Chapter 47
6:30 p.m.
P
hillip is up on the roof. Not on the wide area we sometimes sit on, but on the topmost gable above the attic, perched like a gargoyle. There’s a black Town Car parked in the driveway, its trunk open like a gaping mouth. A portly driver in a black suit leans against the car having a smoke. I jump out of my car and join Paul, Alice, Horry, and Wendy at the edge of the lawn. Serena, slung over Wendy’s shoulder, sucks happily on a pacifier. Tracy stands in the middle of the lawn, looking up at Phillip.
“Please get down!” she calls up to him. “You’ll kill yourself!”
“That’s the general idea,” Phillip shouts back. He stands up, one foot on either side of the gable, and spreads his arms out for balance. “Send the limo away.”
“What’s going on?” I say.
“Phillip proposed to Tracy,” Wendy says. “In front of us all.”
“And what did Tracy say?”
Wendy smirks at me. “Where have you been?”
“I went to see Jen.”
“Really? How’d that go?”
I look up at Phillip, trembling on the roof, arms spread like Christ. “Everything’s relative, I guess.”
“He’s taking it like a man,” Paul says.
“I swear to God, if you get in that car I’ll jump!”
Tracy turns to us. “You don’t think he’d really jump, do you?”
Wendy looks up at Phillip and shakes her head. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”
“I love you!” Phillip shouts.
“You’re being childish and manipulative!”
“Whatever works.”
Mom and Linda come running up from across the street. “What in the world is going on?” Linda says.
“Tracy’s not going to marry Phillip,” I say.
“Tracy’s not a fool,” Mom says. She steps out onto the lawn and faces Tracy. “There’s only one way to treat a tantrum and that is to ignore it.”
“Ignore it?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s not a four-year-old.”
“Honey, we’re all four-year-olds.”
Tracy appears conflicted. “What if he jumps?”
“Then I’ll have to rethink my thesis.”
Tracy looks at Mom for a long moment, her eyes growing wet. “You must think I’m such an idiot.”
Mom looks at her with great tenderness. “You’re no idiot. You’re not the first woman who wanted to believe in Phillip. But you’re far and away the best one, and I’m very sorry to see you go.” She steps forward and pulls Tracy into a warm hug.
“What’s going on?” Phillip shouts from above.
Tracy looks up to him. “I’m going to leave now.”
“Please don’t.”
Tracy turns to us and smiles. “Well, it was very nice to have met you all. I’m very sorry if my being here caused any problems.” She steps over to me and gives me a hug. “Let me know how it all turns out,” she whispers.
“Don’t go!” Phillip shouts.
But Tracy goes. She casts a last regretful look back up at Phillip and then climbs gracefully into the car. The driver tosses his cigarette to take her bag and slams the trunk. We watch the car drive slowly down Knob’s End and then turn back to the roof, where Phillip is now sitting dejectedly. “I can’t believe she really left,” he says.
“Will you come down now?” Mom says.
“I guess so.”
But when he stands up to pull his leg back over the gable, his pants catch on one of the snow guards. He loses his footing and slides down the side of the roof, scrambling in vain to grab on to the slate shingles. There is time for him to gasp, “Fuck me!” as he slides down the roof and then over the gutter. He is briefly airborne, arms flailing, before landing hard in the hedges that line the side of the house. We all run around the corner of the house to find him lying flat on his back atop a crushed bush, looking up at the sky like he’s stoned.
“Philly!” Mom shouts, falling to her knees in front of him. “Don’t try to move.”
“You ever notice how much closer the sky looks when you’re lying down?” he says.
“Can you move your legs?” Wendy says.
“If I feel like it.” He closes his eyes for a second. “That really hurt,” he says.
“I’m going to call 911,” Mom says.
He opens his eyes and looks at her. “Mom.”
“Yes, honey.”
“So what, you’re like, a lesbian now?”
7:30 p.m.
MOM WAS TAKING care of Dad around the clock. When the stairs became a problem, they had a hospital bed installed in the den. Mom would put him to sleep and then go upstairs to sleep alone in their bed. She was tired and bereft and so Linda started spending the nights with her. One night, more as a distraction than anything else, Linda confessed to Mom that she’d had numerous female lovers in the years since her husband had died. Mom had never kissed another woman, a fact of which she was instantly ashamed. What kind of celebrity shrink hasn’t experimented? She owed it to her readers. “We were both sad and lonely and sexually deprived, and within minutes we were making out like a couple of high school kids.”
No one really wants to hear the detailed story of how their mother became a lesbian, do they? That’s not bigotry. I never wanted to hear the details of her heterosexual sex life either. But Mom is ready to unload. She perches herself on one fat arm of the leather easy chair in the living room and tells us her story. Linda sits on the other arm, for purposes of symmetry. They have clearly imagined this moment before.
“It started out as something purely surreal and physical.” Mom speaks in her TV voice, like she’s narrating the documentary of her bisexual awakening. “But Linda and I have been so close for so long. It was only natural that a physical relationship would evolve into something more.”
“You make it all sound so perfectly normal,” Paul says.
“Well, yes. That’s how it felt, I suppose.”
“Except for the part where you were cheating on your dying husband.”
“Paul,” Alice says.
“No, it’s okay,” Mom says. “He knew.”
“Dad knew?” I say.
“Your father was a very enlightened man, sexually speaking.”
“Our father?” Phillip.
“Let me tell you a story about your father.”
“Please don’t.” Wendy.
Linda clears her throat. “Your father was always so good to Horry and me. He accepted us as family, he took care of our finances. When Horry was injured, and I was paying for all of his care, your father made our mortgage payments for a full year, so we wouldn’t lose the house. I would never have betrayed him. Hillary was the love of his life, and he died knowing she wouldn’t be alone. He told me that many times toward the end.”
“So Dad was cool with it,” Phillip says.
“He said he’d always sensed something there,” Mom says.
“So why didn’t you tell us?” I say. “You’ve always been so open about your sex life.”
“I didn’t want to complicate your grief. Mort was a generous and loving husband. He was a good father to all of you. He deserved to be mourned without any distractions.”
Something occurs to me. “It wasn’t Dad who wanted us to sit shiva, was it?”
Mom blushes and looks down at her lap. “Smart boy.”
There are exclamations and groans of dismay from my siblings.
“Oh, come on!” Mom says. “You knew how your father felt about religion. Or, rather, didn’t feel. I’m just surprised you all went along with it for so long.”
“We thought it was his dying request!” Paul says. “Jesus Christ, Mom! What were you thinking?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the four of you to stay in the same place for more than a few hours? My husband, your father, had died. I needed you. And you needed each other, even if you still don’t know it.”
“Boner lied for you,” I say.
Mom shrugs. “Charlie knows where his bread is buttered.”
“Tracy wouldn’t have dumped me if we hadn’t come here,” Phillip says, shaking his head.
“You’re welcome, honey.”
“You ruined my life.”
“Oh, Phillip,” Mom says fondly. “I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it’s time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.”
“You see? Right there. Please don’t talk about my penis. It’s out of your jurisdiction. Mothers do not sit around talking about their grown sons’ penises.”
“So grow up and I’ll stop.”
“You lied to us,” Wendy says softly.
“Yes. I did.”
“But you never lie to us. That’s your thing.”
“I never made love to a woman either,” Mom says proudly. “People can change. Not often, and not often for the better, but it does happen.” Mom, it should be pointed out, is loving this. Her children are shocked and mortified and hanging on her every word. There’s our childhood in a nutshell. It’s like we never left.
Phillip rolls off the couch, wincing in pain as he does, and stands up. “Okay. I forgive you for your lying and your treachery.” He walks over to Mom and Linda and pulls them into a group hug. “I’m happy for you guys.” Then he collapses onto the chair between them. “Anyone have any codeine? I think I’m bleeding internally.”
Chapter 48
8:15 p.m.
M
om and Linda are over at Linda’s house celebrating their official coming out. Paul and Alice are in my old bedroom behind closed doors, procreating under my poster of The Cure. Good luck and Godspeed. I give Cole and Ryan baths while Wendy puts Serena to bed. This entails standing outside her bedroom door and listening to her wail. I towel off Ryan while Cole splashes around in the tub, playing wildly with rubber dolphins that squirt water when you squeeze them. “Dawphins,” he says.
“Don’t be an ass, Cole,” Ryan says.
“Hey!”
“It means ‘donkey,’” Ryan says, giggling.
“Stop being a wise-donkey,” I say.
He gives the matter some thought. “You’re a donkey-hole,” he says.
“You watch your mouth or I’ll kick your donkey.”
It takes him a second and then he laughs so hard I can see his ribs vibrating in his torso.
“Kick your donkey,” Cole repeats in the tub. He raises the dolphins up above his head and brings them crashing down into the water, splashing us. “Fucker!”
“Cole!” Wendy hisses from the doorway. She offers me a pained smile. “We’re working on that,” she says to me.
“It sounds like he’s got the hang of it.”
“Fucker dawphin!” Cole says happily.
I am going to be a father,
I think to myself.
8:45 p.m.
“IT FEELS LIKE the last day of camp,” Wendy says. She is sitting on the edge of Cole’s bed and I am sitting on the edge of Ryan’s in what used to be Wendy’s bedroom. “Tomorrow we all go our separate ways.”
“You going to be okay on the plane alone with these three?” I say. Deflect emotions with logistics. It’s what we do. Dad lives on in all of us. Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they’re never really gone. My siblings and I will always struggle trying to confront an honest emotion. We’ll succeed, to varying degrees, with outsiders, but fail consistently, sometimes spectacularly, with each other. The hardwiring simply runs too deep, like behind the walls of this house; circuit breakers on hair triggers.
“I’ll be fine.”
“And what about Barry?”
“What about him?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Wendy sighs and looks down at her sleeping boy, her face a complex amalgam of love and pain and fear. I don’t know that feeling yet, but I will soon enough.
“I have a very nice life, with a good man,” Wendy says. “I love him for who he is. Sometimes who he is isn’t enough for me, but most of the time, it is. There are women who would leave to find something better. I envy them, but I also know I’m not one of them. And how many of those women truly end up with a better man?” She shrugs. “No studies have been done.”
“And Horry?”
“There is no Horry. Horry is a fantasy. And that’s all I am to him. Time travel. We slept together as a favor to the kids we once were, not because there’s really anything there besides history and some completely useless love.”
She gets off the bed and onto her knees to kiss the forehead of each sleeping boy. Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing herself into each romance with the focus of an Olympic athlete. Now she’s a mother and a wife, who tries to get her screaming baby to sleep through the night, tries to stop her boys from learning curse words, and calls romantic love useless. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.
8:55 p.m.
I COME DOWN the basement stairs to find Phillip sitting on my bed, holding my duffel bag full of cash. “This is a lot of money,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Can I have some?”
“Define ‘some.’”
Phillip thinks about it for a moment. “A grand?”
“Are you going to gamble it?”
“No.”
“Are you going to buy drugs?”
“Jesus, Judd.” He tosses the bag onto the floor and heads for the stairs. “Forget I asked.”
“Phillip.”
He turns around. “I have nothing, Judd. No home, no job, nothing. I’ve been waiting tables and sponging off Tracy for the last year. I’m just looking for a fresh start here. The plan was to work with Paul, but he’s being a real dick about it.”
“Well, maybe you have to work for him for a while, before you work with him.”
He thinks about it for a moment and then hoists himself up to sit on the Ping-Pong table. “I could probably be persuaded to do that.”