This Is Where I Leave You

else, confirms for me that I’m the only Foxman brother who didn’t get any last night.

    10:00 a.m.
    “It was a Saturday morning,” Wendy says, “and, Mom, you were on a lecture tour. Dad was up on the roof, hammering the rain gutters back on or something. He was making a racket, so I was down in the basement, watching TV. It was a Brady Bunch movie, I still remember. The one where they go to Hawaii.”
    “I remember that one,” Phillip says. “Alice hurts her back having a hula lesson, because of Peter’s bad luck charm.”
    “Right,” Wendy says. “That’s not really germane to my story.”
    “I remember thinking it was nice that Alice got to go on vacation with them,” Phillip says. “I mean, she was the housekeeper. You got the feeling that she hadn’t really gone anywhere before.”
    “Phillip remembers every show or movie he’s ever seen,” Tracy says proudly, like we might not know.
    “Now if only that were a marketable skill,” Wendy says. Tracy looks miffed, but Phillip laughs. He and Wendy have a long history of insulting each other. They don’t even hear it anymore. Tracy and Alice are on the couch; Linda is in an armchair, her feet up on one of the plastic folding chairs; and Barry is reading the Wall Street Journal in the backyard while the boys run around. The rest of us are back in our low shiva chairs, steeling ourselves for another 92ass-numbing day of greeting visitors at crotch level. Mom has asked us all to remember personal stories about Dad, which she is scribbling into a large brown journal.
    “So, anyway, that’s where I was, watching television, when I got my first period.”
    “I have one daughter, and I wasn’t here the day she became a woman,”
    Mom says. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
    “Hardly your worst offense,” Wendy says with a smirk. “So I run upstairs and I scream out the window to Dad, but he can’t hear me over the hammering. So I step outside and call up to him, but he still can’t hear me. So I grab a baseball off the lawn - Paul was always leaving baseballs on the lawn - and I throw it up to the roof. I only meant for it to hit the roof and roll down, just to catch his attention, but I guess I didn’t know my own strength, and the ball hits Dad square on the back of his head, and he loses his balance and falls off the roof, pulling the rain gutter off with him as he goes.”
    This Is Where I Leave You “I don’t remember this at all,” Phillip says.
    “Because it didn’t happen on a television show,” Wendy says. She turns to Tracy. “Phillip was their last child. He was basically raised by the television. We don’t hold it against him.”
    “Spiteful bitch,” Mom says with a smile.
    “So Dad’s lying on the ground, flat on his back. His arm is broken, and he’s got this big gash on his forehead, and his eyes are closed, and I’m sure I’ve just killed him. So I scream, ‘Daddy, wake up!’ And he opens his eyes and he says, very calmly, ‘I spent all morning putting that gutter on.’ Then he gets up, and we get in the car, and he drives one-armed to the emergency room. And the nurse at the desk looks him up and down and says, ‘What in the world happened to you?’ and he says, ‘My daughter got her period.’”
    Everyone laughs.
    “That’s such a perfect story,” Mom says, scribbling. “That’s so very Mort.”
    “Victoria - that was the nurse’s name - took me to the bathroom and taught me how to put in a tampon while they set Dad’s arm, and I still see her face every time I use a tampon. She was a big old Jamaican woman with little black freckles like Morgan Freeman, and she said ‘Just ease it in, child. Don’t you be scared. Bigger tings dan dis goin to go in dere. And come out.’ I had nightmares for weeks.”
    “That was great. Can you tell another story about your period?”
    “Shut up, Judd. Why don’t you tell your favorite memory now?”
    “I’m still thinking.”
    “I’ve got one,” Phillip says. “When I was in Little League, I had trouble catching. So they put me out in right field. And in the last inning, I dropped two balls that cost us the game. Our coach was this fat guy, I forgot his name. He got all crazy and started screaming at me. He called me worthless. So Dad stepped between us and I didn’t see what he did, but next thing I know, the coach is on the ground, and Dad is stepping on his chest. And he says, ‘Call my son worthless again.’ ”
    “That’s