This Is Where I Leave You (8 page)

 

 

 

 

 

ALICE AND TRACY are helping Linda in the kitchen. Horry, on Paul’s orders, has gone back to the store to finish out the day. The Elmsbrook store is the flagship, and it stays open until nine every night. Barry is upstairs, watching a video with the boys. So it’s just the four of us and Mom, sitting on low chairs, feeling sheepish and uncomfortable.

“So,” Phillip says. “What happens now?”

“People will come,” Mom says.

“How do they know when to come?”

“We are not the first people to ever sit shiva,” Paul grumbles.

“People will come,” Mom says.

“Oh, people will come, Ray,” Phillip intones, doing his best James Earl Jones. “People will most definitely come.” Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored. When triggered, he will quote thoughtlessly, like some kind of savant.

Paul looks up to catch me staring at the scar on his right hand. It’s a thick, pink line that runs up the meaty edge of his palm, crossing his wrist and ending in a splotchy cluster on the inside of his forearm. There’s another, nastier one on his shoulder that radiates up toward his neck in raised tendrils the color of dead flesh, where the rottweiler missed his jugular by a few inches. Whenever I see him, I can’t help but stare at the scars, looking for the teeth marks I know are there.

He twists his arm around self-consciously, hiding the scar, and flashes me a hard look. Paul has not addressed me directly since I arrived. He rarely addresses me if he doesn’t have to. This is due to a combination of factors, most notably the rottweiler attack that ended his college baseball career before it started and for which he blames me. He’s never come out and said that, of course. Other than Phillip, the men in my family never come out and say anything. So I don’t know for sure if that’s when Paul started hating me, or if that’s just when Paul started hating everybody.

Another possible factor is that I lost my virginity to Alice back in high school, and she to me, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. Alice was my year in high school, not even on Paul’s radar until many years later, when she cleaned his teeth and he picked her up with the always reliable “Didn’t you used to go out with my kid brother?” By then I was long gone from Elmsbrook, already engaged to Jen, so if anyone is to blame for that one, it’s Paul and not me. He knew going in that I’d been there first. For all I know, he may have even started sleeping with her to somehow get back at me for the dog attack, which would have been twisted and stupid and so very Paul. So now, every time Paul sees me, it’s there in the back of his mind, that I deflowered his wife, that I’ve seen Alice naked, that I’ve kissed the wine-colored birthmark in the shape of a question mark that starts below her navel and ends at the junction of her legs. It was seventeen years ago, but men don’t let go of things like that. And every time Alice and I see each other, we can’t help but flash back to those four months we spent having sex in cars, basements, shrubs, and once, late at night, in the plastic tunnel above the slide in the elementary school playground. You never forget your first time, no matter how much you’d like to.

“How are things at the store?” I ask him.

He looks at me, considering the question. “Same old same old.”

“Any plans to expand to any more locations?”

“Nope. No plans to expand. We’re in a recession, or don’t you read the paper?”

“I was just asking.”

“Although I guess a recession is the least of your problems, huh, Judd?”

“What do you mean by that, Paul?” We are ending our sentences with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch.

“Paul,” Mom says.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “We’re just catching up.”

“Forget it,” Paul says.

“No. It’s fine,” I say. “What you meant was, between being unemployed and my wife screwing around, I have bigger things to worry about than the economic state of the country. Right?”

“That’s certainly one way of looking at it.”

“I was surprised I didn’t hear from you when it happened,” I say. “I moved out almost eight weeks ago. I mean, none of you called me. That’s par for the course, I guess. If you didn’t call when we lost the baby, I wouldn’t expect you to call over something as trivial as the end of my marriage. But I figured you’d have called, Paul, just to rub it in a little. It’s lucky Dad died when he did, or who knows when you may have gotten around to it?”

“I’m not happy about it. I always liked Jen.”

“Thanks, Paul.” I wait an extra beat for emphasis. “And I always liked Alice.”

“What did you just say?” Paul says, clenching teeth, fists, and bowels.

“Which part didn’t you hear?”

“All the young girls love Alice.”
Phillip sings out the Elton John lyrics, loud and off-key.
“Tender young Alice they say . . .”

“So, Phillip,” Wendy says. “How did you go about seducing your therapist?”

“Later,” Phillip says. “It’s just getting interesting.”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” my mother says.

I look at the Rolex Jen bought for me with my own money that I haven’t gotten around to selling on eBay yet. We’ve been sitting shiva for exactly one half hour. The doorbell rings, and God only knows to what depths of passive-aggressive sniping we might have descended if it hadn’t. And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.

 

 

 

 

When we were little kids, Dad took Paul and me fishing at a wide, shallow creek in the shadow of an overpass near some back roads a few miles north of the town limits. Paul and I pulled water-smoothed rocks from the creek bed and Dad knotted them into our fishing lines to serve as weights. Then, after slicing some inchworms with his pocket knife to bait our hooks, he taught us how to cast our lines out across the creek. For Paul and me, the casting was more fun than the fishing. We would reel our lines in, stretch the rods out behind us, and try to cast as far across the creek as we could. About an hour into this, Paul slung his rod back and managed to hook my ear just before he launched his rod forward. I felt a sudden, hot pain as my ear cartilage tore, the rock in his line flying back to slap my skull, and suddenly I was on my back in the dirt, looking up at a cloudless sky. Dad had to take off his T-shirt to stanch the flow of blood. Paul stood over me apologizing, but angrily, like it was all my fault. Flecks of my blood clung to Dad’s curly chest hairs. I didn’t feel a lot of pain, I just remember being amazed at how Dad’s crumpled T-shirt went from white to completely red in a matter of minutes. The damage to my ear turned out to be minimal, but there’s still the faint depression in the bone behind my ear where the rock hit me, like a fingerprint in hardened clay.

Chapter 8

 

W
e’ve been at it for a few hours already, and the visitors keep coming, pouring through the door in an endless stream, as if busloads are being dropped off at the front door every half hour. Knob’s End has become a parking lot, and my face is sore from smiling politely as my mother introduces and reintroduces everyone, my ass numb from the cheap foam underneath the crappy vinyl of the shiva chair. The plastic tips of the flimsy catering chairs set up around the room scrape the oak floor as the guests jockey for position, gradually working their way from the back of the room to the front, where they can ask the same questions as the guests who came before them, invoke the same platitudes, and squeeze my mother’s forearm with theatrically pursed lips. We should have a handout at the door to speed things along, a brief summary of Dad’s illness and all that transpired in the final days, maybe even a photocopy of his charts and a four-color printout of his last CAT scan, because that seems to be what all of his and Mom’s peers want to talk about. And at the bottom of the handout a simple asterisked declaration would state that it’s of absolutely no interest to us where you were when you found out our father/husband had died, like he was John F. Kennedy or Kurt Cobain.

Paul gets by without saying much, offering up a series of Rorschach grunts that people seem to hear as actual responses. Wendy shamelessly takes cell phone calls from her girlfriends back in L.A., and Phillip amuses himself by lying his ass off, seeing how far he can push the boundaries of credibility.

And then there are the platters. Jews don’t send flowers, they send food, in large quantities: fruit platters, assorted cookie platters, cold cuts, casseroles, cakes, wild rice salads, bagels and smoked salmon. Linda, who has effortlessly slipped back into her habitual role of supplemental caretaker for the Foxman clan, sets up the nonperishable items on the dining room table, along with a coffee samovar, which leads to an ad hoc buffet situation. The visitors work their way through the chairs, chat with the bereaved, and then gravitate into the dining room for coffee and nosh. It’s like a wake, except it’s going to last for seven days, and there’s no booze. Who knows what kind of epic party this might become if someone popped the plastic lock on the whiskey bar?

The visitors are mostly senior citizens, friends and neighbors of my parents, coming to see and be seen, to pay their respects and contemplate their own impending mortality, their heart conditions and cancers still percolating below the surface, in livers and lungs and blood cells. Another of their number has fallen, and while they’re here to console my mother, you can see in their staunch, pale faces the morbid thrill of having been passed over by death. They have raised their kids, paid off their mortgages, and they will spend their golden years burying each other, somberly keeping track of their relentlessly dwindling numbers over coffee and crumb cake in houses just like this one.

I’m supposed to be decades away from this, supposed to be just starting my own family, but there’s been a setback, a calamitous detour, and you wouldn’t think you could get any more depressed while sitting shiva for your father, but you’d be wrong. Suddenly, I can’t stop seeing the footprints of time on everyone in the room. The liver spots, the multiple chins, the sagging necks, the jowls, the flaps of skin over eyes, the spotted scalps, the frown lines etched into permanence, the stooped shoulders, the sagging man breasts, the bowed legs. When does it all happen? In increments, so you can’t watch out for it, you can’t fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.

There were so many things I thought I might become back in college, but then I fell for Jen and all my lofty aspirations evaporated in a lusty haze. I just never imagined a girl like that would want someone like me, and I had this idea that if I applied all of my energy toward keeping her happy, the future would sort itself out. And so I disappeared without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle of her creamy spread thighs, scraping through my classes with B’s and C’s, and when, shortly after graduation, she accepted my proposal, I remember feeling, more than anything, an overwhelming sense of relief, like I had just finished a marathon.

And now I have no wife, no child, no job, no home, or anything else that would point to a life being lived with any success. I may not be old, but I’m too old to have this much nothing. I’ve got the double chin of a stranger in photographs, the incipient swell of love handles just above my hips, and I’m pretty sure that my hairline, the one boundary I’ve always been able to count on, is starting to creep back on me when I’m not looking, because every so often my fingers discover some fresh topography on my upper forehead. To have nothing when you’re twenty is cool, it’s expected, but to have nothing when you’re halfway to seventy, softening and widening on a daily basis, is something altogether different. It’s like setting out to drive cross-country without any gas money. I will look back at this time and see it as the start of a slow process that ends with me dying alone after living out my days in an empty apartment with only the television and a slow, waddling dog to keep me company, the kind of place that will smell stale to visitors, but not to me, since the stale thing will be me. And I can feel that miserable future hurtling toward me at high speed, thundering across the plains in a cloud of dust like a wildebeest stampede.

Before I know it, I’m on my feet, ducking and weaving through the crowd, intercepting random bits of conversation, keeping my eye on the sanctuary of the kitchen door.

“. . . Paul, the older one. He spoke very nicely . . .”

“. . . on a ventilator for three months . . . basically a vegetable . . .”

“. . . a place down on Lake Winnipesaukee. We do it every year. It’s beautiful. Maureen brings the kids . . .”

“. . . recently separated. Apparently, there was a third party involved . . .”

That last one pierces me like a fishhook—but by then I’m at the door, and I’m not looking back. I step into the air-conditioned quiet of the kitchen and lean up against the wall, catching my breath. Linda is crouched at the fridge, absently chewing on the nub of a raw carrot like a cigar, trying to make room for all of the food that’s been delivered.

“Hey there, Judd,” she says, smiling at me. “What can I get you? And, bear in mind, we have pretty much everything now.”