Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

  When my sisters and I eventually left home, it seemed like a natural progression—young adults shifting from one environment to the next. While our departures had been relatively painless, Paul’s was like releasing a domestic animal into the wild. He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking. Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat Popsicle. I phoned one night just as he was leaning a family pack of frozen chicken wings against the back door. He’d forgotten to defrost them and was now attempting to stomp the solid mass into three 6-inch portions, which he’d stack in a pile and force into his toaster oven.

  I heard the singular sound of boot against crystallized meat and listened as my brother panted for breath. “Goddam . . . fucking . . . chicken . . . wings.”

  I called again the following evening and was told that after all that work, the chicken had been spoiled. It tasted like fish, so he threw it away and called it a night. A few hours later, having decided that spoiled chicken was better than no chicken at all, he got out of bed, stepped outside in his underpants, and proceeded to eat the leftovers directly from the garbage can.

  I was mortified. “In your underpants?”

  “Damned straight,” he said. “I ain’t getting dressed up to eat no fish-assed-tasting chicken.”

  I worried about my brother standing in his briefs and eating spoiled poultry by moonlight. I worried when told he’d passed out in a parking lot and awoken to find a stranger’s initials written in lipstick on his ass, but I never worried he’d be able to make a living. He’s been working for himself since high school and at the age of twenty-six had founded a very successful floor-sanding company. The physical work is demanding, but more tiring still are the nitpicky touch-ups, the billing and hiring, and endless discussions with indecisive clients. When asked how he manages to keep all those people happy, Paul credits the importance of compromise, explaining, “Sometimes you got to put that dick in your mouth and roll it around a little. Ain’t no need to swallow nothing, you just got to play on it for a while. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  At an age when the rest of us were barely managing to pay our own rent, he had bought a house. At thirty-two he sold it and traded up, moving into an established neighborhood inside the Raleigh beltline. Four bedrooms and the place was his, as were the trucks and sport-utility vehicles that spilled from the driveway and onto the lawn he paid to have mowed. All this from a business philosophy based on the art of a blowjob.

  Paul referred to his house as “the home of a confused clown,” but to the naked eye, the clown seemed absolutely sure of himself. There was the farting mound of battery-operated feces positioned on the mantel, the namesake rooster inlaid into the living-room floor, the bright-green walls, and musical butcher knives. “No confusion here,” you’d say, tripping over a concrete alligator. It was an awfully big place for just one clown, so I was relieved when told that a girlfriend had moved in, accompanied by an elderly pug named Venus.

  My brother was overjoyed. “You want to talk at her? Hold on while I put her on the phone.”

  I prepared myself for the voice of a North Carolina girlfriend, something like Paul’s but lower, and heard instead what sounded like a handsaw methodically working its way through a tree trunk. It was Venus. Months later he put me on the phone with their new dog, a six-week-old Great Dane named Diesel. I spoke to the outdoor cats, the indoor cats, and the adopted piglet that seemed like a good idea until it began to digest solid food. They’d been living together for more than a year when I finally met the girlfriend, a licensed hairdresser named Kathy. Erase the tattoos and the nicotine patch and she resembled one of those tranquil Flemish Madonnas, the ubiquitous Christ child replaced by a hacking pug. Her grace, her humor, her fur-matted sweaters—we loved her immediately. Best of all, she was from the North, meaning that should she and Paul ever conceive a child, it stood a fifty-fifty chance of speaking understandable English.

  They announced their engagement and designed a late-May wedding tailor-made to disappoint the Greeks. It would not take place at the Holy Trinity Church but at a hotel on the coast of North Carolina. The service would be performed by a psychic they’d found in the phone book, and the music provided by a DJ named J.D. who worked weekdays at the local state penitentiary.

  “Oh, well,” his godmother sighed. “I guess that’s how the young people like to do it these days.”

  I flew in from Paris two days before the wedding and was sitting in my father’s kitchen when Paul came to the door dressed in a suit and tie. A former high school classmate had committed suicide, and he’d dropped by the house on his way home from the funeral. Since I’d last seen him, my once slim brother had gained a good sixty pounds. Everything seemed proportionately larger, but the bulk seemed to have settled about his face and torso, leaving him with what he referred to as Dick Do disease. “My stomach sticks out further than my dick do.”

  The added weight had softened certain features and swallowed others altogether. His neck, for instance. Obscured now by a second chin, his head appeared to balance directly upon his shoulders, and he walked delicately, as if to keep it from rolling off. I told myself that if I looked at my brother differently, it was because of the suit, not the weight. He was a grown man now. He was going to get married, and therefore, he was a changed person.

  He took a sip of my father’s weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. “This shit’s like making love in a canoe.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s fucking near water.”

  Then again, I thought, maybe it is just the weight.

  I drove to the coast early the next morning with Lisa and her husband, Bob. Being the oldest and the only one married, she’d bumped herself up a notch, assuming the dual roles of experienced older sister and designated mother of the groom. To mention Paul, Kathy, or even Atlantic Beach was to inspire an upwelling of tears, followed by a choked “I just never thought I would see this day.” From Morehead City on, she pretty much cried nonstop, provoked by the landmarks of our youth. “Oh, the bridge! The pier! The midget golf course!”

  Paul was to be married in what used to be the John Yancy but was currently called the Royal Pavilion. The remodeling had been extensive, and what had once been a modest oceanfront hotel now boasted reception rooms and a wedding gazebo. Waitresses wore bow ties and pushed the scampi, explaining that it was Italian. Had you spent the 1980s in a coma, you might have been impressed with the fake columns and pastel color schemes, but as it was, there was something sad and mallish about it.

  While the ceremony would take place at the Royal Pavilion, guests would be staying next door at the Atlantis, a three-story motel essentially unchanged since the early space age. It’s where we’d spent weekends as young adults, when trips to the beach became trips at the beach. Mushrooms, cocaine, acid, peyote: I’d never checked in without being, at the very least, profoundly stoned, and on arrival I was surprised to find the furniture actually standing still.

  My brother had chosen the Atlantis not for its sentimental value but because it allowed the various family dogs. Paul’s friends, a group the rest of us referred to as simply “the Dudes,” had also brought their pets, which howled and whined and clawed at the sliding glass doors. This was what happened to people who didn’t have children, who didn’t even know people who had children. The flower girl was in heat. The rehearsal dinner included both canned and dry food, and when my brother proposed a toast to his “beautiful bitch,” everyone assumed he was talking about the pug.

  An hour before the wedding, the men in my family were scheduled to meet in Paul’s room, no women or Dudes allowed. I went expecting a once-in-a-lifetime masculine moment, and looking back, that’s probably what I got. While my room was immaculate, Paul’s was dark and littered with bones, like the cave of an animal. He’d only arrived the previous afternoon, but already it looked as th
ough he’d been living there for years, surviving on beer and the bodies of missing beachcombers. I spread out a newspaper and sat on the bed as my father, the best man, attached my brother’s cummerbund. It was five o’clock on one of the most important days of their lives and both of them were watching TV. It was a cable news channel, a special report concerning a flood in one of those faraway towns senselessly built on the banks of an untrustworthy river. Citizens stacked sandbags on a retaining wall. A wheelbarrow floated down the suburban street. “And still,” the announcer said, “still the rain continues to fall.”

  I’d heard once, maybe falsely, that when filming the movie Gandhi, the director had hired extras to play the roles of sandbags, that it had actually been cheaper than finding the real thing. It seemed like a worthy conversational icebreaker, but before I could finish the first sentence, my father told me to put a lid on it.

  “We’re trying to watch some TV here,” he said. “Jesus, do you mind?” Over in the bridal suite, they were applying makeup and systematically crying it back off. Noteworthy things were being said, and I couldn’t help but feel I was in the wrong room. My father turned my brother to face him and, with one eye on the television, began knotting his bow tie.

  “Water like that will fuck the shit out of some hardwood floors,” Paul said. “Those sons of bitches are looking at total replacements, I’ll tell you what.”

  “Well, you’re right about that.” My father helped the groom into his jacket and turned to give the flood victims one last look. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

  It was a busy day at the Royal Pavilion. The five o’clock wedding had gotten off to a late start, and we watched from the sidelines as a Marine Corps chaplain finished marrying an attractive young couple in their early twenties. Lisa and Amy gave the relationship three years at the most. Gretchen and I put it closer to eighteen months, and Tiffany suggested that if we wanted the real answer, we should ask the psychic, who stood beside a scrub pine entertaining Paul’s godmother. She was a tall, conservatively dressed woman with flesh-colored hair and matching fingernails. Sunglasses hung from a chain around her neck, and she wiped their lenses while reciting her credentials. It seemed that aside from her regular Friday-night tarot-card readings, she also cured cancer, diabetes, and heart disease by touching the sufferers in secret, hard-to-reach places. “I’ve had the gift since I was seven,” she said. “And believe me, I am very good at what I do.”

  When it came to weddings, she psychically read the prospective bride and groom, divining their innermost selves and using her findings to tailor unique, personally significant vows.

  “Well, I, for one, think that that is really beautiful,” Lisa said.

  “I know you do,” the psychic said. “I know you do.”

  The marines filed out of the gazebo, and we moved in to take their seats. “Who does that woman think she is?” Lisa whispered. “I mean, come on, I was only trying to be polite.”

  “I know you were,” I said. “I know you were.”

  J.D. the DJ was stuck in bridge traffic, so the ceremony commenced without the prerecorded wedding march. Lisa predictably started howling the moment the bride rounded the Coke machine and came into view on the arm of her father. The dogs followed suit, and determined not to join them, I looked beyond the psychic’s shoulder, to a small patch of ocean visible through the trees. It was the place where, twenty-two years earlier, my brother had come very close to drowning. We’d been horsing around at high tide and looked up to find ourselves on the other side of the waves, drifting farther and farther from the hotel. It wasn’t natural to be out that far, and so I swam for shore, thinking he was right behind me.

  “Greetings, friends and family,” the psychic said. “We stand on . . .” She looked at the bride, towering over my pint-size brother. “We stand on tiptoes this afternoon to celebrate the love of . . . Paul and Kathy.”

  He wasn’t supposed to be out at that time of day, especially with me. “You wind him up,” my mother said. “For God’s sakes, just give it a rest.” When accused of winding up my sisters, I’d always felt a hint of shame, but I liked the fact that I could adequately enthuse a twelve-year-old boy. As an older brother, it was my job, and I liked to think that I was good at it. I swam for what felt like the length of a pool, then stopped and turned around. But Paul wasn’t there.

  “This love cannot be bought . . . in a store,” the psychic said. “It cannot be found . . . under a tree, beneath a . . . shell, or even in a . . .” You could see her groping for a possible hiding place. “Even in a . . . treasure chest buried centuries ago on the . . . historic islands that surround us.”

  A swell moved in, and my brother went under, leaving only his right arm, which waved the international sign language for “I am going to die now and it is all your fault.” I headed back in his direction, trying to recall the water-safety class I’d taken years earlier at the country club. Think, I told myself. Think like a man. I tried to focus, but all that came to me was the instructor, an athletic seventeen-year-old named Chip Pancake. I remembered the spray of freckles on his broad, bronzed shoulders and my small rush of hope as he searched the assembled students for a resuscitation victim. Oh, choose me, I’d whispered. Me! Over here. I recalled the smell of hamburgers drifting from the clubhouse, the sting of the life jacket against my sunburned back, and the crushing disappointment I felt when Chip selected Patsy Pyle, who would later describe the experience as “life-changing.” These are not the sorts of memories that save lives, so I abandoned the past and relied instead upon instinct.

  “We ask that this marriage be blessed with as many graces as there are . . . grains of sand in the . . . ocean.”

  In the end, I just sort of grabbed Paul by the hair and yelled at him to lie flat. He vomited a mouthful of seawater, and together we kicked our way back to the beach, washing ashore a good half mile from the hotel. Lying side by side, catching our breath in the shallow surf, it seemed a moment in which something should be said, some declaration of relief and brotherly love.

  “Listen,” I started. “I just want you to know . . .”

  “Fuck you,” Paul had said to me.

  “I do,” Paul now said to Kathy.

  “I just never thought I’d see this day,” Lisa blubbered.

  My brother kissed his bride, and the psychic looked out at her audience, nodding her head as if to say, “I knew that would happen.”

  Cameras clicked and a wind kicked up, blowing Kathy’s veil and train straight into the air. Her look of surprise, his frantic embrace—in resulting photographs it would appear as if she’d dropped from the sky, caught at the last moment by someone who would now introduce himself as the luckiest man in the world.

  At the reception my brother danced the worm, throwing himself on his belly as the Dudes chanted, “Party, fat man, party.” My father delivered a brief, awkward speech while waving a rubber chicken and again the cameras flashed.

  “I cannot believe you,” I said. “A rubber chicken?”

  He claimed he’d been unable to find a rubber rooster, and I explained that that wasn’t really the point. “Not everyone has the ability to improvise,” I said. “Where were your notes? Why didn’t you come to me for help?”

  If I was hard on him, it was because I’d wanted to deliver the big speech. I’d been planning on it since Paul was a boy, but nobody had asked me. Now I’d have to wait until his funeral.

  At one a.m. the room rental ended and plans were made to move the reception onto the beach. Kathy changed out of her gown while Paul and I took the dogs for a quick walk across the front lawn of the Atlantis. For the first time since the wedding we were alone, and I wanted to force a moment out of it. The operative word here, the source of the problem, is force. Because it never works that way. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer, which may be remembered but never the way you’d hoped. My brother had spent his life saving me from such moments, and now he would do it again.
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  A light rain began to fall, and just as I cleared my throat, Venus squatted in the grass, producing a mound of peanut-size turds.

  “Aren’t you going to clean that up?” I asked.

  Paul pointed to the ground and whistled for the Great Dane, which thundered across the lawn and ate the feces in one bite.

  “Tell me that was an accident,” I said.

  “Accident, hell. I got this motherfucker trained,” he said. “Sometimes he’ll stick his nose to her ass and just eat that shit on tap.”

  I thought of my brother standing in his backyard and training a dog to eat shit and realized I’d probably continue thinking about it until the day I die. Forget the tears and brotherly speeches, this was the stuff that memories are made of.

  The Great Dane licked his lips and searched the grass for more. “What was it you were going to say?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  From their perch atop an endangered dune, the Dudes emitted a war cry. Kathy called out from the door of her room, and together with his dogs, my brother set forth, spreading a love that could not be found under a tree, beneath a shell, or even in a treasure chest buried centuries ago on the historic islands that surrounded us.

  Possession

  Finding an apartment is a lot like falling in love,” the real estate agent told us. She was a stylish grandmother in severe designer sunglasses. Dyed blond hair, black stockings, a little scarf tied just so around the throat: for three months she drove us around Paris in her sports car, Hugh up front and me folded like a lawn chair into the backseat.

  At the end of every ride I’d have to teach myself to walk all over again, but that was just a minor physical complaint. My problem was that I already loved an apartment. The one we had was perfect, and searching for another left me feeling faithless and sneaky, as if I were committing adultery. After a viewing, I’d stand in our living room, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling and trying to explain that the other two-bedroom had meant nothing to me. Hugh took the opposite tack and blamed our apartment for making us cheat. We’d offered, practically begged, to buy it, but the landlord was saving the place for his daughters, two little girls who would eventually grow to evict us. Our lease could be renewed for another fifteen years, but Hugh refused to waste his love on a lost cause. When told our apartment could never truly be ours, he hung up the phone and contacted the real estate grandmother, which is what happens when you cross him: he takes action and moves on.