Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

And yet . . . Penny’s clear skin practically glows on the ice, and the piles of hair pouring out from beneath her cap fly behind her as she glides beside me, and there’s something perfectly pretty about her. I watch her profile from the corner of my eye, her slightly bent nose, her sculpted cheekbones, her big hopeful eyes that always seem seconds away from welling up. If you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting . . .

“You want to hold hands?”

I look to see if she’s joking. She’s not. I consider telling Penny about the baby, but something stops me. I’d like to say it’s just my not having adjusted to the reality yet, but the truth is probably a good deal more self-serving than that. I take her hand and we skate through the rotating constellations. Her hand is in a black knit glove and mine is a cold, raw claw. I can barely feel her. I could be holding on to anything.

A FAT GUY with a walrus mustache and a jingling key ring shows up to open the rink for business. He waves to Penny, then disappears into a back room. A moment later the music stops, the lights come back on, and the stars disappear. As if by some unspoken agreement, Penny and I let go of each other. There will be no handholding under the harsh fluorescent lights. Walrus man reappears driving a beat-up Zamboni onto the ice.

“You know what would be nice?” Penny says as we step off.

“What’s that?”

She considers me for a long moment. “Never mind, I withdraw.”

“Come on. What were you going to say?”

“The moment’s passed.” She smiles and shrugs. I use my finger to free a thin strand of her hair where it’s gotten caught in her mouth.

“Thanks for the skate,” I say. “I needed that.”

“I’m glad you came by,” she says.

One or both of us may be lying.

PENNY IS TEACHING her first lesson of the day, and Phillip is late, naturally. I sit on a bench in the parking lot, watching the other skating instructors show up, slender women in baby T’s and black leggings that leave nothing to the imagination. They greet each other with waves and laughs. Their bodies, like Penny’s, are lithe and toned, and they walk with a graceful athleticism as they make their way inside. I suck in my gut and return their perfunctory smiles as they pass, trying for all the world to look like a guy who isn’t checking them out, even though, in their skin-tight leggings, you could spot those asses across a football field.

PHILLIP DRIVES US back home, somewhat more subdued than earlier. The convertible top is down, and the afternoon sun is hitting us hard, burning off the lingering chill of the ice rink. He pulls up in front of the house and we sit there for a moment, steeling ourselves to go back inside. “If we didn’t live on a dead end, I’d probably just keep on driving,” he says.

“I know the feeling, little brother. But your problems will just follow you.”

“I don’t know, this is a pretty fast car. How was the ice rink?”

“It was a little strange, actually. How was your mystery errand?”

“No mystery,” Phillip says. “I just needed some alone time to clear my head.”

“And is it clear now?”

“No. That was just a figure of speech.”

We smile sadly at each other. For some reason sitting here with my little brother, it suddenly occurs to me that we will never see our father again, and I feel a crushing desolation deep in my belly. We used to do this ventriloquist/dummy act for Dad. Phillip would sit on my lap and while I was trying to do the routine, he would suddenly spin and kiss my cheek, and then I’d yell at him and he’d say “sorry” in this high, hoarse cartoon voice, and Dad would laugh until his face turned purple. We didn’t know why he found it so funny, but we relished the ability to make him laugh, and so we did it at every possible opportunity. And then, at some point, we didn’t do it anymore. Maybe Dad stopped finding it funny, maybe I decided I was too old for it, maybe Phillip lost interest. You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

“Phillip,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Your T-shirt is inside out.”

“What? Shit.” He pulls it up over his head. “I must have been wearing it wrong all morning.”

I nod slowly, accepting the lie, feeling sad and old and not up to the conversation. “Stranger things have happened,” I say.

Today’s Inappropriately Self-Absorbed Shiva Caller award goes to Arlene Blinder, an obese, sour-faced neighbor with dark patches of varicose veins running up her thick, mottled legs. That’s an unkind description, to be sure, but the view from down here in the chairs is not a pleasant one. All legs and crotch as far as the eye can see, and, if you look up, double chins and nasal hair. And Arlene Blinder is far from anyone’s idea of a physical specimen. The small catering chair disappears into her massive bottom like it’s been swallowed, and the thin metal legs creak and moan as she settles down. Arlene’s husband, a rail of a man named Edward, sits beside her in silence, which is pretty much all anyone’s ever seen him do. Somewhere there must be an office he goes to, a job he performs, but if he does, in fact, speak, no one but Arlene has ever been around to hear it.

“Oh, we’re expanding the kitchen,” she says, as if someone had asked. “It’s been a nightmare. First they dig the foundation for the addition and discover a boulder the size of a car. They had to bring in all this equipment and it took them four days to get it out. And then, after they dig down, they tell me the existing foundation has crumbled, and they’re going to have to underpin the rest of the house. I don’t know what they’re talking about, all I know is it’s another fifteen thousand dollars out of the gate. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I never would have gotten started.”

For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They run on treadmills, these women, work out with personal trainers and play tennis at the club, but still their hips widen, their legs thicken, their breasts sag. Genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart. There is something in their expressions that is either wisdom or resignation as they sit quietly around my mother and Arlene relentlessly holds the floor like a dominant elephant bull.

“And then yesterday they knocked out the water line and I couldn’t take my bath . . .”

“There’s an image I didn’t need,” Wendy mutters.

“Look at her chair,” Phillip hisses.

Indeed, the legs of the folding chair are visibly bowing, and whenever Arlene makes a hand gesture, the chair shudders and seems to sink a bit further.

“And the contractor is running two other jobs in the neighborhood. The Jacobsons, he’s redoing their pool house, and he’s doing a family room for the Duffs. So there are days when he doesn’t even show up, and God forbid the man should answer his cell phone. So whenever there’s a problem, which is pretty much always, I have to get in my car and go track him down.”