It’s lunchtime. I take my eyes off of the computer screen that seems to rule my waking hours and I stumble through the closet la aqua that separates my quarters from the rest of the household. I open the door. I have no idea what to expect.
Visiting home used to be something of a predictable affair. It was me, my mom, my dad, my sister, and her two kids, who were starting lives of their own. During the day I’d be home more or less alone. My mom worked all day and my dad worked in the dental office whose waiting room I now sleep in. He’d come in for lunch and, depending on the day, be done early or later in the afternoon. In any event, it was usually a predictable month.
Things have changed. Mornings and dinnertime have become variable based on the simple fact that my sister had a kiddo. This child is best described as a mix between Elmo and Nero. Moments of undeniable charm and unimaginable cuteness are punctuated by moments of terror and tantrums that will only be complete when she’s wearing a toga and ejaculating her epithets from atop a hill of human skulls. But that’s dinner – good old fashioned American dinner.
Lunchtime is up in the air. It all depends on who’s sick.
I open the door into Grand Central Station. Nero is sick. My sister and her partner are chasing her through the dining room. She is disturbingly quick and agile for a child and makes sure, as she sashays and dodges all hands, that she coughs wetly upon every surface and available food item. This troubles everyone. My sister has the fray-haired look of a woman whose life choices have ended up with her mugshot on the news. My mother sighs and no doubt imagines a beach in Acapulco from which her chartered rocket ship could launch her into the sun for the peace and quiet promised her retired years.
My father is the only person left unperturbed by the events unfolding around him. He sits in his chair in the kitchen, which half-blocks only way in and out, and talks on the phone. My dad’s hearing is comedically bad and every interaction with him is something out of sitcom where a person says ‘How are you?’ to an older person and they respond ‘A pound of Swiss, please.’
But when he talks on the phone, he puts in the earbuds which bypass whatever makes him deaf. Then he is free from the annoyances around him and can only hear the person on the other end of the line. It is this person that he skirts and dances along several different subjects – movies, music, old friends, food – in order to discusses the one topic that my dad loves above all: bad things that have happened to people.
I am in the kitchen now making my lunch. My dad is about six feet to my right. This, along with the fact that his conversation is had at volume 12 on a 1–10 scale, leaves little chance of me avoiding the pitfalls that have crippled the people he discusses – like death and dismemberment – and those that have befallen humankind – like pestilence and genocide. He is the reaper. Or, at least, our personal reaper. Maybe we all get one.
‘Do you know, he was shot six times in Vietnam.’
Brief pause while other person responds.
‘I don’t know how it came up. He just told me.’
It’s unlikely this just came up and was clearly information sought for informational fodder.
I make my sandwich. The horrors of history and bad luck of people laid out for me, such as actor Errol Flynn (died young and disgraced), writer Saki (shot during WWI), and random patient from 1977 (hit by car while walking to his wedding).
I leave the room, tears dripping into my chicken salad sandwich. I sit at the dining room table with my mother, who is rubbing her eyes. Nero has gotten into the dining room hutch, but she’s quiet, so I eat as fast as possible. She mumbles to herself in a way that would attract the attention of an off-duty exorcist.
Dad has learned that his conversation partner must get off. He doubles down on the misery card and brings up the world with Donald Trump. The main message: the sky is falling. Sadly, he ain’t wrong.
Nero has located a long lighter.
If Rome burns, I know who will tell me about it. And free of distraction.
