Birds of America (13 page)

Ann shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out how to get everybody from the church to the restaurant in a way that won’t wrinkle their outfits and spoil the pictures.”

“Really?” asked Therese. “You are?”

The titles are put in two big salad bowls, each team receiving the other’s bowl of titles. Therese’s father goes first. “All right! Everyone ready!” He has always been witty, competitive, tense; games have usually brought out the best and worst in him. These days, however, he seems anxious and elderly. There is a pain in his eyes, something sad and unfocused that sometimes stabs at them—the fear of a misspent life, or an uncertainty as to where he’s left the keys. He signals that his assigned name is a famous person. No one could remember how to signal that and so the family has invented one: a quick pompous posture, hands on hips, chin in air. Mustering up a sense of drama, Therese’s father does this well.

“Famous person!” Everyone shouts it, though of course there is someone who shouts “Idiot” to be witty. This time, it is Therese’s mother.

“Idiot!” she shouts. “Village idiot!”

But Therese’s father has continued signaling the syllables, ignoring his wife, slapping the fingers of his right hand hard on his left sleeve. The famous person has three names. He is doing the first name, first syllable. He takes out a dollar bill and points to it.

“George Washington,” shouts Ray.

“George Washington Carver!” shouts Therese. Therese’s father shakes his head angrily, turning the dollar around and pointing at it violently. It bothers him not to be able to control the discourse.

“Dollar bill,” says Therese’s mother.

“Bill!” says Therese. At this, her father begins nodding and pointing at her psychotically.
Yes, yes, yes
. Now he makes stretching motions with his hands. “Bill, Billy, William,” says Therese, and her father points wildly at her again. “William,” she says. “William Kennedy Smith.”

“Yes!” shouts her father, clapping his hands and throwing his head back as if to praise the ceiling.

“William Kennedy Smith?” Ann is scowling again. “How did you get that from just William?”

“He’s been in the news.” Therese shrugs. She does not know how to explain Ann’s sourness. Perhaps it has something to do with Ann’s struggles in law school, or with Therese’s being a circuit court judge, or with the diamond on Ann’s finger, which is so huge that it seems, to Therese, unkind to wear it around their mother’s, which is, when one gets right down to it, a chip. Earlier this morning, Ann told Therese that she is going to take Tad’s name, as well. “You’re going to call yourself Tad?” Therese asked, but Ann was not amused. Ann’s sense of humor was never that flexible, though she used to like a good sight gag.

Ann officiously explained the name change: “Because I believe a family is like a team, and everyone on the team should have the same name, like a color. I believe a spouse should be a team player.”

Therese no longer has any idea who Ann is. She liked her better when Ann was eight, with her blue pencil case, and a strange, loping run that came from having one leg a quarter of an inch longer than the other. Ann was more attractive as a child. She was awkward and inquiring. She was cute. Or so she seemed to Therese, who was mostly in high school and college, slightly depressed and studying too much, destroying her already-bad eyes, so that now she wore glasses so thick her eyes swam in a cloudy way behind them. This morning, when she’d stood listening to Ann talk about team players, Therese had
smiled and nodded, but she felt preached at, as if she were a messy, wayward hippie. She wanted to grab her sister, throw herself upon her, embrace her, shut her up. She tried to understand Ann’s dark and worried nuptial words, but instead she found herself recalling the pratfalls she used to perform for Ann—Therese could take a fall straight on the face—in order to make Ann laugh.

Ann’s voice was going on now. “When you sit too long, the bodices bunch up. …”

Therese mentally measured the length of her body in front of her and wondered if she could do it. Of course she could. Of course. But
would
she? And then suddenly, she knew she would. She let her hip twist and fell straight forward, her arm at an angle, her mouth in a whoop. She had learned to do this in drama club when she was fifteen. She hadn’t been pretty, and it was a means of getting the boys’ attention. She landed with a thud.

“You still do that?” asked Ann with incredulity and disgust. “You’re a judge and you still
do
that?”

“Sort of,” said Therese from the floor. She felt around for her glasses.

Now it is the team player herself standing up to give clues to her team. She looks at the name on her scrap of paper and makes a slight face. “I need a consultation,” she says in a vaguely repelled way that perhaps she imagines is sophisticated. She takes the scrap of wrapping paper over to Therese’s team. “What is this?” Ann asks. There in Ray’s handwriting is a misspelled
Arachnophobia
.

“It’s a movie,” says Ray apologetically. “Did I spell it wrong?”

“I think you did, honey,” says Therese, leaning in to look at it. “You got some of the
o’s
and
a’s
mixed up.” Ray is dyslexic. When the roofing business slows in the winter months, instead of staying in with a book, or going to psychotherapy, he drives to cheap matinees of bad movies—“flicks,” he calls them, or
“cliffs” when he’s making fun of himself. Ray misspells everything. Is it
input
or
imput
? Is it
averse, adverse
, or
adversed
?
Stock
or
stalk
?
Carrot
or
karate
? His roofing business has a reputation for being reasonable, but a bit slipshod and second-rate. Nonetheless, Therese thinks he is great. He is never condescending. He cooks infinite dishes with chicken. He is ardent and capable and claims almost every night in his husbandly way to find Therese the sexiest woman he’s ever known. Therese likes that. She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor’s office, but it is a limited thing—like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands, and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable. It is nothing, except that it is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once in a while, Jesus Christ, she needs that.

Ann is acting out
Arachnophobia
, the whole concept, rather than working syllable by syllable. She stares into her fiancé’s eyes, wiggling her fingers about and then jumping away in a fright, but Tad doesn’t get it, though he does look a little alarmed. Ann waves her Christmas-manicured nails at him more furiously. One of the nails has a little Santa Claus painted on it. Ann’s black hair is cut severely in sharp, expensive lines, and her long, drapey clothes hang from her shoulders, as if still on a hanger. She looks starved and rich and enraged. Everything seems struggled toward and forced, a little cartoonish, like the green shoes, which may be why her fiancé suddenly shouts out, “Little Miss Muffett!” Ann turns now instead to Andrew, motioning at him encouragingly, as if to punish Tad. The awkward lope of her childhood has taken on a chiropracticed slink. Therese turns back toward her own team, toward her father, who is still muttering something about William Kennedy Smith. “A woman shouldn’t be in a bar at three o’clock in the morning, that’s all there is to it.”

“Dad, that’s ludicrous,” whispers Therese, not wanting to interrupt the game. “Bars are open to everyone. Public Accommodations Law.”

“I’m not talking about the cold legalities,” he says chastisingly. He has never liked lawyers, and is baffled by his daughters. “I’m talking about a long-understood
moral code
.” Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.

“ ‘Long-understood moral code’?” Therese looks at him gently. “Dad, you’re seventy-five years old. Things change.”

“Arachnophobia!”
Andrew shouts, and he and Ann rush together and do high fives.

Therese’s father makes a quick little spitting sound, then crosses his legs and looks the other way. Therese looks over at her mother and her mother is smiling at her conspiratorially, behind Therese’s father’s back, making little donkey ears with her fingers, her sign for when she thinks he’s being a jackass.

“All right, forget the William Kennedy Smith. Doll, your turn,” says Therese’s father to her mother. Therese’s mother gets up slowly but bends gleefully to pick up the scrap of paper. She looks at it, walks to the center of the room, and shoves the paper scrap in her pocket. She faces the other team and makes the sign for a famous person.

“Wrong team, Mom,” says Therese, and her mother says “Oops,” and turns around. She repeats the famous person stance.

“Famous person,” says Ray encouragingly. Therese’s mother nods. She pauses for a bit to think. Then she spins around, throws her arms up into the air, collapses forward onto the floor, then backward, hitting her head on the stereo.

“Marjorie, what are you doing?” asks Therese’s father. Her mother is lying there on the floor, laughing.

“Are you okay?” Therese asks. Her mother nods, still laughing quietly.

“Fall,” says Ray. “Dizziness. Dizzy Gillespie.”

Therese’s mother shakes her head.

“Epilepsy,” says Therese.

“Explode,” says her father, and her mother nods. “Explosion. Bomb. Robert Oppenheimer!”

“That’s it.” Her mother sighs. She has a little trouble getting back up. She is seventy and her knees are jammed with arthritis.

“You need help, Mom?” Therese asks.

“Yeah, Mom, you need help?” asks Ann, who has risen and walked toward the center of the room, to take charge.

“I’m okay.” Therese’s mother sighs, with a quiet, slightly faked giggle, and walks stiffly back to her seat.

“That was great, Ma,” says Therese.

Her mother smiles proudly. “Well, thank you!”

After that, there are many rounds, and every time Therese’s mother gets anything like Dom De Luise or Tom Jones, she does her bomb imitation again, whipping herself into a spastic frenzy and falling, then rising stiffly again to great applause. Pam brings Winnie in from her nap and everyone oohs and aahs at the child’s sweet sleep-streaked face. “There she is,” coos Aunt Therese. “You want to come see Grandma be a bomb?”

“It’s your turn,” says Andrew impatiently.

“Mine?” asks Therese.

“I think that’s right,” says her father.

She gets up, digs into the bowl, unfolds the scrap of wrapping paper. It says “Jekylls Street.” “I need a consultation here. Andrew, I think this is your writing.”

“Okay,” he says, rising, and together they step into the foyer.

“Is this a TV show?” whispers Therese. “I don’t watch much TV.”

“No,” says Andrew with a vague smile.

“What is it?”

He shifts his weight, reluctant to tell her. Perhaps it is because he is married to a detective. Or, more likely, it is
because he himself works with Top Secret documents from the Defense Department; he was recently promoted from the just plain Secret ones. As an engineer, he consults, reviews, approves. His eyes are suppressed, annoyed. “It’s the name of a street two blocks from here.” There’s a surly and defensive curve to his mouth.

“But that’s not the title of anything famous.”

“It’s a place. I thought we could do names of places.”

“It’s not a famous place.”

“So?”

“I mean, we all could write down the names of streets in our neighborhoods, near where we work, a road we walked down once on the way to a store—”

“You’re the one who said we could do places.”

“I did? Well, all right, then, what did I say was the sign for a place? We don’t have a sign for places.”

“I don’t know. You figure it out,” he says. A saucy rage is all over him now. Is this from childhood? Is this from hair loss? Once, she and Andrew were close. But now, as with Ann, she has no idea who he is anymore. She has only a theory: an electrical engineer worked over years ago by high school guidance counselors paid by the Pentagon to recruit, train, and militarize all the boys with high math SAT scores. “From M.I.T. to MIA,” Andrew once put it himself. “A military-industrial asshole.” But she can’t find that satirical place in him anymore. Last year, at least, they had joked about their upbringing. “I scarcely remember Dad reading to us,” she’d said.

“Sure he read to us,” said Andrew. “You don’t remember him reading to us? You don’t remember him reading to us silently from the
Wall Street Journal
?”

Now she scans his hardening face for a joke, a glimmer, a bit of love. Andrew and Ann have seemed close, and Therese feels a bit wistful, wondering when and how that happened.
She is a little jealous. The only expression she can get from Andrew is a derisive one. He is a traffic cop. She is the speeding flower child.

Don’t you know I’m a
judge
? she wants to ask. A judge via a fluke political appointment, sure. A judge with a reputation around the courthouse for light sentencing, true. A judge who is having an affair that mildly tarnishes her character—okay. A softy; an easy touch: but a judge nonetheless.

Instead, she says, “Do you mind if I just pick another one?”

“Fine by me,” he says, and strides brusquely back into the living room.

Oh, well, Therese thinks. It is her new mantra. It usually calms her better than
ohm
, which she also tries.
Ohm
is where the heart is.
Ohm
is not here.
Oh, well. Oh, well
. When she was first practicing law, to combat her courtroom stage fright, she would chant to herself,
Everybody loves me. Everybody loves me
, and when that didn’t work, she’d switch to
Kill! Kill! Kill!

“We’re doing another one,” announces Andrew, and Therese picks another one.

A book and a movie. She opens her palms, prayerlike for a book. She cranks one hand in the air for a movie. She pulls on her ear and points at a lamp. “Sounds like
light
,” Ray says. His expression is open and helpful. “Bite, kite, dite, fight, night—”