Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  “You have to stop flagellating yourself,” I said. “You have to try not to self-flagellate.”

  “I get you. I’m not going to keep you on forever, don’t worry.”

  “No, no.”

  I’d stopped hearing the road noises. He had said he was on his way to Walmart. Maybe he was in the parking lot, negotiating the traffic there. I was going to pour a glass and settle in. I was performing the service of talk therapy, which I’d benefited from myself, crossing Chelsea to Gramercy Park once a week for my expensive sessions during which I’d range anecdotally over every topic related to my family and relationships. I had very good insurance through Perry and my co-pay was only fifteen dollars. My therapist, an older man I’d only slowly deduced was gay too, had said that he thought I had what was called an “observing ego,” meaning I worried about what others might be thinking and themselves going through—that I tried to see their side, which had been my role as the younger brother caught in the family situation when I was sixteen. I had tried to see every side, was my problem, and Bob, my shrink, was never too hard on me. He said that he trusted me as an “accurate historian,” and begged me to proceed, nodding, waiting for me to get it all off my chest, not just family stuff but stuff related to Perry—groping my way toward my next, and next, breakthrough. And it had helped. I can’t say why, except that I’d paid a man to listen to me and paid money to listen to myself and take myself seriously, so now all of these issues were old hat to me, dead and buried in effect. But here we were again. I was the younger brother. As a kid I’d taken it as my job to stay out of Jeff’s way but snicker at his jokes, listen to him talk about his taste in music, which at the time I didn’t get. I hadn’t liked alcohol, either, but to curb the boredom I started toward the kitchen—and ramped up the tough love a notch or two.

  “And whatever else happens,” I said, “I guess it’s no good being bitter. You’re getting a divorce—right?—so you can cut things cleanly and get the past behind you so you can move on and try to be happy, right? You say everybody made mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. And to be honest, I’ll just admit this right now, don’t know how you’re going to react but I’m going to go ahead and say it, man—I’m looking forward to your being legally single. I think this is what you need, what you want, and what you’re looking forward to. But it’s really happening, right?”

  “It is happening,” said Jeff, “for damn sure.”

  I could see him nodding in the earnest, vigorous way I’d readily recognize. I’d seen him nod like that in Memphis, where our parents had retired, when Jeff had first opened up about the divorce idea, and when we were talking about our father’s hospitalization, the “eventualities”—because Jeff was big on euphemisms, while at the same time talking turkey post-evangelical style.

  I said, “So then it’s all right if I’m happy for you, right?”

  “Well, I’m happy. I’m not exactly over the moon. I’m going to be paying for this shit for the rest of my life, but it’s happening. I’m making like a hockey stick and getting the puck out.”

  I waited cleverly and then I said, “What’s going on with, what’s her name, Terri?”

  “Oh, Terri. Well, that was another situation. I felt like she was moving in too fast. You know, when Dad got sick she started this sympathy-card campaign. She was busting a move.”

  Our father had been diagnosed roughly two years ago with lung cancer, and in the middle of his first year of recovery Jeff had met Terri. She would send my parents cards, sympathy and just-sayinghi-type cards. Can’t wait to meet ya’ll. Most people using y’all can’t spell y’all. I didn’t want to think of Terri as cynical or calculating—and my mother had appreciated the cards, although I suspect Mom wanted Jeff to have a magnet pulling him away from Deanne for good.

  “Terri just wanted to move things along at a different rate than I did,” he went on.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Mom appreciated her cards. She did sound sweet.”

  “Oh, she was,” he said. “I don’t know what happened there. I got claustrophobic.”

  “You have to do what’s right for you. That’s what you’re doing.”

  “Anyway,” he said, sounding infuriatingly distracted, “she was angling to get married.”

  So things were moving forward and I hoped that the conversation would end soon, except that there was one more little matter, the visit he’d been promising me, and this was stressful to a degree. Jeff had been a born-again for God only knows how many years, and in my heart I’d said goodbye to him a while ago. Once while I lived in Paris with Perry, a card showed up signed ostensibly by Jeff, telling me to change my ways and including Bible quotes—as though I hadn’t already memorized those as a secret little junior high queer. I tore up the note, and for the next few days on the rue Saint-Martin, Perry would regard me tenderly as though I were on suicide watch—yet I’d only been wondering what had taken my brother so long to pull a stunt like that.

  “Married?” I said to him now. “Wait, forget I said that. I never even met Terri—and I try to mind my own business. She doesn’t always stick to it herself, but Mom taught us to do that.”

  “Yes, she did,” he said, taking his time between transitions. “And it’s a good policy.”

  I’d begun drinking my wine, noting its cherry notes. I said, “Anyway, end of an era …”

  We laughed, though I daresay mine felt and tasted more delicious. I ideated a heart attack but knew that the phytochemicals and antioxidants in red wine should only prevent one of those.

  I removed a cigarette from the pack and rolled it between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Deanne was a good mother,” said Jeff. I heard in the background a jangling of keys, his great ring of uncountable keys, which guys like him always had, then I heard solid metal making contact with more solid metal, fwump! I took this as Jeff closing his Jeep’s door in the Walmart parking lot. “I will give her that. I leave that alone,” he went on, and I could picture him nodding along to what he was saying. “She raised three more or less levelheaded kids, all three of whom I’m proud to be called their progenitor, their father, and so for that, sure, I will be eternally grateful.”

  You know we have this thing in the South called gab, the more words the better. Jeff had long called our father the progenitor, and I’d forgotten about it until we were in Memphis for my dad’s lung cancer surgery. (By now I’d moved into the living room, settling into one of the club chairs, a hulk of disintegrating leather and a heavy oak frame Perry and I had brought back from Paris. I’d tried not to smoke in the house after my first evening alone. I was lighting up now.)

  “But yeah, Deanne did a bang-up job of homeschooling them,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, remembering when I’d tried to give one of the boys Treasure Island, which Deanne had taken back to Borders, and I suppose traded in for some teen Christian saga.

  “She tried to teach them cleanliness and politeness and personal comportment, what have you, but you know what?”

  “What?”

  “She fell down on one essential duty, to my mind.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I remembered my Dad once saying, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em!”

  “She didn’t work very hard to instill in them the value of a dollar, and now I pray it’s not too late for them to learn. I have taken them each individually aside and tried to explain to them what happened financially. Man, I am telling you I am just so completely wrecked, fucked-up or what have you about this death sentence the woman has passed on my credit history. I will be in this shit for what I’m sure will feel like forever—and that is what cheeses me off so badly on this otherwise nice afternoon. Is it nice there? I’m actually in the habit of checking the weather up in New York on basically a daily basis. Forgot to look at the app on my iPhone. Yeah, definitely. I am so screwed but you know what? I’ve just decided, I’ve tried to look at this situation like from the end of a telescope, you know? Just imagining? Projecting f
orward into the future? And I’ve tried to look at it from the other end, and I know, I know, I’m going to get through this somehow.”

  “Of course you are, man.”

  “I’ve already started making my adjustments, cutting my expenses. I’ve found a situation where I can live for next to nothing rent-wise. I got some advice from a financial consultant, and he was utterly and frankly helpful, and so now with the position I’m in, bro, yeah I’m determined to find my way out of this conundrum, you know? Since that’s what it is, a conundrum. I have a set of goals as my financial man said to have. He helped me draw up a plan but not without fees, but it was worth it, and I’ve—okay, I’ve been going on. Is the weather nice there in New York?”

  “Not a problem but yes, it’s nice. I should probably go out soon, do some shopping, too.”

  It was a perfect spring day. The pears growing along Twenty-Second Street were in full leaf, the skies, if I looked out the window, were clear and blue. Today it was everything I loved about New York: solitude, peace, fresh perfect weather. Now that I was smoking in the house— Perry had quit in the early eighties, along with the drinking—I’d open every window and turn on the fans, light some candles, spray some room freshener about. I just needed to get through these next few minutes, then I could go outside into the immaculate day, maybe head over to the bar.

  I was enjoying that second glass, a little more relaxedly. Which was the good thing about talking on the phone, I realized. Nobody could see you and judge you on your coping strategies.

  He waited on the line then said, “So, have you talked to Mom and Dad anytime lately?”

  I could have killed him,” my mother had said a couple weeks back, on the line in Memphis. Jeff and I were born there, but I had no memories of then. I was eight months old when we left, Jeff a couple of years old. Our parents couldn’t wait to leave. They were raised Baptists and had grown up told never to drink or dance, and as soon as my father had graduated from college he’d looked for a job to take him away. Bumper sticker from back then:

  IF THE VAN IS ROCKIN’

  DON’T BOTHER KNOCKIN’

  And our folks had had parties. I don’t know of any sexual tom-foolery going on between them, I’d be surprised—but maybe the children are always the last to know. They’d played their CCR and Linda Ronstadt, and I remember seeing that bumper sticker out on the highway and my father and mother laughing and calling into the back seat, “What do y’all think that means?”

  We’d had some laughs, but somewhere in there I’d learned to keep secrets, the family spy and double agent, not so much out of mistrust but maybe amusement. I wanted to write early on.

  “I got a sad-ass card from her,” my mother was saying, “and it just tore my G.d. heart up.”

  Yes, Mom was upset that Jeff had broken up with Terri, but she’d had a lot of shit going on recently. Dad was two years into his recovery, and they said that if it came back the window was two to five years, which sounds like a prison sentence—and for her it was. They’d sucked his right middle lobe out, and then had begun the hell for them both of his chemo and radiation. When he had survived the first year, Jeff and I had flown “home” to Memphis for Dad’s surprise seventieth birthday party. We’d grown up in Jacksonville, but we all knew what was meant by “going home.” It was hard not to be proud of Jacksonville, Florida, even though it was so very horrible and wrong. And it was where we’d left Jeff behind. And where we went to high school and where Jeff was working at Albertsons grocery store when he’d met Deanne, the woman my mother had nearly lost her mind over. Deanne was five years older than Jeff, who was a bag boy while she was a checkout girl ringing up groceries. Messed up with Deanne, and now with Terri.

  “I could’ve kicked his ass all over town, if only I’d been there to do it when he told me.”

  Mom had a stream-of-consciousness style of talking, another Southernism. You interrupt yourself when you were saying something else. You begin to narrate a story and another thought occurs to you suddenly, and then your listener is a little confused and gets a little exhausted. The telephone. You can’t read gestural irony, but if I’d been there as Mom’s interlocutor I could have looked around and gathered context clues. The cigarette, the freshly mixed wine spritzer of Diet 7UP and her horribly sweet California muscat, the dinner she was stirring on the stove. Actually whenever I flew to Memphis to visit, she’d already premade everything, so there was not a stove involved. She let the food thaw in its freezer-safe Tupperware or Corningware dish, then while I stood at the expensive black granite-topped kitchen island nearby, she heaped individual portions into separate bowls, covered them with Saran Wrap, and one by one zapped them in the microwave.

  “I never met Terri,” I said.

  “Do you know what I said to him? I said, ‘And what about my seven thousand dollars?’ Like, was I ever going to see that again? Because I bet not. I told him, I said, ‘Your father and I volunteered to give you this money for the lawyer.’ I stood in the post office. I waited. I got up to the counter and insured the damn package. I sent it all certified mail and I said, ‘And now you come to tell me this shit?’ Now Terri. I could kick his sorry ass from here to kingdom come.”

  Perry was in the next room. He was getting his talk ready for Minneapolis. He’d started dinner and I felt a little stress of obligation. When he began yelling my name, “Scott, Scott!” to get me to the table, I’d be in the middle of all this—mostly commentary and throat-clearings and my mother’s bravado and ire and rage—I’d learned through therapy to reason my anger away but just. Just give me the facts, I wanted to say to her. I said, “And you say Terri wrote you a note?”

  “Why did I have to get a note?” she bawled over the line. “Why was it my problem all of a sudden? I hope he’s happy. The note would break your heart. I have it right here, if I can find the damn thing. But why would he do this? I mean, he’s your brother, why would Jeff do this?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said, “we were never very close. I’ve told you this, I don’t know how many times. We were never particularly close. Just because he’s my brother …”

  “And I’ve said to Doug, I’ve told your father, that makes me sad, it really does, depresses me to tell the truth. But you’re a writer, an author—”

  “To call me an author …” I began.

  “But you know what I mean, thinking into people’s minds. Why would he decide to call off his divorce from a woman who’s given him nothing but grief for I don’t know how long, and break it off with a girl, a woman, he said over and over he liked? She was the one, that’s what he told Doug and me. I stood here on the phone with him and he said that, he said as far as he could tell he liked her and that she was the one. Treated him right. Didn’t hurry him along. Didn’t act anxious, just gave him his space. The asshole said he liked her because she gave him his space!”

  In New York it seemed incredible to some of my friends whenever I reported the vulgar speech of my family members, but at some point, again owing to the seventies I suppose, we began using cuss words—it seemed incredible how nasty my mother could sound. But I think it was our fault, my brother’s and mine. We were boys and came home and reported our classmates’ speech and this I think unleashed the freeing vulgarity in my parents, who’d had a history of that, too. It became unsurprising hearing the f-word from either Mom or Dad, and Jeff and I were never too embarrassed to say it, either. My partner Perry, for example, thought this incredible. He was my parents’ age and had grown up in the Midwest and expected better comportment out of women. I liked shocking him. He could be a pain in the ass about this, but he liked my mother. She spoke the way she wanted around him. Perry had helped break down barriers of sexual comportment in American life, and whenever he got too prissy about female social behavior, I’d remind him he’d been celebrated for writing books about sex in back rooms, on the West Side docks. Of course as you have already deduced, I worked from the vantage of guilt. I wasn’t handed a sense of shame from m
y parents, though we’d gone to church. Numerous times I can remember Mom telling me not to be ashamed of my body. We were, to others, unreasonably close. She had raised me to be a gentleman, which in the context of mother-son closeness, I think now, meant that I ended up as something of a male Southern belle—an accurate historian as Bob my shrink had called me, and as I’d strived to be, an observant ego—and so I said to her, “I don’t know, Mom, maybe Jeff was just freaked out about Dad. Maybe with Dad’s health problems Jeff got cold feet, or something.”

  “And why do you say that? How does that work?” she said, a bit defensively, I thought.

  I replied, “I don’t know,” as though I were a tad uncertain, but strictly out of politeness of course, still just reaching for something at this point, “but maybe looking at Dad got him worried that if he got sick he might end up alone and maybe that freaked him out. I never met Terri and I don’t know what she was like, but maybe he was worried that he’d up alone a second time. You said before that it all happened so fast with Terri,” I added, treading the surface of my chatter.

  “I never thought of it like that,” she said, as though considering my words unsteadily, and as though they still hadn’t quite penetrated. “But what do you mean exactly? Why’s that worse? What’s worse than living in hell with a lunatic, who’s manipulative, who manipulated him so?”

  “Mom, Jesus Fucking Christ. I don’t know. I’m just speculating. I’ve told you we were never particularly close, Jeff and me. Remember, I get most of my information from you. I got used to not having a brother, honestly. I have friends who are like my brothers and sisters.”

  “I’m glad about the last thing but not the other. I hate to hear you say that. I hate it that you and Jeff are not close, and I always did. I hate to think a family isn’t like a family to you.”

  “It honestly stopped bothering me after a point, Mom.”