My American Unhappiness Read online

  I suppose it could be said that my mother had had a harder time accepting my generosity than I had extending it. But she needed help, quickly. There was no time to explore options. She sold her house, paid off all the debts (hers and Melody's) that she could, and arrived along with a large moving truck from Smitty's Specialty Movers. It was not a joyful day for her, but she could see that the twins loved their Uncle Zeke, and ever since that move-in day, I have ended my evenings by telling three bedtime stories to the girls. My mother, often exhausted by the twins' eight o'clock bedtime, always seems to sigh with relief when I am home from work.

  That is how, despite my mother's objections to the Kerry-Edwards sign that I'd posted on my lawn, my mother and two nieces moved in with me in the fall of 2004. We celebrated Christmas together that year in our shared living room, my once spacious and spare rooms of Ikea-esque clarity now cluttered with the happy detritus of life with children: toys, dolls, gift wrapping, and small discarded half-empty bags of dried fruit snacks. A fresh-cut Fraser fir looked remarkable all lit up and festive against the backdrop of oak built-in bookcases.

  Shortly after my mother and the twins moved in, I went with my mother to see her pastor one afternoon, in the hope that she would see that I had a respect for her beliefs and that she would soon show the same respect for mine. In truth, I suppose I didn't have respect for her faith—she'd begged me to come along, despite my well-known unbelief—and her new pastor, Revered Ty Willis of the New Promise Church, which has usurped my mother's Catholic faith, encouraged us to read the book of Job. I'm not sure if my mother read it—to her, church, in her post-Catholic phase, was a bit of a social club more than anything—but I did, and I was less than comforted. The horror of the Lord engaging in high-stakes bets with Satan, and the absolute lack of comfort that Job's so-called friends bring to his grief, did change my view of God. The book made me feel as though God, if he existed, was sort of capable of being a major, reckless dick. Christians in the Midwest are fond of saying, "Everything happens for a reason." The book of Job illustrates, I think, that that's not the case at all.

  I have never been a dutiful son, nor have I ever fit in particularly well with my family. As a boy, I spent long stretches of time alone, in a small basement room that I had cleaned out and furnished with garage sale items and called my "study." My father thought of me as a sort of freak. My brother, though younger than me, considered me to be a boy of great weaknesses and useless pursuits, a spineless, though kind and generous, sad sack. My mother took most of my actions personally, as a judgment of her parenting and moral character, especially when, graduating early at the age of seventeen, I turned down a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, in my own backyard, and headed "out east" as my father liked to say, to the University of Michigan, which I did because I desperately wanted to do something that my family did not understand in a place they had never been.

  Years later, lighting that Christmas tree for the first time with my mother and the twins, I felt as if I finally belonged to the Pappas clan, now severely decimated by tragedy. My mother looked at me, playing with my nieces, and I think she felt it too: I, her only remaining son, am not a bad man. And, I must admit, she is not a bad mother.

  I told her that after the tree was lit, and the girls had fallen asleep underneath it. I brought her a cup of Constant Comment tea and poured myself a small tumbler of bourbon. And then I looked at my mother and said, "You're amazing. The girls are lucky to have you."

  My mother turned to me, almost pale, as if she was in utter shock. And then she began to tear up on the sofa, and I put on George Winston's December CD, which I knew she loved and which I once, on a more cynical Christmas years ago, disparaged. I sat with her on the sofa, and we stared at the lights, listening to the tinkling piano. Soon, she too was asleep, and eventually it sounded as if she murmured my name, but I couldn't make out the rest. On the floor, the twins twitched a bit under the afghan I'd spread over their bare legs, and I watched my dreaming family and felt, well, something akin to happiness.

  I'd like to tell you that my family has maintained this domestic bliss on a consistent basis since that Christmas season, but no family finds such bliss sustainable. Still, I am always somewhat happy to come home from the office, which I suppose is more than the breadwinner in a traditional domestic situation can often say.

  Approaching our house after my rather eventful coffee break with Minn and H. M., I can already see that April and May are in the front yard, playing some sort of game with a long yellow jump rope. Today is the sort of sunny afternoon in which a soul goes reeling. On one hand, before us is the sheer and dazzling beauty of spring's golden light, the leaves attempting to burst through their buds. And on the other hand we know winter is not gone for good—we know that in seven months, maybe less, we will have to deal, once again, with the endless snow, the days that go dim at four o'clock, and the icy, painful winds.

  Such dualities—pleasure and pain, contentment and longing—plague us in the Midwest. Everything is beautiful; everything is fleeting. Everything warm eventually cools and bitters.

  This afternoon, as I walk toward April and May, their blond hair absolutely magnificent in the waning light, two teenagers, both driving modest American two-doors, race up and down Commonwealth Avenue, engaged in some sort of vehicular flirtation. The first time they come tearing down the block, I ignore them, though I am aware that up the street, April and May have put down their jump rope and April is now creating enormous bubbles with a bubble wand that I bought her at the dollar store. The second time the two vehicles, a blue Geo and a green Neon, appear on Commonwealth, going faster now, chasing each other, I notice that May is dancing after the bubbles, precariously close to the curb. Soon, two doors away from my home, the two speeding cars reappear, on their third lap, and I scream, at the top of my lungs, "Freeze!"

  April and May stop and stare at me as I sprint after the racing Geo. I find a rock on the ground and hurl it. The Geo stops and does a U-turn and I run to the car window, screaming at the teenaged driver who is also screaming at me, a litany of obscenities between us. The kid, this punk, is wearing a black baseball cap with a logo I don't recognize. Some team of sorts, an expansion team I've never heard of from some league I don't follow. At first, he is smirking at me from underneath a weak caterpillar of a mustache, but once I snarl at him, his face grows sober, and his defiant expression fades. My anger is fierce, and I lean into his open window and hiss in his face, "If you ever drive like this on my street again, asshole, I will cut you from your privates to your throat. I will bleed you out right here."

  It's a variation of a line I remember from the movie Young Guns, which I watched many times as a teenager, and it suddenly comes to me, but it is sufficiently creepy to scare the young punk, who apologizes and drives off. As a man of average size and limited physical prowess, I have long ago learned that insanity is far more intimidating than size or strength. Nobody, if you will, fucks with a crazy man.

  The street once again safe for my nieces, I head toward my front yard. April and May hug me as we stand in front of the Obama yard sign (my mother also disapproves of this one, though the political rage she showed in 2004 has mellowed, replaced by hopelessness) and begin showing me their various tricks. I look up at the front porch, where my mother is sitting in a chair, smiling. My chest is still heaving and my guts are watery with adrenaline. I shake my hands as if drying them; a jittery wave of electricity still pulses in my fingertips.

  "Zeke," she says, "I didn't know you had that in you."

  I shrug and go back to watching April and May craft enormous bubbles with their bubble wands, my heart still racing as the adrenaline begins to subside. Frankly, I sort of surprised myself, but the image of those speeding cars, careening recklessly so near the spot where my nieces were playing, well, I couldn't help but think, what if, what if something happened to them right now that was irrevocable and tragic? Suddenly, it is as if they were the most important things in the whole w
orld to me, as if losing them would stop time and shatter everything.

  And then I realize this: they are and it would.

  That night, we eat dinner at six thirty, like we always do, and my mother is serving what she always serves on Wednesday nights: spaghetti. It has been this way since Cougar and I were young boys, spaghetti and garlic bread, six o'clock Wednesdays. It used to be my father's favorite night of the week, solely for this reason, I think, although my father once slyly intimated to me that Wednesday was also a weekly sex night for him and my mother, though I have tried to forget that for the obvious reasons.

  Tonight, my mother hardly eats a thing, though at least she sits down with us. As of late, she's taken to lying on the couch soon after she serves dinner, falling into a soft nap, and my nieces and I eat together, discussing both the intricacies of my day at a marginal cultural nonprofit, and their days as the only set of twins in the second grade. I might tell them about a grant application I am submitting to a private foundation, and, smiling at each other because they find me so unbelievably boring, they might start to giggle.

  "What?" I'll ask, making my eyes look huge and incredulous. "You're not interested in the programmatic evaluation techniques used by federally funded nonprofits?"

  The girls will giggle harder.

  Eventually, they'll tell me a story about how Miles Gregorson lost three teeth playing floor hockey in gym class, or they'll regale me with details of Marnie Finn's family vacation to Disney World and I will take absolute delight in their storytelling. Watching them build to a narrative climax, trading off the revelation of details, finishing each other's sentences, is really one of the finest moments of my day. When I am away for work, on the road overnight, or even when I am out with friends, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am missing April's and May's stories.

  Tonight, my mother is reading a copy of Simply You as we eat, and she interrupts April's story about Brett Wilson's missing dog and begins to read to us aloud: "Listen to this, Zeke," my mother says. "Does it seem like you're ready for marriage, but you don't have any prospects on the horizon? Well, just like any good business executive knows the importance of cultivating contacts and nurturing networks, any woman who wants to find Mr. Right knows that she must do the same thing. Follow these simple steps, and you might just be head over heels (or engaged!) by the end of the summer."

  "Mom," I say, "April was talking."

  "What does that mean?" April says. "What is head over heels?"

  "I don't get it," May says.

  "Well," my mother says, "it's the sort of quiz that might explain why Uncle Zeke is not married."

  "Aw, come on, Ma," I say. "It's for women."

  My mother continues reading.

  "Are you getting married, Uncle Zeke?" April says.

  "Oh, oh, you totally should," May says.

  "Attractiveness, real attractiveness," my mother says, "lasting attractiveness, doesn't really set in until you get to know somebody, until you admit that you're open to the possibility of a lasting relationship with somebody."

  "Mom," I say, "enough!"

  My mother smiles. "Okay, maybe this isn't a good time," she says.

  "It's not," I say.

  "Always so moody," my mother says.

  The meal falls into silence for a moment, the only sound the clinking of silverware and china together, the same awkward dinnertime cacophony that often plagued my own childhood as the soundtrack for my father's virulent disapproval. When he was mad at me, as he often was, he gave me the silent treatment. If he was disappointed in a sweatshirt I wore, or a paper I'd written, or a comment I'd made, or my failure to get him a birthday card, he could pretend, for weeks on end, as if I didn't exist.

  After supper, my mother wants to rest on the couch as usual. She takes her magazine to the living room, and soon I hear her asthmatic wheeze of a snore from the next room. It is not easy, I'm sure, to be the primary caregiver for two seven-year-olds when one is sixtythree. My mother, it seems, will never have time that is truly her own, though I've never heard her complain about it.

  April and May help me with the dishes that evening, and then they go upstairs to bathe and brush their teeth and dress in their pajamas while I mop up the vast puddles they have created on the kitchen floor. April and May are remarkably self-sufficient, as orphans almost always are. By the time I come upstairs, they are under the covers of the double bed they share, each of them reading a library book, their Ikea bedside lamps—a present from me, as I was always a before-bed reader—lighting their faces in a soft yellow glow. April is looking at a book called Amazing Aquatic Creatures and May is looking at one about a young boy and a terrible, horrible, no-good day.

  "You guys want a story tonight?" I ask, and, neither of them looking up from their books, they mumble, "No, thanks." I go back downstairs to finish cleaning the kitchen, and when I return, no more than ten minutes later, they are asleep. I take their books and stack them on the desk in the corner of the room. I kiss both of them on the forehead, smelling the toothpaste on their breaths, then I turn off the bedside lamps, and, as is my habit of late, I stand there in the dark and listen to their breathing. Only when I am sure, completely sure, that their breaths are steady and normal and without distress do I leave the room and shut the door.

  My mother is still asleep in the living room. The girls have worn her out. On Wednesdays and weekends, when she works her longs shifts (five to five) at the Old Country Buffet on the east side of town (she does this mainly for the health insurance), she seems less tired than she does after an afternoon with the energetic twins. I go out to the porch to sit and enjoy the breeze of the evening. My mother comes out onto the porch fifteen minutes or so later, wrapped in her robe, holding two mugs of tea. She sits next to me on the porch swing, and we sway there, me staring out ahead at nothing, she huddled over her steaming tea for warmth.

  "You should have woken me up," she says.

  "You need to rest," I say. "That's a long day of work."

  "Say, can I bring the girls to your office tomorrow afternoon?" my mother asks. "After school? I have a doctor's appointment at four."

  "Everything okay?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Just need an asthma checkup. My doctor had one open appointment all month. Can you believe it? This was it."

  "No sweat. Bring them by anytime."

  "I know you must be busy at work," she says.

  "Not that busy actually," I say.

  We sit in the dark a while longer. My mother lights a cigarette, her only vice, the worst one an asthmatic can have. I've often tried to turn her on to the joys of alcohol, its uncomplicated sorrow and numbing joy, but she prefers to smoke. She will drink with me on occasion, but frankly, I doubt she likes the strange numbness drinking provides. She is a woman who is often at the helm—of family, of a problem, of a shortage of roast beef in the Sunday afternoon buffet—and I suppose it feels unnatural to her to deaden any impulse or instinct.

  Across the street, in the Mendelsohns' big stone house, I can see the Mendelsohns gathered around the television, watching something that is apparently hilarious, as all four teenagers, as well as the parents, have silly smiles on their faces.

  "They seem like a happy family," my mother says. "Don't they?"

  "Everybody seems happy through a window. Do you think it's weird that we're sitting here watching them?"

  "No," she says. "I think it's weird they don't pull the drapes."

  "Good point."

  "Zeke, I'm sorry I dropped that quiz on you at dinner," she says. "I just thought it would be amusing. I think it ruffled your feathers a bit."

  "I know. I'm sorry if I overreacted," I say. "I just was uncomfortable discussing such things in front of the girls."

  "I suppose," she says.

  We swing in the breeze a bit more, the chains squeaking with marginal protest. Since we've moved in together, my mother and I are exceedingly polite to each other. We know, deep down, that we disagree vehemently on many politica
l and social issues, but we are the only family the girls have now, save for Melody's twin sister, the girls' Aunt Harmony, a real estate agent in Livonia, Michigan, with whom they spend two weeks each summer and two weeks each winter. And so we do what we can to keep the peace with each other, avoiding any topics that would arouse passions.

  "I suppose I was just trying to get information from you," she says. "You're so secretive. You always were."

  "Uh-huh," I say. I let the passive aggressiveness slide.

  "Just tell me, Zeke. Satisfy an old woman's curiosity. Is there anyone you're interested in at all? Are you seeing anybody?"

  "When would I have time to date?" I ask. "I work all day, I'm home with you all in the evenings, and I watch the girls all weekend while you work."

  "I'm home by five thirty on Saturdays and Sundays," she says.