He has become a morose, reticent man who sits at the dinner table or in his favorite La-Z-Boy chair looking tired, his chin resting on the palm of his hand or his fist positioned under his jaw. My mother, who has a flair for words, put it best when she described her Al as a man who was forever carrying the weight of the world on his neck. It was around that time that Albert grew to fear the news in any medium, from the daily paper to the radio traffic report, because he just couldn’t stay away from the screen. He found some relief in VCR tapes, watching the planes crashing into the towers over and over, pausing at the moment of impact, then speeding up to the smoke swirling about in a manic conflagration.
His room is strewn with copies of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Congressional Record. He is familiar with every nuance of duplicity and disingenuousness on the part of politicians and journalists. He knows details of the budget and can cite examples of federal waste on behalf of obscure subsidies for research into medical sunflower seeds, bridges to nowhere, price supports for bee pollen. He has the radio tuned to 91.1, NPR news around the clock. The more he knows, the more unhappy he becomes. Global warming gives him night sweats. Iran, North Korea, and Israel hoarding enriched uranium fills him with a kind detached hopelessness. On some days, when the news of the day is particularly alarming, he remains unshaven in a plaid bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, brown fedora firmly in place. The family has learned it’s best to avoid him or he might clutch an unsuspecting listener by the sleeve and pour out his accumulated chagrin over the course of the war or the latest surveillance of our phone calls, our bank accounts, our hard drives. He can’t get enough of the news, and the very subject of his interest makes him sick—the president’s voice grates like sandpaper in the twists and turns of his ears. Occasionally Father will write letters to the editor of the Star Tribune. These are convoluted essays that drip with anger and sarcasm and are never published.
From time to time I can tell he enjoys looking at Cousin Iris, which I can understand; we all ogle Iris, who is the daughter of Mother and Father’s friends, the Fallons, who died when their airplane fell out of the sky. She was six.
Back then we all liked to look at Iris because her every movement was uncannily beautiful from start to finish. It was already clear that, at sixteen, she was a true dancer. The girl’s simplest gesture was art, alive in the moment, a singular piece of deliberate grace never to be repeated anywhere in the universe.
On that Thanksgiving quiet tears welled in my eyes as I marveled at how precisely she held her fork while making quick, delicate sawing movements with her knife on a piece of breast meat. It was a brutal act performed with elegance. She then took the morsel to her lips, her long, slender hand seeming to float in midair, fingers poised like flower petals, lips slightly parted. It was a moving thing.
There were already hints of her emerging Christianity, though she was not yet a proselytizing, born-again, rapture-ready zealot. She was best avoided when she felt possessed by the Holy Spirit. She found pleasure mainly in the anticipation of the world’s end. I couldn’t help thinking that in her estimation, Heaven would be a dull and lonely place.
My mother’s name is Marjorie. She was a vastly more interesting person, an artist’s model and a poet, in the days before she met my father. Sometimes she was both at the same time: art students sketched her nude while she recited verses to lift their minds from the carnal to the transcendent. She confessed to me once that she had at one time held great expectations of herself. But she came back to earth after she met Albert. There is clearly a pattern here of the members of my family stifling each other’s potential.
“I was going to study with Gregorio Hewett,” she said. “I was fearless. I wanted to learn the sonnet, the sestina, the Homeric simile. Then one day, while I was sitting for a life drawing class, your father saw me through a window. He was selling the famous Mightyplate Roof Coating from Fort Worth, Texas, and was on his way to meet with the principal about the school’s leaky roof. He had his sample case with him, and he had decided to take a short cut through the school grounds. He stopped and looked up at me.”
“Was it love at first sight?” I asked every time I heard the story.
“I thought it was plain voyeurism. There I was without a stitch, twisting myself into a natural-looking pose, when I saw this man outside with his pear-shaped head and wide, amazed eyes. I froze. My heart was beating like crazy, and I was gasping for air. I reached for my clothes.
“It took a while before people realized what was happening. The students were staring and studying my every pore and bump, and Albert was looking puzzled as it started to dawn on him that he may have had something to do with my sudden discomfiture. All he could think of doing was to smile at me kindly and wait for me to get dressed while the kids held their pencils and complained about being left hanging from a breast or stranded in a buttock.
“In the end I scurried out the door. Albert caught up with me, apologizing about a dozen times as he followed me home.”
After that Marjorie stopped posing for art classes. The realization that her body held the potential to so unsettle a man made her self-conscious about showing it to anyone other than Albert. By then her grandfather’s trust fund had kicked in, and she didn’t need the job. In fact, it was Mother’s modest wealth that paid for my years of treatment.
Marjorie opened the oven door, and turkey effluvium invaded every corner of the house. She leaned in with a giant dropper and sucked up turkey sweat from the bottom of the pan and squirted it all along the naked bird, which was all scrunched up, vulnerable and seemingly ashamed. Much the way my whole family seems to feel about nudity.
In fact, the one who first inspired me to walk around naked was Iris. Before finding Jesus she would venture forth in the middle of the night, stepping out from her bed and sauntering down the hall to pee. What a free spirit she was then!
I’m the only one who was lucky enough to have seen her. One time we nearly bumped into each other by the bathroom. I had on my pajamas, and she was a vision of moonlit skin. I whispered, “Well, hello, Iris,” as we crossed, acting as if the sight of her hadn’t taken my breath away.
“You should try sleeping in the nude,” she murmured in her haughty ballet-student accent. “It makes the night très sensual.”
That night I put away my pajamas and haven’t worn them since. In my nightly wanderings down the hall I have never again crossed paths with Iris. I have, however, stumbled into Tedious, who said I looked like a turnip, and my father, who told me it was unsanitary to sleep naked, and my mother, who warned that if the house caught fire I would not be properly dressed for the escape.
Sitting around the table that Thanksgiving, I delighted in the secret that Iris and I had something meaningful in common. Our skins shared a nightly experience of smooth sheets, each individual fiber seeming to find a pore to tickle and rub. It meant that when we dreamed we dreamed with our entire bodies. But most important, it meant that we were open to new experiences, courageous enough to be ready for whatever the fates might send us in the night. I never found a chance to tell her this.
Our family likes to dress up for celebrations. Tedious put on a white shirt and a bolo tie with a silver skull clasp. Albert actually removed his hat and slicked his hair back with a dab of old-fashioned brilliantine imported from Argentina to make his hair as glossy as patent leather. Marjorie put on her pearls. Iris wore a black dress that made her white skin positively luminescent.
As for me, I wore one of mother’s old Sunday dresses. I liked the style, with the full skirt and the blousy sleeves and the neat row of pearl buttons along the front. The overall effect was capped by a leopard-skin pillbox hat I’d found at a costume shop: the nice lady gone haywire.
White or dark?” Father asked, holding the carving fork in his right hand. He looked me straight in the eye, not letting on if he thought my attire was in any way strange.
“Neither.” I smiled throughout the exchange.