Sure,” Horry says, floating on his back. “I’ll play.”

  The thing is that Wendy’s in the pool, so it’s impossible to tell if those are tears or just water that she’s brushing off her cheeks.

  Chapter 26

  8:45 p.m.

  The show goes on. We are all back in our shiva chairs, except for Paul, who has begged off, claiming some kind of retail emergency at the store. Alice has not been seen since the fit she threw this morning, but Tracy has reappeared, sitting off to the side, smiling graciously. The rest of us face the crowd like a rock band on tour, same set list, different town. We perform our sad little shiva smiles on cue and repeat the same inane conversations over and over again. He just slipped away, Mom says. Three kids now, Wendy says. I’m a photojournalist. I just got back from a year in Iraq, embedded with a marine unit, Phillip says. We’re separated, I say.

  What happens is this. Every half hour or so, someone will ask me where Jen is. And I will say that we are separated. Then, like a game of telephone, word will quietly spread through the room, so that everyone present will know not to ask. And then, invariably, new visitors will arrive, and someone uninformed will ask me again, and the cycle will repeat. I feel bad for the ones who ask, who bear the awkwardness for the rest of the crowd.

  My mother’s closer friends have known for weeks. Millie Rosen brings her daughter, Rochelle, who is twenty-seven, unmarried, and pretty in a forgettable way. She positions her right in front of me and makes painfully obvious attempts at engaging us in conversation. What pretty much every person in Elmsbrook except Millie knows is that I am not Rochelle’s type, being that I don’t have breasts and a vagina.

  Mom’s older brother, Uncle Stan, has arrived with his latest senior citizen tramp, Trish, who wears her makeup like a drag queen, coloring way outside the lines with her lipstick and eyebrow pencils. Stan was an appellate court judge and married to my aunt Esther, a broad, sexless slab of a woman, for forty years. After Esther died of emphysema, Stan waited what he considered to be an appropriate mourning period, two weeks or so, and then began sleeping his way through all the willing widows in his retirement village down in Miami Beach. He’s closing in on eighty and has his pick of the litter, being that he can still drive and screw. I know this because he’s supremely gifted at working it into every conversation.

  Uncle Stan is also highly accomplished in the field of flatulence, and he’s been here long enough for the room to carry the stale stench of his geriatric farts. The other visitors look around, wrinkling up their noses, searching for the source or for an escape route, but they are too polite to say anything.

  Phillip is not. “Christ, Uncle Stan! That’s just brutal. How do you live with yourself?”

  “It’s all that coffee I drank on the airplane.”

  “He’s also on a high-fiber diet. The combination is like jet fuel,” Trish explains with a giggle. Women of a certain age shouldn’t giggle.

  “Trish is a nurse,” Stan says proudly.

  “Was,” Trish says. “I’m retired.”

  “But she still has the uniform,” Stan says, winking and kicking at my feet. “If you take my meaning.”

  “Stan!” Trish says, although she’s not nearly as mortified as she should be, if you ask me. S
tan shrugs, then leans forward in his chair to release some more deadly fumes.

  “Lord have mercy,” Wendy says under her breath.

  8:54 p.m.

  PAUL RETURNS FROM the store, but instead of joining us in the shiva chairs, he makes his way purposefully through the crowded hallway and disappears up the stairs, ostensibly to check on Alice. “Why is he off the hook?” Phillip grumbles, sounding ten years old.

  Someone has gotten my mother started on the topic of toilet training, and the room falls silent as she holds forth. She is considered to be an expert on the topic, and the children of her friends still e-mail and call her to ask for guidance as they struggle to train their children. There is a long and celebrated chapter in Cradle and All in which she basically explains the psychology of crapping. She details the way she trained each of her children, the mistakes she made, and, sparing no scatology, the funny things that happened along the way. Mom draws heavily on her own maternal experience throughout the book, and we are all mentioned by name. There are two pages on Paul’s undescended testicle, a section on Wendy’s late-blooming breasts, and a full chapter on how Mom finally solved my bed-wetting problem when I was six years old. I used to shoplift copies from our local bookstore and toss them out in the Dumpsters behind the Getty station, in an effort to keep the books out of circulation. I was in the sixth grade when my classmates finally discovered the book, and I never heard the end of it. That was the year I learned how to fight.

  As Mom warms to her topic, she becomes a lecturer again, enunciating, gesticulating, and inserting little canned jokes that her friends must have heard a thousand times already but still laugh at because she’s in mourning. So Mom entertains the crowd with all the wisdom she’s gleaned about children and their toilet habits, and it’s so quiet that when another sound intrudes, we all hear it. It’s indiscernible at first, a burst of static and what sounds like a child out of breath, but then Alice’s voice can be heard loud and clear through Wendy’s baby monitor in the front hall. And what Alice says is this:

  Are you hard yet?

  There is more panting and a low moan, and then Alice says, Put it in me already.

  Then a moment of quiet, followed by Alice’s short, high-pitched moans and Paul’s grunts as they start to go at it. The visitors, all twenty or so of them, sit shell-shocked, their eyes wide, as Mom stops talking and turns toward the monitor.

  Harder. Fuck me harder, Alice cries.

  Quiet! Paul grunts.

  Yes, baby. Come in me. Come now.

  “I would not have figured Alice for a talker,” Phillip says. “Nice.”

  “I put Serena in there to nap earlier,” Wendy announces to the room. “I guess I forgot to take the monitor out. My bad.”

  Phillip leans back in his chair and grins widely. “This probably shouldn’t be making me as happy as it is.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, people,” Mom says sternly. “It’s just sex. You’ve all had it. A few of you might even have some tonight.”

  “I know I will,” Stan says, kicking my leg again. Dirty old man.

  You could hear a pin drop in the living room. That is, if it weren’t for Paul’s escalating grunts and Alice urging him—Come on, come on!—over and over again.

  “Sexual stamina runs in our family,” Phillip explains to the crowd. “This could take a while.”

  Linda miraculously appears in the hall and unplugs the receiver. “Sorry about that, everybody.” It’s unclear if she’s apologizing for what they’ve heard or what they’ll now miss.

  “Alice is ovulating,” Mom explains.

  Some of the women nod with understanding while their husbands grin stupidly and look up at the ceiling. The low buzz of hushed conversations slowly returns, like a machine powering up, but a short while later, Paul comes downstairs to sit in his shiva chair and the visitors fall silent, trying not to stare at him. Trying and failing. He looks around the room quizzically, then down at his shirt. He checks his fly. “What?” he says, looking over at me. “What’s going on?”

  Before I can answer, Uncle Stan stands up and begins to clap, his large, gnarled hands coming together with the mild clink of pinky rings, a doddering, bent standing ovation of one.

  “Sit down before you fall down, old man,” Mom says.

  Paul looks around one more time, then shrugs and leans over to me, making a sour face.

  “Who farted?” he says.

  Chapter 27

  9:30 p.m.

  Penny shows up as the shiva is winding down for the night. “Hey,” she says, taking the empty chair in front of my seat. She’s wearing a black sundress and sandals, her skater’s legs crossed tantalizingly at eye level. “I’ve never paid a shiva call before.”

  “You’re doing great,” I say.

  “Some old perv pinched my butt on the stairs as I was coming in.”

  “That’s my uncle Stan. He’s harmless.”

  “Tell that to my butt cheek. It’s like he wanted to take a piece with him.”

  “Hello, Penny,” Mom says.

  “Hi, Mrs. Foxman. I’m so sorry about Mort.”

  “Thank you. He was very fond of you.”

  “He was such a nice man. We all miss him down at the store.”

  “Well, it was very nice of you to come see us.”

  “I’m just sorry it’s taken this long. You know we keep the store open until nine in the summer.”

  “Penny is the only one Dad trusted to close up and turn on the alarm,” Paul says.

  “It’s not exactly rocket science,” Penny says, blushing. Then, noticing Wendy, “Oh my God, Wendy! I didn’t recognize you.”

  “That’s because, unlike you, I’ve actually had the decency to age. Look at you. I bet they still card you in bars.”

  “Hardly,” Penny says, shifting nervously under Wendy’s unflinching scrutiny.

  “I mean, Jesus,” Wendy says, shaking her head. “What are you, a size two?”

  9:50 p.m.

  THE VISITORS ARE all gone, and the house has fallen quiet. Penny and I sit in the dark by the pool’s edge with our feet in the water. The only light comes from two submerged pool lamps, so all we can see is a fine mist rising up off the heated water. “So, how are you doing?” she says.

  “Fine, I guess. It’s a lot of family time. I think we’re going to need a year off from each other when this is over.”

  She nods, tracing little circles in the water with her toes. “I live around the corner from my parents. My mother has macular degeneration; she can’t see well enough to drive anymore. So I take her grocery shopping every Tuesday and I have dinner with them every Sunday night.”

  “That’s nice, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs. “It can be, with the right mix of meds. God, it’s hot out here.”

  “Yeah. It’s been like this all week. Muggy as hell.”

  “You’d think it would get cooler at night.”

  “Yeah. Not lately.”

  “Oh God, Judd. Listen to us. We’re talking about the weather. Are we avoiding something, or do we simply have nothing to say to each other?”

  “Conversation was never a problem for us.”

  “Well, then, let’s put a moratorium on small talk, okay?”

  “Deal.”

  “And for God’s sake, let’s get in the water already.” She stands up, and I can’t quite see her eyes, but I know they’re daring me. “Turn around,” she says.

  I do, and a few seconds later I hear a light splash as she slides into the water. I turn around and see the dark pile of her dress on the ground. I pull off my polo shirt and my cargo pants. I hesitate for a moment when it comes to my boxer briefs. To doff or not to doff, that is the question. How did Penny answer it? In the dim light coming up from the depths of the pool, it’s impossible to say. I slide into the pool with my underpants on. Better safe than sorry.

  She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted
enough that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Judd.”

  “Me too.”

  “Do you think you’d like to kiss me now?”

  I glide over to her, my hand falling over hers on the ladder rung. Up close, I can make out the tantalizing outline of her breasts, wet and glistening, where they disappear into the water. “Listen,” I say, but then, somehow we’re already kissing, deep and slow, our tongues colliding softly, gathering speed. And her taste is exactly as I remember it, brings me back in an instant to those nights of sweaty dry-humping in my basement, and I can feel her nipples hard against my chest, her fingers gliding up my back to my neck, pressing against the spot where my spine becomes my skull.

  I have kissed no one but Jen in over ten years, and we have not kissed like this in a very long time, with gaping mouths and frantic tongues, where kissing is its own kind of sex. I am kissing another woman, and the awareness of these lips opening against mine in wet surrender, these fingers snaking down my chest, these smooth, naked thighs wrapped around my hips, is both exhilarating and surreal. If one woman is willing to kiss me like this, it stands to reason that, in due time, others might be equally willing, and for the first time since I walked in on Jen and Wade, I feel something approaching optimism about my future.

  After a while, Penny stops to catch her breath, gasping a little as she turns around to rest her arms against the edge of the pool. I swim up behind her and put my hands on either side of her arms, pressing my chest against her back. She leans her head back to press her cheek against mine. “That was so nice,” she says.