Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“In fact, Otto, we do. And we all used to.”

“Who?”

“All of us.”

“Never. When? Can you imagine Mother being thankful for anything?”

“We always celebrated Thanksgiving when Father was alive.”

“I remember no such thing.”

“I do. I remember, and so does Martin.”

“Martin was four when Father died!”

“Well, you were little, too.”

“I was twice Martin’s age.”

“Oh, Otto — I just feel sad, sometimes, to tell you the truth, don’t you? It’s all going so fast! I’d like to see everyone in the same room once a century or so. I want to see everybody well and happy. I mean, you and Martin and Sharon were my brothers and sister. What was that all about? Don’t you remember? Playing together all the time?”

“I just remember Martin throwing up all the time.”

“You’ll be nice to him, won’t you, Otto? He’s still very sensitive. He won’t want to talk about the lawsuit.”

“Have you spoken to Sharon?”

“Well, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I’m afraid I might have offended her. I stressed the fact that it was only to be us this year. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, no friends. Just us. And husbands or wives. Husband. And wife. Or whatever. And children, naturally, but she became very hostile.”

“Assuming William to be ‘whatever,’ ” Otto said, “why shouldn’t Sharon bring a friend if she wants to?”

“William is family. And surely you remember when she brought that person to Christmas! The person with the feet? I wish you’d go by and talk to her in the next few days. She seems to listen to you.”

Otto fished up a magazine from the floor — one of the popular science magazines William always left lying around — and idly opened it.

“Wesley and I reach out to her,” Corinne was saying. “And so does Martin, but she doesn’t respond. I know it can be hard for her to be with people, but we’re not people — we’re family.”

“I’m sure she understands that, Corinne.”

“I hope you do, too, Otto.”

How clearly he could see, through the phone line, this little sister of his — in her fifties now — the six-year-old’s expression of aggrieved anxiety long etched decisively on her face.

“In any case,” she said, “I’ve called.”

—

And yet there was something to what Corinne had said; they had been one another’s environs as children. The distance between them had been as great, in any important way, as it was now, but there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves. They had been born into the arid clutter of one another’s behavior, good and bad, their measles, skinned knees, report cards…

A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one’s antecedents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good-bye.

“I don’t know,” William said. “It doesn’t seem fair to put any pressure on Sharon.”

“Heaven forfend. But I did promise Corinne I’d speak with Sharon. And, after all, I haven’t actually seen her for some time.”

“We could just go have a plain old visit, though. I don’t know. Urging her to go to Corinne’s — I’m not really comfortable with that.”

“Oof, William, phrase, please, jargon.”

“Why is that jargon?”

“Why? How should I know why? Because it is. You can say, ‘I’m uncomfortable about that,’ or ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’ But ‘I’m uncomfortable with that’ is simply jargon.” He picked up a book sitting next to him on the table and opened it. Relativity for Dummies. “Good heavens,” he said, snapping the book shut. “ Obviously Martin doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. Why bother to mention that to me? Does she think I’m going to ask Martin whether it’s true that he’s been misrepresenting the value of his client’s stock? Am I likely to talk about it? I’m perfectly happy to read about it in the Times every day, like everyone else.”

“You know,” William said, “we could go away early this year. We could just pick up and leave on Wednesday, if you’d like.”

“I would not like. I would like you to play in your concert, as always.”

William took the book from Otto and held Otto’s hand between his own. “They’re not really so bad, you know, your family,” he said.

Sometimes William’s consolations were oddly like provocations. “Easy for you to say,” Otto said.

“Not that easy.”

“I’m sorry,” Otto said. “I know.”

—

Just like William to suggest going away early for Otto’s sake, when he looked forward so much to his concert! The little orchestra played publicly only once a year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Otto endured the grating preparatory practicing, not exactly with equanimity, it had to be admitted, but with relative forbearance, just for the pleasure of seeing William’s radiant face on the occasion. William in his suit, William fussing over the programs, William busily arranging tickets for friends. Otto’s sunny, his patient, his deeply good William. Toward the end of every year, when the city lights glimmered through the fuzzy winter dark, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, William with his glowing violin, urging the good-natured, timid audience into passionate explorations of the unseen world. And every year now, from the audience, Otto felt William’s impress stamped on the planet, more legible and valuable by one year; all the more legible and valuable for the one year’s diminution in William’s beauty.

How spectacular he had been the first time Otto brought him to a family event, that gladiatorial Christmas thirty-odd years earlier. How had Otto ever marshaled the nerve to do it?

Oh, one could say till one was blue in the face that Christmas was a day like any other, what difference would it make if he and William were to spend that particular day apart, and so on. And yet.

Yes, the occasion forced the issue, didn’t it. Either he and William would both attend, or Otto would attend alone, or they would not attend together. But whatever it was that one decided to do, it would be a declaration — to the family, and to the other. And, the fact was, to oneself.

Steeled by new love, in giddy defiance, Otto had arrived at the house with William, to all intents and purposes, on his arm.

A tidal wave of nervous prurience had practically blown the door out from inside the instant he and William ascended the front step. And all evening aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, and siblings had stared at William beadily, as if a little bunny had loped out into a clearing in front of them.

William’s beauty, and the fact that he was scarcely twenty, had embarrassed Otto on other occasions, but never so searingly. “How intelligent he is!” Otto’s relatives kept whispering to one another loudly, meaning, apparently, that it was a marvel he could speak. Unlike, the further implication was, the men they’d evidently been imagining all these years.

Otto had brought someone to a family event only once before — also on a Christmas, with everyone in attendance: Diandra Fetlin, a feverishly brilliant colleague, far less beautiful than William. During the turkey, she thumped Otto on the arm whenever he made a good point in the argument he was having with Wesley, and continued to eat with solemn assiduity. Then, while the others applied themselves to dessert, a stuccolike fantasy requiring vigilance, Diandra had delivered an explication of one of the firm’s recent cases that was worth three semesters of law school. No one commented on her intelligence. And no one had been in the least deceived by Otto’s tepid display of interest in her.