Calypso Page 7

  When Hugh returned, I passed on Randy’s suggestion regarding the KitchenAid, and he nodded. “While he was here, did you ask him about the leak under the sink?”

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  “Goddamn it, I told you last night—”

  My father tapped me on the shoulder. “You need to call a doctor and get a checkup.”

  This was my second trip to our house on Emerald Isle, and the second time my entire family, or what was left of it, was assembling here. Summer was still a month away, and already the temperature was in the nineties. The humidity was high, and once you left the beach the breeze disappeared, inviting in its dearth great squadrons of biting flies. Still, I would force myself out every afternoon. On one of my walks, I came across my brother and his daughter, Madelyn, standing on a footbridge a few blocks inland from our house and dropping bread into the brackish canal. I thought they were feeding fish, but it turned out they were throwing the food to turtles, dozens of them. Most had shells between six and eight inches long and are what my sister Gretchen, who owns a lot of reptiles, calls sliders. Then there were the snapping turtles. The largest measured around three and a half feet from nose to tail. Part of his left front foot was missing, and he had a tumor on his head the size of my niece’s fist.

  “And you’re giving them bread?” I said to Paul. It made me think of my first visit to Spokane, Washington. I was walking through the park that fronts the river there and happened upon people feeding animals that resembled groundhogs.

  “What are these?” I asked a man who was kneeling with his arm outstretched.

  “Marmots,” he told me.

  “And what do they eat?”

  He reached into a bag he kept at his feet. “Marshmallows.”

  I’ve subsequently seen people feed all sorts of things to the turtles in the canal on Emerald Isle: dry dog food, Cheerios, Pop-Tarts, potato chips.

  “None of that is good for them,” Gretchen says. Her turtles eat mainly worms and slugs. They like fruit as well, and certain vegetables. “But potato chips, no.”

  “What about barbecue potato chips?” I asked.

  During the week that we spent at the beach, I’d visit the canal every afternoon, sometimes with raw hot dogs, sometimes with fish heads or chicken gizzards. The sliders would poke their heads out of the water, begging, but it was the snappers I was there for. Seeing one was like seeing a dinosaur, for isn’t that what they are? Watching as they tore into their food, I’d shiver with fear and revulsion, the way I used to when watching my brother eat. On YouTube there’s a video of one biting off a finger, and of the man whose finger it used to be acting terribly surprised, the way that people who offer sandwiches to bears, or jump security fences to pose beside tigers, ultimately are. There are other videos of snapping turtles eating rats and pigeons and frogs, all of which are still alive, their pathetic attempts at self-defense futile. It’s a kind of pornography, and after sitting for twenty minutes, watching one poor animal after another being eviscerated, I erase my Internet user history, not wanting to be identified as the person who would find this sort of thing entertaining—yet clearly being that person.

  Did it help, I wondered, that my favorite turtle was the one with the oversize tumor on his head and half of his front foot missing? Did that make me a friend of the sick and suffering, or just the kind of guy who wants both ice cream and whipped cream on his pie? Aren’t snapping turtles terrible enough? Did I really need to supersize one with a cancerous growth?

  My main reason for buying the house on Emerald Isle was that it would allow my family to spend more time together, especially now, while my father’s still around. Instead, though, I was spending all my time with these turtles. Not that we didn’t do anything as a group. One afternoon we scattered my mother’s ashes in the surf behind the house. Afterward, standing on the shore with the empty bag in my hands, I noticed a trawler creeping across the horizon. It was after shrimp, or some kind of fish, and hovering over it, like flies around a garbage pail, were dozens of screaming seabirds. It made me think of my mother and how we’d follow her even to the bathroom. “Can’t I have five minutes?” she’d plead from behind the locked door as we jiggled the handle, relating something terribly important about tights, or a substitute teacher, or a dream one of us had had about a talking glove. My mother died in 1991, yet reaching into the bag, touching her remains, essentially throwing her away, was devastating, even after all this time.

  Later, drained, we piled into the car and drove to the small city of Beaufort. There we went to a coffee shop and fell in line behind a young man with a gun. It was tucked into a holster he wore belted around his waist, and after he had gotten his order and taken a seat with two people I took to be his parents, we glared at him with what might as well have been a single eye. Even my father, who laughs appreciatively at such bumper stickers as DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR THE AMERICAN, draws the line at carrying a pistol into a place where lattes are being served. “What’s he trying to prove?” he asked.

  The guy was my height or maybe a little shorter, wearing pressed jeans. “He’s obviously got a complex of some kind,” my sister-in-law, Kathy, said.

  “It’s called being a Republican,” Lisa offered.

  My father frowned into his decaf. “Aw, come on, now.”

  I mentioned a couple of T-shirts I’d seen people wearing on the pier not far from my turtle spot. INVEST IN HEAVY METALS, read one, and it pictured three bullets labeled BRASS, COPPER, and LEAD. Another showed a pistol above the message WHEN YOU COME FOR MINE, YOU BETTER BRING YOURS.

  “Since when is the government coming for anyone’s guns in this country?” I asked. “I mean, honestly, can’t any of us enter a Walmart right now and walk out with a Sidewinder missile?”

  It was a nice moment, all of us on the same page. Then my father ruined it by asking when I’d last had a physical.

  “Just recently,” I said.

  “Recently, like when?”

  “1987,” I told him, adding, after he moaned, “You do know this is the fourth time today you’ve asked me about this, right? I mean, you’re not just being ninety-one, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I know what I’m saying.”

  “Well, can you please stop saying it?”

  “I will when you get a physical.”

  “Is this really how you want to be remembered?” I asked. “As a nagger…with hammertoes?”

  “I’m just showing my concern,” he said. “Can’t you see that I’m doing this for your own good? Jesus, son, I want you to have a long, healthy life! I love you. Is that a crime?”

  The Sea Section came completely furnished, and the first thing we did after getting the keys was to load up all the televisions and donate them to a thrift shop. It’s nice at night to work puzzles or play board games or just hang out, maybe listening to music. The only one this is difficult for is my father. Back in Raleigh, he has two or three TVs going at the same time, all tuned to the same conservative cable station, filling his falling-down house with outrage. The one reprieve is his daily visit to the gym, where he takes part in a spinning class. Amy and I like to joke that his stationary bike has a front wheel as tall as a man and a rear one no bigger than a pie tin—that it’s a penny-farthing, the kind people rode in the 1880s. On its handlebars we imagine a trumpet horn with a big rubber bulb on one end.

  Being at the beach is a drag for our father. To his credit, though, he never complains about it, just as he never mentions the dozens of aches and pains a person his age must surely be burdened by. “I’m fine just hanging out,” he says. “Being together, that’s all I need.” He no longer swims or golfs or fishes off the pier. We banned his right-wing radio shows, so all that’s left is to shuffle from one side of the house to the other, sometimes barefoot and sometimes wearing leather slippers the color of a new baseball mitt.

  “Those are beautiful,” I said the first time I noticed them. “Where did they come from?”

&n
bsp; He looked down at his feet and cleared his throat. “A catalog. They arrived back in the early eighties, but I only just recently started wearing them.”

  “If anything should ever…happen to you, do you think that maybe I could have them?” I asked.

  “What would ever happen to me?”

  In the ocean that afternoon, I watched my brother play with his daughter. The waves were high, and as Madelyn hung laughing off Paul’s shoulders, I thought of how we used to do the same with our own father. It was the only time any of us ever touched him. Perhaps for that reason I can still recall the feel of his skin, slick with suntan oil and much softer than I had imagined it. Our mother couldn’t keep our hands off her. If we’d had ink on our fingers, at the end of an average day she’d have been black, the way we mauled and poked and petted her. With him, though, we never dared get too close. Even in the ocean, there’d come a moment when, without warning, he’d suddenly reach his limit and shake us off, growling, “God almighty, will you just leave me alone?”

  He was so much heavier back then, always determined to lose thirty pounds. Half a century later he’d do well to gain thirty pounds. Paul embraced him after our sister Tiffany died and reported that it was like hugging a coatrack. “What I do,” he says every night while Hugh puts dinner together, “is take a chicken breast, broil it with a little EVOO, and serve it with some lentils—fantastic!” Though my father talks big, we suspect the bulk of his meals come from whatever they’re offering as free samples at his neighborhood Whole Foods, the one we give him gift cards for. How else to explain how he puts it away while we’re all together, eating as if in preparation for a fast?

  “Outstanding,” he says between bites, the muscles of his jaws twitching beneath his spotted skin. “My compliments to the chef!”

  One night, I looked over and saw that he was wearing a Cherokee headdress someone had brought to the house for Thanksgiving. Paul had put it on him and, rather than shake it off the way he would have a few years earlier, he accepted it—owned it, really. Just before dessert was served, Amy and I noticed that he was crying. He looked like the Indian from that old “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign. One single tear running down his cheek. He never blubbered or called attention to himself, so we never asked what the problem was, or if there even was a problem. “Maybe he was happy that we were all together,” Lisa said when we told her about it. Gretchen guessed that he was thinking about our mother, or Tiffany, while Paul wondered if it wasn’t an allergic reaction to feathers.

  It’s not that our father waited till this late in the game to win our hearts. It’s that he’s succeeding.

  “But he didn’t used to be this nice and agreeable,” I complained to Hugh.

  “Well, he is now,” he said. “Why can’t you let people change?”

  This is akin to another of his often asked questions: “Why do you choose to remember the negative rather than the positive?”

  “I don’t,” I insist, thinking, I will never forget your giving me such a hard time over this.

  Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

  For whatever reason, I was very happy with my snapping turtles. In the wild, they can live for up to thirty years, though I fear that my favorite, the one with the hideous growth on his head, might not make it that long. There’s something wrong with his breathing, though he still manages to mount the females every chance he gets.

  “Oh, look,” a passerby said, pointing down into the churning water on the last full day of our vacation. “They’re playing!”

  I looked at the man with an incredulity that bordered on anger. “Snapping turtles don’t play,” I said. “Not even when they’re babies. They’re reptiles, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Can you believe it?” I said to my father when I got back to the beach house that evening. He was standing beside the sofa, wearing a shirt I clearly remember throwing into his trash can in the summer of 1990, and enjoying a glass of vodka with a little water in it. All around him, people were helping with dinner. Lisa and Amy were setting the table while Gretchen prepared the salad and Paul loaded his juicer with what looked like dirt. Hugh brought fish up from the grill, and as Kathy and Madelyn rounded up chairs, I put on some music. “Attaboy,” my father said. “That’s just what we needed. Is this Hank Mobley?”

  “It is,” I told him.

  “I thought so. I used to have this on reel-to-reel tape.”

  While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man, oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in, “isn’t this just fantastic?”

  Your English Is So Good

  There’s a language instruction course I turn to quite often. Pimsleur, it’s called, and I first used it in 2006, when preparing for a trip to Japan. “I am American,” I was taught to announce, somewhat sheepishly, at the start of lesson one. Half an hour later, I’d advanced to 日本語がお上手ですね, which translates to “Your Japanese is so good!”

  It seemed a bit early in the game to be receiving compliments, but still I learned to recognize the phrase and to respond to it with ありがとうございます、ですが私はまだそんなに上手ではありません (“Thank you very much, but I am not really skilled yet”). This came in handy as, once I got to Tokyo, every time I opened my mouth I was clobbered with praise, even if I was just saying something simple like “Huh?”

  The same was true with a number of other phrases I’d considered unnecessary but heard again and again once I arrived in Japan. The fact is that, unless we’re with friends or family, we’re all like talking dolls, endlessly repeating the same trite and tiresome lines: “Hello, how are you?” “Hot enough out there?” “Don’t work too hard!”

  I’m often misunderstood at my supermarket in Sussex, not because of my accent but because I tend to deviate from the script.

  Cashier: Hello, how are you this evening?

  Me: Has your house ever been burgled?

  Cashier: What?

  Me: Your house—has anyone ever broken into it and stolen things?

  With me, people aren’t thinking What did you say? so much as Why are you saying that?

  I know that Pimsleur offers an English course for native Spanish speakers, but I’m not sure if it’s geared toward U.K. English or what you hear in the United States. The former would most certainly include “At the end of the day…” Turn on British TV or follow anyone named Ian for more than a few minutes, and you’re guaranteed to hear it. In France the most often used word is “connerie,” which means “bullshit,” and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,” which has replaced “incredible,” “good,” and even “just OK.” Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.

  Pimsleur has made me hyperaware of the phrases I hear most often over the course of an average day, so aware that I’ve started jotting them down in hopes of putting together my own English program, one for business travelers visiting the United States. Let’s start at the airport newsstand, shall we? There, you’ll lay a magazine upon the counter and be asked by the cashier, “Do you need some water to go with that?” This will be said as if the two things should not really be sold separately, as if in order to properly read a copy of Us Weekly you’ll have to first rinse your eyes out with a four-dollar bottle of Evian.

  The pra
ctice of pushing more stuff on you is called “upselling” and is one of those things that, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing. At the airport in Baton Rouge a few years back, I ordered a coffee.

  “Do you need a pastry to go with that?” the young man behind the counter asked.

  “I wasn’t too shy to order the coffee,” I said, “so what makes you think I’d hold back on a bear claw if I wanted one?”

  The fellow shrugged. “We have Danish too.”

  This made me furious. “On second thought, I don’t want anything,” I told him. Then I went a few doors down to Dunkin’ Donuts and said, “I would like nothing but coffee. Just coffee. Period.”

  The woman behind the counter crossed her arms. “No cup?”

  “Well, of course I want a cup.”

  “No milk or nothing?”

  This always happens when I try to make a point. “And milk,” I told her. “Coffee in a cup with some milk in it but nothing else.” Then, of course, my flight got delayed by two hours and I had to go crawling back for some Munchkins. “Do you need coffee or a soda to go with that?” the woman who’d replaced the one I spoke to earlier asked.

  Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”

  As a business traveler, you’ll likely be met at your destination by someone who asks, “So, how was your flight?” This, as if there are interesting variations and you might answer, “The live orchestra was a nice touch,” or “The first half was great, but then they let a baby take over the controls and it got all bumpy.” In fact, there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.

  Next you’ll meet the desk clerk at your hotel, a woman most likely, in her mid- to late thirties. She won’t know if you’ve driven to this city or flown and will ask after taking your credit card, “So how was your trip in?”