Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

In the first grade, Hannah Allison was immortalized in an inane jump-rope song the girls sang during recess to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Hannah Allison, Hannah Allison / Two first names, two first names / You can call her Hannah / You can call her Allison / What a shame, two first names. Hannah cried about the song, there was a meeting between her parents and the principal, and the song was banned from the school-yard. Like all banned songs, it became an instant underground classic and continued to haunt Hannah until her peers outgrew jump rope in favor of Run-Catch-Kiss. Beyond that, I remembered a small, mousy girl with bushy eyebrows and glasses.

“I’m sure Hannah has her own problems,” I say, hoping my mother will see the murder in my eyes.

“Nonsense,” Betty says. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from an old friend.”

Betty and my mother smile conspiratorially at each other and I can hear the telepathy buzzing between them. Her husband was addicted to porn, his wife screwed around . . . it’s perfect!

“I’m not ready to start dating anytime soon,” I say.

“No one said anything about dating,” my mother says.

“That’s right,” Betty agrees. “Just a friendly phone call. Maybe a cup of coffee.”

They both look at me expectantly. I am conscious of Phillip’s elbow in my ribs, his low, steady chuckle. I’ve got six more days of this, and if I don’t nip it in the bud, my mother will be trumpeting my situation to the entire community.

“The thing is, I enjoy some good Internet porn myself, every now and then,” I say.

“Judd!” my mother gasps, horrified.

“Some of it is done very tastefully. And especially now, being single and all. It’s a great resource.”

Phillip bursts out laughing. Betty Allison’s face turns red, and my mother sits back in her chair, defeated. Hannah Allison and her two first names have been wiped off the board.

“He’s just being funny,” Mom says weakly.

“I would have to disagree,” Betty says.

Phillip is laughing so hard that tears stream down his face as he slides down in his shiva chair. Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate.

THE LAST VISITORS have finally left. You can feel the house exhaling, returning to its normal proportions. After my shabby behavior toward Betty Allison, Linda began quietly shooing out the guests, her voice soft but unyielding as she told them that we’d been through a long and emotional day.

Unbeknownst to me, the sleeping arrangements were decided while I was out earlier. Wendy has pretty much taken over the upstairs, commandeering Phillip’s room for the baby’s Portacrib, her own old bedroom for Ryan and Cole, and the guest room for her and Barry. Phillip and Tracy are on the sofa bed in the den behind the kitchen. Paul and Alice have unceremoniously taken my childhood bedroom, which is where I always stayed when I visited with Jen. But now, being the lone single sibling, I have been relegated to the basement, which seems to be the default for me these days.

As kids, Paul and I shared a room until he sprouted pubic hair and moved down to the basement, where the hiss and clank of the boiler would drown out his Led Zeppelin, his phone calls with girlfriends, and his ever busier masturbation schedule. Paul had been allowed to furnish the basement as he saw fit, which is why the sofa bed cannot be fully opened without hitting the corner of the Ping-Pong table, which is itself positioned against a support column, so whether it’s a game of Ping-Pong or a good night’s sleep you’re after, you’re going to be shit out of luck.

DEATH IS EXHAUSTING. Whether it’s from the trauma of burying my father or from spending the entire day in close proximity to my family, I barely have the energy to take my pants off before collapsing on the mostly opened sofa bed, my legs tilted upward toward the Ping-Pong table. There, beneath the house, in the oblong shadow cast by the single naked lightbulb, I can feel the panic rising, the sense that I’m disappearing. A few miles away, my father is buried in a grassy bluff overlooking the tangle of blacktop where the interstate and thruway intersect. We are both underground, both gone from the world. At least his legs are fully extended.

I turn on my cell phone. As expected, there’s a new voice mail from Jen. She’s been calling me every day for the last few weeks, determined to achieve some level of amicability and open communication to facilitate a quick and peaceful divorce and so that she can believe she’s been forgiven. She always cared a little too much about being liked, and the guilt over her betrayal isn’t nearly as upsetting to her as the fact that I now despise her. I’ve taken to keeping my phone off and not returning her calls. I am still perfecting the art of hating her, and until I’ve got it down, I don’t feel ready to engage. This infuriates her, and so she tries every possible approach to draw me out: contrite, dispassionate, tearful, philosophical, plaintive, and witty. Sometimes I play her messages, left over the course of weeks, all in a row, listening to the erratic swing of her tone between each beep. Tonight she actually descends into something of a rage, telling me I can’t keep avoiding her, threatening to empty our joint checking account if I don’t return her call by tomorrow. No doubt she’d like to be divorced by the time she and Wade have their baby. I especially like today’s voice mail, because she’s shouting at me like I’m standing right there in front of her, like it’s an actual conversation. Still, just to be safe, first thing tomorrow I’ll run out to the bank and withdraw the bulk of what’s left in our checking account. It was around twenty-two thousand dollars last time I checked, although the balance has probably fallen a bit since then. I have a feeling her next voice mail will break new ground.

Ihave a recurring dream in which I’m walking down the street, all footloose and fancy-free, when I look down and realize that beneath my pants, one of my legs is actually a prosthesis, molded plastic and rubber with a steel core. And then I remember, with a sinking feeling, that my leg had been amputated from the knee down a few years back. I had simply forgotten. The way you can forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life but, of course, can’t. In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget. So I’m walking, usually out on Route 120 in Elmsbrook, past the crappy strip malls, the mini golf, the discount chains, and the themed restaurants, when I suddenly remember that I lost my leg a few years ago, maybe cancer, maybe a car accident, whatever. The point is, I have this fake leg clamped to my thigh, chafing at my knee where my calf used to descend. And when I remember that I’m an amputee, I experience this moment of abject horror when I realize that when I get home I will have to take off the leg to go to sleep and I can’t remember ever having done that before, but I must do it every night, and how do I pee, and who will ever want to have sex with me, and how the hell did this even happen anyway? And that’s when I will myself awake, and I lie there in bed, sweaty and trembling, running my hands up and down both legs, just making sure. Then I get up to go to the bathroom, even if I don’t have to, and the cold bathroom tiles against my heels are like finding fifty bucks in a jacket pocket from last fall.