Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

“What would have been the point of asking?” he said. “Dad kept going on about breaking up the family. ‘What with your brother off and gone already,’ he kept saying. If I had asked the Weissbergs it would have been worse. Because they would have said okay and Dad would have wanted to say okay, but he wouldn’t have been able to, or he’d have said okay and then had to take it back. Either way it’d have killed him.”

“How can you know that?” I said.

“How can you not know that?” he said.

And he was right, was the thing. My little brother, Rusty, with his restricted driver’s license and his smoker’s cough, had it pegged. It would have gone just like that — him screaming “I’ll never” with all the teen angst he could muster, which was plenty. And he would have lost. Our father could be the most stubborn and solipsistic of God’s creatures, even if it left him lonely as a goat. The isolation was a kind of fuel, I think. And though the two of them were in that regard nearly identical, in the end it wouldn’t have been a battle of wills. It had been a question not of wanting but of suffering, and the still-deeper truth of the matter was that it had not been a question at all. And so now, maybe, Rusty was going to smoke himself to death just to spite them.

Dara dropped by. My mother introduced her parents. My grandmother invited her to stay for dinner. My father groaned. My mother turned and gave him a look.

“What?” she said. “There’s plenty.”

It wasn’t that he had anything against Dara. To the contrary, he thought she was a very good influence — I’d heard him say so in just those words (not like Rusty’s layabout bum of a big brother, seemed to be the implication). It was the presumption he objected to, his in-laws inviting somebody to dinner in his house!

Dara, smart girl, went off to find Rusty, who was out on the back deck again.

“It’s good that Rusty has such a nice little friend,” my grandmother said to me.

“His little friend is not so little,” my grandfather said. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true. Dara was seventeen, a looker even though she dressed down. Or maybe that was just when she came over to our house. I tried to imagine what she’d look like primed for a night on the town. The kids, I had been told, made a popular hangout of the Sonic Burger down Hillsborough Road, where they’d all meet up after the school football games.

Okay, so maybe some things were different from Miami.

“Does Rusty date that girl?” my grandmother asked.

“No,” my mother said. “Or — well I don’t know exactly, but don’t bring it up with him, okay?”

“If Rusty doesn’t date that nice girl,” my grandmother said, turning to me, “then you should ask her on a date.”

“Grandma, she’s like a kid.”

“I was engaged to be married at her age,” my grandmother said. “And by the time I was your age I had already given birth to your uncle Steve.” My father shook his head. His brother-in-law’s wife is a crazy goy bitch and we don’t talk to either of them anymore.

“It was a different world,” my mother said to her mother.

“A nice Jewish girl comes to a house with two eligible young men and can’t get herself so much as asked on a date.”

“Daniel doesn’t need to date his brother’s friends,” my mother said, “and Rusty’s life is complicated enough as it is.”

“Why is his life so complicated, I want to know?” my father interjected. “He goes to school, he has his friend, he smokes those damn cigarettes just to make me crazy. He doesn’t even get all A’s. His life is cake and pie.”

“He got one B,” my mother said, “and it was in phys ed.”

“Those damn cigarettes—” my father said. Mom just shook her head.

My father was in high school when his parents moved him from some Long Island suburb of no particular distinction to a sunnier, if equally indistinct, suburb of Miami. He should have been glad to escape the fate of that life, but you know how it is — his friends, the places he knew, a girl probably, all his baseball cards. He lost everything, and swore to himself to hate the new state, city, school, life. But couldn’t. He loved South Florida, almost right off the bat. He met my mother there, started his family, and was even heard to say that it was where he expected to die. But none of that love and happiness enabled him to forgive his own parents for the trauma that made it all possible. Whatever he finally fell out with my grandfather over, I know it was really over this.

One thing my father always swore: he would never do to his children what his parents did to him. But then God, who they say works in His own ways and who can be so cruel, made it so the trauma had to be passed down like a rite of passage. Whether or not Rusty ever forgives him, our father will never forgive himself. Nobody ever tried harder than that man, but some things are just beyond control, like if Abraham had had to go through with the sacrifice of Isaac, but somehow Isaac lived, and then when it was time God made Isaac put the knife to Jacob.

Even my mother’s parents know to withhold comment on the thick air-freshener atmosphere, that fake-clean floral stench, that reek of grasping for control. They kvetch about everything, but never that.

Smells are the easiest to get used to anyway. After a few minutes you hardly even notice. If you’re out of the house for a while, okay, it hits pretty hard when you come back in. But you just wait.

“What a place Germany was,” my grandfather said, gesturing with his fork — not so much stabbing as nudging the space in front of him.

“You’re flicking brisket juice,” my grandmother scolded. He put the fork down.

Grandpa favored baby blue golf shirts and ran his left hand over his bald, liver-spotted head when he was feeling wistful. “Such culture,” he said. “And even with the war on there was plenty of time. I used to know quite a bit of the native tongue. Very much like Yiddish, German. I couldn’t read Goethe, maybe, but who wants to read Goethe? I could order dinner, I could ask directions. What else could I have wanted?”

“To read Nietzsche?” I said. “Or listen to Mozart in the original?” My grandfather loves opera so I figured I could force an ally out of him.

“Jew-hating bastards — the both of them,” my grandmother said. Her thing was heavy necklaces and doing her hair up with spray. It was retirement condo chic and they had taken to it as well as other kinds of Jews took to yarmulkes, black coats.

“How would you know?” I asked.

“I know what I know,” she said.

“He’s like this,” my father said. “Always siding with the Jew-haters.”

“Dara,” my mother cut in, “are you looking forward to the new school year?”

“I’m going to spend a quarter in Israel,” Dara said. All the grown-ups at the table went ooh .

“It’s very lovely there,” my grandmother said. “We’ve been a number of times.”

“You’re going to learn so much,” my father said.

“Very modern,” my grandfather said. “All the amenities. Not like some of the places we’ve been to.” He glared, half-kidding half-serious, at his wife. She liked to travel to exotic places on senior discount tours. When they would get back, Grandpa would start his recollection of the trip by saying, Now, when I was a soldier fighting Hitler in the Second World War, I thought the living was rough, but let me tell you…

“Israel,” I said. It was too easy, it was totally pointless, and I was going to do it anyway. “Try not to get blown up by an insurgent.”

“THEY’RE NOT INSURGENTS THEY’RE FANATICS!” my father said.

“They can be both,” I said.