The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  “Because if things keep going the way they’re going,” our mother says, “the bank is going to foreclose on this house.”

  “I knew it,” our father says. His ice cream is melting in the bowl. He hasn’t touched it. “Kathy, I told you. It’s all over with. We’re gonna wind up on the street.”

  He thumps his forehead onto the table and keeps it there.

  “Don’t overreact, Jim,” our mother says.

  “You said you had it all under control,” he says to the floor.

  “I did,” she says. “I do. But the medical bills are piling up. Plus credit cards, taxes, food. Everything.”

  “How long have you kept this from me?” he asks.

  “If I had told you two months ago, would it have mattered?” she asks. “You wouldn’t be sitting here in your bathrobe?”

  “Well, what are you saying?” our father asks.

  “You don’t seem to want to get better,” she says.

  “I have cancer,” he says.

  “Treatable cancer,” she says. “They all say you have a good chance. That’s all we keep hearing.”

  “How bad is the mortgage?” is all he says.

  “If we default, it doesn’t mean we’re destitute,” she says.

  “What about the money I’ve given you?” Chip asks.

  “What money?” I ask. This is news to me.

  “Your brother’s doing well at his job,” our mother says. “He’s been helping out a little with the bills.”

  “More than a little,” Chip says, finishing his dessert.

  “Since when?” I ask.

  “For a while,” our mother says. “And I really appreciate what Chip is doing, but it might not be enough in the end.”

  “And everyone laughed when I put all that rice in the garage,” our father says.

  “We’re still laughing,” I say.

  “It won’t be so funny when we’re living off it,” he says.

  “We can’t just give up,” Elissa says.

  “No one’s giving up, sweetie,” our mother says. “We need to regroup, is all. Figure out a way to stay together.”

  “Calvin doesn’t care,” Chip says. “He’d be happy if the house went down.”

  “That isn’t true,” I say. “All I ever said was we can’t all live here forever. It isn’t normal.”

  “You talk a lot,” Chip says, “but I’m the only one throwing in most of my salary to help keep everyone together. In this house, I’m the selfless one.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Your brother doesn’t want you to do anything,” our mother says.

  “I have nothing to give,” I say.

  “I’m sure you have something squirreled away,” Chip says. I shoot him what in my mind is the most withering glance I can muster.

  “I might need that money,” I say.

  “For what?” he asks.

  “Stop now,” our father says.

  “No one is asking you for anything, Calvin,” our mother says. “I don’t expect anything. I just think everyone needs to be aware of what’s going on around here. This affects all of us.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Elissa says. “What’s gonna happen to us if we can’t keep the house?”

  “We’ll figure something out,” our mother says.

  “Oh God,” our father moans, finally lifting his head off the table.

  “It’s not just us,” Elissa continues. “What if there were . . .” She trails off.

  Don’t break it to them now, I think. And she must be thinking the same thing because she doesn’t say anything else.

  In the silence, our father reaches out a shaky hand. His spoon clinks in the bowl. He scoops some melted ice cream into his mouth.

  THE SEESAW GOES up and down. Flashes of inspiration and hopefulness are trailed by groundswells of bleak anxiety. In my notebook I try to write out some bizarro version of Moretti life. In some other house. Where everyone is healthy and in good spirits and no one carries firearms or forgets to wear a condom. Life isn’t so bad in the notebook because I can mete out whatever fate I deem appropriate for all of us.

  My week of vacation rolls on. Days go by like tiny windows of color. Flowering, brilliant, florid peaks of productivity and inspiration. I take up my guitar, dream of writing pensive ballads to magically disintegrate girls’ pants. I pick five novels off the shelf and lay them on the floor. Famous, grand works of literature’s fine, storied past.

  I will read all of these this month, I tell myself.

  Then come the death-defying spells of lethargy. Couches, sitcom reruns, junk food. I indulge in seventies horror films. I write the films in my notebook, date the entries. I make phone calls to see who has drugs. I visit friends. I accompany my grandmother to the grocery store.

  << 8 >>

  On the way, I get into a debate with her about technology. It begins when I turn on the radio and start flipping stations.

  “Don’t fool with that,” my grandmother says, swatting at my hand. “I have it just the way I want it.”

  We are heading down Route 9 through the picturesque commercial district of Tarrytown, which takes all of three minutes.

  “I’m not fooling with anything,” I say.

  “You’re fooling with my radio player,” she says. “It took Grandma a very long time to find those songs.”

  “Do you have any idea how a radio works?” I ask. “Even the vaguest concept?” She doesn’t answer. “You hit the button until it goes to the station you want. See, look, 88.5, that’s the one you like. It’s right here, it’s not going anywhere.”

  I’ve had this argument with her before. She believes once you tune in a frequency on the radio, you have to leave it there forever.

  “This is my car,” she says, getting frustrated. “Turn the radio off now, you’re making Grandma upset. That crazy music of yours.”

  “Fine,” I say. I turn off the radio. The Hudson River rolls by. I catch glimpses of it down side streets. The Palisades yawn on the far side of the water. I lean my head against the window. The doctors have told us Dad has a 68 percent chance of successfully getting the cancer into remission, but before that can happen he must undergo a painful stem cell transplant, which entails not only the procedure but three weeks of isolation. He is not looking forward to it. I don’t like the thought of losing him. I wish I had said something to him about the letter he wrote me. I promise myself I’ll bring it up, but I know I never will. I try to think about what Elissa’s baby might look like, which is hard, considering I have no idea who the father is. Regardless of that piece of the puzzle, perhaps there’s a chance it will defy the paternal traits of our family and embrace those of our mother: Fine blond hair. Soft features. Blue eyes.

  I lift my head and look at the smudge of grease I’ve left on the glass. I push the button that raises the back of my seat to get a better view of tedious suburbia, restored Victorian houses.

  “Will you stop fooling with everything,” my grandmother says. “You’re going to break it.”

  “Oy,” I say. “This is painful.”

  “We’re not Jewish,” she says. “Just sit still, we’re almost there.”

  She turns her attention back to driving. She narrows her eyes into little slits and scrunches up her nose.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Squinting,” she says. “I’m having trouble seeing the lines.”

  “Should you even be driving?” I say, raising my eyebrows and sitting up, more attentive now. “Where are your glasses?”

  “I left them at home.” She is hunched forward, clutching the steering wheel with all her might.

  “I’ll drive back,” I say. “Jesus.”

  “Watch it,” my grandmother says. “He hears you.”

  I LIKE SUPERMARKETS. I feel at home in supermarkets. It’s strange because most of the time I dread being in public. I am not a fan of crowds. I sit in the back of movie theaters. I am awkward when placing orders at restaurant
s. I have a tendency to leave social gatherings abruptly, without saying good-bye to anyone. I lurk and slink in the shadows. I enjoy eavesdropping on strangers.

  Supermarkets are anonymous. Neatly organized shelves, immediate access to brownie mix, powdered lemonade varieties and fruit juices, assortments of bread, guys behind the meat slicer, prepackaged taco kits, select cheeses, depressed lobsters, teenage checkout girls.

  “You should eat more meat,” my grandmothers says holding an entire turkey in her hands, turning it over and over like she’s trying to roast it with her eyes.

  “I eat fish,” I say. “I like shrimp.”

  She frowns. “Where do you get your protein from? You need protein.”

  “What do you know about protein?” I ask.

  “There was a wonderful article in Reader’s Digest,” she says. She returns the turkey to its ranks among the other turkeys.

  “Reader’s Digest sucks,” I tell her. “I’m gonna get some cookies.”

  “Tsss,” my grandmother says, giving me a disapproving look. “There’s certainly no protein in cookies,” she adds.

  “I’m not eatin’ ’em for the protein,” I say to her, but already I’m gone, around the corner, heading down the dessert aisle. I’m surrounded by colorful arrays of chocolate and sweets, granola bars and artificially preserved cakes, wafers and doughnuts. Everything wrapped in foil and plastic, sealed up to survive nuclear winter. I take my time selecting. Chocolate chip. Double chocolate chip. No chips. Fudge. Circle. Square. Oval.

  I take a package of gingersnaps and stand there looking at it. I remember when Elissa was younger we used to sneak gingersnaps out of the jar and sit out back with glasses of milk. Elissa held the shovel. I wrapped Tanis in paper towel and laid him in the dirt. She helped me pack my records when I went off to Boston for grad school. She came with our mother to pick me up when I dropped out. She told me not to worry. She dances in front of her mirror. She twirls her hair around her fingers when she’s nervous. She steeps two tea bags at once in her mug. She smiles and she cries and the telephone rings in the middle of the night. Caught with a can of spray paint. Caught stealing clothes. Caught doing something wild. The wild child—my sister. Officer at the door, understanding smile. “She’s a wild one.” Breaking curfew, lack of motivation at school, dirty clothes, but somehow always pulling it off. Always talking her way out of things, quelling our parents, making it impossible to get angry with her.

  And if we lose the house? No one could say it was my fault. It’s not like my pitching in $567.88 will have the bank walking away satisfied. Or is it something larger than that? The fear of responsibility? Immaturity rearing some heretofore unseen face? No, that face has been around for a while. She needs a safe place to have this baby, if she’s going to have it. He needs a safe place to recover, if he recovers. How much are these gingersnaps anyway? Four dollars and sixty-eight cents. I stand and try to weigh the importance of things. The importance of living my own life versus the importance of doing the right thing, assuming I know what the right thing is. Maybe it’s an easy decision, depending on how you look at it.

  I’m surrounded by chocolate and cookies and frosting and flour sifters, rolling pins, the sugar and sugar substitutes. I feel everything flowing in strange, circular organization. Everything in life seems to converge here with the desserts. So much of me wants out of that house, away from it all. If I stay? Is it just a string of long nights at his bedside ahead? Holding his hand when he’s going through a rough patch. Holding her hand in the delivery room. Holding all of their hands, shepherding them through their problems. Is that the right thing? I’d be no help in that regard anyway. The truth is I have no idea what I’m going to do. Even less of an idea about what’s going to happen.

  “YOU’RE TALKING CRAZY,” Elissa says through a mouthful of strawberry ice cream. We’re seated on the back porch, in lawn chairs. The sun is setting. Colors are everywhere.

  “But don’t you see?” I say. “If I keep living here, if I don’t get out, where will it end? What stops it from turning into forever?”

  Elissa looks down at the pint of ice cream in her hands and frowns. She puts it on the wrought-iron table, licks the spoon. I keep going.

  “Chip thinks he’s doing the right thing giving them money, and that’s great, but he likes living here. He likes spending time with Dad.”

  “You like that, too,” Elissa points out.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Where will you go?” she asks. She takes a stray lock of hair and curls it around and around. Her jeans are dirty.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not even sure I should go anywhere, that’s what’s getting to me.”

  “But where would you go?”

  “Anywhere I can afford.”

  “Quite a plan,” Elissa says.

  “I was just starting to get some money saved up,” I say. “And now all this.”

  “Feel like you’d be deserting us?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re here now, Calvin,” my sister says.

  “That’s the problem,” I tell her.

  “You talk like it only affects you.”

  “You’re seventeen, Elissa, it’s fine for you to be here.”

  “At least you and Chip got through college. You see Mom and Dad shelling out for tuition now?”

  “College?” I say.

  “Why not?” she says.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “After,” she says.

  “So you’re keeping it?”

  “I like to think I’m taking responsibility.”

  “The girl who intentionally misspelled her name on the SATs is all grown up?”

  “Don’t hassle me, okay?”

  “You’ll be the only freshman with a kid,” I say.

  “It doesn’t matter now anyway,” she says.

  “So then what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to try my best to help them,” she says. She says it spontaneously, without even thinking.

  “Tell me how.”

  “I could get a job,” she says.

  “Back at Hot Topic?”

  “I’m not working there. Ever again. Don’t even mention it,” Elissa says. I open my mouth to suggest something else. “Or Videorama,” she says, beating me to it. “People who rent movies are weird.”

  Just off the deck, the kitchen window is open slightly. Our mother stands at the sink, starting to fix dinner. Directly behind Elissa and me, through glass sliding doors that lead to the family room, our father is asleep, sprawled across the sectional.

  “I’m really worried about everything,” Elissa says.

  “When are you gonna tell them?” I ask.

  Elissa stands, walks to look in on him. I join her. Together we watch the folds of his robe rise and fall with shallow breaths.

  “I can’t seem to bring myself to add more to this mess,” she says.

  “It is a mess,” I say.

  “I was thinking I should wait till after the transplant.”

  “That might not be such a bad idea,” I tell her. I put my hand on her shoulder. I feel collarbone through T-shirt, fragile, delicate. As quickly as I do it, I regret the gesture and drop my hand.

  “Are we gonna make it?” Elissa asks.

  I think about the question for a long time and fight back some tears bubbling to the surface.

  “I hope so,” I say.

  The screen door pops open and our grandmother is standing there. Her apron has an enormous lobster on it whose claws look like they are pinching her nipples.

  “There’s a letter for you, Cal,” she says, waving an envelope.

  << 9 >>

  I stand looking at the letter for a long time. It’s postmarked only a few days ago.

  I tear the thing open. Inside, printed on heavy, off-white card stock, is a formal invitation to Chris Hillman’s wedding, to take place on September 23.

  I think about the one time Chris got a bon
er in gym class. It was in eighth grade, during gymnastics week. Leaping onto the pommel horse. Falling from the pommel horse. Walking across the balance beam. Falling from the balance beam. Hanging limply off the still rings while Mr. Schizarro, the PE teacher, taunted us from the ground until we fell from the still rings.

  The boner Chris Hillman got during those glorious floor exercises became something of a myth. It popped up in the middle of a tumbling exercise. Mr. Schizarro was kneeling next to the springboard, banging his hand on the blue mat, screaming at us to run toward him. When we hit the board and sailed into the air, the idea was to flip forward as Schizarro snatched with his greasy claws and helped us land in a bridge position, heads tilted, stomachs pointing toward the ceiling. Chris’s turn saw him bolt down the mat like a madman and leap with all his might. Schizarro took hold of him in midflight and guided his body down. And there it was. Hillman, held suspended, quivering slightly, his back arched like a cat’s, palms resting on the ground, head steady, belly and pelvis thrust forward. And an erection as clear as day pushing against the confines of his navy gym shorts. Boners were relatively new to us back then. The laughter grew slowly, from a few stifled chuckles to a full and steady roar. Hillman’s face turned beet red and he bolted into the locker room.

  I was a nerd then, as I am now. I traveled with a group of kids who were seriously into Dungeons & Dragons. We weren’t LARPers. There was no dressing up involved, just intense gaming. I was an elf. I had exceptional dexterity and a bow and arrow—stolen from the den of an ogre. An übergeek with inch-thick glasses named Arthur Kornberg was the Dungeon Master. Together with Max Whitman, Leonard Morgenstern, Charles DiDomenico, and Chris Hillman, we formed something of a dork supergroup. Girls snickered at our ill-fitting attire and fondness for sweatpants. Our T-shirts displayed such witticisms as “I’ve Got Level 14 Charisma” and “Show Me Your Dice.” We were never invited to parties, stayed in on the weekends, talked passionately about horror movies. We stood on the cusp of high school, that giant labyrinth where older kids smoked cigarettes, loitered in the parking lot, made out with each other.

  We didn’t know it, but our little crew of losers wouldn’t survive past the eighth grade. Arthur went off to genius school in Manhattan. Leonard, to a Catholic preparatory somewhere in Texas when his parents deemed Sleepy Hollow too “liberal.” Max Whitman was arrested for stealing his neighbor’s car and wound up in juvenile hall. No one saw much of him after that. Charles DiDomenico moved two towns over, to Croton, and got really involved in drama club. Only Chris Hillman and I made it to Sleepy Hollow Memorial High. For me, high school was a chance to start fresh, a place where I could sculpt a new Calvin and shed my Poindexter status. I stopped playing D&D. I started hanging out with a different crowd, the “cool” kids. I wandered the streets on weekend nights. I listened to classic rock. My T-shirts grew sloganless. My clothing got tighter. I discovered pot. I learned if you smoked enough of it, everything became suddenly and inexplicably hilarious. Every movie ticket purchase was an enormous feat, an exercise in nuanced and exquisite contract negotiation. Every trip to the mall, a staggering journey filled with lingerie-display ogling and teriyaki chicken in the food court.