The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (24 page)

“How d’you like being a teacher?”

Whenever he’d asked me this in the past, I’d always said “Fine” and added some sort of disclaimer about the pain-in-the-ass principal or pain-in-the-ass parents—this to make him feel better about lacking any professional status himself. Now I said something about the pain-in-the-ass kids, how thirteen is a difficult age and so on.

“Thirteen,” Scott said huskily. He gave me a little push. “Hey Zwieb, you ever fuck one of your students?”

“No,” I said.

“Man.” He shook his head and sipped his beer. “Thirteen.”

I excused myself and proceeded to the back room. Shut the door. Sat in the gathering dusk. After a while I turned on a lamp and realized I’d forgotten to grab more photo albums; since their retrieval would mean leaving the room and possibly bumping into Scott again, I picked up a book from the lamp table and tried to read. By now Scott and my mother were having a loud discussion in the living room; I could hear bits and pieces if I listened. Most of what Scott said, as ever when he was drunk or getting that way, was liberally sprinkled with the word “fuck” in various forms.

“Fuck that,” I heard him say. “If you fucking
think
I’m getting a job, then you don’t fucking know the first thing about me!”

He didn’t sound particularly aggressive. Rather he seemed amused by the fact that, after all these years, our mother still didn’t understand him.

“But what will you do?”

“I’ve always gotten by, you don’t have to fucking
worry
about it.”

“But I’m curious, Scott. You can’t stay here forever.”

“I don’t need your . . .”

What I mostly noticed was the pains our mother took not to provoke him: she kept him going with ingenuous little questions and sometimes laughed at his answers, careful to make it clear she was laughing with rather than at him. After all these years she was finally afraid of him; also, I think, she wanted to keep him engaged so he wouldn’t bother
me
. She wanted me to enjoy my visit.

But after a while it petered out—his chair gave a loud creak as he lurched to his feet and my mother sighed “Not another beer, Scott,
please
”—and sure enough he paid me a visit. He stood in the corner of the room wearing briefs and an olive-drab T-shirt.

“. . . and I just want to grab that fucker by the scruff of his neck” (he was talking about a celebrated wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys who’d recently had a number of setbacks related to an incorrigible cocaine habit), “and say ‘Listen, you stupid nigger: Stop acting like a fucking
six
-year-old and get off your pathetic lazy ass and get your shit together’ . . .”

This from a guy who’d taken more than his share of drugs and only minutes before had laughed at the idea of ever getting a job. In the past I would have assayed some witticism or pointed remark—“I can think of any
number
of people who’d benefit from such advice”—but this time I hesitated, too bemused or perhaps intimidated to speak. I wondered if my brother picked up on the irony and was daring me to be a smartass about it. But I don’t think so. I don’t think any irony occurred to him. Anyway, he broadened his attack to include black people in general.

“Face it, Zwieb, niggers are despicable. It’s all about who’s the biggest
pimp
and who’s fucked the most
bitches
and, you know,
killed
the most people.”

I was sorry to hear Scott say this. One of his most endearing traits had always been a steadfast sympathy for black people and anyone else who was treated unfairly by the world. His hero (with John Lennon) had been Muhammad Ali at a time when I myself thought the man was a cocky bastard who needed to get his head knocked off. Granted I was a child, but Scott was only a little older and his friends felt the same way I did.

I said that it was more a question of class than race. I pointed out that my own black students were mostly middle-class and pretty much indistinguishable from their white counterparts, which wasn’t strictly true but I thought it best not to get bogged down in nuance.

“I mean racism is pretty cretinous, Scott. I hope it’s just a passing phase.”

He stood swaying a bit in his underwear, thinking it over, and I glanced wistfully at my book. Finally he gulped the dregs of his beer and daintily smacked his lips as though he were drinking it just for the taste, then squeezed my shoulder a bit too hard and left the room.

THE NEXT MORNING
he was full of beans. I’d slept on the couch in the living room—the spare bedroom was taken by Scott and his things—and I awoke to the huff and thump of jumping jacks. It was very cold outside, and Scott wore a stocking cap but no shirt. He was in good shape, remarkably so for a drunk, but then he’d always had better muscle tone than I.

“Sorry, Zwieb,” he said, “but I couldn’t wait any longer. Gotta get some PT in.”

“By all means.”

He counted fifty, flourished a hand, and trotted out the door. I smelled coffee and found my mother in the kitchen feeding her cats—or rather opening cans and mixing wet food with dry, though no cats appeared. In the past they’d always swarmed purring around her legs, all seven or eight of them (with more outside), rushing into the kitchen at the first click of the can opener.

“Where are they?” I asked. “Where’s Sam and Sophie and—”

I realized I hadn’t seen a single cat since I’d arrived. But here was my mother feeding them.

She shook her head. “They’re hiding. They won’t come out until Scott’s been gone a while. I think he
did
something to them.” She gave a gusty sigh.

“Poor sweetie.”

“At first I had to make excuses to get him out of the house so they’d eat. ‘Scott, have you weeded the garden yet?’ Something like that. But then he got so goddamn
lazy
I couldn’t ask him to do anything, so I just said ‘Scott, get outta here! The cats need to eat!’ ” Marlies’s cats were the love of her life. Her frown trembled with a tough look; she was trying not to cry. “And he said ‘Let ’em eat, then.’ And I said ‘Don’t gimme that, buster. You know they won’t eat around you.’ And he gives me this innocent look: ‘Why not?’ ‘Because,’ I said”—she leveled a spatula at my face as if I were Scott—“ ‘they
hate
you!’” She nodded with satisfaction. “Son of a bitch.”

After the cats were fed, or rather the food was laid out, my mother cooked breakfast and we took our plates into the living room. On the table I noticed the Modern Library edition of
A Fan’s Notes
that I’d sent Scott for his birthday the year before last. I’d inscribed the flyleaf as follows: “There’s a little Exley in all of us (though more in some than others). Happy 37th! Love, Z.” I asked my mother if she wanted me to read to her, and she nodded at the ceiling. She was lying on the couch with a plate propped on her belly. A cat appeared out of nowhere and began lapping up her egg yolk; my mother did nothing to stop him. She stroked the cat gratefully and shut her eyes. The cat moved on to her sausage. Other cats had begun swishing furtively into the kitchen. I was reading to my mother when suddenly the cats scattered and the screen door whacked shut: Scott. He stood at the head of the couch and placed a cold hand on my mother’s cheek. She looked too tired to recoil. He gestured for me to keep reading and listened with a little smile, tracing a finger over his muscular chest. I read another page or so from the first chapter, all about the events leading up to the narrator’s latest alcoholic collapse. My brother laughed wheezily. Exley had just taken an oblivious piss in the middle of the street when my mother announced: “Stop. I don’t like this man.” She took our plates to the kitchen and began washing up.

“That’s great, Zwieb,” Scott remarked. “I mean it’s not only entertaining but the guy has a real ear for language. Every sentence is kind of”—he paused for the right word—“lapidary.”

I nodded. “But you’ve already read it, right? At least this chapter?”

He shook his head with a little moonbeam smile.

“But I don’t get it, Scott. This is practically the story of your life! And if you agree it’s entertaining and well-written—‘lapidary,’ no less—then why the hell don’t you read it?” I laughed. “I mean why not? Seriously.”

But he only shrugged, smiling, and left to take a shower. The point was this: he knew a well-turned phrase when he heard it, his critical-aesthetic faculties were intact more or less, but his book-reading days were over. It would no more occur to him to read a book—literature anyway: a nonutile work of fiction—than it would to get a job, and that was simply that.

MY MOTHER AND
I spent the second day of my visit running errands. Over breakfast Scott had babbled on about his lawsuit (he expected that damages would run in the millions), and now he asked to come along, but my mother put her foot down.

“I want to spend time with your
brother
,” she snapped.
“Alone.”

Scott narrowed his eyes at the TV and forced a little smirk. When sober he picked his battles, and for her part my mother became her old bullying self, venting the bitterness she’d bottled up while he was drunk and abusive. This, in turn, made Scott all the more abusive once he was drunk again. It was easy to see where things were heading.

“So when’s he moving out?” I asked in the car.

My mother, who’d just started to relax a little, got an almost frantic look.
“I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk about it! It’s Christmas! Can’t we just be pleasant for an hour or so!”

I found a radio station playing Muzak carols and we stopped talking.

I often think my mother is happiest when she’s grocery shopping, and the half hour or so we spent trawling the aisles at Albertson’s was pretty much the high point of our holiday. My mother likes to kvetch at the butchers, whom she knows by name: “Paul! Where’re those lamb kidneys you were going to save me!” Or: “You call that a hock? I want a
big
one!” And Paul (or whoever) would smile in a silly-me sort of way and fetch what she’d asked for. I imagine if I ever addressed a butcher like that he’d sink a cleaver in my head, but it was okay in her case. She was the eccentric German lady, a little spot of color in their workaday lives.

“What shall we have?” she asked me, rhetorically, rubbing her palms as she surveyed the meat bins. “A lovely duck?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Pick one.”

I picked a duck. My mother batted it out of my hands.

“
No-oo!
You call that a duck?” She grabbed a proper duck and dragged the cart along. Whenever we shopped I’d make a show of pushing the cart while my mother bustled in front yanking it this way and that; if I let go, she’d snap, “Push the cart! Do I have to do
everything
?”

“What about herring?” she asked. “You want some herring?”

“Herring?”

She put a jar of pickled herring in the cart. “For herring salad, dummy.”

“Right.”

I was happy to play the dummy, the doormat, happy to see my mother enjoying herself.

Next we went to Barnes & Noble to finish our Christmas shopping; it was cold enough to leave the groceries out in the car. I bought Scott a couple of videos: some sort of rockumentary and
Annie Hall
, the high points of which he’d once recited at the dinner table twenty years before (while implying how stoned he’d been during the movie, the better for us to admire his talent for retention). As a stocking stuffer I also picked up a little one-dollar Penguin minipaperback of Chekhov’s long story “The Black Monk.” Scott wouldn’t read it, of course, but I looked forward to letting him know it was about a young lunatic whose only reasons for living are his delusions of grandeur: “His ‘black monk’ is a bit like your ‘lawsuit,’ ” I’d explain, since I still thought the key to my brother’s better self was his sense of humor.

It was late afternoon by the time we got back, and I was surprised to find Scott only a little sodden. His face was oily with the few beers he’d drunk, but he still smelled of soap and his eyes were clear. I was about to commend him for his restraint when he waved me into his room.

“Zwieb,” he said in a stage whisper. “There’s no liquor in the house.”

“Well,” I said, “but that’s part of the deal. You’re not supposed to have liquor, right?”

My poor mother, I thought. In order to reform a lunatic she’d sacrificed one of the great comforts of her life (and mine), the nightly cocktails. Another comfort was her cats. That left gardening, grocery shopping, and cooking.

“It’s her house,” I added.

He socked me playfully in the arm. “C’mon, Zwieb! It’s Christmas! Don’t you want a cocktail?”

What it amounted to was this: he was driving to the liquor store one way or the other, and it would look better if he did so at least partly on my behalf. Two against one. I told him he was captain of his soul, a middle-aged man with a car, and if he wanted to go to the liquor store I couldn’t stop him. As for our mother, what could she do?

“Fuck right!”

He wasn’t whispering anymore, provoked by my “middle-aged man with a car” crack. A minute later he whacked out the door, tripping a bit on the ice when my mother called,
“Scott, where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.

“He’s off to the liquor store,” I said, and she sagged against the wall. Such was her despair that she didn’t bother to berate me for failing to talk him out of it.

AS IT HAPPENED
Marlies had some brandy stashed away, and as soon as Scott’s car had sizzled into the distance she asked me to retrieve the bottle. She stayed put in the kitchen. Once the drinks were poured she staggered to the breakfast bar and we stood slumped on either side, talking and drinking. I told her the situation was bad, worse than I’d expected, and she agreed with a heavy nod. She wanted to be rid of him but didn’t quite know how to go about it. She admitted she was a little frightened of him, which meant she was terrified. He seemed capable of anything. She told me other things he’d said and done in the two months he’d been there, none so bad as kneeing her in the groin (she showed me part of a hideous bruise on her inner thigh) but ominous in terms of their escalating audacity.