This Is Where I Leave You (18 page)

 

 

 

 

I haven’t skated in years, stopped playing pickup hockey around the time I got married, but it comes back fast. While I was putting on my skates, Penny dimmed the main lights and turned on the disco effects, so we are skating to “Time After Time” through a dusky universe of spinning blue stars. It’s like we’ve been transplanted into a romantic comedy, and all that’s left to do is say something meaningful and kiss Penny at center ice while the music swells, and the happy ending is guaranteed.
If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time.
Penny was always recklessly attracted to grand romantic gestures, to jumping into fountains fully clothed, to long, deep kisses in the rain. She dreamed of Richard Gere in his navy dress whites carrying her out of the factory, of telling Tom Cruise that he had her at hello. But we are hardly free and clear for a happy ending. After all this time, we are little more than strangers to each other, each of us pretending otherwise for our own sad reasons. I don’t even know if I’m here because she’s someone I once loved, or because I’m just lonely and desperate and more than a little sexually frustrated and our past gives me something of a head start. And there’s something off about Penny, something not quite there. I shouldn’t be here. I should be back at home, mourning my father and adjusting to the reality of becoming one myself, continuing to put all my energies into falling out of love with Jen.

And yet . . . Penny’s clear skin practically glows on the ice, and the piles of hair pouring out from beneath her cap fly behind her as she glides beside me, and there’s something perfectly pretty about her. I watch her profile from the corner of my eye, her slightly bent nose, her sculpted cheekbones, her big hopeful eyes that always seem seconds away from welling up.
If you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting . . .

“You want to hold hands?”

I look to see if she’s joking. She’s not. I consider telling Penny about the baby, but something stops me. I’d like to say it’s just my not having adjusted to the reality yet, but the truth is probably a good deal more self-serving than that. I take her hand and we skate through the rotating constellations. Her hand is in a black knit glove and mine is a cold, raw claw. I can barely feel her. I could be holding on to anything.

 

 

 

 

 

A FAT GUY with a walrus mustache and a jingling key ring shows up to open the rink for business. He waves to Penny, then disappears into a back room. A moment later the music stops, the lights come back on, and the stars disappear. As if by some unspoken agreement, Penny and I let go of each other. There will be no handholding under the harsh fluorescent lights. Walrus man reappears driving a beat-up Zamboni onto the ice.

“You know what would be nice?” Penny says as we step off.

“What’s that?”

She considers me for a long moment. “Never mind, I withdraw.”

“Come on. What were you going to say?”

“The moment’s passed.” She smiles and shrugs. I use my finger to free a thin strand of her hair where it’s gotten caught in her mouth.

“Thanks for the skate,” I say. “I needed that.”

“I’m glad you came by,” she says.

One or both of us may be lying.

 

 

 

 

 

PENNY IS TEACHING her first lesson of the day, and Phillip is late, naturally. I sit on a bench in the parking lot, watching the other skating instructors show up, slender women in baby T’s and black leggings that leave nothing to the imagination. They greet each other with waves and laughs. Their bodies, like Penny’s, are lithe and toned, and they walk with a graceful athleticism as they make their way inside. I suck in my gut and return their perfunctory smiles as they pass, trying for all the world to look like a guy who isn’t checking them out, even though, in their skin-tight leggings, you could spot those asses across a football field.

 

 

 

 

 

PHILLIP DRIVES US back home, somewhat more subdued than earlier. The convertible top is down, and the afternoon sun is hitting us hard, burning off the lingering chill of the ice rink. He pulls up in front of the house and we sit there for a moment, steeling ourselves to go back inside. “If we didn’t live on a dead end, I’d probably just keep on driving,” he says.

“I know the feeling, little brother. But your problems will just follow you.”

“I don’t know, this is a pretty fast car. How was the ice rink?”

“It was a little strange, actually. How was your mystery errand?”

“No mystery,” Phillip says. “I just needed some alone time to clear my head.”

“And is it clear now?”

“No. That was just a figure of speech.”

We smile sadly at each other. For some reason sitting here with my little brother, it suddenly occurs to me that we will never see our father again, and I feel a crushing desolation deep in my belly. We used to do this ventriloquist/dummy act for Dad. Phillip would sit on my lap and while I was trying to do the routine, he would suddenly spin and kiss my cheek, and then I’d yell at him and he’d say “sorry” in this high, hoarse cartoon voice, and Dad would laugh until his face turned purple. We didn’t know why he found it so funny, but we relished the ability to make him laugh, and so we did it at every possible opportunity. And then, at some point, we didn’t do it anymore. Maybe Dad stopped finding it funny, maybe I decided I was too old for it, maybe Phillip lost interest. You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

“Phillip,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Your T-shirt is inside out.”

“What? Shit.” He pulls it up over his head. “I must have been wearing it wrong all morning.”

I nod slowly, accepting the lie, feeling sad and old and not up to the conversation. “Stranger things have happened,” I say.

Chapter 24

 

T
oday’s Inappropriately Self-Absorbed Shiva Caller award goes to Arlene Blinder, an obese, sour-faced neighbor with dark patches of varicose veins running up her thick, mottled legs. That’s an unkind description, to be sure, but the view from down here in the chairs is not a pleasant one. All legs and crotch as far as the eye can see, and, if you look up, double chins and nasal hair. And Arlene Blinder is far from anyone’s idea of a physical specimen. The small catering chair disappears into her massive bottom like it’s been swallowed, and the thin metal legs creak and moan as she settles down. Arlene’s husband, a rail of a man named Edward, sits beside her in silence, which is pretty much all anyone’s ever seen him do. Somewhere there must be an office he goes to, a job he performs, but if he does, in fact, speak, no one but Arlene has ever been around to hear it.

“Oh, we’re expanding the kitchen,” she says, as if someone had asked. “It’s been a nightmare. First they dig the foundation for the addition and discover a boulder the size of a car. They had to bring in all this equipment and it took them four days to get it out. And then, after they dig down, they tell me the existing foundation has crumbled, and they’re going to have to underpin the rest of the house. I don’t know what they’re talking about, all I know is it’s another fifteen thousand dollars out of the gate. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I never would have gotten started.”

For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They run on treadmills, these women, work out with personal trainers and play tennis at the club, but still their hips widen, their legs thicken, their breasts sag. Genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart. There is something in their expressions that is either wisdom or resignation as they sit quietly around my mother and Arlene relentlessly holds the floor like a dominant elephant bull.

“And then yesterday they knocked out the water line and I couldn’t take my bath . . .”

“There’s an image I didn’t need,” Wendy mutters.

“Look at her chair,” Phillip hisses.

Indeed, the legs of the folding chair are visibly bowing, and whenever Arlene makes a hand gesture, the chair shudders and seems to sink a bit further.

“And the contractor is running two other jobs in the neighborhood. The Jacobsons, he’s redoing their pool house, and he’s doing a family room for the Duffs. So there are days when he doesn’t even show up, and God forbid the man should answer his cell phone. So whenever there’s a problem, which is pretty much always, I have to get in my car and go track him down.”

“When will you be finished?” my mother asks, and for an instant I think she’s asking when Arlene will be done boring us to tears.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Arlene says. “At this rate, I won’t have a kitchen for the holidays, and my Roger is supposed to be coming in with the grandchildren.” Her Roger was in my class, a morbidly obese kid with crumbs on his shirt who wrote a computer program that he sold for millions, bought a mansion in Silicon Valley and a mail-order bride from the Philippines.

“It will be worth it when it’s done,” Mom says, trying to wrap things up.

“If it hasn’t killed me by then,” Arlene says, and then gasps at the potential offensiveness of her remark. But before the awkwardness of the moment can harden into something uncomfortable, there’s a sharp cracking sound as Arlene’s chair finally gives out, and she comes crashing down to the floor with a shriek. There follows a moment of stunned silence, the kind that stops time and pulls it like taffy. Everyone’s inner child struggles to suppress a grade-school snicker. It takes a handful of women to help Arlene to her bloated feet. I look at Edward, who has gotten up from his own chair but has been pushed outside the circle of straining women, and our eyes meet. And maybe I’m projecting here, but I would swear, at that moment, that he’s fighting back a smile that, unhindered, would split his face in two.

 

 

 

 

 

ARLENE’S FALL EFFECTIVELY clears the house, which frees everyone else to weigh in on the news that I’m going to be a father.

Chapter 25

 

R
yan and Cole are in the pool. Cole wears Spider-Man water wings on his arms to keep him afloat. He and Ryan are engaged in an endless cycle of jumping in off the side and then climbing out to jump in again. Wendy sits suspended over the water on the far edge of the diving board, flipping through a tabloid magazine, while I pick at a platter of pastries on one of the lounge chairs. Serena is asleep in her carriage under an umbrella. The sun is just receding beyond the perimeter of the yard, and the mosquitoes haven’t yet emerged. It’s the best time to be outside.

“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?”