Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“Get out while you still can!” Alice jokes too loudly. Her agitated smile is a long, crooked fissure across her cheeks, widening painfully before faltering and then disappearing altogether.

“We’ve been down this road before,” Barry says. “It’s a nonstarter.”

“And this is my mom,” Phillip says, turning Tracy to face our mother, who is sitting beside Linda, forcing a smile.

“Hello, Tracy. I hope you won’t judge our behavior too harshly. It’s been a trying day.”

“Please, Mrs. Foxman. I’m the one who should apologize, for arriving unannounced at such a difficult time.”

“So why don’t you?” Wendy says.

“Wendy!” Mom snaps.

“He called Barry an ass.”

“I’m sorry,” Phillip says. “It’s been a while. It’s entirely possible, though highly unlikely, that Barry is no longer an ass.”

“Phillip.” Tracy says his name sternly, with control and conviction, and Phillip clams up like a trained dog.

“Phillip is nervous,” Tracy says. “This is hard for him. Obviously, he would have preferred to make the introductions under better circumstances, but in addition to being Phillip’s fiancée, I am also his life coach, and we both felt, at this difficult time, that it would help him greatly if I were here.”

“Define ‘life coach,’” my mother says, her tone clipped and loaded.

“Tracy was my therapist,” Phillip says proudly.

“You’re his therapist and you’re dating him?” Wendy says.

“As soon as we realized our feelings for each other, I referred Phillip to another colleague.”

“Is that even ethical?”

“It’s something we grappled with,” Tracy says.

“It just happened,” Phillip says in the same instant.

And then little Cole comes down the stairs, naked from the waist down, carrying the old white potty that’s been sitting under the sink in the hall bathroom since Phillip was toilet trained. Cole is in what Wendy refers to as his E.T. stage, wherein he waddles around the house like E.T., exploring and trashing everything within reach, making strange little noises as he goes. He steps over to Barry, who has finally ended his call and sat down at the table, and proffers the potty for his inspection. “Look, Daddy,” he says. “T!”

Barry looks down, uncomprehending. “What does he want?” Like he’s never met his three-year-old son before.

“T!” Cole yells triumphantly. And indeed, the crap in the potty does seem to be shaped like a crude letter T. Then Cole bends down and heaves the potty up over his head in a high arc that brings it crashing down onto the dining room table, shattering glasses and sending silverware flying. Alice screams, Horry and I dive for cover, and the contents of Cole’s overturned potty land on Paul’s plate like a side dish. Paul jumps back like a grenade has landed, so violently that he somehow takes Alice down with him in a jumble of limbs and chair legs.

“Jesus Christ, Cole!” Barry screams. “What the hell is wrong with you!”

“Stop yelling!” Wendy yells.

Cole looks up at his frazzled, worthless parents and, with no preamble, bursts into a loud, fully realized crying fit. And since neither one of them seem inclined to comfort him, I exercise my uncle privileges and pick him up to blubber into my neck, his tiny kid butt sticky against my forearm. “Good job, little man,” I say, “making in the potty like that.” Positive reinforcement and all that. After this trauma, the kid will likely be in diapers until he’s ten.

“I make a T,” he says through subsiding tears, rubbing his snot on my collar, and there’s nothing sweeter than a two-year-old speaking, with his high-pitched sincerity and his immigrant English. I’ve never really appreciated kids the way some people do, but I can listen to Cole talk all day. Of course, as an uncle, I’m not the one who has to scrape his crap off the table.

“That’s right, Cole,” I say, looking over at Paul’s plate. “It is a T, and a nice one at that.”

Paul and Alice climb to their feet shaken and nauseated. We are all standing now, posed around the table like a painting, the Foxman family minus one, contemplating the steaming, erudite turd on Paul’s plate. It’s utterly inconceivable that we will survive seven days together here, caroming off each other like spinning molecules in a chemical reaction. There’s no way to know how it will all shake out, but as far as metaphors go, you can’t do much better than shit on the good china.

If you’ve ever been in a failed marriage, and statistically speaking, it’s a safe bet that you have, or, if not, that you soon will be, then you’ll know that the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it’s some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn’t fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or the Cure on the soundtrack. There you were, minding your own business, walking across campus to class, or stepping into a café for a cup of coffee, or dancing at a wedding, or drinking at a bar with some friends. And then you saw her, laughing at someone’s joke, tucking her hair behind her ear, or taking the stage with a friend to sing a slightly drunken karaoke version of “Ninety-nine Red Balloons” (and she was just drunk enough to cop to knowing the German lyrics too), or she was leaning against the wall, eyebrows arched genially over her lite beer as she surveyed the scene, or she was strolling alone through the falling snow without a jacket, her sleeves pulled tightly over her hands in the absence of gloves, or she was . . .

. . . riding her bike across the quad, on her way to class. I had seen her around, with her small leather backpack, her blond ponytail flying in the slipstream behind her as she sailed past on her red Schwinn. We were both juniors, but we didn’t have any classes together and were probably just a few weeks away from being on nodding terms. But on that day, as she pedaled past me, I called out to her, “Hey! Bike Girl!”

She braked too hard and skinned her shin on the pedal as she slid off the seat. “Ouch! Crap!”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to actually stop.”

She looked at me, perplexed. “But you called out to me.” Her eyes were an incandescent green; I suspected tinted lenses, but I wanted to write a song about them right there anyway. I’d stand outside her dorm room with a guitar and serenade her, while her friends looked on, smiling approvingly in their skimpy pajamas.

“Yeah, I guess I did. Poor impulse control, I’m sorry. I didn’t really have a plan beyond that.”

Her laugh was rich and throaty. She did it like a girl who knew how to laugh, who had a long association with laughing. And she looked at me, this pretty blond girl, the kind of girl from whom I’d been conditioned to expect a smiling but no less firm rejection, and she said, “I’ll give you five seconds to come up with one.”

This was unprecedented, and the miracle emboldened me. “I just thought we’d have a lot to talk about,” I said.

“Really.”

“This bike, for instance. You’re the only girl on campus who rides a bike.”

“So?”

“I think you do it ironically.”

“You’re accusing me of ironic cycling?”

“It’s a growing sport. There’s an Olympic petition.”

“Is your hair always like that?”

I had thick, curly hair like pulled springs, and back in college I kind of gave it the run of the place. “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”