I’m a number-pattern guy. I never thought about that story structure until she noticed it. But she’s dead-on. That’s the way they all play out. Friends is wrapping. One quick knockout after the last commercial, then the preview of the next episode. I’m thinking maybe Wolfgang Puck. I don’t know.
“Wolfgang Puck?” I ask.
“Okay,” Shea says.
“Skipping Jessie?”
“I don’t care, you decide.”
“Microwave or oven?” “Microwave — oven takes too long.” “Yeah.” “Honey, will you grab your card so we can order the literature chair at the break?” “You sure? I mean. .” “We’ll get the miles.” “That make you happy?” “Yes!”
She loves me, she really does. I love her, really do. We love each other. Truly. Honestly. More than most. I’ll bet our lives on that.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you back,” she says. And we both know it’s not television.
And my god, fat Monica cut off Chandler’s toe at their Thanksgiving, only instead of sending the detached digit to the hospital to be sewn back on, she mistakenly sent a baby carrot that had fallen on the floor beside it! I’ll pop in a pizza but hold off on the tape until the local news comes on. “Let’s give Jessie another chance?” “Okay.” “The chair comes to $2,304.50, including ship.” “Let’s see, 2-3-0-4-5. You know, February 30 is almost like saying March 2.” “You’re cheating!” she shrieks. “Feb. 30 doesn’t exist!” “I know, babe,” I say, “But that’s how it came to me. February 30, 1945. So, anyway, whose birthday?” “What?” “Come on. Work with me, silly. Who’s birthday is March 2, 1945?” “My mother!”
Give Jessie another try and wine, and then Frasier. Slice off a toe like a bloody baby carrot. I can hear the wet knife. Can feel the wet knife. Jesus, I still have to check the email. Amazing how consuming the Internet’s becoming. The chair is 5-4-3-2 then 0, missing 1. Just like Shea and I. March 2 is the day that Gulf War combat formally ended. Took 100 hours, on a 24-hour news cycle. Anyway, I’ll log to email after Frasier, at the start of the Seinfeld tape. It’s the one where Jerry dates a woman called “Man Hands” anyway, so I know how it starts.
PickleSYCORAX? TODAY?
Yes, even today, my brother plays a song featuring Sycorax, an eerie, operatic soprano, which is why it’s so difficult to be around him and Janine. As the clarinet snakes from the Wi-Fi jukebox, the few forlorn men at the bar peer up from their drinks. With the rise of the orchestral chorus they sigh, or pick at scabrous ears and necks, then resume a silent perturbation.
And I tell you there is nothing like chasing your father’s funeral in a drop-ceiling honky-tonk, midday in Nashville, alongside agitated siblings and exit-ramp panhandlers. . listening to German opera.
Danny walks back from the jukebox barking like Hitler. “Brenne Laterne! Nahe und ferne dammere auf!” I’m so tired of these roles. I only want to focus on what’s happening here, to try and salvage something between the three of us. I love these people. Dad is dead.
“I recall this ditty,” our sister, Janine, says, the strings and soprano wailing. She turns to Danny. “Dad playin’ all that Teutonic hostile stuff while y’all worked out in the garage, right?”
“Wagner,” he says. “Spohr, and whatever. I hear it every time I exercise.”
“Guys?” I ask. “Please?”
She rolls her eyes. Danny’s jaw flexes.
Okay, I get it. I’ll grant that Colonel Dad was a little freaky with the competition stuff, a bit too Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. But it’s not supposed to be like this today. Not between us.
“You know,” I say to Danny, “I was so jealous of that. I always wished you guys would ask me to join you on the weight bench.”
Danny nods, looks away.
Considering my brother’s starched broadcloth shirt, and his lust to both embody and destroy convention, I can’t help but mumble, “That painful to win so many trophies, Danny? Life so bad out in chichi Belle Meade?”
Janine turns to me. “What’d you say, baby? Wait. Don’t answer, I don’t wanna know.” She wags the empty pretzel bowl at the bartender and starts to giggle. “Oh, god, do y’all remember the Chex Mix thing?” Her eyes dart to Danny and she covers her mouth, as if to take the question back. “Danny, sorry. Just slipped out.”
“Jesus, sis, no worries,” he says. “That was like thirty years ago!”
“Still,” she says. “I can’t believe he made you eat Chex Mix, every meal for a week, after I dropped a bowl of it into the furnace return. I swear, Dad making us suffer for each other’s mistakes was, like, evil genius.”
“Nah,” Danny says. “It was just an old Basic Training trick. They were mostly just old Basic Training tricks brought home.”
I look to the muted television above. Spies Like Us is on. Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. I have seen this movie a hundred times in my forty-two years. Despite our father’s having been the self-proclaimed “Baddest Lurp to Ever Sling a CAR-15” in Vietnam, it is this film, alongside The Hunt for Red October, that bookends my understanding of the Cold War.
“Frank’s the reason,” Janine tells me. “You act like nobody’s to blame, Bobby. Like we should just be sad. But dead or no, Frank’s still responsible for all our crap.”
“Frank” means our father; this “crap” means her marriages.
She continues, “Somehow, I thought it would stop today. Visualized, you know, the three of us holding on to each other, like, letting go? But it didn’t. It won’t.”
On the television, Chevy Chase performs his patented physical and facial comedy.
Janine is hung up on the moms that blotted her childhood. She chooses to forget that growing up we watched Caddyshack like fifty times, nuzzled up on a pillow pile on the floor in the den, everybody calling out the zingers, Dad impersonating Rodney Dangerfield, Danny steamrolling the heck out of Janine and me. . all of us laughing our faces off.
“I remember when I got my first period. .” she says.