Chapter 11
8:25 a.m.
A
shower in the morning is an imperative for the Foxman men, whose bed-head is legendary in this region. Our pillow-bent curls, sculpted by scalp oils, stand up in large, coiled clumps, making us look like electrocuted cartoon characters. The problem is that the water boiler cannot accommodate so many showers at the same time, and within minutes, the water goes from hot, to lukewarm, to chilled. Adding to the confusion, Tracy and Alice are both blow-drying their hair while Wendy is microwaving frozen waffles for the kids, so the circuit breakers trip, knocking out half the power in the house, including the basement lights.
You would think the home of a former electrician would be wired better, but it’s a classic case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot. Having been in the “trade,” as he called it, Dad was much too stubborn to spend money on electricians. He did everything himself, refusing to file any work he did with the city, which saved him the trouble of having to bring things up to code. Having spent years laboring under the restrictions of the power company, he took a certain pride in outwitting them in his own home. He was always fishing lines through the walls, splicing and rewiring, creating a dense maze of circuitry behind our walls to the point where even he lost track of where everything went. The house gradually became something of an electrical puzzle, with too many lines on overburdened fuses and patchwork wiring that doesn’t always hold up. Slamming the doors of certain rooms can actually turn off the lights, and there are extra wall switches everywhere, some redundant and some that do nothing, so it always takes a few tries for the uninitiated to turn on or off the light they want. When he had central air installed a few years ago, he was supposed to upgrade the house from two hundred to four hundred amps, but that would have involved filing with the power company, so instead, he rewired the electric panels in the basement to make room for the compressor and air handlers. As a result, the house is more than a little electrically temperamental, and Mom always jokes that one day she’ll flip a switch and the house will explode. Until then, the circuit breakers will bravely go on tripping to protect the overloaded wires.
I rush through my shower, cold and blind and cursing a blue streak, then step shivering into the basement, where I find Alice in a white bathrobe, fiddling with the electric panel in the sparse morning light filtering down from upstairs.
“Hey,” she says when she sees me. “I’m sorry to invade your space like this.”
It’s the invading of my old bedroom upstairs that she should be apologizing for, but I just say it’s fine, suddenly self-conscious. The last time Alice saw me undressed was in this very room, several lifetimes ago. I looked better shirtless then, although I’m sure she did too. Time hasn’t necessarily been unkind to us, but it hasn’t gone out of its way either. And for the last two months, I’ve been living on a diet of delivered pizza and fried Chinese takeout. I suck in my gut and fold my arms strategically below my chest.
“I can’t find the switch,” she says.
I stand dripping beside her, studying the circuit panel. It’s too dark to see the little orange tab that shows on a tripped fuse, so I run my hand down the line of switches until I feel one that has more give than the others. “It’s this one,” I say, flipping the switch. The lights flicker back on at exactly the same instant my towel falls. “Whoops!” I say, doubling over to catch it and pull it back up to my waist. “Sorry about that.”
Alice smiles as I fumble with my towel. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she says, heading back upstairs; a rare lighthearted moment for Alice, which, if nothing else, confirms for me that I’m the only Foxman brother who didn’t get any last night.
10:00 a.m.
“IT WAS A Saturday morning,” Wendy says, “and, Mom, you were on a lecture tour. Dad was up on the roof, hammering the rain gutters back on or something. He was making a racket, so I was down in the basement, watching TV. It was a Brady Bunch movie, I still remember. The one where they go to Hawaii.”
“I remember that one,” Phillip says. “Alice hurts her back having a hula lesson, because of Peter’s bad luck charm.”
“Right,” Wendy says. “That’s not really germane to my story.”
“I remember thinking it was nice that Alice got to go on vacation with them,” Phillip says. “I mean, she was the housekeeper. You got the feeling that she hadn’t really gone anywhere before.”
“Phillip remembers every show or movie he’s ever seen,” Tracy says proudly, like we might not know.
“Now if only that were a marketable skill,” Wendy says.
Tracy looks miffed, but Phillip laughs. He and Wendy have a long history of insulting each other. They don’t even hear it anymore.
Tracy and Alice are on the couch; Linda is in an armchair, her feet up on one of the plastic folding chairs; and Barry is reading the
Wall Street Journal
in the backyard while the boys run around. The rest of us are back in our low shiva chairs, steeling ourselves for another ass-numbing day of greeting visitors at crotch level. Mom has asked us all to remember personal stories about Dad, which she is scribbling into a large brown journal.
“So, anyway, that’s where I was, watching television, when I got my first period.”
“I have one daughter, and I wasn’t here the day she became a woman,” Mom says. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
“Hardly your worst offense,” Wendy says with a smirk. “So I run upstairs and I scream out the window to Dad, but he can’t hear me over the hammering. So I step outside and call up to him, but he still can’t hear me. So I grab a baseball off the lawn—Paul was always leaving baseballs on the lawn—and I throw it up to the roof. I only meant for it to hit the roof and roll down, just to catch his attention, but I guess I didn’t know my own strength, and the ball hits Dad square on the back of his head, and he loses his balance and falls off the roof, pulling the rain gutter off with him as he goes.”
“I don’t remember this at all,” Phillip says.
“Because it didn’t happen on a television show,” Wendy says. She turns to Tracy. “Phillip was their last child. He was basically raised by the television. We don’t hold it against him.”
“Spiteful bitch,” Mom says with a smile.
“So Dad’s lying on the ground, flat on his back. His arm is broken, and he’s got this big gash on his forehead, and his eyes are closed, and I’m sure I’ve just killed him. So I scream, ‘Daddy, wake up!’ And he opens his eyes and he says, very calmly, ‘I spent all morning putting that gutter on.’ Then he gets up, and we get in the car, and he drives one-armed to the emergency room. And the nurse at the desk looks him up and down and says, ‘What in the world happened to you?’ and he says, ‘My daughter got her period.’”
Everyone laughs.
“That’s such a perfect story,” Mom says, scribbling. “That’s so very Mort.”
“Victoria—that was the nurse’s name—took me to the bathroom and taught me how to put in a tampon while they set Dad’s arm, and I still see her face every time I use a tampon. She was a big old Jamaican woman with little black freckles like Morgan Freeman, and she said, ‘Just ease it in, child. Don’t you be scared. Bigger tings dan dis goin to go in dere. And come out.’ I had nightmares for weeks.”
“That was great. Can you tell another story about your period?”
“Shut up, Judd. Why don’t you tell your favorite memory now?”
“I’m still thinking.”
“I’ve got one,” Phillip says. “When I was in Little League, I had trouble catching. So they put me out in right field. And in the last inning, I dropped two balls that cost us the game. Our coach was this fat guy, I forgot his name. He got all crazy and started screaming at me. He called me worthless. So Dad stepped between us and I didn’t see what he did, but next thing I know, the coach is on the ground, and Dad is stepping on his chest. And he says, ‘Call my son worthless again.’”
“That’s fantastic,” Alice says, clapping. “I never heard that one.”
“This might sound twisted, but I hope, when I have a kid, that someone calls him a name, just so I can do for him what Dad did for me.”
“That’s beautiful, Phillip,” Mom says.
“Yes,” Tracy says. “But why not just hope that no one calls your child a name?”
Phillip looks at her. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“You know damn well what.”
“I was just saying that as long as you’re being theoretical, why not aim higher?”
“My dad stood up for me. I want to stand up for my kid.”
“And teach him that violence is a legitimate means of conflict resolution?”
“He’s going to have to learn it sometime.”
“A few well-chosen words might have shamed your coach into apologizing.”
“But if he had, I wouldn’t have had a story to remind me of how my father took care of me, and you wouldn’t have been able to suck all the joy out of it, and where would we all be then?”
Tracy blinks repeatedly, blushing as she gets to her feet. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I was being insensitive.”
“Apology accepted,” Phillip says without looking at her.
“I’m going to take a walk and return some calls.”
“You meant well, honey,” Linda says to her as she leaves.
Once she’s gone, Phillip looks around at us sheepishly. “She takes a little getting used to.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have dressed her down like that, in front of your family,” Linda says. “She’s still a guest here.”
“I thought you were completely justified,” Mom says.
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree then,” Linda says.
Mom casts a dark look at Linda before turning to me. “So, Judd, what do you have for me?”
What I have is nothing. I’ve been wracking my brain, but every memory I have of my father is tied up with everyone else. I know there must have been times when it was just the two of us, but I can’t remember any of them. I can only see him in the context of everyone else. Phillip’s story, in particular, made me think of riding home in Dad’s car after Paul’s games.
Paul was a standout pitcher, the only one of us with true ability, and driving home from his games, Dad would relive the highlights out loud, shaking his head in disbelief that one of his children was capable of anything other than disappointing him. Having a brother who was the school’s most acclaimed athlete was not without its perks. It may not have been enough to land me a girlfriend, but being Paul’s untalented runt of a brother was still better than being just another pimply underclassman with bad hair and an ass to kick. Still, I hated those car rides after the games, the Cadillac littered with samples and torn packaging, the next month’s sale signage shifting and grinding in the trunk like tectonic plates every time Dad braked, listening to him come out of his customary shell to praise Paul in a way he would never praise me. Wendy would sit directly behind Dad, lip-syncing to his soliloquy, trying to get me to laugh, while Phillip whined about always having to sit between us on the hump, and Mom looked out the window, humming along to the oldies station on the radio.
In his senior year, Paul was awarded a full baseball scholarship to UMass. Now, not only was he the talented son, he was also paying his own way. Paul was golden. He spent his summer celebrating with his buddies and having sex with a rotation of baseball groupies. It was a busy time for him, and on those rare occasions he was home, he was either passed out in his basement bedroom or hungover at the kitchen table, reading the sports pages and sipping at a black coffee.
Simmering with envy, I wondered what I could do to distinguish myself as anything other than a waste of space. Athletics were out—I played hockey in a local league, but there was no school team, and I wasn’t particularly gifted anyway. I briefly considered joining the debate team, but I knew my father wouldn’t see the point to a group of kids putting on striped red and blue ties to argue in public. As far as I could see, my best shot at gaining his approval was to get wounded while foiling an armed robbery at the 7-Eleven. Instead, I spent my summer in the 7-Eleven parking lot, smoking pot and wishing for something bad to happen to Paul.
And then something did.
Chapter 12
11:30 a.m.
M
r. Applebaum is all over Mom. He clasps her hand between his, he pats her arm, his fingers snaking around her wrist, his eyes darting back and forth across her chest like a tiny tennis match is being played across the line of her cleavage. He’s pulled his folding chair up close to her, and with Mom down in the shiva chair, he is perfectly positioned to ogle.
“I’ve been through this, Hillary,” he says. His dark, bushy eyebrows call to mind political cartoons as they arch compassionately under his wiry silver hair. “When I lost Adele, the community was very supportive. Mort was wonderful. You remember, he came over and fixed the air conditioner during my shiva? All those people in the house, and the air handler crapped out.”
“He knew machines,” Mom says.
“Look at that,” Wendy whispers. “He’s staring at her breasts, and her head is practically between his knees.”
“It’s just the angle,” I say. “These low chairs.”
“These chairs are a practical joke. And Mom should wear less revealing shirts.”
“She doesn’t own less revealing shirts.”
“I feel like I’m watching the opening scene of an AARP porno,” Phillip says.
Mr. Applebaum rubs Mom’s wrist. He’s the only visitor right now, and so he’s got her cornered. Not that she seems to mind the attention. “If you ever need to talk, Hill. Day or night. Just call, and I’ll be there.”
“I bet he will,” Wendy says.
“Just call my name,”
Phillip sings in a head voice.
“And I’ll be there.”
“Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that.”