Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

These are the rare moments when it actually still feels good to be me.

And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn’t it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there’s a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children’s light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it’s my own.

THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.

But this morning I can hear the low groan of the floorboards above me, the rhythmic creak of the sofa bed in the den—Phillip and Tracy enjoying some early morning, pre-shiva coitus—and my options are whittled down to none. I can hear Tracy’s muffled voice groaning something over and over again as they gather momentum. The first song that comes to mind is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and I hum it loudly to drown out the muffled cries and grunts seeping through the ceiling as I flee to the linoleum safety of the closet-sized bathroom. I’m still pissing when I reach the home of the brave, so I loudly hum the theme to Star Trek in a continuous loop until I’ve washed my hands and brushed my teeth. When I emerge, the noise has subsided, and my mother is sitting on the edge of my bed in the kind of short, satin bathrobe you’d want to see on your twenty-three-year-old girlfriend.

“Sleep well?” she says.

“Not really.”

Upstairs the creaking begins again. Mom looks up at the ceiling and smiles at me. “That boy,” she says, shaking her head fondly. “Tracy must be forty-five if she’s a day. Obviously, he’s working through some mother issues.” She leans forward, and the satin lapels of her robe spread, revealing the large D cups she had installed about fifteen years ago. She’d discovered a lump that turned out to be benign and somehow converted the experience into an excuse to upgrade her breasts. She hasn’t worn a bra since.

“Mom!” I say, looking away. “Cover up, will you?”

She looks down, lovingly surveying the promontories of her age-inappropriate breasts like she would an infant grandchild, before unhurriedly refastening her robe. “You were always something of a prude,” she says.

“It’s a mystery to me why anyone in this house might have mother issues.”

“They’re breasts, Judd. The same ones you suckled at.”

“Those are something other than breasts.”

“Your father didn’t see it that way. When we made love, he used to love to—”

“Shut up, Mom!”

“Why is it so hard for you to accept that your mother is a sexual being? Do you think you were immaculately conceived? I should think it would make you happy that your father and I were still fucking.”

Yes. That’s what she said. My mother is a sixty-three-year-old bestselling author with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Pamela Anderson’s breasts, who talks about fucking her late husband like she’s discussing current events.

“Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that that was a remotely normal thing to say to your son. It still doesn’t mean I want to hear the intimate details of your sex life.”

“Judd. I’m your mother, and I love you.” That’s what she always says, what she advises the millions of mothers who read Cradle and All to say, just before eviscerating or emasculating their offspring. The next word is always “but.” According to Doctor Hillary Foxman, the patron saint of frustrated mothers, this is called softening, rendering the child receptive to correction. What I’ve learned, after nine years of marital spats, is that everything before the “but” is bullshit.

“But,” she says, “your sorrow has become malignant.”

I nod slowly, as if considering her words. “Thanks, Mom. That wasn’t even the slightest bit helpful.”

She shrugs and pulls herself up off the bed, stopping at the foot of the stairs to consider me. Dust mites dance in the sunlight pouring down from the opened door upstairs, and I can see the bags under her eyes, the gray roots at her scalp, and the acute sadness in her eyes as she looks at me. Somewhere in there, underneath those ridiculous breasts and the psychobabble, is a real mother, hurting for her child, and for reasons I probably couldn’t begin to explain without years of therapy, her pain fills me with a quiet, relentless rage.

“I miss your father,” she says.

“I miss him too.”

“Do you?”

“I missed him while he was still alive.”

She nods. “He was never comfortable expressing himself. But he loved you very much.”

“Not like he loved you.”

She smiles and massages the back of her neck. Upstairs, Phillip and Tracy have finally, mercifully finished, and a welcome quiet fills the room.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t have your old room,” she says. “I thought Paul and Alice could use some privacy. They’ve been trying to conceive, you know.”

“Wendy mentioned something.”

“That sofa bed is fine for sleeping, but it’s simply not built for procreation. The springs creak like a couple of fighting cats. You can hear it throughout the house.”

“I don’t suppose I can stop you from telling me why you know that.”

“Your father and I made love on every bed in this house.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, I found an ovulation test kit in the wastebasket in the hall bathroom, so I’m thinking these are key nights for Alice.”

Mom never had any use for discretion, never even had the sense to fake it. She habitually went through our drawers and coat pockets, inspected our sheets, listened in on our phone calls, and read Wendy’s diary so often that we started composing entries just for her to find.

Mr. Jorgenson, my phys ed teacher, still says I can’t call him Ed, even after I had a three-way with him and Mike Stedman, who swears the whole genital herpes thing was just a nasty rumor started by his ex-girlfriend who was pissed at him for sleeping with me and Ed.

Liz Coltrane gave me these awesome pills that make you vomit after every meal, so I don’t have to use my finger anymore. It’s much more civilized, and I can finally grow my nails again. Thin and manicured! Win-win!

I know incest is wrong. I just figured I’d do it once to see what all the fuss was about. But now Paul wants to do it with me all the time and it’s starting to get creepy. It would have been so much easier with Judd, if only he wasn’t gay.

Mom believed that intrafamily secrets were unhealthy, and because of that, we spent the better part of our childhood lying our asses off to her.

When I was twelve years old, she unceremoniously handed me a tube of KY Jelly and said that she could tell from the laundry that I’d begun masturbating, and this would increase my pleasure and prevent chafing, and if I had any questions, I should feel free to come to her. My siblings did joyous spit takes into their bowls of chicken soup, and my father grunted disapprovingly and said, “Jesus, Hill!” He uttered those two words so often that for a long time I thought Jesus’s last name was actually Hill. In this particular case, I was unsure if it was masturbation my father condemned or the relative merits of discussing it over Friday-night dinner. I fled upstairs to sulk and didn’t stop hating her even after discovering, a short while later, to my eternal chagrin, that she’d been right about the lube.