Marie-Helene Bertino - Safe as Houses

Bob Dylan mopes in the car. I feel saddled with him now. He was supposed to create some sort of lather, and he barely summoned enough energy to behead a pile of string beans. I buy him a magazine, a Liberty Bell key chain, Band-Aids shaped like pieces of bacon, and a pack of Camel reds. They are parting gifts. In line, I try to catch his eye through the window, but he is sulking and won’t look up. Bob Dylan can be a real baby.

…

My brother’s car is gone when I pull in to my mother’s driveway.

There is a picture in her garage: a stop-motion account of that day. In the first panel the Vet is whole, intact. In the second panel there is smoke around the eastern wall — a stadium with a headache. In the third panel it is half obscured by the smoke, and so on.

My mother is at the table drinking. She has poured one for me before I come in, stamping off mud and leaves.

“Where’s your friend?” she says.

“Dropped him off at the train.”

She nods and senses my apology before I have time to form one. “I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “You should try to get along with your brother.”

On her collar, a pin as small as a thumbprint, the shape of a flag.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and then I can’t stop saying it.

…

We tailgated all day, but it wasn’t until the second inning that he told me about Genevieve leaving for school in Vermont.

“Said I was narrow-minded because I never went to college,” he said. “Said the experience would have done me good. What fucking experience? What kind of experience is in Vermont?”

His fingers strummed his knees. By then he had cultivated hard knots of muscles up and down his arms and legs, making him look in motion even when he was sitting.

“Maybe she won’t like it,” I said.

“Maybe fuck her.”

He was dating girls from the neighborhood and had gotten one of them pregnant. He told me like it was something he had forgotten at my house. It was one of the only times I had seen him in years, and I felt him slipping through me even as he sat next to me. I held on to his arm. “You could have something real and true.”

“It’s the size of a pea,” he said, like a punch line.

When the fight below us broke out, I grabbed his arm. “Don’t go down there,” I said. “Please,” I said. “Please.”

He shook me easily, “Get off me, punk.”

His friends pushed him into the aisle and down the steps. People were already on the field swinging at each other. I kept an eye on his blue hat until he came to the lip where the bleachers met the field and he had to jump. I caught glimpses of blue here and there until the press of bodies moved him too far away and he became indistinguishable. There were fields of him. Fields and fields.

I found him outside the stadium. Flanked by his friends, he held up Chris Monahan’s T-shirt to a gash in his head. When he caught sight of me he smiled right through all the blood, proud of himself. His face lit up so pretty and so fast that it made me light-headed. I swayed.

He needed it, so I gave him the money. After that, he made himself into a secret, answered his phone rarely and then not at all.

…

Finally, my mother’s voice through the phone in my New York kitchen. “Your brother has enlisted. Your brother is going to war. Your brother is in the army, and they are sending him to war. Come home for Thanksgiving. We are going to have Thanksgiving. Before he leaves, we will have one last… we are going to have Thanksgiving.”

“No, Mom, you’re wrong. No one is going to war,” I say. “No one is going to war.” I keep saying it after she hangs up.

There is an aunt who escaped to California, but she exists mostly in postcards, so it’s four of us for Thanksgiving dinner. My mother, Bob Dylan, my brother, and I sit around our nuclear table, making bland, unseasoned comments and doling out corn and mashed potatoes.

Then my brother says, “When’s the last time you visited?” He is not looking at me as he rolls the sleeves of his flannel shirt, but I know it’s me he’s talking to.

I pretend to think about it. “Good question. I don’t know.”

“Five years, you think?” He passes the string beans to Bob Dylan, who takes a liberal spoonful.

“Maybe.” I shrug.

“Maybe,” he says. “Mom, don’t you think it’s been five years?”

“Don’t know,” she says. “Glad she’s here now though. Let’s pray before we forget. Bob, would you like to lead us in—”

“Bob’s a Jew,” I say.

Bob laughs, I laugh. After thinking about it, my mom laughs.

My brother stabs at a pile of dark meat, securing three pieces onto his fork. My last remark bothered him. Not because it might have offended Bob but because I am trying to be funny. I am his sister, and I know this.

He makes his voice sound light, as if suggesting a swim. “Oh, do Jews not pray?”

I say, “Do army people pray?”

My mother folds her hands. “I’ll pray,” she says. “Dear God, we are all of us going strong. Keep my baby safe in I-raq and keep my other baby safe in New York and thank you for sending us a helpful dinner guest on such an important night for our family.” She winks at Bob, who to my confusion blushes, and I wonder, Is my mother hitting on Bob Dylan?

A quick amen and it is over. We eat what we have deposited onto our plates. Ours is an eat-it-or-wear-it family, so I check to make sure Bob Dylan has not taken too much.

My brother sees this and rolls his eyes. Then he says, “Thought you’d come back for Chris’s funeral.”

I say, “I sent a card.”

“Oh, a card. Well then.”

My mother layers finger-sized pieces of white meat onto Bob Dylan’s plate. She says, “I don’t know if you do this in New York, Bob, but in this family we have a tradition: after dinner we compete to break the wishbone. The person who ends up with the biggest piece has a year of good luck. What do you think about that?” She wants Bob Dylan to be interested; she wants him or anyone to wrestle with her over the dry, cracked wishbone, to fight over a year of good luck, to take it outside if necessary; she wants to lose both of her terry-cloth slippers in the struggle; she wants us all to share a big laugh over it. My mother is not afraid to make desire plain on her face, a trait shared by neither of her children. It makes her seem vulnerable to attack, and I can’t look straight at her while she waits for the words of Bob Dylan.

I am proud of Bob. He begins to eat the turkey noisily, signaling to her with a thumbs-up, another kind of answer.

“Did they write back?” my brother says.

“Did who write back?” I say.

“The Monahans. Did they write back to your card?”

“They may have. I didn’t keep track.” This is a lie. I checked my mailbox twice a day.

“I wonder why they didn’t write back. Their only son killed in Iraq, and you send a card.”

My mother says, “Okay everyone.”

“Were you too busy hanging out with Bob Dylan in New York?”

“I have a job.”

“And I am the loser with no job,” he says, as if we are introducing ourselves to guests. “I guess that is some kind of New York etiquette, Mom, and we just don’t get it. Big dinner, bring a stranger. Neighbor dies, send a card. Why don’t you just admit it: you don’t like it here.”

A shiver of my mother’s hand holding the gravy boat produces a small jangle on its plate. She places her left hand on her right to say to it, Be calm . During this small movement, I realize I am signing up for a life of disappointment if I think my brother will ever appreciate a gift I give him. The desire to please him wobbles, an amorphous yet contained thing, easily trashed, like the cranberry sauce no one eats. It is a boozy feeling, making me capable of inducing great hurt.