Authors: Lisa Lutz
T
he wave of familial discord, precipitated by Rae’s camp ordeal, soon settled into an eerie calm. A few weeks later, Rae was still feeling the gratitude of having been sprung and strived to be on her best behavior. I, however, was still feeling the sting from her shady tactics and needed a modicum of revenge. Since Rae is usually aboveboard in her activities, I had a single offense: to take away her one and only vice—junk food. I began noticing that her Pop-Tart breakfasts bled into Frito and Twinkie lunches. At family dinners, she picked at the main course, ate her vegetables under extreme duress, and then devoured dessert like a wild animal. I was irked by the fact that I was the only one who noticed this. But it was my fault, wasn’t it? I raised the bar on acceptable behavior in that house and Rae always managed to stay well under it.
However, just because her habits went unnoticed did not mean that I couldn’t persuade my parents to attend to them. I brought home articles on the effects of large sugar consumption on adolescents and its relationship with low scores on aptitude tests in school. I showed documentation on the correlation between old-age diabetes and sugar consumption in youth. I suggested that precautionary measures be enforced. My mother suspiciously agreed: Sugar on the weekends only. No exceptions.
Rae ran upstairs and banged on my apartment door when she heard the news. “How could you?” she asked, almost teary-eyed.
“I’m concerned for your health.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You want to call a truce?”
“Fine.”
Rae reluctantly held out her hand and we shook on it. However, a truce with me would eventually seem trivial, as Rae was about to begin a battle I didn’t know she had in her.
I
locked my apartment door and tiptoed down the staircase, hoping to avoid chitchat with any family member. In particular, I was trying to avoid my mother, who had found another lawyer she wanted me to drink coffee with. I tried explaining to her that I was capable of drinking coffee without legal help, but she did not follow my logic.
Instead of running into my mother, I found Rae (with binoculars) peering out the window on the second landing. I checked the view and saw that Uncle Ray was moving in. Instead of a large orange-and-white truck outside, his moving vehicle was a Yellow Cab. It was a heartbreaking sight, and I turned to Rae, hoping that she might have seen the same thing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied sharply, and I knew she didn’t see a tragic old man. She saw her archenemy.
“Don’t you think it’s time to let this thing go?”
I could tell from the look on Rae’s face that she didn’t.
Let me explain: My sister Rae and my uncle Ray had been at odds for about six years. It began when Rae was eight and discovered that her uncle had dipped into her well-catalogued Halloween stash. The tension mounted when she turned ten and Uncle Ray bought her a pink dress for her birthday and not the walkie-talkies she had so pointedly demanded. And then it escalated into a full-grown battle when my uncle fell asleep on a surveillance job they were working together and could not be woken with even the most violent kicking. Between all the aforementioned events, their strife was peppered with TV hogging, appropriations of favorite cereals, and the constant sharp tongue of my grudge-holding sibling.
Still, I repeated my question: “Don’t you think it’s time to let this thing go?”
“No, I don’t,” Rae replied. So I left her alone on the staircase to spy on her uncle.
I met Uncle Ray as he was walking up the steps into the foyer, lugging a badly packed duffel bag. I took the bag off his shoulder and questioned its contents.
“Let’s see. I got a winter coat, a couple pairs of shoes, a bowling ball, and I think some sandwiches I made this morning with what was left in the fridge.”
“Next time, ask Mom to help you pack.” I carried the bag inside and put it on David’s—now Uncle Ray’s—bed. “Good to have you here, Uncle Ray.”
Ray pinched my cheek and said, “You were always my favorite designated driver.”
I leaned against the windowsill as Ray proceeded to unpack. He pulled items from the lumpy bag and placed them throughout the room without any hint of order or purpose. There was only one article that he had packed with a sense of care. Wrapped in towels of increasing size was a tastefully framed photograph of the Spellman clan. Uncle Ray laid the picture on his dresser and then adjusted its placement just so. While there are dozens of photographs throughout my parents’ house, there is not a single one of all the family members. The image merely reminded me of how incongruous we appeared together.
My mother’s long hair and athletically petite frame have erased at least a decade off her fifty-four years. Her sharp, even features stood up well to the hazards of time. But Dad’s thinning hair and growing gut have added some years, and only his wrinkles provided unity to his mismatched features. Uncle Ray shared a single feature with Albert—the broad, slightly flattened nose. Ray was leaner, handsomer, and blonder than my father. And then there was David’s fashion-model perfection, which appeared utterly alien next to Rae, who was ultimately a tiny, cuter version of her uncle. She was the fairest of the Spellman children, dirty blonde with gray-blue eyes and a pattern of freckles across her often tanned face. I towered over Rae, appearing like a clumsier version of my mother.
Uncle Ray dusted off the photograph and decided that he needed a break after the arduous five minutes of unpacking. He offered to make me a sandwich. I declined, thinking it might be a good idea to give my father a warning message.
I caught my dad at his desk.
“Trouble is brewing with the short one. I’d get on it if I were you,” I said.
“How bad?” my dad asked.
“Five stars, if you ask me. But only time will tell.”
That afternoon, I dropped by David’s office to deliver a surveillance report on the Mercer case (stock analyst suspected of insider trading).
I was able to deliver the report early because the subject did the same exact thing seven days in a row. Gym. Work. Home. Sleep. Repeat. I adore creatures of habit. They make my job so much easier.
When I announced myself to Linda, she explained that he was in the middle of a haircut. I strode into David’s office and discovered that the haircut was being administered by my best friend, Petra.
“What are you doing here?” Petra casually asked.
“Delivering a surveillance report. Why are you cutting my brother’s hair?”
“I can give you two hundred and fifty reasons why,” Petra, now in a new tax bracket, replied.
I feigned shock at my brother’s intemperance, but really, it didn’t surprise me at all.
“Did you have to tell her how much I pay you?” David asked.
“There is no such thing as client-stylist confidentiality.”
“How long has this been going on?” I inquired.
They turned to each other to calculate a response. I was disappointed. Any relative or friend of mine should have a better concept of stealth.
I offered up an exaggerated sigh and said, “Forget it.” I tossed the surveillance report on David’s desk and headed for the door. “Why you feel the need to keep a fucking haircut from me, I will never understand.”
“See you tonight, Isabel” was David’s only response, that night being Uncle Ray’s welcome-home dinner.
I had forgotten about the dinner until David reminded me. Had I remembered, I would have tried to weasel my way out of it. The Ra(e/y) Wars were brewing and I was determined to stay out of them. However, their impact, as I correctly anticipated, could not be outrun.
I returned home early that evening and found Rae on the living room floor obliterating a gift-wrapped box from the local electronics store. It was the newest, top-of-the-line digital video recorder. In fact, Spellman Investigations still had not updated their equipment to this level. Somehow my parents deemed it reasonable to bestow this enormous gift on a teenage girl when birthday and Christmas were either long gone or far away.
As Rae sat as an island amid a sea of Styrofoam, plastic wrap, and cardboard, I eyed my parents with the superior skepticism of an IRS agent and waited patiently for them to catch my stare. True to form, they avoided eye contact, knowing full well what I was thinking. I casually walked over to my father.
“Not one word, Isabel.”
“Are you willing to pay for my silence?”
My father’s posture sagged as he imagined an endless stream of payoffs and buyouts. I was joking, of course, but I let the threat hang in the air.
“I suppose it’s only fair. What do you want?”
“Relax, Dad. I don’t want to shake you down. But I would like to say—”
“I am begging you, Isabel, don’t say anything.”
Finding the prospect of holding my tongue almost unbearable, I grabbed a beer and then plopped down on the couch in the den next to Uncle Ray, who thoughtfully handed me his plate of cheese and crackers as he channel surfed. When he hit upon an episode of
Get Smart
from the first season, I said, “Stop.”
Max
1
and Agent 99, disguised as a doctor and nurse, roamed the halls of Harvey Satan’s sanitarium.
2
“Can you bring me up to speed?” asked Uncle Ray, who sadly does not have a catalogue of episodes imprinted in his brain.
“KAOS
3
agents have kidnapped the chief and are holding him for ransom. Oh, and there’s this scene that you just missed where Max uses seven different kinds of phones. A shoe phone, wallet phone, eyeglasses phone, tie phone, handkerchief phone, and…I can’t remember the last one.
4
”
“What is the chief doing in the closet?” asked my uncle.
“It’s not a closet. It’s a freezer.”
“Why are they freezing him?”
“They need to lower his body temperature for mind-control surgery.”
“Okay. That makes sense,” said Ray, who took back his plate of cheese and crackers.
A commercial came on the TV and Uncle Ray pretended to be engrossed in the latest acne remedy.
“You think the kid will get used to me after a while?”
“Yeah, Uncle Ray, I think she’ll come around. Eventually.”
“I hope so. Been wearing my lucky shirt.”
“I noticed.”
The lucky shirt: a threadbare, short-sleeved, Hawaiian-print number that had been in circulation nearing two decades. It used to surface only on special occasions—the Super Bowl, the playoffs, the World Series. Eventually it made its way into a smattering of poker games and casual weddings, but lately it was rare to see him in anything else.
At dinner my sister’s pointed glares across the table discomfited all. David and my father made dull small talk about work, but it was my mother who briefly eased the tension, by redirecting it.
“Don’t you think that’s enough red meat for one day?” she asked as my father reached for a second helping of roast beef.
Dad served himself two more slices and said, “Yes, now it is.”
“I thought Dr. Schneider put you on a diet.”
“He did,” Dad replied.
“How’s it going?” my mom asked.
“Great.”
“Have you lost any weight?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.”
“How much?” she asked.
“A pound,” my father replied proudly.
“You were supposed to start that diet one month ago. You’ve lost only one pound so far?” asked my mom.
“All the experts say it’s better to lose it slow and steady.”
“That’s good. So you’ll be thin somewhere around the time you’re eligible for Social Security benefits,” said Mom, holding her glare.
“You’re not the boss of me, Olivia.”
“The hell I’m not.”
Since some variety of this conversation was a staple of most Spellman family meals, the rest of table continued eating without much notice. Then Uncle Ray made the fatal mistake of speaking to my sister.
“Rae-Rae, pass the potatoes, will ya?” said my uncle.
My sister continued eating, deliberately not responding to the request. My mother waited a moment, hoping, probably praying. When her younger daughter still refused to move, she intervened.
“Sweetie, Uncle Ray wants you to pass the potatoes.”
“No, he wants ‘Rae-Rae’ to pass him the potatoes. I don’t know who ‘Rae-Rae’ is,” my sister snapped.
I reached across the table, elbowing Rae, picked up the potatoes, and handed them to my uncle.
“My name is Rae. Just one Rae. Not two. Just one.” Rae spelled it out like the rudest member of the debate team.
“How long are you going to hold this grudge?” my uncle asked.
“How long are you going to wear that shirt?”
“Don’t talk about the shirt.”
“Why, can it hear me?”
“Just don’t talk about it. We don’t need the negative energy.”
My brother, the lawyer, the corporate dealmaker, the man who bills four hundred dollars an hour, believes he can negotiate anything. He is foolish enough to think that he can negotiate peace through mutual understanding. At times like this, I believe it is very possible that David was swapped with the real Spellman boy at the hospital.
“Uncle Ray, tell her about the shirt. Maybe she’ll understand,” said David.
“No way.”
“Either you tell her or I’ll tell her,” my brother said, knowing the effect of his words.
“You won’t tell it right, David.”
“Go on, tell me about the shirt,” Rae said, folding her arms across her chest.
Uncle Ray contemplated his delivery, cleared his throat, and offered a dramatic pause.
“January twenty-second, 1989. Superbowl Twenty-three, score sixteen to thirteen Bengals, with three minutes, twenty seconds left on the clock. Montana makes five consecutive passes to move the ball to the Bengals’ thirty-five. A holding penalty. The ball goes back ten yards. Yet Montana comes up with a twenty-seven-yard completion to Rice. A time-out and he connects with Taylor in the middle of the end zone. I’m wearing the shirt. June second, 1991. Oak Tree. I put one hundred on Blue Lady. Who knows why? I’m in the mood for a long shot. Blue Lady noses Silver Arrow in the final stretch. Payoff: thirty-six to one. I’m wearing the shirt. September third, 1993. I go into Sal’s Deli and Liquor to buy some lottery tickets. I walk in on a two-eleven in progress, surprising the perp. He fires five rounds in my direction before I can pull out my piece and take him down. Not a scratch on me. No one dies that day, and the perp has only a flesh wound. I’m wearing the shirt.”
Uncle Ray clears his throat and continues devouring his plate of potatoes.