Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Occasionally the system broke down. The day before the electricity went out, in fact, we had just such a situation. A cornerstone of jurisprudence in our two-man country maintained that you were not liable for your brother's responsibilities, hence the constant declarations of “That's not mine, that's Reggie's” with regard to property placed where it shouldn't, and “It's Benji's turn” with respect to some duty or chore. Blame and responsibility were synonyms in our dictionary, and we disavowed all association until there was no avoiding it.

One law that came into play quite frequently, given our love of prepared meals, was Thou Shalt Not Clean Thy Brother's Soup Pot. There was one go-to pot that was ideal for warming a sixteen-ounce can of soup to eating temperature, celebrated for its heat-conducting properties and an elegant surface-area-to-height ratio that enabled it to heat up fast without boiling over if we suffered a spell of teenage distraction and forgot about it. According to our highly ritualized pot etiquette, if you used it last, you had to clean it if the other person needed it for their soup — instantly stop whatever you were doing, bust out the sponge, and rub away the residue of Chunky Beef Stew.

What happened in the episode in question was that my mother had made tacos for us the night before she and my father went back to the city. Distracted, she hadn't washed the pot out, and it sat on the far burner of the stove for days. It was during a heat wave, and we didn't have air-conditioning. Making the place even hotter was the fact that the windows were closed. My father had been yelling at my mother with such volume and ferocity the night before they left that I had been seized by a deep humiliated feeling, which usually paralyzed me but on this occasion sent me scurrying around the living room closing all the windows. The houses on the beach were quite close together, you see, compared to the interior streets of the developments, to maximize the use of the lot. In the city, when my father raised his voice, it was more or less swallowed up by the ambient noise of the city and absorbed by the walls of our prewar building, which were the product of the construction ideas of a better era and meant to take a licking.

The sound of my father's voice still escaped through the screen door, but by shutting the windows I thought I might cut off the most direct routes to our neighbors' ears. I imagined the progress of the sound waves through the air, as depicted in my Introduction to Physics textbook: the yelling bouncing off the closed windows and remaining trapped inside the house, ricocheting around us off the refrigerator and the media stand and the framed watercolor of the Long Wharf, which was the only thing hanging on our walls, and then some of the yelling sieving through the screen doors and flying out over the deck before being lost and diminished in the immense void of the bay, where there was no one to overhear. My parents ignored me on my window-closing mission or did not see me. They didn't mention it.

The thing was, now that Reggie and I were out working, the glass doors of the living room were shut more often than usual, and during the heat wave the house really became an oven, what with the windows closed, too. I had neglected to open them again after my parents' departure. In the taco pan, a wide and beloved skillet of varied purpose, nature took its course.

“What's that smell?” Reggie said when he got back from work. I had smelled something, too, but wasn't bothered enough to investigate. Reggie and I sniffed near the likely sources. The trash can, which we emptied only when overflowing. According to the even-Stephen system, and its preference for last-minute choring, there was no reason to take out the trash if it was possible to close the lid of the trash can or if it tilted open, propped up by garbage, at an angle of less than forty-five degrees. But the trash can didn't stink too much. We moved the dishes out of the sink. In our logic, we didn't clear the sink unless all sink-related tasks had become impossible by the jutting, ziggurat mess, and consequently food sometimes loitered under the plates and bowls and moldered. But the clumps of browning food didn't stink that much. The smell came from the stove.

“What's in there?” I asked Reggie, referring to the pot.

“It's not mine,” he said, testifying under oath.

“It's not mine,” I said, with equal gravity, and now that we had pleaded not guilty to whatever charge was about to be read, I lifted the lid off the pot.

The stench burst forth. The pale boil of maggots writhed, bumped, and grinded in the decomposing ground beef and orange lumps of solidified fat. They slithered, slightly tinted pink by the Taco Mix Flavor Packet.

“Gahh,” I yelled.

“Arrggh,” Reggie screamed.

We were brothers.

I slapped the lid back on the pot and we conferred. I pressed down on the lid as if leaning against the rattling Gates of Hell. The problem was that this situation lacked precedent. The pot was outside the reach of the law, over the state line. Who had jurisdiction? It was my mother's pot. Eventually it would be cleaned on an eve-of-parents'-return cleanup, and whoever was on kitchen duty that day would have to scrub it out. It was Reggie's turn coming up, in fact. But that was in the future — our parents wouldn't return for days. Did Reggie's impending responsibility apply retroactively? No, he argued, just as I argued the reverse — and had the roles been switched, we would have argued the opposite just as learnedly and emphatically. The pot, in the eyes of the law, did not exist as such. It wasn't my pot, or Reggie's pot — it was society's pot.

The smell, however, was no hypothetical. I made a suggestion. I'd get rid of the maggots, but Reggie would scrub it clean. Motion passed. Afterward, I opened the windows. We didn't yell at each other that much anymore, those days.

Episodes such as these, when even Stephen was put to the test, made us run to the safety of our parents' queen-sized. When you got the big bed, you had it until our parents returned, which meant that when they skipped the weekend, you had it for like eleven days straight. Bonus.

Reggie stuck his head in the door. “There's a blackout,” he said. I got up to check it out. The power went out a lot. Any big storm knocked down a power line or two somewhere across the Long Island grid. Sometimes it was our neck of the woods, sometimes it wasn't. The power went out for a couple of hours, or, in the case of hurricanes, days. Our stove was electric, and we needed electricity for the hot-water heater, but the power usually returned quickly so blackouts were rarely more than a minor nuisance. You broke out the candles, cursed yourself for not buying more batteries after the last blackout even though it had occurred to you plenty of times, and went to bed. By the time you got up in the morning the lights were back on. Usually.

It was beautiful and blue outside. But nothing turned on as I toured the house, flipping, switching, opening the refrigerator. I slipped out the side door to see if I could hear Chuck Woolery's voice booming from Mrs. Johnson's TV — she was a big Love Connection fan and from all evidence had discovered a twenty-four-hour Love Connection channel — and saw the ticket noosed on the doorknob. LILCO had cut off the juice for nonpayment. There was no blackout. It was just us.

“Dag,” Reggie said.

“That's cold, right?” I said.

Reggie went to catch the bus to his job at Burger King and I called our mother at work. “Any message?” her secretary asked. I told her no. Telling my mother's secretary that the juice was shut off, that was impossible. I was wired not to let other people know our business. What happened in the house stayed in the house, caroming off the walls and furniture and us, until it was absorbed or forgotten. When my mother called back, she seemed unconcerned. “That's just a payment mix-up,” she said. “I'll take care of it.” She told us they'd be out on Friday. She'd see us then.