Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

We, the pallbearers, step away soaked and muddy from the grave and melt back into the fair-sized crowd gathered graveside, where an ineffective canvas pop-up shelter has been erected to fend off the rain. Friends, neighbors, and business associates all jockey for position under the canvas, the less fortunate ones forced to the edges, where the pooled water pours down from the roof in thick, drenching rivulets. Paul stands beside his wife, Alice, who leans against him to warm him as he cries. Barry finds Wendy, who hands him back his BlackBerry, which he can’t resist checking before sliding it into his belt holster like a gunslinger. I stand beside my mother, whose red eyes are dulled by the Valium she chose not to split today. Her hair, gray at the roots and auburn everywhere else, is pulled into a tight bun. Her black suit is formfitting and, as always, she’s showing way too much surgically enhanced cleavage. The height of her stiletto heels, like the diameter of her breast implants, is inappropriate for both her age and the occasion. She squeezes my hand, avoiding direct eye contact, and I feel Jen’s absence like a festering wound.

“It’s okay to cry,” Mom says quietly.

“I know.”

“You can laugh too. There’s no correct emotional response.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Mom is a shrink, obviously. But she’s more than that. Twenty-five years ago she wrote a book called Cradle and All: A Mother’s Guide to Enlightened Parenting. The book was a national phenomenon and turned my mother into something of a celebrity expert on parenting. Predictably, my siblings and I were screwed up beyond repair.

You’ve seen Cradle and All, thick as an almanac, with red and black borders and cover art of a naked toddler morphing into a teenager. The book starts with breast-feeding and toilet training and goes all the way through puberty (defecation to masturbation, we used to say), advising mothers in the same frank, maternal, gratuitously shocking tone Mom often used with us. On the back cover is a photo of Mom striking a sex kitten pose on our living room couch. There’s a tenth-anniversary edition, a fifteenth, a twentieth, and next year they will be releasing an updated twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, and Mom will do a twenty-city signing tour and all the major talk shows. There has been talk of an Oprah segment and the possibility of a face-lift before the book tour.

“Today we say good-bye to Morton Foxman, beloved husband and father, dear brother, and cherished friend.”

The speaker is Boner Grodner. He was Paul’s best friend when we were kids. Now he’s Rabbi Charles Grodner of Temple Israel, but to those of us who grew up with him, who were invited to the back of the school bus, where he presided over private viewings of purloined pornography from his father’s extensive collection, he will always be Boner. When Boner wasn’t smoking pot with Paul and trying to discern the hidden messages in Led Zeppelin songs, he was holding forth shamelessly on the pros and cons of various sex acts.

“Mort was never a big fan of ritual . . . ,” Boner says.

“Will you look at that,” Wendy says, elbowing me in the ribs. I follow her gaze across the cemetery to the access road, where a black Porsche has noisily pulled up. And for a moment, I don’t recognize him, this man attempting to knot his tie while running across the wet lawn in his rumpled suit pants and motorcycle jacket like he’s finishing a marathon. And then I do, from the way he runs shamelessly toward us, without the slightest hint of decorum. He is wearing moccasins, of all things.

“Phillip,” my mother says softly, and signals Boner to stop.

By this point Phillip’s given up on the tie, which he leaves hanging unknotted around his neck. He comes running down the lawn and then slides the last few feet, like we used to do on the slight slope of our front lawn when it rained, coming to a stop right in front of my mother.

“Mom,” he says, and throws his wet arms around her.

“You came,” she says, overjoyed. Phillip is her baby, and he’s spent his life reeling in the slack as fast as she can cut it for him.

“Of course I came,” he says. He pulls back and looks up at me. “Judd.”

“Hi, Phillip.”

He grabs my arm and pulls me into a dramatic hug. Phillip, my baby brother, who used to climb into bed with me, smelling of lavender baby shampoo, and press his smooth, rounded cheek against mine, gently pulling at my arm hairs as I told him stories. He loved to guess the morals of Aesop’s fables. Now he smells of cigarettes and mouthwash, and he’s put on a good ten pounds or so since I last saw him, most of it in his face. I feel the familiar wave of loss and regret that always seems to accompany our infrequent reunions. I’d give anything for him to be five again, happy and unbroken.

He reaches past me to shake hands with Paul, who reciprocates quickly and self-consciously, trying to speed things along and get the funeral back on track. Phillip kisses Wendy’s cheek.

“You got fat,” she whispers.

“You got old,” he responds in a stage whisper, loud enough for everyone to hear. Behind him, Boner clears his throat. Phillip turns around and straightens his jacket. “Sorry, Boner. Please continue.” Wendy hits the back of his head. “Charlie! Sorry. Rabbi Grodner,” he says quickly, but the chuckles have already rippled through the crowd and Boner looks momentarily homicidal.

“Before I call on Mort’s eldest son, Paul, to remember his father for us, I’d like to read a short psalm . . .”

“I shouldn’t have called him that,” Phillip whispers to me, eyes wide. “Damn.”

“It was an honest mistake.”

“It was disrespectful.”

I am tempted to point out that showing up a half hour late to his father’s funeral might also be construed as disrespectful, but it would be pointless. Phillip has always been happily impervious to advice and criticism.

“Be quiet!” Paul hisses at us. Phillip winks at me. And here we stand at our father’s grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing processes. We each have our father’s dark curly hair and square, dimpled chin, but there would be no mistaking us for twins. Paul looks like me, only bigger, broader, and angrier; me on steroids. Phillip looks like me, only slimmer and much better-looking, his features rendered more gracefully, his smile wide and effortlessly seductive.

When Boner finishes reading his psalm, Paul steps up to deliver what is meant to be a eulogy but instead seems to be an acceptance speech for the Most Dedicated Son award. He thanks Dad for teaching him how to run the business; he thanks his wife, Alice, for taking a leave of absence from her job as a dental hygienist to help out at the stores when Dad fell ill, he thanks Mom for taking care of Dad, and then he talks at length about what it was like working with his father, running Foxman Sporting Goods, the Hudson Valley’s premiere sporting goods chain. He does not mention any of his siblings, all of whom are wet and cold and wishing for an orchestra to play him off the stage.

When he finally wraps up, he seems surprised that there is no applause. Saint Nick flips a switch on the hydraulics, and Dad’s coffin slowly descends into the grave. Once he is down, Boner steps forward and solemnly hands a tall garden shovel to Paul. “It is customary for members of the immediate family to each shovel some dirt into the grave, fulfilling the obligation of burying a loved one,” he says. “Our sages say burying someone is considered the truest form of kindness and respect, as the deceased will not be able to thank you for it.”

That’s kind of funny, actually, since Dad was not exactly prone to expressing gratitude to his children when he was alive. You were either screwing up, or you were invisible. He was quiet and stern in a way that led you to expect an Eastern European accent. He had soft blue eyes and unusually thick forearms, and when he made a fist it looked like he could punch through anything. He mowed his own lawn, washed his own car, and painted his own house. He did all these things capably, painstakingly, and in a way that silently passed judgment on anyone who paid for someone else to do it. He rarely laughed at jokes, just nodded his understanding, as if it was all pretty much what he’d expected. Of course, there was a lot more to him than that, it’s just that none of it is coming to me right now. At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.