The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (9 page)

That night we avoided each other. I sat in my room and rehearsed, with scalding eyes, all the scathing things I’d say to my persecutors; my father was too tired and disgusted to talk to me. The next morning, when he drove us to school, his manner was subdued. He asked me what it was all about, and I told him I had no idea. He seemed to accept this, nodding, and we didn’t speak again.

Brother Howie, the vice principal, was a pale, squat, square-shaped man in a black polyester suit. He blinked behind wire-rim glasses in a flustered, tic-ish way as he shook hands with my father. By contrast my father seemed princely—gracious, receptive, vividly prosperous, and subtly annoyed that his time had been given up to such proceedings. He kept his head cocked gravely and waited for Brother Howie to explain.

The deal, said Howie, was this: I hadn’t done anything
major
, but a number of teachers had come to him with “concerns”—three on the same day, in fact, which had “raised a red flag.” He thought it best, then, that they “nip this thing in the bud,” if possible. My father nodded.

A couple of teachers took the time to come in and discuss their concerns, and I was dejected but unsurprised to find that these were my favorite teachers. There was Mr. Bernard, the music teacher who’d ordered porn and Jack Daniel’s up to his room at the Hyatt during our band trip to New Orleans. His everyday manner was ironical and tolerant. While helping to paint sets for the play, he told my father, I’d carelessly spattered paint all over the floor of the band room and made no effort to clean it up. My face burned with anger and shame: anger because I’d been kicked out of the cast of that play, in light of which I thought it magnanimous of me to work on those sets at all, and shame because the nature of my offense was all too similar to what my father dealt with on a daily basis. But he said nothing and neither did I. Next was my drama teacher, Ms. Archer, the woman who’d kicked me out of the play. The previous summer, with two of my friends, Ms. Archer had traveled a hundred miles to watch me perform at a prestigious arts camp. On the way she’d gotten drunk and given one of my friends a hand job in the back of a van. Since then she’d been subject to weird mood swings and paranoia (when touched from behind she’d jump as if Tasered), in the midst of which she’d kicked me out of that play, because I’d asked—snidely, she thought, and once too often—for a little feedback on my performance. To my father she gave a slightly exaggerated account of this episode and related it to the set-painting by way of suggesting a trend; that said, she was moved to add, “Your son knows I love him. He’s talented and capable of real brilliance. You know, one moment he’s talking about Schopenhauer and the next he’s . . .” She bugged her eyes to indicate some typical bit of foolery. I was embarrassed by the reference to Schopenhauer—my father deplored my pseudo-intellectualism, knowing the ignorance at the bottom of it—but mostly I felt betrayed by Ms. Archer, who did love me in a way and was punishing me, I thought, for not loving her enough in return.

Finally Howie added his two cents with a chuckle. I knew what was coming. A couple of weeks before, during lunch, someone had thrown a greasy piece of baked chicken at a sad, shy little girl who always sat alone. For a moment the girl had looked dazed, bereft, then began wiping the grease off her cheek in a slow, tentative way, discreetly dealing with her tears as she did so. Perhaps because I was observing her so intently, and because of my reputation for mischief, the cafeteria monitor had assumed I was the culprit and sent me to Brother Howie’s office. I was outraged. I’d been in trouble enough lately without having to answer for something I hadn’t done—would
never
have done—so I left a note to that effect on Howie’s desk; I wrote that if he “wished to confer” about the matter later, I was happy to oblige, but for now I had to get on to my next class. No sooner had I set foot in this class than Howie’s voice, usually so modest and monotone, squawked over the room’s intercom speaker demanding my return to the office
now
. He ambushed me in front of the receptionist and three or four students who were getting tardy slips; he seized me by the front of my collarless dress shirt (briefly fashionable then) and shoved me stumbling against the wall. He tore my shirt as he stood there shaking me and telling me what he’d do to me if I ever pulled a stunt like that again.

“
That
got his attention,” he told my father, still chuckling in a between-us-men sort of way.

I’d wanted to kill Howie the day he ripped my shirt, or at least do something to defend myself in front of pretty Ms. White, the receptionist. I’d played the scene over and over in my mind: Howie balling up on the floor as I kicked him, or flipping end over end as I pummeled him down the stairs. And here he was bragging to my father.

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “I didn’t throw that”—I paused to swallow the word “fucking”—“chicken.”

My voice trembled on the edge of tears, and I fell silent. Everybody but my father was looking at me now with mild reproach, as if to suggest that it wasn’t
about
the chicken. My father cleared his throat.

“My son can be difficult,” he said, picking his words with care, “but he is, as far as I can tell, without malice. And for reasons I’d rather not go into, both he and I have been through a pretty bad time lately. That’s not to excuse his behavior, just to put it in context. I agree with you”—he smiled at Ms. Archer, who nodded with moist eyes—“that he’s an exceptional young man. And I can assure you we’re going to work on these problems he’s having.”

The next thing I knew we were on our feet shaking hands. My father’s eyes narrowed a bit vis-à-vis Howie, a nuance of contempt I knew well, and then I was free to return to class on a probational basis. I determined to be not only a model student but a model human being, such was my relief on learning that my father hadn’t altogether lost his love and respect for me. More than anything related to Scott or my mother, I’d resented him for that.

THIS WAS THE
fall of 1980, and my brother was now a twenty-year-old freshman at the University of Oklahoma. After he’d gotten tired of the vagrant life in Manhattan, he assured my father that he was ready to come home and turn over a new leaf, agreeing to all conditions except psychiatric help. “There’s nothing wrong with
me
,” he said. In return my father bought him a bus ticket and paid his tuition and expenses at OU; he insisted, however, that Scott live in the freshman dormitory, not in the off-campus apartment Scott had wanted because of his relative seniority.

During one of my rare visits chez Marlies, I accepted Scott’s invitation to stop by his dorm and say hello. He was delighted to see me. That was the first time it occurred to me that I’d become, effectively, the big brother. Scott
deferred
to me now; what with my careful hair and preppy clothes and circumspect manner (around him), he seemed to accept that I was going places he wasn’t likely to go. He’d lost some of his old arrogance, and now he was simply goofy: he bobbed on his toes like a jaybird with a tune stuck in its head. If I said anything remotely odd or droll, he’d screw up his face and let go a burst of elaborate wheezy laughter, slugging me about the chest and shoulders.

That evening he had a date with a girl in his dorm, which was why he particularly wanted me to visit—to show me off to this girl. To show her what a normal, presentable brother he had. What he hadn’t counted on was my pimply face, the one sure way of knowing we were brothers. Unaware of the role he wanted me to play, I’d applied a harsh acne cream that dried up the pores and left a flaky white residue that one wasn’t supposed to wash off entirely. My brother’s eyes kept drifting to the blanched area around my mouth, a bit of localized film, a sight that made his goofy grin flicker slightly. Finally it was time to meet his date, and he came out with it:

“What’s that shit on your face, Zwieb?”

I told him. He asked if I minded washing it off, and I said it didn’t work if you washed it off, and besides the skin remained white and flaky whether you washed it off or not. My brother was pensive as we started toward the elevators; then he ducked into a bathroom and asked me to keep him company. While I stood at the mirror surveying the effects of this wonder drug, Scott came up behind me and rubbed a soapy hand around my mouth.

“Fuck!” I said. “Stop!”

He stopped. “Just
wash
it a little,” he pleaded. I splashed a bit of water on my face, raw where he’d rubbed it, and patted it dry with a paper towel. The whiteness returned with a faint, phosphorescent glow.

“See?” I said. “Look: would you rather I meet this girl some other time?”

Scott shook his head with a kind of anxious, haunted look. The rest of me was
fine
, he said, and indicated as much by plucking the shoulders of my button-down shirt and skimming a hand over the gloss of my careful hair. The fullness of pride leaked from his eyes.

The girl was a decided anticlimax. She’d set up an ironing board in the hall outside her room and was dank with toil. Blowzy and moonfaced, she put me in mind of a good-natured housemaid who tells your kids about Jesus while scrubbing the toilets. Nor would she have been out of place in a Vermeer, hefting a milk jug.

“Scott, this your bruth-uh?” she said with an Okie drawl. She shook my hand over the ironing board, glancing at the film around my mouth and smiling a little too brightly. “He just talks and talks about
yew
!”

“Well,” I said, “and vice versa.”

“I look awful!
Scawwt!
”

Scott mumbled something about her looking fine,
beautiful
in fact, this in a husky reverential way that made her (and me) blush. Then the girl shot me a look to let me know she wasn’t really
serious
about Scott, that she was just being—
you
know—nice, but it was good to meet me anyway. All that with a quick little smirk.

“What’d you think, Zwieb?” my brother asked as we parted in the lobby.

“She’s nice,” I said, and gave him a hug. “But maybe not your type?”

He began to say something, but thought better of it. He gave me an unhappy smile and went back to the elevator.

“How was Scott?” my father asked that night.

I said he seemed all right. And it may have been that same weekend that I had an interesting exchange with some incidental numbskull at a keg party. He was a college student, and I was about to be a college student.

“What’d you say your name was?” he asked.

I told him, and with a drunken hoot the guy said he
thought
so, that the craziest motherfucker he’d ever met in his whole motherfucking life went by that name and kind of looked like me too; people on his floor called him “the punk rocker” ’cause all he ever did was get wasted and listen to the Ramones and shit. My interlocutor bugged his eyes and mimed sucking a joint, bouncing in place like a jaybird with a tune stuck in its head. Did I have a brother like that?

I did not.

“Shit, I bet you do!” he said, backing away, spritzing a jet of beer between his grinning front teeth.

AND SO, MY
father beside me, I sat on a sagging couch a month or two later and watched my brother bounce around to a B-52s record in the grim apartment he took when he dropped out of college again and moved back to Todd the Tortoise’s neighborhood in the bleakest section of downtown Oklahoma City—a slum of crumbling bungalows, apartment houses that looked like Aztec ruins, and the odd vacant lot of overgrown grass and trash and dog shit. On the whole he seemed happier: through old connections he’d gotten a job in a good restaurant—busing tables for now, with the possibility of becoming a waiter if he “worked out”—and here, amid these stained and fissured walls, he could bounce around to his heart’s content. Apparently he’d spent a lot of time at CBGB’s and the like in New York, where such behavior was hardly out of the ordinary. My father kept him company with a jiggling foot, an indulgent smile. Scott was on his own again, this was his apartment, and he could carry on howsoever he liked. He was free, white, and almost twenty-one.

Back in the car, Burck sat a moment before starting the engine. A smile lingered on his face like a door he’d forgotten to shut. “Scott is strange,” he said, “but in many ways . . .” He peered up at Scott’s window and frowned. “In many ways he’s a very lovable young man.”

The worst part was watching my father parry the questions of a curious public. He was a well-known man. On the street, in crowded restaurants, striding through the carpeted underground tunnels downtown, he was accosted: “And how’s that
older
boy of yours? What’s
he
up to these days?” Around me, at least, he couldn’t equivocate, and I doubt he could anyway; for all his surface polish, he never became adept at handling that particular question. Perhaps he never meant to. Rather he
taught
these acquaintances, one by one, never to repeat their error. Wincing as if lashed, he’d muster a faint smile—puzzled at the world’s obtuseness—and say in a soft voice, “Well . . . I don’t really know, Ted. Have to get back to you on that.”

THE MAIN REASON
my parents had gone to the trouble of formalizing a divorce was because my father had fallen in love. Her name was Mandy, and she was exactly half his age, a law student at OU who’d clerked in his firm the summer before my senior year in high school—for me a summer of long enforced walks around the neighborhood, of loitering with friends, because Mandy was visiting and I’d been tacitly banished, another source of friction between Burck and me.

But I liked Mandy. There was nothing not to like: she was sweet, she was smart, and while perhaps not a beauty, she had a cute little body and a big toothy grin; her whole face and neck would flush when she looked at my father, whom she wanted to screw almost every waking minute of the day and night. For him this wasn’t a problem. Sometimes, though, he had to work or whatever, and after her clerkship was over Mandy and I played a lot of afternoon racquetball. We were pals. I found myself missing her when she left for Scotland that fall on a Rotary law scholarship; except for the constant walking on my part, she’d made our home a happier place.