Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (16 page)

That’s not what I meant at all, but just as I try to explain myself, she places her hand on the driver’s shoulder. “If someone offered you a perfectly good turkey, you’d take it, wouldn’t you?”

The man says yes, and she pats him on top of the head. “Mamma likes you,” she says.

She’s gotten him on her side, but unfairly, and I’m surprised by the degree to which it enrages me. “There’s a difference between someone offering you 'a perfectly good turkey' and finding a turkey in a garbage can,” I say.

“Trash can,” she corrects me. “God, you make it sound as if I’m back behind the Star Market, burrowing through their Dumpster. It was just one turkey. Ease up, will you.”

She has, of course, found valuable things as well and formed relationships with the sort of people who are wont to buy them. These are the guys you see at flea markets, men with beards and longish fingernails who scold should you refer to a certain color of Fiesta ware as “orange” rather than “red.” There’s something about them I don’t trust, but when asked for a reason, I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything beyond their general unfamiliarity. When meeting a friend of Amy’s or Lisa’s, I feel a sense of recognition, but the people whom Tiffany hangs out with are a completely different breed. I’m thinking of the woman who was shot seven times while evading the police. She’s lovely, really, but evading the police? As my brother would say, “That’s some outlaw shit.”

The closer we get to her apartment, the more my sister engages the cabdriver, and by the time he pulls in front of the house I am left out of the conversation completely. It seems the guy’s wife had a hard time adjusting to life in the United States and has recently returned to her village outside of St. Petersburg.

“But you’re not divorced,” Tiffany says. “You still love her, right?”

On paying the man, I sense that she would be much more comfortable were he the guest instead of me. “Would you like to come in and use the bathroom?” she asks him. “Do you have any local calls you need to make?” He politely declines the invitation, and her shoulders slump as he pulls away from the curb. He was a nice-enough guy, but more than his friendship she’d wanted a buffer, someone to stand between herself and what she sees as my inevitable judgment. We climb the few steps to her porch and she hesitates before pulling the keys from her pocket. “I haven’t had a chance to clean,” she says, but the lie feels uncomfortable, and so she corrects herself. “What I meant to say is that I don’t give a fuck what you think of my apartment. I didn’t really want you here in the first place.”

I’m supposed to feel good that Tiffany has gotten this off her chest, but first I need to make it stop hurting. Were I to ask, my sister would tell me exactly how much she has been dreading my visit, and so I don’t ask and comment instead on the cat brushing its big rusty head against the porch rails. “Oh,” she says. “That’s Daddy.” Then she slips off her shoes and opens the door.

The apartment I imagine during our phone calls is not the apartment that Tiffany actually inhabits. It’s the same physical area, but I prefer to envision it as it was years ago, back when she held an actual job. It was never extravagant, never self-consciously decorated, but it was clean and comfortable and seemed like a nice place to come home to. There were curtains on the windows, and a second bedroom made up for guests. Then she got the rickshaw, and as her house became a revolving junk shop, she shed all traces of sentimentality. Things come in, and as rent time nears, they go out, the found kitchen table sold alongside the serving bowl once belonging to our great-aunt or the Christmas present you’d given her the year before. For a time certain objects were replaced, but then she hit a rough patch and learned to do without such things as chairs and lampshades. It is this absence I try to ignore on entering her apartment, and I do pretty well until we hit the kitchen.

The last time I visited, Tiffany was pulling up the linoleum. I’d assumed that this was part of a process, phase one to be followed by phase two. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a one-step procedure, the final product a tar-paper floor. Combine it with bare feet and you’re privy to the pedicurist’s worst nightmare. My sister has appendages connected to her ankles. They feature toes and arches, but I cannot call them feet. In color they resemble the leathery paws of great apes, but in texture they are closer to hooves. In order to maintain her balance, she’ll periodically clear the bottoms of debris — a bottle cap, bits of broken glass, a chicken bone — but within moments she’ll have stepped on something else and begun the process all over again. It’s what happens when you sell both your broom and your vacuum cleaner.

I see the dirty rag covering the lower half of the kitchen window, the crusted broken-handled pans scattered across the greasy stovetop. My sister is living in a Dorothea Lange photograph, and the homosexual in me wants to get down on my knees and scrub until my fingers bleed. I’d done it on all my previous visits, hoping each time that it might make some kind of a lasting impression. Gleaming appliances, a bathroom reeking of bleach: “Doesn’t this smell great!” I’d say. The last time I was here, after scraping, cleaning, and waxing her living-room floor, I watched as she overturned a wineglass onto what amounted to six hours’ worth of work. It wasn’t an accident, but a deliberate statement: I do not want what you have to offer. She later phoned my brother, referring to me as Fairy Poppins, which wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t so apt. I am determined not to get involved this time, but without the cleaning, I have no purpose and don’t know what to do with myself.

“We could talk,” Tiffany says. “That’s something we’ve never tried.”

Haven’t we? I think. If I talk to Tiffany less than to my other sisters, it’s because she never comes home. We spent months persuading her to attend my brother’s wedding, and even when she agreed, we didn’t really expect her to show up. She and Paul get along very well, but as a group the family makes her nervous. We’re the ones who idly sat by while she was having golf balls putted into her mouth, and the less time she spends with us, the happier she is. “Don’t you get it?” she says. “I don’t like you people.” You people. As if we’re a collection agency.

Tiffany stomps her lit cigarette onto the tar-paper floor, and as she sits on the countertop I notice the smoldering butt still clinging to the bottom of her right hoof. “I’ve been doing a lot of tile work,” she tells me, and I follow her finger in the direction of the refrigerator, where a mosaic panel leans against the wall. She started making them a few years ago, using the bits of broken crockery she finds in the trash. Her latest project is the size of a bath mat and features the remains of a Hummel figurine, the once cherubic face now reeling in a vortex of shattered coffee mugs. Like the elaborate gingerbread houses she made during her baking days, Tiffany’s mosaics reflect the loopy energy of someone who will simply die if she doesn’t express herself. It’s a rare quality, and because it requires an absolute lack of self-consciousness, she is unable to see it.

“A woman offered to buy it,” she tells me, genuinely surprised that someone might take an interest. “We set a price, but then, I don’t know, I feel wrong accepting that kind of money.”

I can understand thinking that you’re not good enough, but no one needs cash more than Tiffany. “You could sell it and buy a vacuum cleaner,” I say. “Lay some new linoleum on the floor, wouldn’t that be nice?”

“What is it with you and my kitchen floor?” she asks. “Who cares about the goddam linoleum?”

In the corner of the room Daddy approaches my sports coat, kneading it with his paws before lying down and curling into a ball. “I don’t know why I even bother with you,” Tiffany says. She’d wanted to show me her artwork — something that truly interests her, something she’s good at — and instead, like my father, I’m suggesting she become an entirely different person. Looking at her face, that combination of fatigue and defiance, I am reminded of a conversation I annually hold with my friend Ken Shorr.

ME: Did you get your tree yet?

KEN: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees.

ME: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead?

KEN: I just told you, I’m a Jew.

ME: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for a cheap wreath.

KEN: I’m not looking for a wreath at all. Leave me alone, will you.

ME: You’re probably just tense because you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping.

KEN: I don’t Christmas shop.

ME: What are you telling me? That you make all of your presents?

KEN: I don’t give Christmas presents period. Goddamit, I told you, I’m a Jew.

ME: Well, don’t you at least need to buy something for your...

KEN: They’re Jews, too, idiot. That’s what makes me one. It’s hereditary. Do you understand?

ME: Sure.

KEN: Say the words “I understand.”

ME: I understand. So where are you going to hang your...

I can’t seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen. “Yes, your Tiki god is very handsome, but we’re here to talk about Jesus.” It’s no wonder Tiffany dreads my visits. Even when silent, I seem to broadcast my prissy disapproval, comparing the woman she is with the woman she will never be, a sanitized version who struggles with real jars and leaves other people’s teeth and frozen turkeys where she finds them. It’s not that I don’t like her — far from it — I just worry that, without a regular job and the proper linoleum, she’ll fall through a crack and disappear to a place where we can’t find her.

The phone rings in the living room and I’m not surprised when Tiffany answers it. She does not tell her caller that she has company, but rather, much to my relief, she launches into what promises to be a long conversation. I watch my sister pace the living room, her great hooves kicking up clouds of dust, and when I am certain she’s no longer looking, I shoo Daddy off my sports coat. Then I fill the sink with hot, soapy water, roll up my shirtsleeves, and start saving her life.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

A Can of Worms

H UGH WANTED HAMBURGERS, so he, his friend Anne, and I went to a place called the Apple Pan. This was in Los Angeles, a city I know nothing about. The names of certain neighborhoods are familiar from watching TV, but I don’t understand what it means to be in Culver City as opposed to, say, Silver Lake or Venice Beach. Someone suggests a destination and I just sort of go along and wait to be surprised.

I thought the Apple Pan would be a restaurant, but it was more like a diner — no tables, just stools arranged along a U-shaped counter. We ordered our hamburgers from a man in a paper hat, and while waiting for them to arrive, Anne pulled out some pictures of her bull terrier. She’s a professional photographer, so they were portraits rather than snapshots. Here was the dog peeking out from behind a curtain. Here was the dog sitting human-style in an easy chair, a paw resting on the paunch of his stomach. Gary, I think his name was.

When she’s not taking pictures of her dog, Anne flies around the country, on assignment for various magazines. A day earlier she’d returned from Boston, where she photographed a firefighter whose last name is Bastardo. “That’s bastard with an o on the end,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”

Hugh told her about some neighbors in Normandy whose last name translates to “hot ass,” but unless you speak French, it’s hard to get the joke.

“Is that hyphenated?” Anne asked. “I mean, did Miss Hot marry Mr. Ass, or is it all one word?”

“One word,” Hugh said.

Thinking the conversation would rest there for a while, I prepared myself to contribute, wary of how easy it is to fall into a game of one-upmanship. If you know a Candy Dick, the other person is bound to know a Harry Dick or a Dick Eader. I’d recently learned of the race-car driver Dick Trickle, but for the time being we were operating on a higher plane, and so I mentioned Bronson Charles, a woman I’d met earlier that week in Texas. Had she been young, I would have wondered, not about her but about her parents, who obviously thought they were being clever. But Bronson Charles was in her seventies and had married into the last name. It wasn’t funny, just odd — the well-bred matron and the action hero, their sexes, names, and natures reversed. It was like meeting a timid man named Taylor Elizabeth.

Anne and Hugh met in college, and when our hamburgers arrived they reminisced about some of the people they had gone to school with. “What was that guy’s name? I think he was in the Art Department, Mike, maybe, or Mark. He used to go out with Karen, I think her name was. Or Kimberly. You know who I mean.”

Talk like this can go on for hours, and while you do have to accept it, you don’t have to actually pay attention. I stared straight ahead, watching a broken-nosed cook top a hamburger with cheese, and then I turned slightly to my left and began listening to the two men seated on the other side of me. There was about them the weariness of people who could not afford to retire and would keep on toiling, horse-like, until they dropped. The man beside me wore a T-shirt endorsing the state of Florida, and as if the weather were completely different on the other side of the ketchup bottle, the man beside him wore a thick wool sweater and heavy corduroy pants. A coat rested in his lap, and before him, on the counter, sat a newspaper and an empty cup of coffee. “Did you read about those worms?” he asked.

He was referring to the can of nematodes — tiny worms — recently discovered on the Texas plains. They’d been sent up with the doomed space shuttle and had somehow managed to survive the explosion, the cause of which was still a mystery. The man in the sweater massaged his chin and stared into space. “I’ve been thinking we could solve this problem in no time,” he said. “If only ... if only we could get the damned things to talk.”

It sounded crazy but I remember thinking the same thing about the Akita in the O. J. Simpson case. “Put it on the stand. Let’s hear what it’s got to say.” It was one of those ideas that, just for a second, seemed entirely logical, the one solution that nobody else had thought of.

The man in the T-shirt considered the possibility. “Well,” he said, “even if the worms could talk, it wouldn’t do much good. They was in that can, remember?”

“I guess you’re right.”

The men stood to pay their bills, and before they reached the door their stools were taken by two people who did not know each other. One was a man dressed in a fine suit, and the other a young woman who sat down and immediately started reading what looked to be a script. Over on my right Hugh had decided that rather than Karen or Kimberly, their classmate had been named Katherine. While I’d been listening to my neighbors, Anne had ordered me a slice of pie, and as I picked up my fork she told me that I was supposed to eat it backward, starting with the outer crust and working my way inward. “Your last bite should be the point, and you’re supposed to make a wish on it,” she said. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

“Come again?”

She looked at me the way you might at someone who regularly tosses money into the fire. The senselessness! The waste! “Well, better late than never,” she said, and repositioned my plate.

As Anne and Hugh resumed their conversation, I thought of all the pie I had eaten during the course of my life, and wondered how different things might be if only I had wished upon the points. To begin with, I would not be seated at the Apple Pan, that much was certain. Had I gotten my wish at the age of eight, I would still be rounding up mummies in Egypt, luring them from their tombs and trapping them in heavy iron cages. All subsequent wishes would have been based upon the life I had already established: a new set of boots, a finer whip, greater command of the mummy language. That’s the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they’re nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted. One’s best bet — and the moral to all those stories — is to be unselfish and make your wish for the benefit of others, trusting that their happiness will make you happy as well. It’s a nice idea but would definitely take some getting used to.

Since we’d entered, the Apple Pan had grown progressively busier. All the seats were now taken, and people leaned against the wall, their eyes moving from stool to stool, determining which customers should pay up and get out. Looking around, I saw that we were the likeliest candidates. The man in the paper hat had removed our hamburger wrappers, and all that remained was a single plate, supporting the tip of my pie. I wished that the people against the wall would stop staring at us, and then quickly, but not quick enough, I tried to take it back.

“I guess we should get going,” Hugh said, and he and Anne pulled out their wallets. There was a little struggle over who would pay — “It’s my treat,” “No, it’s mine” — but I stayed out of it, thinking of what might have been had I not wasted my wish. A laboratory filled with sensitive equipment. Men in white coats, trembling with hope and wonder as they lean forward, catching the sound of one small voice. “Come to think of it,” the worm says, “I do remember seeing something suspicious.”