This Is Where I Leave You

Stan is also highly accomplished in the field of flatulence, and he’s been here long enough for the room to carry the stale stench of his geriatric farts. The other visitors look around, wrinkling up their noses, searching for the source or for an escape route, but they are too polite to say anything.
    Phillip is not. “Christ, Uncle Stan! That’s just brutal. How do you live with yourself?”
    “It’s all that coffee I drank on the airplane.”
    “He’s also on a high-fi ber diet. The combination is like jet fuel,” Trish explains with a giggle. Women of a certain age shouldn’t giggle.
    “Trish is a nurse,” Stan says proudly.
    “Was,” Trish says. “I’m retired.”
    “But she still has the uniform,” Stan says, winking and kicking at my feet. “If you take my meaning.”
    “Stan!” Trish says, although she’s not nearly as mortified as she should be, if you ask me. Stan shrugs, then leans forward in his chair to release some more deadly fumes.
    “Lord have mercy,” Wendy says under her breath.

    8:54 p.m.
    Paul returns from the store, but instead of joining us in the shiva chairs, he makes his way purposefully through the crowded hallway and disappears up the stairs, ostensibly to check on Alice. “Why is he off the hook?” Phillip grumbles, sounding ten years old. Someone has gotten my mother started on the topic of toilet training, and the room falls silent as she holds forth. She is considered to be an expert on the topic, and the children of her friends still e-mail and call her to ask for guidance as they struggle to train their children. There is a long and celebrated chapter in Cradle and All in which she basically explains the psychology of crapping. She details the way she trained each of her children, the mistakes she made, and, sparing no scatology, the funny things that happened along the way. Mom draws heavily on her own maternal experience throughout the book, and we are all mentioned by name. There are two pages on Paul’s undescended testicle, a section on Wendy’s late-blooming breasts, and a full chapter on how Mom finally solved my bed-wetting problem when I was six years old. I used to shoplift copies from our local bookstore and toss them out in the Dumpsters behind the Getty station, in an effort to keep the books out of circulation. I was in the sixth grade when my classmates finally discovered the book, and I never heard the end of it. That was the year I learned how to fight.
    As Mom warms to her topic, she becomes a lecturer again, enunciating, gesticulating, and inserting little canned jokes that her friends must have heard a thousand times already but still laugh at because she’s in mourning. So Mom entertains the crowd with all the wisdom she’s gleaned about children and their toilet habits, and it’s so quiet that when another sound intrudes, we all hear it. It’s indiscernible at first, a burst of static and what sounds like a child out of breath, but then Alice’s voice 168can be heard loud and clear through Wendy’s baby monitor in the front hall. And what Alice says is this:
    Are you hard yet?
    There is more panting and a low moan, and then Alice says, Put it in me already.
    Then a moment of quiet, followed by Alice’s short, high-pitched moans and Paul’s grunts as they start to go at it. The visitors, all twenty or so of them, sit shell-shocked, their eyes wide, as Mom stops talking and turns toward the monitor.
    Harder. Fuck me harder, Alice cries.
    Quiet! Paul grunts.
    Yes, baby. Come in me. Come now.
    “I would not have figured Alice for a talker,” Phillip says. “Nice.”
    “I put Serena in there to nap earlier,” Wendy announces to the room.
    “I guess I forgot to take the monitor out. My bad.”
    Phillip leans back in his chair and grins widely. “This probably shouldn’t be making me as happy as it is.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, people,” Mom says sternly. “It’s just sex. You’ve all had it. A few of you might even have some tonight.”
    “I know I will,” Stan says, kicking my leg again. Dirty old man. You could hear a pin drop in the living room. That is, if it weren’t for Paul’s escalating grunts and Alice urging him - Come on, come on! -
    over and over again.
    “Sexual stamina runs in our family,” Phillip explains to the crowd.
    “This could take a while.”
    Linda miraculously appears in the hall and unplugs the receiver.
    “Sorry about that, everybody.” It’s unclear if she’s apologizing for