Writing About Me

My brother and his girlfriend are moving into my father's garage. My mother is moving next door to my father--with her boyfriend. My grandfather has lost control of his bowels and mows through adult diapers like there's no tomorrow. My best friend's boyfriend of five years left her suddenly. My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow. The semester is officially done. A student recently told me I need to stop assigning readings about "cancer and dead babies and stuff."

These are some things that have been going on lately.

I know I haven't been here to tell you about them. I've been wondering why I stopped writing. I've been wondering that for a long time, actually. My reluctance to blog started shortly after I started up with The Lady-Killer. Why? Because The Lady-Killer and I spent most of the summer and fall of 2010 in bed, but we did not--contrary to Christine's opinion--develop bedsores. Also, living with someone takes up a lot of time. Seriously. There are days when I get in bed at night and think, "I wanted to do, like, eighty things all day, and yet I spent a good chunk of time lying on the couch reading a magazine and watching TLK play video games." The glorious thing about these thoughts though--and this is showing some real growth here, people--is that they generally do not bother me. The fact that I got almost no shit done would have driven me crazy, pre-TLK. But my world since TLK is like a whole new world, one where a psychiatrist prescribed me a whole mess of anti-anxiety meds. That's right. TLK is like a walking, talking anti-anxiety pill. Plus, he has a lip piercing that feels really good when you kiss him.

And here's another thing. I don't want to tell you some of these things. I mean, I do. I really do. I want to tell you about a million beautiful things about TLK--how he's so funny and charming, how he sometimes makes me giggle until I think I'm going to wet my pants, how he makes really good scrambled eggs because he puts cream cheese in them, how we sleep on the same pillow at night (a fact that, when I told my friends Emily and Christine, almost made them barf)--but I also don't want to tell you those things. I feel more private now. I want to hold some things close to the vest. (I mean, see that list of cute things about TLK up there? THAT IS NOTHING. TRUST ME.) But there's just something in me now that is saying Shhh.

I think it has something to do with me protecting TLK's privacy, and mine. I also think it has something to do with growing up. I mean, back in grad school, you could not shut me the fuck up. I wanted to talk about myself all day and night. And then after grad school, I wah-wah-wahed for months about how sad I was, about how rotten and dumb my life had become now that I had graduated and been forced out of the loving cocoon of the MFA program, where everyone is batshit crazy in really lovable (okay, mostly lovable) ways. I wah-wah-wahed over the Wily Republican, who I now, for days at a time, sometimes forget even exists (oh glorious, happy day that I never thought would come!). Then I wah-wah-wahed over having to take up waitressing when my adjunct gig was over for the summer. Oh my God, how did anyone stand me?

But now, I sort of don't want to talk about myself. And that's really startling to me, because I really love to talk, and I really love to talk about myself. (This, I think, has something to do with my family. Generally, during every phone call my mother and I have, we will spend 15 minutes detailing how stupid our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or other people out in the world are. Then one of us will pause and say, "Well, you know, because we're obviously perfect." Sitting in judgment of others and thus illuminating our own awesomeness is one of our favorite pastimes, right up there with badminton and pierogi-eating.)

Anyway, sometimes I miss writing about myself, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think, holy crap! That thing TLK is doing right now is so funny (or weird! or crazy! or ill-advised!) I really should write about it! (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: TLK is a lot like my brother. He's lovable in the same way and for similar reasons that have made a lot of complete strangers who read this blog fall in love with my brother. Therefore, I think he makes a beautiful muse.)

Still, I have struggled to get it right when writing about TLK. It's easier to write about my brother than it is to write about TLK. A lot of what's funny between me and TLK has to do with the origin of our relationship, and that's one of those private things I'm not willing to share right now. I don't really care about exposing my brother's weird foibles. The kid is related to me, but it's like he's actually not. It's actually like he's some glorious, horrible space alien that took over the room in our house that had been previously reserved for my mother's typewriter. That kid--the one who took over the typewriter room, which I used to think was its own kind of heaven? That kid I'll expose all day long. TLK though? I'd rather not. That one's all mine.

So that's part of it. The other parts I'm really still trying to understand. But right now I have the inclination to be quiet, but who knows how that's going to go and how long that's going to stick around? After all, when I go home this summer, my mother will be convincing my grandfather that he can never again leave the nursing home and return to his house and that she, in fact, will be renovating the house and moving in. (Wait. Did I say "will be renovating?" I actually mean "totally already did it and has already had new furniture delivered. Surprise, Grandpa!)

In addition, my brother and his girlfriend are consolidating all the things they went to the trouble to dig up for their new apartment, which they've only been in for one year, and they will be moving those things into a small room off to the side of my father's garage. They'll be living there for God knows who long, which means they'll be there when I arrive at my father's house for my usual summer R&R. I think this year my stay at Dad's house will be less like a quiet spa vacation and more like a sitcom staring a boy who once frittered away his life savings at a Hooters.

So maybe I'll be back, but maybe I won't. Either way, I wanted you to know that everything is good--more than good--and that I'm just wrapped up in it, loving it, and being quiet about it for right now.

Pink Lady

Last Wednesday The Lady-Killer called me up while I was at school and said, "Hey. How do you feel about going to New Hampshire?"

As a general rule, I feel pretty good about going to New Hampshire. It has no sales tax! It has liquor outlets! Its state motto is Live Free or Die! What else could possibly be needed to coax a person into a state?

So I told TLK I felt swell about going to New Hampshire. "And just what are we going to New Hampshire for?" I asked, hoping the answer was to buy liquor and shout the badass state motto at passers-by.

"To buy a car," he said.

Turns out the hours TLK spends skulking in the CARS AND TRUCKS section on Craigslist paid off. He'd found a car he was in love with. And it was a pretty serious love. When he showed me the ad, I could see hearts and rainbows and unicorns swimming in his big eyes.

"This car," he told me, "is fast."

"Yeah?"

"I mean FAST-FAST," he said.

"I don't doubt it," I said.

TLK loves fast. When his last car could no longer pass inspection because it was rotting, he and his friends tore everything "unnecessary" out, hollowing it out to be a rally car.

One day he and I went to his house, picked up his brother, and together we drove down to an old railroad bed that was now a rough gravel road that extended God knows where. TLK pointed his car toward the God knows where and asked which of us wanted the first ride.

His brother went first. And when they came back, the brother's face was flushed and excited. "I screamed!" he said. "Also, we were air-born!"

Then it was my turn. "Listen," I said as I buckled myself in, "if you kill me, my father is going to be very disappointed in you."

TLK nodded gravely and then, in the next second, he had us roaring down the road and we were transformed into nothing more than a spout of dust. And then we went air-born as TLK launched us over a bump.

I don't know what the appropriate reaction to a thing like that is, but the reaction my brain chose at that moment (and most moments since) was laughter. I squealed and I giggled and I buried my head in my heads.

When we got back to where we'd left his brother standing, TLK cracked a grin my way. "Just imagine if this was turbo," he said.

So it didn't surprise me at all last week that he decided in order to properly grieve for the loss of his beloved car (the one now turned in a hollowed-out shell of its former self), in order to properly process the loss, in order to move past the heartbreak, he needed to buy a car that would smoke his old car.

So I told him, yeah, okay, let's go to New Hampshire. Sure. Why not?

And so we did, and TLK inspected his car and then forked over the money for it and said, "I'll follow you home."

When we got home a few hours later, I parked my car and TLK pulled up behind me. I grabbed my purse and stepped out of my car. And then he gave me a gesture--a simple nod--that almost made my heart explode out of my chest. Here was a boy who was so pleased with himself, so happy, and he wanted to take me for a ride in his fast car, so he was giving me a nod, telling me, "Hey, Baby. Jump in." It was the world's most perfect nod, born of beautiful old films where the men wore leather jackets and white t-shirts and tight jeans, where they smoked cigarettes and slung a sun-tanned arm out the window of whatever smooth machine they were driving. It was American Graffiti meets a Bruce Springsteen video.

I went around, opened the passenger door. I slid into the seats--which were not normal seats but seats you'd find in a racecar--and strapped myself down.

One minute later, after TLK had driven us down the long road that circles the small airport around the corner from my apartment, we were sideways. The car was roaring, I was screaming, TLK was smiling as much as I'd ever seen him smile. We tore into a curve and the car slid through it gracefully, as if over ice.

It was then that I realized something very important about myself: I have always wanted to be this girl. I am the girl Milner gets stuck riding with in American Graffiti. I am a Pink Lady. I am, at all times, hoping to star in my own version of Grease. This would explain why I consistently disappointed my friend Greg in grad school when I chose rough-tough-working boys instead of, say, poets, which was who he thought I should be with. I said I wanted a man who could discuss literature with me, who would write poetry about the way my hair smelled or the way I looked coming out of the shower, but, really, honestly, deep down I wanted nothing to do with them and everything to do with someone who could get his hands dirty in a way most darling MFA boys will not.

If I'm completely honest with myself, I am certain this has something to do with the types of men I grew up around--my grandfather, my uncle, my brother, my father. My father, of course, isn't a rough-tough-dirty-man in the way that some of the others on that list are, but he grew up around cars. He grew up loving cars. He's the type of man who can identify the make, model, and year of any old car when it passes on the street. He's the type of man who, when I smile and ask him sweetly, will change my brakes for me.

So maybe I've always been looking for what I'm used to. And while I was in the sideways car, shrieking and giggling and saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" I realized that, hey, look at this. I've found something I've always been secretly looking for, and in finding it, I have managed to transform myself into the girls I always wanted to be, the girls I always identified with: the ones who would run down the stairs and into the car of a boy who's wanting to take them out, show them some fun, drive them fast along the dark country roads where no one else is around and all that's there is the long squeal of a tire and a quick flash of light in the place where, just seconds ago, a car had been.

Soiled

Sitting in the backseat of my father's car, on the way home from a day in Ontario, my brother leans to one side, lifts a cheek, and farts in the direction of his girlfriend.

She does not seem fazed.

I am in the front seat. I turn around and stare at him. "Adam!" I said. "Don't fart on your girlfriend! That's not nice!"

He farts again.

"You should be careful with that," I say. "You seem like you're pushing a little too much."

"He always does," his girlfriend says. "I'm always telling him 'Don't push! DO NOT PUSH!'"

"That's because I've pooped my pants three times in the last year," Adam says.

"What now?" my father says.

"Oh my God," I say.

"It's true," my brother says. He's delighted with the sudden turn in the conversation. Moments before he'd been sulking because he had gone off on an angry rant about some of his friends who were getting married, and the rest of us in the car had told him to shut the hell up, to stop getting so angry, to stop getting so worked up because he was going to have a heart attack. What bothered him the most was that we didn't agree with him, and he kept trying to make his point by raising his voice and repeating exactly what he'd already said.

"Okay, George Edward," my father said, invoking my grandfather's name. It's well known that my brother is my grandfather in lots of ways, both physical (looking at a picture of them at the same age is downright eerie) and emotional (neither can control their outrage, which they simmer in often).

"Yeah, George," I said. "Zip it back there. Enough out of you."

And then my brother really became our grandfather. He huffed and sighed and thrashed a little in the backseat, even when his girlfriend reached over to soothe him. He had himself a twenty second tantrum and then threw himself into the sulking. And this wasn't the first time. Half an hour earlier, he'd gone through the same cycle when he breathlessly transitioned from a lecture on how to make French onion soup into a lecture on gay men and how he's okay with gay men, how he's on their side, how he's in their corner--unless they're "gross about it"--and this, of course, prompted me and my father and Adam's girlfriend to tell him that was a bit homophobic and he better evaluate his attitude. Then he Georged us, yelled, huffed, thrashed, and sulked.

But now--now!--there is finally something on the table he's ready to talk about again, and that something is poop. He sits up a little straighter, squares his shoulders. "Want to hear how I did it?" he asks. "Want to hear how I pooped my pants three separate times this year?"

"No," I say.

"Yes," my father says.

"Okay." Adam cracks his knuckles. "So, the first time I was at work. I was closing up for the night, and I was sweeping the aisles, and I decided to let one go. I had really bad gas that day, and I needed to let some out. So I relaxed and just went for it. I blew out a really long, really loud fart. But at the end, there was a little surprise waiting for me."

"Oh my God," I say. "You pooped your pants at work!"

My father is laughing. He is bent over the steering wheel and laughing.

"One of the other times was just ridiculous," Adam's girlfriend says.

"How was it ridiculous?" Adam asks.

"You were standing three feet from the toilet when it happened!"

Adam grins. He laughs. "Oh," he says. "That time. Yeah." He pokes his girlfriend in the side. "I was in the bathroom getting ready for the day, and I was firing one off at her, but things got a little out of hand. I pooped my pants so bad there was no saving them."

"Good thing your mother doesn't do your laundry anymore," my father says.

Adam chuckles. "Oh yeah," he says. "That's true. She'd be finding little stink pickles all over the place."

"So was it anything like what you found in the bathroom today?" I ask.

It had been an eventful day in the public bathrooms in Port Dover. Early in the afternoon when my brother and father went in for a bathroom break, Adam came out real excited, real would up.

"You will NOT believe what I just saw in there!" he said.

My father started laughing. "Hush," he said. "Be quiet. Say it quietly. You don't know who it was."

"BE QUIET?!" my brother shouted. "BE QUIET?! DAD! SOME GUY SHIT HIS PANTS SO BAD HE HAD TO LEAVE THEM BEHIND IN THE STALL! THAT'S F-ING HILARIOUS!"

"What?!" I said.

"You're kidding!" Adam's girlfriend said.

"No," he said. He pointed back at the door. "Some guy shit himself so bad, it was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And his jeans were there, wadded up on the floor of the stall. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine pooping your pants that bad and abandoning ship?"

Of course, that wasn't the end of the story. Hours later, after we'd finished our buttery perch dinners at a picnic table on the beach, my brother went back to the bathroom. When he came out again, he was shaking his head.

"Jesus," I said. "Now what?"

He made a face. "Someone put his hands in the shit," he said, "and spread it all over the walls in there."

But now, my brother is telling his own story, his own pooped-his-pants-unexpectedly story, and I want to know if it is anything the same, if it was of the magnitude of what happened in the public beach bathrooms.

"No way," he says. "It was gross, but it wasn't THAT gross."

And then he turns his head toward the window, stares out into the Canadian fields that are still dotted with long-abandoned tobacco drying houses. A dreamy expression settles on his face, and it's easy to tell that he's thinking about his lack of bowel control and how it isn't as bad as the guy who cut loose in the public bathrooms, but there's a glimmer of something else there in his look--it's a little like he's impressed, a little like he's jealous that he doesn't have that story to tell the next time we're all gathered around a dinner table.

And Now a Story that Involves Wine, Vomit, and My Brother

Let me brief and honest: My last full day of spring break was not awesome.

At first it seemed promising. It went a little something like this: Broadway Market for pierogi and placek and rye bread and pounds of sponge candy, and then the whole world fell off its axis and went spinning off into space.

There was some family drama, and after that family drama unfolded my mother was left teary-eyed and demanding to know where we'd put the fucking wine. She went into the bathroom to cry for a little bit, and I stood in the kitchen with forty dollars of Chinese food still sitting untouched and pristine in its take out containers. My mother was upset and crying in her bathroom, and I was trying to yank a stuck cork from a stubborn bottle of wine.

This called for reinforcements.

HOLY SHIT, I texted my brother. YOU NEED TO COME HOME NOW. I NEED BACKUP.

It's not that I needed help with the cork--eventually I bashed that thing out of the neck of the wine and poured two glasses (a giant one for my mother, a small one for me)--but it was that I needed help with the drama. I am not very good at handling my mother's sadness. It's true. I've handled it poorly all my life--especially after my parents' divorce. Back then, I adopted the attitude that it was her own fault, she'd made her choice, now she had to live with it. Sometimes I looked at my mother and thought SUCK IT UP.

On my last full day of spring break, though, I was not thinking SUCK IT UP; I was thinking THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD I CAN DO TO MAKE MY MOTHER FEEL LESS SHITTY RIGHT NOW. I knew I would eventually need help and that I wouldn't be able to be a clown for long enough to make her forget her problems.

Thus the text to my brother.

He arrived three hours into my crisis control--which, it should be noted, is not very smooth or sophisticated. If anyone is ever hurt or sad, this is what I will do to try to soothe them: I will park it on the couch, mix a drink or pour some wine, and I will pat a knee or a shoulder or a head until it seems lame to continue to do so, and then I will mix another drink or pour some more wine, and then I will say something stupid and silly and inappropriate in hopes that the person I am getting drunk will laugh and forget, for just a second, whatever is making them sad.

But the family drama on this particular Saturday had made me sad, too, and I needed someone to come refresh me, too. If we were going to make it through this, we all needed to be at our best. And that was where Adam came in.

"So," he said, after arriving and sitting himself in front of me and my mother, "how drunk are you? I saw the two wine bottles on the counter."

"I'm not drunk," my mother said.

That was a lie.

"She's pretty drunk," I said.

"How much did she drink?" Adam asked.

"Well, I only had one glass," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh."

"I'm not that drunk," my mother said.

"Are you going to puke?" my brother said. He wrinkled his nose, thinking about the possibility. "What I'm saying is I don't really want to wake up in the middle of the night to hear you barfing into the toilet. It is right next to my room, you know."

"Adam," I said, "shut up. She can puke if she wants to puke. She's a grown woman."

"I don't want to hear it!" he said. "That's gross!"

"Oh, like you've never done it," my mother said.

My brother grinned and sat back in the chair. He cracked his knuckles and surveyed the floor of the living room. "Oh, I've done it before," he said.

"I know," my mother said. "You've had parties. You've had them here!"

"It's true."

"Gross," I said.

"Whatever," he said. "Have I ever told you two the story about the rug?"

"What rug?" my mother asked.

"The rug that is missing from this room."

"There's a rug missing from this room?" my mother asked.

"Yes. For, like, years."

"Liar!" she said. "There's no rug missing."

"Mother," Adam said, "do you mean to tell me you've never noticed that one of your runners is missing from the living room?"

She took a long sip from her wine.

"I puked on it," my brother said. "I was having a party, and the boys were here, and we were drinking, and I'd had a lot, and I couldn't make it to the bathroom, so I just leaned forward, opened my mouth, and vomited out a neat little pile of puke. RIGHT. ONTO. THE. RUNNER."

"You are vile," I said.

My mother started giggling.

"We were too drunk to do much of anything about it," my brother said, "so I told the boys to just leave it, and we'd worry about it the next morning."

"OH MY GOD!" I said. "You left puke sit over night!"

"I was trashed, Jess," my brother said. "What did you think I was going to do?"

My mother giggled harder. "What did you do with it?" she asked.

"In the morning, I rolled the rug up, put it in a bag, and we put it in the car and took it to the car wash."

"Holy shit," I said. "You took a puked-on runner to the CAR WASH?"

"Listen," he said, "it was a good idea. You know how they have the clips for the car mats? Well, I took the rug out of the bag, clipped it up, and then blasted the shit out of it."

"You sprayed vomit with a pressure washer," I said. "That's smart. Vomit everywhere!"

My brother nodded. "Yes," he said. "But it got clean, okay? And I rolled it up and put it back in the bag--"

"The puke bag?!" I asked.

He glared.

"Fine," I said. "Continue."

"I put it back in the bag, and I took it home, dragged it into the garage, and then I forgot about it," he said. "A few days later I was out there, and I realized I'd forgotten the rug. And there it was, in a dark corner, and the bag was really condensated. So I knew there were really only two possibilities now: That I'd open that bag, and I would find the rug all moldy and disgusting; or, alternatively, I'd open the bag and smell the worst old vomit smell that ever existed. So I just took that bag and threw it into the garbage can and buried it."

"My rug!" my mother said.

"You're disgusting," I said. "You threw out MOM'S RUG."

But my mother was laughing and spilling her wine and mopping it up and laughing some more. She was denying that there was a rug missing. She was saying she'd never noticed its absence. She was saying it wasn't true.

And what she wasn't saying was everything else that was in her mind at that moment--all the bad stuff--and at that moment, for that reason, I loved my brother very, very much.

Merry Christmas from the Stupid Girl

Let me be clear: I do not know Polish. My family is Polish, yes, and my grandparents infused some Polish words into my lexicon, but those were mostly words for food (kapusta! pierogi! placek!) or body parts (butt=dupa!) and thus were not enough for me to pick up anything substantial.

Upon hearing that I was Polish and could not speak the language, two of my old (perverted) customers at the diner--the ones who, when I asked them what they'd like to eat one night, gestured to my apron, which was slung over my hips, and said, "Oh, you know.")--took it upon themselves to teach me parts of the language. But they always chose the worst possible times. They'd test me on last week's lesson on a swamped Friday night, when I was running to and from the kitchen with my arms piled high with plates of fish fry. I was a very bad student. I'd always end up muttering something that was halfway correct or in no way correct, and they'd always look disappointed and tell me to study harder. "You have to listen to us," they'd insist. "You have to listen very carefully."

But I was less interested in listening to them and more interested in making it through the summer so I could get out of that diner and to Maine, where I would start my full-time teaching job. After all, it was possible these men were not being good teachers. It was possible that while they were telling me, "This is the phrase for 'good morning to you'" they were really telling me the phrase for "Your female bits look mighty delicious this morning, and I'd wish you'd take off that apron and service me right here in the dining room."

I didn't trust them, and I didn't trust their Polish.

And so my Polish is still rusty.

As it turns out, if I were a little better at speaking the language, I wouldn't have had to rely on my brother's girlfriend on Christmas. She was the one who ended up translating for me when my grandfather started hissing Polish words at me shortly after dinner, just as the cousins and I were setting up our annual Uno Smackdown in the living room.

Here's the deal: My grandfather has many things wrong with him--legs still riddled from a childhood bout of polio, heart disease, no peripheral vision due to stroke, bad lungs, general bowel craziness, etc.--but the one thing he takes the least care of is his diabetes. He hates taking his medicine, he hates pricking his finger, he hates having to care about the number that his meter beeps back at him. So mostly he does none of those things.

I was over at his house the other day--not because I am a good granddaughter, but because I had to give him something of his my mother had accidentally left at my apartment in Maine during her Thanksgiving visit--and while I was there I felt compelled to make his lunch and do his dishes. I knew he was supposed to be taking his medicine and worrying about his blood sugar, so I made him do it while I stood there and watched (or, more specifically, pretended to dry a pan for fifteen minutes), and so he did. When the number came back as 346, I asked if that was good or bad.

"Well," he said, "it means I'm about ten seconds away from a coma."

But he just doesn't care about those things, and that became even more clear on Christmas, when the cousins and I were sitting around waiting for the Uno to begin. Grandpa was in a recliner in the corner, watching us through slitted eyes.

When my cousin Sarah got up to get herself a raspberry candy, my grandfather said, "Hey. Give me one."

I watched as Sarah took one of the candies for herself and then lifted the whole bowl and transported them over to where he was sitting. He slipped his fingers into pile and drew out several candies that he immediately shoved in his mouth.

"Grandpa..." I warned.

"Be quiet," he said.

Later on, it was sponge candy. Sarah was heading back to the kitchen for some, and my grandfather requested that she bring him one. Actually, several. Actually, bring the whole plate.

Appealing to or guilting my grandfather wasn't doing the trick, so I said, "Don't do it, Sarah."

She looked between the two of us, and then my grandfather narrowed his eyes at me. He started mumbling something under his breath. It was garbled, fast, angry. It was Polish.

"Well, I don't speak Polish," I said. My voice was light, bright, cheery. "So here's a bonus: I don't know what mean thing you're saying about me right now!"

But my brother's girlfriend, whose very Polish grandmother has taught her more of the language than I'll ever know, was there to translate.

"He's saying, 'Shut up, stupid girl!" she said.

And I nodded, said, "That seems about right," and turned back to the game at hand.

Marvel at the Glory

Here's what I was greeted with bright and early on Christmas morning. The robe:



And if you're wondering if that's vodka-tea in that glass my brother's holding, you'd be right. He left it out overnight, and when he scuffed into the kitchen on Christmas morning he said, "I wonder how this tastes now. Want some?" And when I said I really did not want some he tried it himself. And that face he's making tells us it wasn't that great.

Because He Wanted It

I'm home. I'm back in Buffalo. ("I wish you wouldn't say that," Josh said. He was on the phone with me as I was crossing over into New York from Massachusetts. "You're misrepresenting yourself, you know. You're not from Buffalo. You're from the country. You grew up in a town an hour from Buffalo. Don't be a liar."

"Don't be a pussy," I said. "I can get to Buffalo in half an hour.")

Two days after I got home, my mother and I decided to spend a day making Christmas cut-outs and our family's (hard! ridiculous! pain-in-the-ass!) fudge recipe. Here's how that went: The oven started on fire and we ruined the fudge.

Later, my brother came home from work in a pissy mood. He's mad at our mother. He's avoiding her and not speaking to her. Why? Well, recently he passed the test he'd failed twice before--the test that allowed him to enroll in an intense one year nursing program his girlfriend had already gotten into--and this made him happy, but that happiness was short lived. Back when he started trying to get into the program, our mother told him that if he did get in, he could stop paying her rent, rent that he has been required to pay for a while now, since after he flunked out of auto mechanic school it seemed possible that he might just freeload off my mother forever. Since she has been collecting rent (forty bucks a week), my mother has been socking it away for Adam so that she can give it to him when he moves out. He doesn't know this. He has no idea that he has several thousand dollars saved up in his name for when he and his girlfriend get an apartment together. Surprise!

So, because he doesn't know this, and because he is under the assumption that my mother is collecting all his hard-earned Ass. Head Cashier money and then throwing fistfuls of it over her head as she rolls around in the rest on her bed, he is pretty angry because he came home and said, "Hey! I passed! Looks like I don't need to pay rent anymore!" and my mother said, "Uh, no. I said when you started the program you won't need to pay me rent anymore. You don't go to school until October." She told him to pony up the dough. He told her she was black and evil inside.

"I mean it!" he said. "You're black and evil for doing this to me, Mother!"

And then he stomped away and hasn't really spoken to her since (unless you count our family dinner on Sunday, when, after we finished our stir-fry, he brought out his recent acquisitions, a book called 400 Sauces and a book called The Encyclopedia of Cooking Ingredients, and gave us all a lecture on the superiority of European lobsters and the importance of a good Bernaise). He's still pissed about his money. He wants that $160. He's got stuff to buy. Important stuff.

Like a robe. A really good robe. A really, really good robe. This was at this top of his to-buy list this past week, and he made a purchase--sad because he didn't have an extra $160 to do it with--that he unveiled at dinner. He was chilly, he said, so he needed to put on a robe. Now, it's important to know that the child has a perfectly fine, perfectly good, perfectly normal robe already, but it's also important to know that this robe, this new robe, spoke to him. It called his name. It whispered in his ear: Adam! Touch me!

And Adam did. And he loved the robe. And he purchased the robe.

The only problem? It's a girl's robe. It's a red, satin-trimmed, fluffy-necked girl robe.

"Nice robe," I said.

"Thanks," he said. He petted it. He rubbed the fluffy neck against his cheek. "It's the best robe ever."

"It's also a girl's robe," I said.

"I don't care," he said.

His girlfriend rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

"You're wearing a girl's robe," I said.

"IT IS COMFORTABLE," he said. "IT'S THE MOST COMFORTABLE ROBE I'VE EVER TOUCHED. OKAY? I WANTED IT!"

"Okay," I said. "Fine."

And then he reached for some more duck sauce and another egg roll.

The End of the Semester: Notes

(1.)

I go to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then I am done, done, done.


(2.)

I call my father. I need gift ideas for his fiancee.

I say, "What does Kathy want for Christmas?"

He says, "She never tells me."

I say, "How about toilet paper? Do you think she'd like some toilet paper?"

I recently bought what I'll quantify as a WHOLE FUCKING LOT of toilet paper because, well, it was a good price. (I felt very thrifty, very Midwestern at the exact moment I was cradling the giant package of toilet paper in my arms and hiking it back to the registers. Really, I was channeling my inner Katy.)

When I arrived home with my whole fucking lot of toilet paper, I realized I didn't have enough room for it. I am in toilet paper surplus. I have more triple-roll spools than I know what to do with. Right now, they are in my closet, stuffed behind garment bags full of dresses.

"Toilet paper, huh?" my father says. "Well, sure. Now there's a gift. Who wouldn't love getting that?"


(3.)

I call my father again, later.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "Are you Christmas shopping?"

"I am doing the dishes," he says. "Hey. Guess what. We went to a wedding last night."

"Whose?"

"No one you know. A friend of Kathy's. Anyway, I skipped the wedding itself, but Kathy went. When we met up before we went to the reception, and she told me she had a surprise for me. Someone we had in common was going to be there, and we'd get to sit with them during dinner."

"Who was it?"

"Your brother."

"My brother?"

"Yeah. And you should've seen him." My father laughs. "That kid was a dancer last night. I've never seen him like that before. He was spastic. He danced with everyone... even the groom. I think he might've had one too many pops, if you know what I mean."


(4.)

So, there's this student. This student is a male, around my age, an auto guy. I think it's safe to say he has a crush on me. I make this assumption because of the following items: a.) Last weekend I received an e-mail from him that referred to me as "Doll" ; b.) he routinely asks if I'd like to hang out with him on the weekends, even after I've scolded him and told him to stop asking that because I'm his teacher, and he's my student, and NO ; c.) if I come over to help him, he likes to tell me I smell good ; d.) he's said, "So, I bet you have trouble with your guy students all the time, because, you know, you're hot and all." And then he waggled his eyebrows at me.

So, the other day in class, after one of my other students informed me she'd gotten me a Christmas present while she was down in New York visiting her boyfriend--"A boyfriend in New York," I said dreamily. "Swoon!"--the student with the crush said, "Well, I'm giving you your Christmas present next week."

"You got me a Christmas present?" I said. "There's really no need, you know."

"Oh, I didn't get it," he said. "I'm making it."

I think this is something I'm going to have to brace myself for.


(5.)

My grandmother sent a Christmas card the other day, and after I opened it and read it, I sat down to send a card in reply. When I was done, I realized what a poor job I'd done. I had written about how sad my students had made me this semester--what says Merry Christmas! more than an in-depth discussion of the decaying behavior and skill set of college-level students?!--and then I'd tried to change subjects by discussing the fun I was going to have next week when my friend Emily and I go Christmas shopping in Portland on the night they have free wine in all the stores.

When I was finished rereading it I knew I'd have to throw it out and start a new one. The end of the card--what with its shift in tone from downtrodden to upbeat, just when I'd started discussing Emily and all the good, glittering times we were going to have shopping--was just more evidence that I am a giant, hulking lesbian. And I figure grandma doesn't need to worry herself about that at Christmastime.

The Modern Man

(1.)

Over crab cakes in Damariscotta, my brother let it slip that he'd lost his license. Again.

I was eating a giant haddock sandwich, and I glared at him over the roll I'd just finished slathering with tartar sauce. "YOU LOST YOUR LICENSE?" I said. "For how long this time?"

The last time this happened, he'd lost it for a month. He'd gotten too many speeding tickets in a very short period of time, and the state of New York thought he could use a little break from anything vehicular.

"Six months," my brother said. He said this casually as he stuffed another crab cake in his mouth. "These are delicious," he said.

"SIX MONTHS?" I said. This time I turned to glare at my mother. She hadn't breathed a word of this to me in any of the calls we'd placed to each other in the days prior to their trip to Maine.

"What?" she said. She had her own crab cakes to contend with, and she busied herself with her own plate so as to look simple and innocent.

("He kept that news from me for a long time, too," my father told me tonight. "But why didn't Mom tell you? She obviously knew."

"Probably because she didn't want to give me any more reasons to ask the kid if he was an idiot," I said.

"Right," my dad said. "Of course.")

I put my sandwich down. "Are you an IDIOT?" I asked.

"It's no big deal," Adam said.

"NO BIG DEAL? SIX MONTHS?"

"Whatever," he said.

"Well, what happened?"

"I got a few too many speeding tickets in an unlucky time period."

"STOP DRIVING FAST."

"It's not that I drive fast," he said. "It's just that I don't pay attention. That's all."

"How do you get around now, without a car?" I asked. My brother has inherited my father's restlessness, and he's always moving, always going somewhere, always leaving one place for someplace better. I couldn't imagine him living his life without a car.

"Well, I can drive between set hours to work and back, and only within a certain range of miles. If I'm caught out of that, I'm done," Adam said. "Plus, I've got a driver, too." He poked his girlfriend in the side. She smiled at him over her pulled pork sandwich.

"It's going to get tricky soon," she said. "My car is not a good car in the winter."

I found that almost impossible. My brother's girlfriend drives a big old car that could, in a pinch, serve as a small tank in a small nation's budding arsenal.

"Isn't that thing pretty badass?" I asked.

"Oh, hell yes," my brother said.

"That's not exactly the problem," she said. "It's that it doesn't have heat."

"No heat?"

"Nope. None."

"How do you stand to drive it in the winter then?" I asked.

"Blankets," she said. "Lots and lots of blankets."


(2.)

Thanksgiving morning, my brother woke up twitchy. He prepared a pot of coffee in the coffee maker he'd packed and brought along with his fondue pot, and then he announced he was going to the gas station.

"I am going to get the paper," he said. "I want to look at the Black Friday ads."

My mother and I said yes, yes, sure, fine, whatever. We were busy. I was making a pumpkin cake, and she was making an apple pie. We didn't need Adam puttering around my small kitchen, underfoot while trying to perfect another brew.

So Adam and his girlfriend went down the street for the paper and came back ecstatic.

"Look at this!" my brother said. He shoved the ads in my face. "So thick!" he said. "We're going out! We're going out early!"

"Have fun," I said. By this time, I'd moved on to making biscuits. "I'll be here. At home. In bed. Warm. SLEEPING."

"It's going to be great!" he said, and then he and his girlfriend sat down to sift through the ads until they came to their favorite: Wal-mart.

My brother held the paper up to his nose and took a whiff. "Ohhhh," he said reverently. "Wal-mart."

I leaned over to my mother. "I will kill him before the day is out," I whispered.

"Make your biscuits," she said.

Ten minutes later, it was settled. My brother had seen enough. He'd seen exactly what he wanted to see. There were indeed great deals to be had at Wal-mart. So good, in fact, he was nervous about them. He figured everyone in their right mind--except me, except our mother, who were so clearly addled--would be staking their claim at Wal-mart and that meant he and his girlfriend would need to head out extra early to guarantee that they got the things they wanted (a laptop for her, a video camera for him).

"We're leaving at nine," he announced.

"NINE?" my mother said.

"That seems drastic," I said.

"It's necessary," he insisted. "Trust me. I've got a feeling this is gonna be big."

And it was big. When my brother and his girlfriend, still full from dinner, still full from the two desserts we forced on them before they left, arrived at Wal-mart just after nine, they were not the first people standing in line. The store would open at midnight, but the items could not be sold until five AM. They would simply have to stand in line to prepare for the lunging after the workers unwrapped the stack of deals.

And that's exactly what they did. My brother and his girlfriend had to stand on opposite sides of the store for their items, and they had to raise their hands when they wanted to use the bathroom, and they had to get a hall pass from the person in charge of their line, and they had only twenty minutes to use the facilities, and if they weren't back in twenty minutes--and the time was clearly recorded on their pass and on a master checklist--they lost their spot in line and, thus, their deal.

But they mustered through. My brother--the boy without a license--and his girlfriend--the girl without a heated car--spent over four hundred dollars on electronics.

Later, as my mother and I combed Freeport for deals at the Banana Republic outlet, I abruptly stopped admiring the silk scoop neck I was certain would look fantastic with a pencil skirt at a holiday party.

"Mother," I said, "why the hell did they just spend all that money on electronics instead of, you know, a car with heat? Doesn't that seem like the more important item to have during a Buffalo winter?"

"Don't think about it," my mother said. "I try not to anymore. We'll just drive ourselves crazy."


(3.)

My brother and his girlfriend slept in after their escapade at Wal-mart and met up with us later that afternoon. Adam called when they rolled into town, just as my mother and I were finishing up our mid-afternoon lobster stew.

When my mother got off the phone she looked exasperated.

"What now?" I asked.

"Your brother," she said. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

"What about him?"

"He's wearing his Crocs," she said.

At that moment, we both turned and stared out the window. It was pouring so bad that the road had turned lake-ish in spots.

"His feet are sopping wet already," she said.

"Jesus!" I said.

"Now, now..." she said.

"No! I mean Jesus!" I said. "Does that kid THINK? Like, EVER?"

"Jess," she warned. "Stop. We can't change it now. Don't say anything to him about it, okay? It'll only cause a fight."

But fifteen minutes later, my brother was standing in front of me in the vestibule of LL Bean, and he was hopping from one foot to the other, trying to force water out of his shoes.

"Are you an idiot?" I asked.

"I didn't know it was raining," he said.

"I have a giant sliding glass door in my living room," I said. "How could you not notice it was raining?"

"I just didn't, okay?" He flicked his Croc at me.

"And then when you went downstairs to go to the car--you didn't notice it then?" I asked. "You didn't notice it the minute you stepped outside?"

"I did," he said. "I noticed."

"But you didn't turn around and walk the fifteen steps back upstairs to change your shoes?" I asked.

He glared at me.

"Whatever," I said. "Fine."

"I'm going upstairs," he said. "I'll be in Fishing. See you in eight hours."

But things didn't get any better for the kid. When he'd had his fill of LL Bean, we figured we'd take off for Portland, get some dinner, duck into a few of the cute shops in the Old Port. But it was raining even harder then, and my mother and I--under the cover of an umbrella, coats, and appropriate footwear--were soaked by the time we got to our car. Adam was almost drowned.

But he's nothing if not resourceful. When we got to Portland, he--suddenly inspired, suddenly giddy with invention--grabbed two bags from the earlier Wal-mart excursion, stuck his feet in them, and then tied them around his ankles. He slid the Crocs over the bags, and he traipsed around the Old Port and sat through dinner with the Wal-mart logo beaming up at anyone who passed us by. And he didn't mind in the least.

Hiatus

I turned twenty-eight on Sunday. It happened without a lot of fanfare--mostly because my grandmother and the man she married were in town. They'd come with my father, who dropped them off with their friends from Florida, who have a spring-summer-and-fall-home in Maine, and we went back down to retrieve them on Sunday morning so they could spend my birthday with me.

My father and I had spent the day before trying to make whatever fanfare we could, which included taking a trip to the very famous Red's Eats for lobster rolls and taking a trip to Popham Beach for some beautiful Maine coast and taking a trip to Freeport to shop and fill up on truffles from the Lindt outlet, but when we picked my grandmother and grandfather up, the day, my actual birthday, became less about fanfare and more about shouting.

My grandmother's husband can't hear very well--even with his hearing aid, which he took out and polished during lunch--and most of the day was spent having conversations like this one:

Grandma: This lobster is delicious.

Grandpa: WHAT?!

Grandma: I said, THIS LOBSTER IS DELICIOUS.

Grandpa: DELICIOUS?

Grandma: YES. YES! DELICIOUS! THAT'S WHAT I SAID!

--Pause--

Grandpa: I accidentally shot a deer last weekend.


We took them to the coast for lobster, and then we drove them to my town and gave them a tour of the high points, which included the college, the hotel where they'd spend the night, and Home Depot. After that, we took them back to my apartment and my grandfather fell asleep in my recliner and my grandmother watched me and my father polish my new dresser with Old English.

When my grandfather woke up, my grandmother cut the angel food cake she'd brought for the occasion and my father put on Fox News so my grandfather could get his fix. We ate the cake and watched a doctor discuss the merits of vegetable cleansers you can now buy in the produce section of grocery stores. Then my grandmother announced she was ready to go to back to the hotel to get ready for bed. It was 6:10 PM.

It had just been one of those days. It was nice to see my grandparents, of course, and doubly nice to see my father, but the few days before their arrival had been pretty wretched and I'd spent most of my birthday trying not to cry.

After all, it's been an interesting time since I came back to Maine at the beginning of August. Some pretty decent things started happening to me--"Hey!" my office-mate said. "Maybe Saturn's cutting you some slack!"--and those things continued to go pretty well until they stopped going anywhere at all. All the lovely, all the good, all the sweet disappeared a few days before my family's arrival, before my birthday.

And it's pretty well documented that I don't do well with with change and affairs of the heart. Especially affairs of the heart. I get nervous and critical of myself. I analyze. I analyze. I analyze. But worst of all is this: I hope. I hope an awful lot. I tie myself up in that hope, bind it right up to my throat, choke myself with it. I think, Maybe! Maybe! Maybe!

It's never maybe. It's always never. And I'm left feeling wrung out.

Today the chair of my department sent around an e-mail asking everyone to get downstairs to gather for a cheesecake in honor of my birthday. It's the twenty-eighth birthday, right? the e-mail said. I wrote back to say that, yes, it was, and that I hoped twenty-eight was going to be a bit better than twenty-seven and that I had high hopes for it; after all, eight is my lucky number.

Honey, another member of the department wrote back, they're all lucky. We just have to be able to recognize the luck. And that was enough to make me put my head down on my desk and cry for a few minutes before I went off to get a slice of turtle cheesecake.

What am I trying to say? I guess just this: I am tired. I am confused. I am busy cataloguing my faults and trying to determine how I ended up here again. I am too cluttered in the head. I want quiet. I need to shut myself up, to stop listening to all that chatter kicking around my brain. I want to silence that very Catholic part of myself that's saying, You know this happened because you're a bad person, right? Because you don't care about anyone but yourself. Because you are rotten. Because you're a brat. Because you don't do anything good for anyone. You're getting what you deserve.

It's too much. And I don't want to be like that anymore, although that seems like a lofty wish. I know that no matter how much quiet introspection I muddle through, no matter how much therapy I will eventually enroll myself in, no matter how much time I sit around trying to make myself still, I will always be a version of this girl. But for now I'm going to try to force myself to be quiet. This blog is going on a small hiatus until I can come back and tell the complicated story of how I did it again, how I ended up feeling like something that has just spent the last month turning over and over and over in the surf and saltwater until it made it back to the beach, to the sun and wind that will drink from it any of the water that kept it alive and moving in the first place.

Difficult: Four About My Grandfather

(1.)

This weekend at my cousin's graduation party my grandfather tried to explain where he got another of my cousin's nicknames from. He calls her "Schwartzy"--short for Schwarzenegger because, apparently, he had predicted that she will marry someone with a very long name.

"You can predict who we're going to marry, huh?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said.

"Okay," I said. "Go ahead. Who am I going to marry?"

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "A monkey," he said.

"A monkey?"

"Bozo the Baboon," he said. "You're going to marry Bozo the Baboon."


(2.)

At the same party, my aunt told us this story:

One day after work she picked up my grandfather after work and took him to dinner. At dinner, he was unable to concentrate on his food because he was too distracted by the girl--"She couldn't have been more than fourteen," my aunt said. "I swear!"--who was leaning over into the cooler to scoop ice cream.

"That's right," my grandfather muttered under his breath. "Keep leaning. Keep going. Farther over. Oh yeah, that's good. That's right."

Later, after dinner, he mentioned he'd recently seen a nice Jeep for sale over on the Indian reservation and he was wondering if my aunt might take him over there. She said fine, she'd take him. She was tired and she hadn't yet been home that day, but she wanted to make the old man happy--she hasn't been around him all her life, considering she married my uncle maybe only 10 years ago, and she hasn't hit her limit yet--so she asked him if he was certain he knew the way to where they were going because she didn't.

He said sure.

He lied.

He got them lost.

She stopped for directions, and the man in the gas station said it would take another forty minutes to get where they needed to go. Still, she took him.

When they arrived at the reservation, my grandfather found the Jeep he was interested in--why? Because he wants one, but only to use in the field; he swears only the field (yeah right)--and he toddled over to it and started touching it.

"There's not a for sale sign on it," my aunt said. "You're sure it's for sale?"

"No," my grandfather said. "I guess I was wrong. I guess it's just someone's Jeep."

And then he tried to lift the hood to look at the engine.


(3.)

He wants a Jeep. He wants wheels bad. But he has had a stroke. His vision is iffy. His doctor wrote a letter that revoked his license. Still, still, still, that man swears he is fine, he is good, he can drive, he wants something he can pilot. He says he's in the market for a Jeep, as if we could forget the three flat-tired ones that have sunk into the ground behind his house. These are the Jeeps he drove near the end of his career as a driver, and each is busted in a unique way from his string of "minor accidents." He routinely drove into the picnic bench outside his favorite diner. He routinely clipped passing mail trucks or concrete mixers or Mazdas.

And if no one is willing to get him a Jeep, he's ready to compromise. He'll take a motorized bike.

"That way," he says, "if I have an accident, I'll only end up killing myself."


(4.)

"You know," my mother said at the family party, "when people at work ask me to describe my father, I just say, 'He's difficult.'"

And Then He Mentioned He Might Shit on My Seats

At 2:00 the other day my mother called me and said, "Hey. You want to come out for dinner?"

I said sure. Of course I did.

Then there was this. She said, "Bring your grandfather."

My grandfather lives next door to my father, in the house he has let go to pot since my grandmother's death in 2003. For the entirety of his life, my grandfather never had to make his own food, tidy his own house, do his own laundry, take care of his bills and other important matters. But after grandma was gone, suddenly he was faced with an important decision. Either he did the stuff he never had to do, or he didn't do it and live in squalor.

He chose squalor.

The house is filthy. People--my uncle, his wife, my brother, my mother--come to tidy it, come to tell him he can't keep living like this, but because they come, and because they have picked up where my grandmother left off, he doesn't see any reason to shape up.

A few weeks ago my brother went over to the house to make sure grandpa's medicines were lined up for the week ahead. He came prepared to do a little cleaning, too, since grandpa has been known to shirk even the most basic of normal cleaning duties--like keeping his urine in the bathroom. He, like his father before him, had, for a while, taken to urinating in a bucket kept in the living room, by his recliner, where he no doubt watches hours of pornography like he was recently when my mother came by for a scheduled visit.

Anyway, when Adam showed up to our grandfather's house, he found the man watching television while the kitchen surfaces crawled with maggots. The man--who is capable of getting up and putting his uneaten food in the trash, who is capable of running a sponge over spilled spaghetti sauce, who is capable of taking the trash from his house into the garage; and I know this because he is capable of walking down to the back lawn to check on his garden, to water his plants, to climb on the tractor and mow patches of the field in his backyard--the man chooses not to do any of those things. And so there are maggots. Maggots my brother had to clean up. Rotten food my brother had to hold while he searched for a trash can that was no longer in the house. Messes he--and everyone else--has to clean up.

When I hear these things, I get so angry I can hardly breathe. I recognize that I have it easy, that I'm not here, that I don't have to deal with the man on a daily basis, that I am not his son or his daughter, both of whom had to live with his cruelty and indifference for years, and therefore I should suck it right up and do what little I can do--like transporting the man to my mother's house for a spaghetti supper on a Sunday night--but sometimes that seems like the most exhausting thing I could ever ask myself to do.

And so I was angry at my mother when she asked. But I, after a few hours of sulking, agreed to do it. I went over to his house and went to the front door to collect him. He came down tottering down the hall, shrunken, skinny, wearing suspenders to keep his pants up around his waist. He looked sad, pathetic, a hangnail of his former self, but I wasn't fooled.

I made nice, loaded him into my car, and then held awkward conversation for thirty minutes about the following things: bird shit, elderberries, hay baling, and his cat. He didn't ask me a single question about myself. He didn't wonder how I was doing up in Maine, how the semester had gone, how my writing was coming along. He didn't wonder about anything. But at the end of the drive, as we sat at a stop light near the turn for my mother's house, he did let me know one crucial thing about himself.

"I sure hope we get there soon," he said. "If we don't, I think I'll just shit on your seats."

"What?!" I said.

"I've got to go to the bathroom," he said. "And I'd hate to leave that kind of mess on your seats." The way he said it, though, made me think that was a fairly big lie, that he wouldn't actually mind doing such a thing. He was, after all, past embarrassment, and it might've been the most interesting anecdote of his week.

"WE ARE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER," I said. "JUST HOLD IT."

He held it, and when we got to my mother's house, he spent the next twenty minutes in the bathroom, while the rest of us sat on the back porch looking down into our plates of spaghetti.

Later, after we'd pushed back from our plates and were sitting and listening to my brother tell one of his stories--this one about taking his girlfriend on a sketchy trip to find an unmarked graveyard that was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of dead fetuses that had been extracted in illegal, quick, and dirty abortions--my mother noticed the bruises on my leg (fall) and arm (collision with kitchen wall).

"Jess," she said, "where did all those bruises come from?"

"She always bruises easily," my brother said. "You know that."

"It's true," I said. "I do. But these are from substantial things. This one," I said and twisted around so everyone could see the black and blue circle that marked my upper arm, "is from running into the corner in the kitchen the other day. You wouldn't believe how bad it hurt."

My grandfather, who was sitting next to me, turned to consider the bruise. "Oh yeah?" he said. Then he raised his index finger and jammed it into my arm, straight into the center of the bruise.

I saw white behind my eyes. It hurt just as bad as when I had first hit the corner and slumped into the wall, my breath knocked out of me. I wanted to hit the old man back, to hurt him like he'd hurt me, but I couldn't do that, and I couldn't say anything either because that's not what we do in this family. We let that man hurt us, and we press our lips shut and just let him do it again. And again. And again. And he will because that's what he knows best, that's what he loves, that's exactly his favorite thing in the world.

A Conversation with My Brother

My brother called me today, which is weird. My brother never calls me. He is far too busy updating his Favorite Light Beers List or buying knock-off cologne or reading books titled How to Care for Your Dwarf Rabbits--which was exactly what he read on the flight down to Miami ("What the hell are you doing reading a book about dwarf rabbits?" I asked him. "What the hell are you doing reading Brides magazine?" he asked.)

When I saw it was Adam--if he calls, a picture of him holding my mother's cat pops up on my phone--I knew it could be one of two things: tragedy or bizarreness. Here's how it went:

Me: Hey.

Adam: Hi. Listen, I'm in a post office, so I am going to have to talk really quietly.

Me: Okay.

Adam: Okay, okay. I'm getting my passport. I'm filling out the form. I know Dad's birthday is in June, but I can't remember the day.

Me: Dad's birthday isn't in June.

Adam: Sure it is! I know that when Father's Day rolls around, I have to save double because Dad's birthday is right after it.

Me: (sighing) This is why I call you every year before Mom and Dad's birthdays.

Adam: It's really not in June?!

Me: It's in May. May 28th.

Adam: Oh, that explains it. It's the month after father's day.

Me: ADAM! FATHER'S DAY IS IN JUNE!

Adam: Oh. Oh. Right! April-May-June. Yeah. May comes before June.

Me: YES.

Adam: I'm a retard.

Me: And you know when Mom's is, right?

Adam: July?

Me: Hey! Good!

Adam: Yeah. July 14th. I never forget that one.

Me: Oh my God, Adam. Mom's birthday is July 28th. Our parents share the same day for their birthdays. The 28th. It's not that hard to remember.

Adam: Well, I'm seriously retarded.

Dirty Old Man

"Your uncle's on vacation for a week," my mother says when I call her this morning, "so I've got Grandpa Duty."

"Oh yeah?" I say.

"Yeah. I started yesterday and I'm already sick of it," she says.

This seems reasonable to me. After all, I know what a pain in the ass my grandfather can be. Just last night, for example, I had a dream about him that seemed to sum him right up. In the dream, he showed up after I had just finished baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies and frosting a dozen sprinkled cupcakes. He walked right into the kitchen and sat in a chair in front of those forbidden sweets and reached out for one.

"GRANDPA!" I said. "You can't have any of that!" I swatted his hand away from the cupcakes.

He looked at me and then back at the cookies, the cupcakes. He reached again.

"No!" I said and hit his hand again. "No! No! No!"

The dream was pretty accurate. My grandfather is a whiner, a big overgrown baby who will keep reaching for the things that are bad for him, even after he's been told not to. When my mother tells me she is already tired of her father's antics and she is only a day and a half into her duties, it doesn't surprise me one bit.

"So, what's that been like?" I ask her.

"Ugh," she says. "I went over there yesterday afternoon, and when I walked through the door there was a porno playing blaring from the living room."

"GROSS!" I say.

"It gets worse," she says. "He came trudging out from the bathroom and started talking to me like it was no big deal. I could hear the girl moaning. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I said, 'Dad, what is that?'"

"Oh God."

"And he said, 'Oh, that's one of my adult movies.' He didn't even go turn it off. He just wanted to sit there with me and have a conversation with that playing in the background. His daughter! He wanted to have a conversation with his daughter while a porno blared!" she says.

"I'm going to throw up," I say.

"Yeah, so was I," my mother says. "I finally had to tell him it was disgusting and that I was going to go shut it off."

"Inappropriate!"

"So inappropriate," she says. "He's getting weird. He's a really dirty old man."

"And today you're making him a meatloaf," I say.

"Yeah," she sighs. "And today I'm making him a meatloaf."

Add This to the List of Things I Never Again Want to Hear Him Say

Last night while we were at dinner with my cousins, my brother decided to tell a story in which he was trying to render the loveliness, the sublimeness of something he had recently eaten. Instead of using the wide expanse of figurative language available to him, he decided to go a simpler route. A more disgusting route. He brandished his fork in the air, took a sip of his beer, and said, "Well, guys, it was so good, I almost came."

It was all I could do to keep myself from putting a fork in my eye.

Thanksgiving: A Play in Four Acts

Act I: The Arrival

We open on my uncle's kitchen. My uncle is carving a turkey. A smoked ham is already sliced and waiting on the stove. There is Southern gravy--floating thick with giblets and hard-boiled egg, his wife's favorite--in a large pot. A sweet potato casserole that would make you see God is steaming on one of three tables.

Enter the Cousins. There are six of us. We are a little misbehaving gang. Five minutes after our arrival, my brother has already cussed fifteen times, none of those times discreetly. "Adam!" my mother has to keep saying. "Adam! ADAM!"

My cousin Aaron, who talks sass like no one else, interrupts one of my stories to ask if I ever, ever, ever shut up.

"I will kill you," I say, but I am kidding. I am in a good mood. After all, I have already pulled kittens off the back porch and cuddled them under my chin. The kittens are Abbey's half-siblings. Her mother, it appears, gets around.

Now that I'm in the kitchen, I wonder why there are three tables crammed into the currently-being-renovated-room. I am not entirely certain we know enough people to sit in that many chairs. "Who's coming to dinner?" I ask.

My uncle explains that he and his wife--a slow-talkin' Tennessee lady he met while working in the South--have somehow signed on to cater the wedding of someone they know from work, and--surprise!--those people are coming to dinner to test their food out before agreeing to the catering.

I have questions--who tests out a caterer's food on Thanksgiving; since when has my uncle been a caterer; don't these people have family dinners of their own to deal with; who comes over to a co-worker's house on a major holiday--but that will have to wait. There's another surprise!

My uncle looks over his shoulder, not stopping his turkey carving, and mouths the words THEY. ARE. BLACK.

For a moment I think I have hallucinated. For a moment I think I am getting my leg pulled. Everyone knows what an awful sort of racist my grandfather is. If pain and embarrassment were amusing, it would be sort of funny if someone other than the white people he was related to sat down for a holiday dinner with my grandfather--especially if that dinner involved giving thanks and expressing love and tolerance. Ha! Ha! The thought of that is mildly amusing and not bad fodder for a story, a novel, a play.

Then I realize my uncle is not laughing and that he is instead flaring his eyes in a terrified sort of way.

"Oh Jesus," I say.

My mother's boyfriend calmly gets up and takes his glass--not a wine one, but a giant plastic pop cup--over to the counter and pours himself a tall drink of White Zinfandel. When I get up to follow suit, he says, "Yup. Keep pouring."

Act II: The Dinner

My grandfather arrives at the exact same time as my uncle's co-workers. I can't imagine worse timing. I am in the living room when it happens, and I see my aunt trying to lead my grandfather--who is tapping his cane over ice--to the house. I see the co-workers headed to the house, too, and they are carrying a small child bundled in winter finery. This makes me even more nervous because if there's anything my grandfather hates more than black people it is black people who have procreated and thus contributed to another generation of black people who will go on ruining his country long after he is unable to complain about it.

I skitter away from the living room, back into the kitchen. "Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus," I say.

When my grandfather finally makes it into the room, everyone starts talking all at once about everything. His pills! The weather! The pie! His dead wife! Anything that cannot even remotely be brought back to any race, cultural group, or religious sect that my grandfather despises. If we can just bamboozle him! If we can just keep him dazzled for an hour! Maybe we'll all make it out alive!

It is the child that makes me the most worried. He is the cutest thing I have ever seen, what with his little sneakers and little jeans and little holiday sweater. He is three and just learning to talk, and whatever he does say comes out loud, shrieky, and sort of wrong. I want to pick him up and tickle him and listen to him giggle. I sense, however, that my grandfather wants to talk about his hair--I can sense the words nappy and afro on his tongue--and I start guzzling wine and praying that our small corner of the world will suddenly crack open and suck the whole family into a fiery abyss so at least our deaths are quick.

This does not happen. But the Cousins act up and say foul things and cavort in a manner that makes it hard to hear anything that is going on over at the adult table. When pie is served, everyone is still in one piece, no one is crying, and I take this as a good sign.

Act III: Moaning

The Cousins have eaten so much and so quickly that we have all made ourselves sick. Sick as dogs. We cannot get comfortable. We arrange ourselves in different locations, trying to find a place that allows us to be the least nauseous that's possible. We try sitting next to the Christmas tree, in the parlor, on couches, in high-backed chairs. We finally settle on the floor directly in front of the bathroom, just in case anyone needs to go shoot turkey and stuffing from their mouths, which, considering the way my brother is moaning and writhing, might just happen. No, really:

Act IV: The Departure

We are sitting in the back living room. The adults are sitting in the front living room, down by the tree, and they are watching TV. They are talking adult things. No one is screaming, shouting, or cursing, so we assume my grandfather is being made--somehow--to be quiet.

The Cousins are playing Uno. My brother is discussing all the bathroom trips he's made this evening. He is cataloguing the results of those bathroom trips. He's talking about poop and smelly farts. He is making my girl cousins squeal Gross! Gross! Gross!

He occasionally drops a sentence or two about how much sex he and his girlfriend are having.

"Just kill me," I say.

I say that for several reasons. First, eww. Second, this is the most nervous I've felt in a long time--and I've recently gone out to lunch with The Boy From Work, and the moment before I opened the door and saw him for the first time since we broke up was a pretty sweaty moment--and I feel like we're all sitting around waiting for something to go wrong.

During a lull in the game, my brother needles me in the ribs. "Just look at him," he says. "He's dying to say something. You can tell." Then my brother slaps a Draw Four Wild onto the pile and turns to my cousin Aaron. "Take that, Fuck Head," he says.

After an hour or two of digestion--during which the sweet little three year old has torn around the living room, chasing after the cat, climbing under the Christmas tree, plucking off parts of my aunt's massive Christmas village--my uncle's co-workers are ready to go. They plop their son into his snow boots and winter coat. They pull a hat over his head. They say goodbye, wave, thank everyone for everything, say how full they are, and then they shut the door behind them.

All the Cousins' heads whip around to see our grandfather, who is sitting like some shrunken king in a chair angled directly at the television, but most of us are too far away to hear him. Still, his lips are moving, and they are moving fast and quick.

My brother, who is sitting closer to him than any of us, widens his eyes. He rolls those eyes to the ceiling. He shakes his head. "You don't want to know," he says. "You just don't."

But in that moment I am thankful for that small mercy, for the fact that he at least kept his mouth shut while guests were there, for the fact that he didn't ruin their holiday and send them away from our family thinking, What the hell is wrong with them? Just who do they think they are inviting us over and letting that happen?

And already we are moving on, blocking him out, sliding more red-yellow-green-blue Uno cards across a towering pile, saying take that! and ha! and suck it! and, really, it's not a bad way to spend a night. In the back living room, we are all getting our assess whooped at a game we used to play four hours with our grandmother--a woman we loved more than anything ever--and in the front living room, my grandfather is spilling hate from his lips, but for once we don't hear it.

I Imagine There Will Be A Lot of Awkward Silences

My grandfather was raised by a woman who got her kicks off drowning kittens in front of her children and grandchildren. I never knew the woman, but that--and heaps of other evidence--makes me come to the conclusion that she probably wasn't the most nurturing soul. This is probably part of why my grandfather is the way he is: full of rage and hate.

And I was thinking about this today as I stood crammed up against a wall in a funeral home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a memorial service was being held for the chair of our department's father. There were so many people in attendance they spilled over into a back room, and even that wasn't enough to contain them all, so the funeral directors set up another room, not in view of the podium, where the visitors could watch the service on an in-house television feed. To say that this man, our chair's father, was a wonderful and beloved man is the biggest underestimate in the world. He was worshipped.

I'd never met him, but I understood from the way people were acting, from the stories that were told, that this was a man you'd love to know. Which, of course, prompted me to wonder what exactly would happen at my grandfather's service. I felt slightly guilty wondering about this, especially considering my grandfather doesn't exactly seem to be going anywhere. He's had awful health for pretty much his entire life (polio, heart disease, emphysema, hypoglycemia; he's had strokes, heart problems, breathing problems; he smoked cigarettes for 40-some years, but of course never developed cancer, although my grandmother did--twice, and the final time killed her), but he's grouched his way through it all. He's yelled at his family, at paramedics, at nurses, at doctors--in fact, at his most recent surgery, my grandfather decided to call his doctor a fag--but he's still made it through in the face of all that sourness.

So what can I assume will happen at his wake, his funeral? Will it be well attended? Will the people there come for him or for us? Will an entire town turn out to say one last goodbye to the man who called them all faggot assholes, queer shits, mouthy bitches? Will we put a good picture in a gilt frame, balance it on a casket, and watch as people come forward to look fondly on that snapshot of him in better health and times?

Most importantly, how will I feel? Ever since the Christmas that changed everything, I have not wanted to be anywhere near my grandfather. It is awkward and awful. He wants to go on pretending nothing happened. He wants to go on being the same man he will always be. And I only talk to him now because I was forced to when my grandmother got sick and died.

In our family history, there are a million moments--both big and small--that I'd rather forget because he somehow ruined them, but there are other things to consider, too. At one time, I was my grandpa's girl. There is a famous family story that involves a day shortly after I came home from the hospital. My grandfather packed me carefully into my carrier and drove to his favorite breakfast place--a place where anyone who was anyone in town dined on the weekends--and walked me from table to table, showing me off like I was the best baby the world had ever seen. When people tell that story, my grandfather will break in and say, "I was ten feet tall that day."

He spoiled me. I was his only grandchild for a good long time, so I had his undivided attention and affection. He took me for special trips on his tractors and jeeps back into the family woods, where he would teach and quiz me about the different types of trees and animals. Whenever we went to town, my grandfather would find occasion to duck into one of the gas stations and fish out our favorite treat: ice cream sandwiches. He'd often come back to the car nibbling the soft, chewy cookie edges of his, and I'd squeal, "Did you get me one? Did you get me one?" and he'd make a big production about no, he hadn't, he'd forgotten, he was sorry, he'd get me one next time, did I want a bite of his? And as I crossed my arms and pouted, he'd tell me to take a look in his jacket pocket, and that's where I'd find my own ice cream sandwich--a little melty, a little sticky, but delicious nonetheless.

I'm not sure how I'll match all that up in my head when I finally need to, when I finally need to face his absence. I'm not sure how I'll do it because I can't now. I don't understand how it is you can go from loving someone so completely, so unconditionally, to wishing to be anywhere else but in the same room with that person because he has done things to you that are so hateful, so evil, so awful you wish you weren't related.

And it's not just me. It's the whole family and everyone he's ever come into contact with. How will we all handle it? How are we going to approach that day? I'm almost fairly certain that the service will feel absolutely nothing like the one I attended today--one that made me want to cry because I felt just how much everyone in the main room, the overflow room, and the television room would miss that man, that good man who loved them all more than anything.

Thirteen Year Old Boys

I don't really remember my brother as a thirteen year old boy. What I do remember about my brother is that he has always been the way he is, no matter what age he was. Adam's behavior is ageless and without period. What he was as a thirteen year old boy was mostly like what he is now, except with less money and less women calling him at all hours to tell him Adam, I love you! Adam, you're so hot! Adam, you're so fun!

When my brother was thirteen years old I was eighteen. I was in college. Our parents had just divorced, and so my brother was living a divided life. Some days he would ride the school bus home and other days my mother would pick him up and drive him to her new apartment. He had a poster of Britney Spears on the ceiling over his bed. He had a girlfriend named Amy. He had back acne.

But that's all I know. I didn't spend a lot of time around him, so I can't tell you the finer points of his thirteen year old boy self, which might be why I was so stunned when hanging around with my mother's boyfriend's son these last few days of their vacation in Maine. I don't have much experience with thirteen year old boys, so I'm not sure if this boy is what they're generally like, but all I can say is wow. I used to think he was gay, a tiny gay child who didn't know yet that he would never like girls or any of the things the female kind could do for him. But I'm not sure how I feel about that now. He may or may not be gay--he has ditched his obsession with Beanie Babies and replaced it with an obsession with ghosts, hauntings, and haunted places, which concerns me less than his five thousand angel bear Beanies--but even if I'm unsure about that, I am pretty sure about one thing: that kid is annoying.

The annoying is not a bad annoying. It is not the type of annoying that hangs like a cloud over some people and makes you think Should I hang out with that person today? No, I'd rather clip my toenails and make a snack of that almost-spoiled deli meat. It's not the kind of annoying that makes you bargain with yourself, makes you decide that if you spend half a day with this annoying person, you can go straight home and climb into bed to drink a bottle of wine and watch Two Weeks' Notice. Instead, it's a mild annoying. A half-endearing kind of annoying. It's an annoying that permeates from the skin of children.

And it's not entirely the boy's fault. He is the product of rotten circumstances. His parents had an awful marriage and an even worse divorce. His mother spends most of her days filling her son's head with nonsense about his father and nonsense about life. He is afraid of most things because his mother is afraid of most things. He has silly ideas about the world. For example, he thinks that a real party involves going over to someone's house after they've laid out a spread of Totino's pizza rolls and mozzarella sticks. He thinks store bought brownies and pie are better than anything that could ever be made at home. He says, "I'm not picky!" and then says he likes hot dogs, but only when they're split down the middle, placed on a toasted bun, and served with room-temperature Heinz ketchup. He says blueberry pie is gross, although he's never had it. He thinks potatoes--unless they are fried in some capacity--are foul.

He talks too loud. He shouts. His voice cracks. He giggles and giggles and giggles. He giggles so loud it startles me, my mother, my cat, my mother's cat. My mother's cat hisses any time he comes near her. My brother rolls his eyes whenever anyone mentions his name. He is just gawky, jangly, itchy. He is just a little off.

And, yes, I realize that any thirteen year old--girl or boy--is going to be a little off (at the age of thirteen, I used to chug Pepsi after Pepsi just because I wanted the guy at the racetrack's pop stand to know I was alive), but this kid seems so off it breaks my heart a little bit. He's nice and sweet, but he's just trying so hard to be liked and loved. If I use a fancy verb, he'll use that fancy verb in the next hour, and he'll beam so big like he's proud at himself for just coming up with that on his own. He'll put on a big oblivious act when he knows he's suddenly at the center of everyone's attention just so he can keep it. If his father says, "Hey, you've got to anchor those napkins down with something or else they'll fly off into the ocean," he'll widen his eyes like he's never before thought about the effect wind has on things that weigh less than nothing. "Really?" he'll say without a trace of sarcasm. "I didn't know that."

When I take a step into the ocean and grit my teeth at the coldness of it all, he says, "What? It can't be cold. I know it's not cold." And then he'll jump into the ocean with both feet and he'll immediately break into shivers, and then he'll say, "See? Not cold. It's warm. So warm!" while his lips turn blue and I run for shore.

When I see that he is ignoring the coleslaw that came with his fried shrimp and fries, I'll say, "This is great coleslaw! Don't you want to eat it? It's delicious!" he will say, "Coleslaw is disgusting. I hate it." When I ask him if he's ever had coleslaw, he'll say no, he never has. When I suggest he might give it a whirl--after all, this is very good coleslaw, and if he doesn't eat it, it's likely that the seagulls will dive bomb our table and pluck that slaw straight from his plate--he wrinkles up his nose. "Cabbage," he says. "Ew."

When I tell him enough is enough and that he's definitely trying the coleslaw, he gingerly picks at it with his fork looking like he's afraid the cabbage is going to spring to life and bite his head off. When I stick my own fork into the coleslaw and hover it near his face, he opens his mouth and plugs his nose. When the cabbage hits his tongue, he shrieks and shrieks and shrieks. "Eeeeew!" he screams. "Sick! Ick! Blecchh! Barf, barf, barf!" He swallows without unplugging his nose, without tasting. He sticks his tongue out of his mouth and scrapes it with his fingertips. "I'm going to throw up!" he says, not caring that the neighboring tables perched on the shore of the ocean are giving us a critical eye. He gags. He gags again.

When I roll my eyes and set aside my fork and reach for the just-out-of-the-oven mini blueberry pie, he stops gagging and shrieking. He takes his hand away from his throat. "Blueberries are gross," he says. And so it goes and goes and goes, and my mother raises her eyebrows and gives me a Look that says, See? See? This is what I have to live with, and I feel for her--oh, I really do.

Still, even if I'm no great friend, no great cheerleader for thirteen year old boys I do have to admit sometimes they are pretty cute, pretty fun, pretty darling things when you least expect them to be.

Abbey Disapproves of My Attempts to Keep Her From Getting Under My Desk

My mother and her boyfriend and her boyfriend's son (you know, this kid) have arrived to tour Maine's coast. My mother has another agenda, too, and that's to snuggle my kitten as much as humanly possible. In fact, when she left work on Monday afternoon she announced to the whole office that she was going to Maine not to visit her daughter but to visit her daughter's cat. And since my mother brought me an early birthday present that was packed in layers of tissue paper and ribbons, Abbey thinks she's just about the best thing ever because, well, ribbons are the best thing ever. She's enamored of the whole ribbon-bearing group, and she's taken up residence on their laps, in their arms, and in their shoes.

So, until they've gone and until I can come back up from the whirling, lobster-filled mini-vacation, there will be a new picture of Abbey here every day to fill the space. The first is one I like to call Abbey Disapproves of My Attempts to Keep Her From Getting Under My Desk. I used rolled up sweatshirts and stacks of envelopes to block the different entrance points--thin, claustrophobic--to the swampy area behind the computer, but she got around them anyway, and I'd have to reach behind and pluck her out of the tangle of wires every day. She is nothing if not resourceful.

It'll Have to Do

This Sunday was the annual family reunion. It was going to be a good day. There was going to be good food and new babies (and let's not lie--this one's the cutest) and the traditional mocking of absent relatives. But that wasn't all. In fact, after the family reunion, I was driving back to my father's house, parking the car, walking next door, and putting a kitten into a carrying case so I could take her home to be my own.

But none of that could happen until we got through the reunion. After dinner--hot dogs, corn, a bevy of pasta and fruit salads--my grandmother stood up, clanged an empty pop can on the back of a clipboard, and tried to raise her voice over the din.

"EXCUSE ME!" she said.

No one excused her.

"EXCUSE ME!" she tried again--this time with more success. People stopped chatting and turned to face her. They knew what was coming: the Annual Revelation of Good News.

The Annual Revelation of Good News hasn't always been good to me. For example, the year I graduated from grad school--something I thought was a pretty impressive feat--my grandmother forgot to mention it. She ran through the list she'd marked up of everyone else's good news--marriages, births, other grandkids' graduations--and then she said, "Anything I missed?"

I blinked. My family blinked. Finally, my father said, "Uhm, Mom? Jess graduated."

"Oh," my grandmother said, and she bent to write it down on her list. That was it.

Since then, nothing terribly important (birth or marriage) has happened that would wrangle me a spot on the Annual Revelation of Good News. This year looked like it was going to be no exception. Grandma listed a slew of babies and a few marriages, and that was that. When she finished her list, she bent over to grin at me. "What about you, Jessie?" she said. "Any engagements for me to write down?"

"No," I said.

"Any other good news?" my grandmother asked.

"She's adopting a kitten," one of my cousins offered. "She's getting a cat named Abbey."

And my grandmother--perhaps figuring that's as good as she's going to get from her possibly lesbian granddaughter with the "boyfriend" who was busy behind the line of his restaurant and thus suspiciously absent from the family reunion--smiled and started writing that down in the Annual Revelation of Good News's notebook. When she finished, she turned the paper toward us as proof. There, underneath the list of other happy occasions--weddings, anniversaries, births--was this entry: August 2008. Jessie adopts a cat named Abbie.

And that was good enough for me.

After all, a few hours later, I would open up a carrying case and let a pink-nosed cat named Abbey scamper out onto the floor: