This Is Where I Leave You

One or two other visitors have to move their chairs to accommodate his exit. At some point in time, Greg gave up on things and accepted his fate to spend the rest of his life fat and exhausted and dull as a butter knife.
    “Great to see you,” he says. His hand is thick and clammy.
    “Thanks for coming, man. I appreciate it.”
    “You bet.”
    He lumbers out of the room with the unhurried gait of a circus elephant. He was once a funny kid, pleasant-faced and not repulsive. A certain type of girl liked him. I wonder if he remembers our Clint Eastwood and Stallone impressions, if he watches Rambo like I do when I come across it flipping through the cable channels late at night, when the world is spinning much too fast for me to sleep.

Chapter 35
    11:22 a.m.
    It’s a day for reunions. Some old girlfriends of Wendy’s show up. She hides her diamond rings and sits up straighter. She trots out her boys for a command performance of cuteness. Ryan sulks, but Cole obliges, letting the women lift him up, pointing out their ears and eyes. Ryan picks his nose and wipes it on his shorts. Everyone coos. Snapshots of children are passed around and exclaimed over. Everyone is adorable. Everyone is perfect. No one here has ever produced an ugly or even ordinary baby. The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It’s a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother’s legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition. Someone procures an old yearbook and they all shriek like hyenas. 11:35 a.m.
    Peter Applebaum is back to comfort my mother at close range. There are other people over, attempting to visit with her, but he doesn’t 240register them. He is a hammer, she is a nail, and the rest of them are screws. He’s had a haircut since we last saw him, almost military in its closeness, and he has shaved the dark, gangrenous fuzz off his earlobes. His cologne fills the room like bad news. He is pulling out all the stops, Applebaum is. He has not many more years of sexual function ahead of him, and there is no time for the subtlety of a slow flirtation. He pats Mom’s arms, takes her hand in both of his, and strokes it relentlessly. That’s just his way. Mom tries to draw some of the other visitors into the conversation, tries to retrieve her hand, but Applebaum holds the line, talking and stroking, his bushy eyebrows unfurling like caterpillars. Linda steps out from the kitchen, her expression grim, and makes her way through the visitors. She whispers something into Applebaum’s ear, and his expression falls, his face turning red. He follows Linda back into the kitchen while Mom looks on, somewhat concerned. Behind the swinging door, slightly raised voices are drowned out by the sound of the Cuisinart. A few moments later, Applebaum shuffles down the front hall, stooped and deflated, pausing just long enough to leave a few bills on the tip plate next to the memorial candle. I feel sorry for him. There is some basis for comparison between us, I think. Linda reemerges at the kitchen door and she and my mother exchange a long, dense look over the heads of the shiva callers, decimating whatever lingering doubts I might have had. Wendy looks over at me, raising a drawn eyebrow into something like a question mark, but she’s not really asking.

    11:45 a.m.
    Some distant relatives have driven up from Long Island to pay their respects: my mother’s first cousin Sandra, her husband, Calvin, and their twin teenage sex-kitten daughters. The girls are vacant and beautiful and wield their budding sexuality with a certain lack of control, like a toddler with a power tool. They stretch their long, ripe bodies out on the couch and look around the room with the dismayed air of the recently conned. It was a long way to come for a room full of irrelevant relatives.
    There is an air of striving perfection about this family, evident in Sandra’s expensive-looking haircut and pedicure, Cal’s - for that’s what they call him - diamond-encrusted watch and expensive polo shirt with a golf club logo, in the girls’ smooth, tanned legs dipped into white canvas tennis shoes, their blown hair, their flawless