About My Sisters (21 page)

My sisters and I all worked for many years as waitresses. Déja, in fact, is still working in a restaurant—the last waitress among us. We've had varying success in this sector of the service industry. If I had to qualify, I'd say that Maya was the most competent (and certainly the friendliest) waitress among us, even though I hold the record for the greatest number of years logged at the table. Lavander was never the world's greatest waitress (and she'll be the first to admit this), although she managed to work in several different restaurants over the course of her brief, checkered career. My brother, however, could never tolerate any aspect of the business. After a short and painful stint as a busboy, he swore off the restaurant business forever. He opted, rather, for another area of the service industry—one that none of us would ever have contemplated—the hotel business. He was the night auditor in a series of midscale hotels and even tried a couple of seedy motels. The weird hours and even weirder clientele suited him perfectly. Soon, he was calling regularly with tales from the dark side, each more twisted and darkly funny than the one before.

“This dude calls me from his room,” Bo related one night. “Wants me to send up
two
bottles of Dom Perignon. Tells me ‘I'm having a big night up here, dude, I need some alcohol.' So
I tell him, ‘Sorry, dude, we don't stock Dom and the bar's closed. I don't know what to tell you, but there's a lovely ice machine on seven.' I mean, I think maybe he thought he was in Vegas or something. So he calls down a little later, says, ‘Dude, I've got a couple of ladies coming up here. Make sure you tell them where to go. They've got the room number, but make sure you tell them where it is, okay? There's
two
of them, okay?' Like he's really trying to impress me. He's such a player, right? So I say, “Yeah, dude, whatever.' Then he keeps calling, says he got hold of some booze, wants to know if I can score him some coke. I mean,
come on
. The chicks must have snuck in the back way, if they came at all. And they're almost certainly hookers anyway. He calls me again, says, ‘I'm chilling the Champagne right now.' I tell him, ‘Have a great time,' and I think that's it, right? Wrong. He calls down again, says, ‘Dude, I'm in the
hot tub
with two beautiful naked women. I'm getting it on with two women.' And I can't stand it anymore. I wanted to tell him, ‘Dude, you are such a
loser
. You're up there with two women, why the hell do you keep calling me—the night auditor?' Then he says, ‘Hey, dude, you want in on this?' And I tell him, ‘Yeah, you know that would be great, but I really can't leave the desk, you know?' He says, ‘You don't know what you're missing.' I was afraid that he was going to call again and ask me for help. Guess he finally got it together. What a loser.”

A week or so later, there was this:

“Guy calls me at the desk, says there's a strange buzzing sound in his room and thinks maybe it's the TV, can I come fix it? I asked him if the TV was coming in okay and he said it was, so I said, ‘Well, it's probably not the TV then, is it?' So he says he can't hear it right now, he'll call again if it comes back. Sure enough, ring, ring, and it's him again. The buzzing sound is back and he can't stand it, it's really driving him crazy. I've got to come up and see to it. I tell him I'm not really a repairman, but
he doesn't care, wants me up there. So I go up, check out the TV, the bathroom, the lamps, everything's fine, right? I don't hear anything. He says it's been going on and on, just stopped the minute I walked in. Okay, sure. I go back downstairs and, again, there he is. I tell him I can move him to a different room and he wants to know can't I just fix it? Can't I just get rid of this buzzing noise that's driving him crazy? I'm starting to think that the buzzing noise is in his head, but I ask him again if he wants to move to another room. Okay, he says, can I come up and help him move? Up I go again and move him into another room. We get him settled and then I hear the noise. ‘See? See?' he shouts. ‘There it is! The whole place has that noise. I demand a refund.' I look over at the table next to the bed and see it. ‘Sir,' I tell him, ‘it's your
pager
. It's vibrating on the table.' He looks over at the pager, picks it up, says, ‘Hmm, looks like I missed a couple of calls. Okay, you can go now.' Not ‘Thank you' or ‘I'm such an idiot.' ‘You can go now.' Thanks, buddy.”

Almost every week there was a story about how various clients tried to get him to arrange hookers to be sent to their rooms and how annoyed they were when he wouldn't comply. Of course, he did nothing to stop the hookers once they found their way into the hotel and turned a (somewhat) blind eye when they disappeared into the elevator and reappeared an hour or two later, sometimes dropping business cards off with him on their way out, asking him to call cabs for them, and promising large “tips” if he would consider calling them the next time a client wanted some company. “I worry about them,” he said more than once. “I want to make sure they get home safely.”

“Don't you worry that something will happen to them up there in those rooms?” I asked him. “It's not exactly safe, you know. It could be on your head.”

“What am I going to do?” he said. “Everyone's got to make a living, right? They know what they're doing.”

“They may know what they're doing, but they don't always know what they're getting into,” I told him.

“I keep an eye out,” he said. “They know that when they come in. They kind of smile and nod at me. I've got their backs. I'm very popular with the ladies, don't worry.”

I was sure that he was.

Although he was offered changes in shift and upgrades in position, Bo chose to remain on the night shift, watching the dark eddies of human behavior ebb and flow around his desk. Although the argument could be made that he chose graveyard because it entailed a great deal less actual work (how many people check in at three in the morning?), there was more to it than that. Bo found it comfortable down there in the middle of the night in his personal little heart of darkness. He also found it very entertaining. Until the night he checked in a suicide.

He was called in to work early the next day to answer questions about the man whom the maid had found hanging in the bathroom earlier in the day.

“The guy seemed perfectly normal,” he told us later. “He was friendly. He didn't even check in very late. Just an average guy. Why would a guy do that? Why would you go to a hotel to kill yourself?”

“Maybe he didn't want anyone in his family to find him,” Maya said. “He was trying to be considerate.”

“Somebody found him,” Bo said. “And it doesn't matter that it's not a family member. I checked him in. And now he's dead. They had to call his family. He's got a daughter or something.”

“It's not your fault, you know. All you did was check him in,” I told him. “You couldn't have known what he was going to do.”

“It was my shift,” Bo said. “I was sitting there at the desk and the guy was upstairs killing himself. I'm going to have that in my mind forever.”

Bo never really got over the suicide. There was dark and then there was sheer blackness. That night signaled the beginning of
the end of his illustrious hotel career. It was also the end of his love affair with the late shift. It was a pity only in that we no longer got the stories he so elegantly told. My brother is nothing if not an excellent storyteller. Just don't try to solicit information from him. And certainly don't ask him what his motivations are. Like this brunch, for example. I'm still not sure why he's doing it, but I'm sure there's a reason apart from what he told me in the supermarket. And that's what he wants me to think, I'm sure. My brother is a person, after all, who seldom calls my house as himself. He's always adopting one persona or another, making himself sound like a telemarketer, an old friend we've forgotten about, or a bill collector. A talented mimic, he waits until he's really got us going and then announces himself to a chorus of, “Omigod! I can't believe you did that
again
! Can't you just call like a normal person?” There's never an answer to this question, just hysterical laughing on the other end of the phone.

 

When Maya, Blaze, and I arrive for the birthday brunch, we find we are the last to get there. It takes me a minute to realize that this is because the people who usually arrive the latest live here and are therefore de facto on time. There is a pile of birthday presents on the kitchen counter and Lavander sits next to them on a bar stool. We wish Lavander a happy birthday and place our gifts on the pile. Déja and Danny are milling about the living room and my parents are already sitting at the table in front of a bowl of apples and bananas. The artful fruit bowl is one of the things that each one of my mother's children have inherited from her. There was always an inviting one in the house when we were growing up. For my mother, there was nothing sadder than an empty fruit bowl. Now, no matter where we have lived as adults, each one of us has always had a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table or somewhere near by. The fruits in the bowl vary,
of course, according to which one of my siblings is involved, but there is fruit nonetheless. Lavander sometimes opts for wax fruit. Déja is partial to oranges and apples. I like to have at least one mango hanging around. So it goes.

Bo is standing in the kitchen, frying potatoes and slicing bagels. There is the usual low roar of voices that accompanies all of our family gatherings, but he isn't speaking, just performing his culinary duties with a small, enigmatic smile on his face as if he's the only one in on a joke.

“Would you like some coffee?” he says brightly, waving the pot at me when I walk into the kitchen.

“Nice spread,” Maya says, looking around at the pastries, bagels, and fruit juices.

“Yes,” Bo says, “isn't it? Jealous?”

“I know you think I'm envious of your masterful abilities here,” Maya says, “but you couldn't be more wrong. I'm perfectly happy to have you make
every
meal here, you know. I don't have a problem with that at all.”

“Uh-huh,” Bo says. “We'll just see about that.”

“Whatever,” Maya says.

We gather around the table (there are even fewer chairs here than in our house and some of us have to perch on barstools next to the counter, while others sort of hang around the fringes, grabbing a seat if someone vacates it to refill the coffee or something similar) and begin eating. Bo runs back and forth from the kitchen, serving and grinning.

“This is divine,” my mother says. “Who knew he was such a good cook?”

“Bo, is there any particular way you'd like us to eat this?” my father says and, although everybody else seems to miss his implication, it really makes me laugh. Even though Maya hasn't made this meal, my father's still found a way to tease her about it.

“What do you mean?” Bo says.

“Debra knows what I mean,” my father says, nodding at me.

“Oh, I see,” Maya says. “Is that supposed to be some sort of jab at me? Because I don't like it when people take all the cheese off the top of the macaroni or eat all the crust from the pot pie? Is that it?”

“Come on, it's funny,” my father says.

“I'm not cooking for you people anymore,” Maya says. “You don't appreciate it.”

As if to punctuate the conversation further, the smoke alarm starts squealing. Since it's directly over the table, we all cover our ears and turn in the direction of the sound.

“Goddamn it!” Bo says. Danny runs over to the alarm with a T-shirt and starts waving it at the alarm, which continues to shriek.

“Piece of shit!” Bo exclaims.

“What's the problem?” my mother asks. “I don't even smell any smoke. Is something burning?”

“It goes off when you've got something in the oven,” Déja says. “It's very sensitive.”

“That could be a problem,” Maya says.

“Happens all the time,” Bo says as Danny continues to fan. “You can hear people's alarms going off all the time and you can't even rip the damn thing out of the wall. I can't stand this place. It's a ghetto.”

“Sure, a ghetto,” Déja pipes in. “What are you talking about? I'm sick of you always trashing this place.”

To be sure, this apartment complex is anything but a ghetto. Like so many of the new developments around here, it sprang up practically overnight, complete with swimming pools, hot tubs, weight rooms, and spaces to host events. The colors are predominantly variations on beige and the shape is square so everything is relentlessly uniform. It's heavy on amenities, very light on character, but character isn't what the denizens, mostly
young, unmarried, childless professionals, are looking for. Déja, Danny, and Bo got in here when the paint on the walls was barely dry and management was offering big breaks on the rent as move-in incentives, so it's not a bad deal for the three of them, seeing as how each one of them was having tremendous difficulty finding a place to live before they moved in here.

Lavander, Bo, and Déja have spent the last few years revolving through my parents' house on their way in and out of various other places. They've all moved in and out several times. Lavander and Bo attempted to live together at one point, which was short-lived but disastrous. It turned out to be the kind of situation one often sees in those TV courtrooms where family members sue each other over unreturned cable boxes and unpaid phone bills.

Bo spent a couple of years staying with his girlfriend, but when they broke up, he was unable to find an apartment he could afford by himself. He went through a series of potential roommates—friends and friends of friends—each one less responsible than the one before. One disappeared the day he and Bo were scheduled to move into an apartment they'd found. One flashed lots of cash and offered to pay the lion's share of the rent. Bo thought he'd found a sweet deal until he found out that the source of his new roommate's wealth was his lucrative marijuana crop, which he planned to continue growing in the new house. Another showed up to an interview with a potential landlady covered in cat hair and told her about how he was planning to break his previous lease. Bo was forced back into my parents' spare room.