tools, cases of soda and stacks of old magazines filling the void. Inside my dad and mom are both asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which murmurs the narration to a game of golf. I find these games absurdly soothing, in a tranquil, pastoral way. A green expanse so stupid you need cacophonous abuse from the outside world to make you crave its stillness.
I sit down on the couch between my mom and dad and put my arms around them. Peter takes a photo with his phone. My mom’s eyes flutter open and she hugs me. Despite our movement, my dad remains asleep. His cocktail glass is empty on the table next to him.
“Let me put dinner on,” my mom says. “Or do you want to do it?” She giggles and walks away, the big joke being that we all know I’m a terrible cook.
My brother hugs my mom, then goes into the next room, which is an auxiliary family room next to the family room. He turns on another TV kinda loud. I can’t tell what he’s watching but there’s a lot of gunfire and booming noises. I’m annoyed that he has separated himself already. I stand in the doorway and look at him while he watches the screen. He doesn’t even look at me.
“You don’t want to hang out with us?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. To some degree, I think I’ve always been afraid of him. He is a tangle of mood swings and quick rage. He looks up at me, then back to the TV.
“Come sit down,” he says. I walk over and sit next to him. “You are a tense little wombat,” he says. I sit quietly and absorb the weirdness of our functioning relationship. He takes my hand and holds it. We watch violent TV until my mom calls us to eat.
I shake my dad by the shoulder to wake up and eat with us. He rips a loud snore and turns his head away from me. I shake harder until his eyes crack open and he looks around. He registers my face. He gets up and makes himself another drink.
At the dinner table we start out weirdly quiet. “So! Happy anniversary, you guys,” I say. I feel like I drove a red Mini Cooper into a white brick wall at 60 mph.
“Thank you, Loma,” my mom says. She sips her scotch and saws off a slice of pork chop. She’s still a pretty big drinker, though not like she used to be. My parents were both big partiers when we were little, having people over most nights of the week and playing their records loudly in the living room. I hated it at the time, but in retrospect it seems cool that they didn’t let kids change their lives too much.
One of their friends, a neighbor, molested my brother for years. Peter started wetting his bed and having nightmares. It went on for two years before the guy’s wife caught him. She kicked him out, and told my parents but it didn’t make anything better. Peter went into counseling at a local church that we didn’t even attend. I never understood how that happened. My dad just started drinking more. He was sullen and spent a lot of time in the garage watching TV, not talking to any of us. My mom pulled back on her drinking and stopped having people over all the time. Peter seemed so sad and alone. I wanted to make him feel better but didn’t know how. He got angry easily and threw fits all the time, and that made me uncomfortable. Hating my wounded brother made me feel like a monster, but I didn’t like how everything would stop the moment he got upset. If we were going out for pizza and he didn’t like his shoes, it would take half an hour of him yelling and crying, and my mom struggling with him while my dad stayed silent until she would finally let him wear his slippers out and we could get pizza, which had lost a lot of its shine by then.
I make myself ask my dad how he’s doing. He answers in his customarily brief manner: “Good.” I feel like I’m part of a procedure. Arrive, greet, sit down, eat one bite at a time. I thought this shit was supposed to be about human connection. I know there are families out there who talk to each other and play board games. I saw Glenn Close on Letterman one time talking about her boyfriend’s family, and how they wore sumo suits and wrestled each other at Thanksgiving. She said they were really fun people. I wanted a playful family of my own.
Peter’s phone rings.
“Pete,” my dad starts.
“One second,” Peter says, holding his finger up and backing up his chair. He disappears into the bathroom.
“So, how’s your job hunt?” My mom asks me.
“I’m doing some babysitting here and there,” I say. “I was thinking I should look into trade school, maybe like plumbing or electrical. Something that pays well, and eventually I can start my own business and make my own schedule.”
“You want to spend your time in other people’s shit?” my dad asks.
“I already do psychically, so why not?”
“Well, you’re being funny, but it’s tough work. You wouldn’t believe how some people live.”
“There’s a chance I would believe it.”
“Can you afford trade school, honey?” my mom asks.
“I don’t know. It’s probably a few thousand dollars or something.”
“I was talking to Sylvia Hernandez last week and she said her daughter Jenny was shocked at the cost of beauty school. It sounded like it was over ten thousand dollars.”
“Gonna be a tough climb for you, Paloma,” my dad says. “You’re aimless, and you have a problem with authority.”
“Thanks for the fucking support, Dad,” I say. I drop my fork on my plate and it clatters loudly.
“Am I wrong?”
“Are you confusing this commentary with parenting?” I shout and push my chair back. Peter comes back in and tries to assess what’s going on.
“Hey, do you mind if we head back to San Francisco kinda soon?”
“Not at all,” I blurt angrily. I look at my mom, who looks down at her lap. My brother walks over to her and gives her a hug from behind, as she sits. He walks over and shakes my dad’s hand. I squeeze my mom’s shoulder, and walk out.
When we’re back on the road, driving through the inky dark, I blink back a few waves of tears. “So who was on the phone?” I ask Peter.
“Oliver. He’s in the Shitty,” he says.
“Good one,” I say. Peter loves calling The City the “Shitty.”
“We’re going to hook up when we get back.”
“Where is he living now?”
“Humboldt County. He’s couch surfing.”
“He still shooting dope?”
My brother doesn’t answer for a while. He stares at the road, and I unreasonably want to scold him severely for making me wait for the answer.
“Probably,” he says finally.
I’m lying in bed back in San Francisco, grumpy as fuck after dealing with my family. My neck hurts and it feels like my left hip is tight. I don’t even know why, though probably from a skateboarding fall. I need to snap out of it, so I try to remember if I’ve ever thought anything was funny. Everything feels so powerfully stupid right now. I know I’ve seen some funny things on TV. I remember watching a Gallagher comedy special over and over when I was a kid. It must have been on HBO or something, and I thought it was the funniest thing of all time. I’ve
