The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (3 page)

One night my brother was babysitting at one of our neighbors’ houses (some residual legend of responsibility clung to him), and I was home alone. I was ten years old, and I guess my parents thought I could handle the odd evening by myself. They were mistaken. A sudden sense of rural isolation had spooked me. In tears, I called my brother and begged him to come home right away. Somehow or other he managed it—he got our neighbors on the phone at some dinner party and made up a bogus emergency so he could leave early—and when he came in the door I threw myself at him, kissing him on the lips. For a few minutes we loved each other better than anyone.

Our happy reunion didn’t last. Ever since we’d come back from Germany the year before, I’d been fanatically attached to seven cartoon figures called Mainzelmännchen—little men from Mainz, whose fifteen-second antics were interspersed with commercials on German television. I had little rubber Mainzelmännchen that I played with constantly, most memorably in the rain, when the irrigated pasture on the property behind our house became an enchanted city of canals. For a while my brother was interested too, but less so over time—he was thirteen, after all. Unfortunately, the night he came home early from his babysitting job to comfort me was also the night he let me know once and for all that he didn’t want to play with the Mainzelmännchen anymore, that he was
sick
of the Mainzelmännchen.

In deadpan earnest I told him I hated him. For a moment he looked stunned; then he began to cry. “You were so happy to see me,” he sobbed, “and now you s-say you
hate
me . . .” It was a fascinating business—my brother crying over a trifle, so it seemed to me—and I didn’t want it to end. So I told him, too, what our father had said while we were playing chess: “He says you’re mean to me because you’re jealous. Because I’m smarter than you and can do things like play chess and play the piano.”

Rather abruptly Scott stopped crying; he nodded slightly, once, twice, as if this were something he’d suspected all along and now saw clearly, the way a person finally accepts the irrefutable fact of cancer. Without a word he went to his room and shut the door.

After an hour or so, a guilty panic got the better of me and I looked in on him. He was lying on the floor in that sleeping bag he used so he wouldn’t muss the bed. In the dark I saw the glimmer of his staring eyes. “He didn’t really say that,” I ventured, but Scott didn’t bother to dignify this with a response.

AFTER THAT NIGHT
my brother made less of an effort to cultivate my parents’ favor. He was particularly defiant toward Marlies, who was going through a Madame Bovary phase and seemed annoyed by the finer points of motherhood. Life in the country had been nice for the first year or so, but the rest of us didn’t share her enthusiasms and she became bored and a little bitter. She took to spending long hours at the Old Dodge, a mall bar in Edmond, and was often tipsy when she came home to make dinner. At the best of times she was quick to slap or yell at us; volatile by nature, she’d been brought up in a German household so strict she’d put an ocean between it and herself. One night Scott made a typically snide remark at the dinner table, and just as typically my mother slapped him. I doubt Burck and I even looked up from our plates. But then my brother began shouting: “Don’t you hit me! This is my house too and I can say whatever I want!” So my mother hit him again.

Suddenly they were both on their feet, scuffling along the kitchen floor. Marlies was still bigger than Scott and had the better of it, but he refused to give in. “You shut your mouth!” she yelled, her thorny gardener’s hands flapping at his face, which was flushed with unrepentant rage. “I’m
not
going to shut up! I can say what I want! Don’t you hit me anymore!” She pummeled him out of the kitchen and their voices trailed off down the hall, down the stairs, punctuated at last by a banging door. “And you
stay
in there, buster!” my mother bellowed. My father and I sat there looking at each other.

NOW IN HER
midthirties, Marlies began taking classes at the University of Oklahoma in nearby Norman. She’d yet to get a college-equivalent degree, and anyway it was something to do. Not only was she an excellent student (she got straight A’s on her way to an eventual master’s in anthropology), but something of a party girl too. Enamored of all things Arabian, she mostly hung out with Arabic exchange students, who embraced the Afros, bell-bottoms, and chest-hair jewelry of seventies America. Two young men I remember in particular, Khalid and Muhammad, as well as their older friend, Walid, who was roughly my mother’s age. When I came home from school in the afternoon, I’d find them all lounging around our living room with my mother and a few of her girlfriends—Penny and Lenore and Phyllis, the last of whom fancied herself a belly dancer and torch singer. A pall of cigarette smoke hung near the ceiling while the ice tinkled in big glasses of Scotch. “Heyyy!” Walid would greet me with a drunken growl, and Khalid would give me a dopey grin; Muhammad, the moody one, would look away. It all seemed harmless enough. Sometimes my mother would ask me to play piano, and Phyllis would sing along with a lot of harrowing coloratura:
“Chlo-eeee! Chlo-eeee!”

My father was a good sport about things and at one point agreed to throw a big catered party for the whole Arabic cultural exchange program. In one of the photographs from this occasion my father is wearing a keffiyeh and smiling gamely; my mother is decked out in a kaftan, her sleeves drooping as she hugs my father around the neck. Probably I was in bed by then—anyway, I don’t remember the keffiyeh. What I do remember is the small gathering at dusk as the caterer was setting up. My father was still at his office in Oklahoma City. I’d snuck out of my room to lurk around the swimming pool, and I watched, undetected, as my mother took Muhammad by the hand and led him off behind the propane tank, where their silhouettes came together kissing in the twilight. Then, a bit later, I followed my brother and his friend Warren at a stealthy distance as they left our house along the gravel driveway. By then I was dreading the worst. Standing behind one of the brick pillars at our entrance gate, I peered into the dark and saw Scott and Warren pause around a flaring match, then walk away with two embers swinging at their sides.

My father came home around eight or so—his usual time—and asked me to keep him company while he changed for the party. Off the master bedroom was a balcony overlooking the pool, and we could hear Marlies’s friends hooting and splashing around below. “What’s wrong, son?” he asked, pausing in his underwear to look at me. I was crying. I couldn’t help it. Probably I shrugged and bit my lip, shaking my head, but my father persisted.

“I saw Scott and Warren,” I said finally, “
smoking
.”

He nodded with a grave, thin-lipped look. Like most little brothers I had a tendency to tattle, but this was nothing like that, and my father knew it. Nor did he find my grief melodramatic, as it certainly seems in retrospect—devoid, that is, of the weird subjective dread I think we both felt at the time.

“Have you told your mother?” he asked.

I shook my head.

A bit later that night, at my father’s behest, my mother met me in the garage (why the garage, I wonder). She seemed put out; I had taken her away from the party.

“What is it?” she asked.

I told her.

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” She gave me a look of elaborate disgust, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes. “He’s fourteen years old! Kids that age take a little
puff
now and then!” Unwilling to waste another second on me, she left the garage with a whirl of her silken hem, barking “Go to bed!” over her shoulder. I thought I’d get even by telling my father about her little monkey business with Muhammad, but I never did.

DURING HIS MIDTEEN
years Scott didn’t worry so much about his status in the family because he didn’t have to—he had plenty of distractions. He was more handsome than ever: his face was clear, his hair was still golden blond in the summer, he’d grown a few inches and had better muscle tone than I ever would. I look at photographs of us together, shirtless around the pool, and it’s just pathetic. No wonder he didn’t mind when I was elected president of the seventh grade. Now that I was in junior high, we attended classes in the same building of a small rural public school, and the day of my election it promptly got back to me (as intended) that Scott had sneered at one of my classmates, “You people
must
be desperate.”

A lot of the older kids hated me because of Scott. Big scary hicks with baseball caps advertising chewing tobacco or cattle feed would corner me in the halls and ask me if I was Scott’s brother. In response to my apologetic nod, they’d bend down and give me a piece of advice:
don’t be like your brother, unless you want to get your ass kicked
. And yet I can’t remember Scott getting into any fights. I think he was careful not to cross the line, or was just too loftily disdainful of the whole redneck crowd to bother mincing words with them. Scott’s friends were stylish worldlings like himself, children of commuters who lived in the same sort of upscale subdivisions (Sorghum Mill, Rambling Wood). They didn’t play sports or attend FFA meetings; they acted. During Scott’s sophomore year, our last in the country, he appeared in a scene from
Barefoot in the Park
as part of a “montage” production of duet acting and dramatic monologues; the Jane Fonda part was taken by his girlfriend, Barbie Benedict, a blandly cheerful brunette. All I can remember about Scott’s performance was the natural way he took off his necktie, as if he’d worn one all his life. My parents and I were impressed by little touches like that.

What I saw of my brother at home was somewhat in contrast to the dashing (if controversial) figure he struck at school. Perhaps it was jealousy to some extent, but I found him a pretty despicable character. He was constantly baiting my mother, who didn’t hit him anymore because he was too big and it would only prolong the nastiness. Instead she stayed away more than ever, rarely home when I returned from school in the afternoon, and often a bit drunk if she showed up later. Scott did what he could to make my life miserable too, insofar as he bothered. He mocked me constantly, repeating my every word in a girlish whine. Any protest on my part, emotional or not, was met with the same shtick: Scott would bunch up his face and say “
Aye-lie-lie!
”—a bawling baby. Sometimes I did cry, which really brought out the sadist in him, especially if our friends were around. “
Aye-lie-lie! . . . Aye-lie-lie!
” he’d cry over and over, gamboling about, shoving me, getting in my face. He’d force me to the floor and make me smell his farts, and once he insisted I watch when he climbed to the roof and took a shit off the chimney. Afterward he scrambled down and confronted me.

“What’d it look like, Zwieb?” he said, a little out of breath.

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘
Whaddyoo meeean?
’ . . . I mean—you stupid little shit—what does my asshole look like when the stuff’s coming out?”

I just stared at him. If I said anything he’d only mock me, and I’m not sure I really understood the question.

“Down,” he said, pointing, which meant I had to lie supine while he farted in my face.

“No! Leave me alone!”

“ ‘No! No! Leave me alone!
Aye-lie-lie!
’ I said get
down
. . .”

Naturally I struggled, but it was no use.

Oddly or not, the more abusive he became, the more I wanted his approval. If he told me to do something I’d do it, usually, and not just because I feared some kind of reprisal. He’d taken to jumping off our second-floor balcony into the pool, which required a forceful push of the legs lest one hit the sidewalk or the fake boulders skirting the water. One day he and his friend Kent were jumping again and again, both of them naked, the better to flaunt their big wagging dicks and fresh growth of pubic hair for my benefit. They hectored me to jump too, until I stood naked and trembling on the balcony rail, clutching the rain gutter as I measured the distance below. “Better cover your balls!” Kent yelled, to which my brother added, “Your
middle
one too!” No sooner had I jumped—just clearing the rocks—than my brother clambered all the way up to the roof and ran soaring into the deep end. So much for proving my mettle.

TO MAKE MY
mother happy we moved back to the city in the summer of 1976. Nobody minded but me. Our new house was in the shabbier part of an upscale neighborhood, Nichols Hills, and I hated it: it was too small and ivy-smothered in a way that struck me as seedy; there was no pool. My father admitted in the car, as he took us to see the place for the first time, that he’d already bought it on impulse: a done deal. I thought he meant the big Tudor I’d picked out during an earlier house-hunting excursion, but no. I was dizzy with disappointment. As we parked in front of our new house and got out of the car, I said “Yuck!”—which struck my father from behind like a vicious little pebble: he’d made this move under duress, hastily accepting the first offer he got on our place in the country because his family was falling apart out there; his back stiffened, he paused, then walked on. It helped that my mother was ecstatic. “Mein
häuschen
!” she gushed, and wouldn’t let anyone paint the bricks or trim the ivy, until we discovered that the vines were actually pushing the roof off.

I had nothing to do until school started. My brother had his learner’s permit and was allowed to drive my mother’s red Porsche 914, the kind with the motor in the middle for a low center of gravity, the better to take hairpin turns at top speed, as Scott did with or without a licensed adult. Meanwhile I got it in my head that a hamster would solve my unhappiness, rather the way Algernon had helped my brother before he got muscle tone and pubic hair. My mother reminded me that my last hamster, Amy, had died of neglect only two years before, and my brother was glad to elaborate on this.

“Her tiny paw was thrust into the cedar shavings for a last, piss-soaked food pellet,” he reminisced, and imitated the way Amy had looked in her death agony: little bug eyes glazed, paw gnarled, her once-pouchy cheeks hollow.