The New Yorker Stories

“Of course she can come,” Kate says.

“And you know what?” Becky says.

“Say hello to people when you come into a room,” Kate says. “At least make eye contact or smile or something.”

“I’m not Miss America on the runway, Mom. I’m just walking into the kitchen.”

“You have to acknowledge people’s existence,” Kate says. “Haven’t we talked about this?”

“Oh, hel-lo,” Becky says, curtsying by pulling out the sides of an imaginary skirt. She has on purple sweatpants. She turns toward me and pulls the fabric away from her hipbones. “Oh, hello, as if we’ve never met,” she says.

“Your aunt here doesn’t want to be in the middle of this,” Howard says. “She’s got enough trouble.”

“Get back on track,” Kate says to Becky. “What did you want to say to me?”

“You know what you do, Mom?” Becky says. “You make an issue of something and then it’s like when I speak it’s a big thing. Everybody’s listening to me.”

Kate closes the door to the dishwasher.

“Did you want to speak to me privately?” she says.

“Nooo,” Becky says, sitting in the chair across from me and sighing. “I was just going to say—and now it’s a big deal—I was going to say that Deirdre just found out that that guy she was writing all year is in prison. He was in prison all the time, but she didn’t know what the P.O. box meant.”

“What’s she going to do?” Howard says.

“She’s going to write and ask him all about prison,” Becky says.

“That’s good,” Howard says. “That cheers me up to hear that. The guy probably agonized about whether to tell her or not. He probably thought she’d hot-potato him.”

“Lots of decent people go to prison,” Becky says.

“That’s ridiculous,” Kate says. “You can’t generalize about convicts any more than you can generalize about the rest of humanity.”

“So?” Becky says. “If somebody in the rest of humanity had something to hide, he’d hide it, too, wouldn’t he?”

“Let’s go get a tree,” Howard says. “We’ll get a tree.”

“Somebody got hit on the highway carrying a tree home,” Becky says. “Really.”

“You really do have your ear to the ground in this town,” Kate says. “You kids could be the town crier. I know everything before the paper comes.”

“It happened yesterday,” Becky says.

“Christ,” Howard says. “We’re talking about crying, we’re talking about death.” He is leaning against the counter again.

“We are not,” Kate says, walking in front of him to open the refrigerator door. She puts a plate of stuffed tomatoes inside. “In your typical fashion, you’ve singled out two observations out of a lot that have been made, and—”

“I woke up thinking about Dennis Bidou last night,” Howard says to me. “Remember Dennis Bidou, who used to taunt you? Dad put me up to having it out with him, and he backed down after that. But I was always afraid he’d come after me. I went around for years pretending not to cringe when he came near me. And then, you know, one time I was out on a date and we ran out of gas, and as I was walking to get a can of gas a car pulled up alongside me and Dennis Bidou leaned out the window. He was surprised that it was me and I was surprised that it was him. He asked me what happened and I said I ran out of gas. He said, ‘Tough shit, I guess,’ but a girl was driving and she gave him a hard time. She stopped the car and insisted that I get in the back and they’d take me to the gas station. He didn’t say one word to me the whole way there. I remembered the way he looked in the car when I found out he was killed in Nam—the back of his head on that ramrod-straight body, and a black collar or some dark-colored collar pulled up to his hairline.” Howard makes a horizontal motion with four fingers, thumb folded under, in the air beside his ear.

“Now you’re trying to depress everybody,” Kate says.

“I’m willing to cheer up. I’m going to cheer up before tonight. I’m going up to that Lions Club lot on Main Street and get a tree. Anybody coming with me?”

“I’m going over to Deirdre’s,” Becky says.

“I’ll come with you, if you think my advice is needed,” I say.

“For fun,” Howard says, bouncing on his toes. “For fun—not advice.”

He gets my red winter coat out of the closet, and I back into it, putting in my good arm. Then he takes a diaper pin off the lapel and pins the other side of the coat to the top of my shoulder, easing the pin through my sweater. Then he puts Kate’s poncho over my head. This is the system, because I am always cold. Actually, Kate devised the system. I stand there while Howard puts on his leather jacket. I feel like a bird with a cloth draped over its cage for the night. This makes me feel sorry for myself, and then I do think of my arm as a broken wing, and suddenly everything seems so sad that I feel my eyes well up with tears. I sniff a couple of times. And Howard faced down Dennis Bidou, for my sake! My brother! But he really did it because my father told him to. Whatever my father told him to do he did. He drew the line only at smothering my father in the hospital when he asked him to. That is the only time I know of that he ignored my father’s wishes.

“Get one that’s tall enough,” Kate says. “And don’t get one of those trees that look like a cactus. Get one with long needles that swoops.”

“Swoops?” Howard says, turning in the hallway.