Parents

YOUR

EAT

We're hoovering plutonium out from the floorboards of Claire's living
room. Plutonium —that's our new hipster code word for the rogue, pos­
sibly radioactive Trinitite beads. 'Feisty little buggers," blurts Dag
as he thwacks a nozzle at a problematic wood knot, in good cheer and
far more himself after twelve hours of sleep, a shower, a grapefruit from
the MacArthur's tree next door—a tree we helped string with blue
Christmas lights last week—as well as the Dagmar Bellinghausen secret
hangover cure (four Ty- lenol and a lukewarm tin

of Campbell's Chicken & Stars soup). "These

beads are like killer bees, the way they invade

everything." I spent the morning on the phone

arranging and being pre- occupied with my up-

coming trip to Portland to see my family, a trip that

Claire and Dag both say is making me morbid.

"Cheer up. You have nada to worry about. Look at me. I just made someone's apartment uninhabitable for the next four and a half billion years. Imagine the guilt / must feel." HDag's actually being generous about the plutonium matter, but he did have to make a psychic trade­off, and now he has to pretend he doesn't mind Claire and Tobias copulating in his bedroom, staining his sheets (Tobias brags about not using condoms), dealphabetizing his cassette tapes, and looting his Kel-vinator of citrus products. Nonetheless, the subject of Tobias is on Dag's mind: "I don't trust him. What's he up to?"

"Up to?"

"Andrew, wake up. Someone with his looks could have any bimbette with a toe separator in the state of California. That's obviously his style. But then he chooses Claire, who, love her as much as we do, chic as she may be, and much to her credit, is something of a flawed catch by Tobias standards. I mean, Andy, Claire reads. You know what I'm saying."

"I think so."

"He's not a nice human being, Andrew, and he even drove over the mountains to see her. And pllll-eeze don't try to tell me that somehow it's love."

"Maybe there's something about him we don't know, Dag. Maybe we should just have faith in him. Give him a reading list to help him better himself—"

A frosty stare.

"I think not, Andrew. He's too far gone. You can only minimize the damage with his type. Here—help me lift this table."

We rearrange the furniture, discovering new regions the plutonium has colonized. The rhythm of detoxification continues: brushes, rags, and dustpans. Sweep, sweep, sweep.

I ask if Dag is going to go visit his somewhat estranged parents in Toronto this Christmas. "Spare me, Andrew. This funster's having a cactus Christmas. Look," he says, changing the subject, "— chase that dust bunny."

I change the subject. "I don't think my mother really grasps the concept of ecology or recycling," I start to tell Dag, "At Thanksgiving two years ago, after dinner, my mother was bagging all of the dinner trash into a huge nonbiodegradable bag. I pointed out to her that the bag was nonbiodegradable and she might want to consider using one of the degradable bags that were sitting on the shelf. She says to me, 'You're right! I forgot I had them!' and so she grabs one of the good bags. She then takes all of the trash, bad bag and all, and heaves it into the new one. The expression on her face was so genuinely proud that I didn't have the heart to tell her she'd gotten it all wrong. Louise Palmer: Planet Saver."

I flop down on the cool soft couch while Dag continues cleaning: "You should see my parents' place, Dag. It's like a museum of fifteen years ago. Nothing ever changes there; they're terrified of the future.

Have you ever wanted to set your parents' house on fire just to get them out of their rut? Just so they had some change in their lives? At least Claire's parents get divorced every now and then. Keeps things lively. Home is like one of those aging European cities like Bonn or Antwerp or Vienna or Zurich, where there are no young people and it feels like an expensive waiting room."

"Andy, I'm the last person to be saying this, but, hey—your parents are only getting old. That's what happens to old people. They go cuckoo; they get boring, they lose their edge."

"These are my parents, Dag. I know them better than that." But Dag is all too right, and accuracy makes me feel embarrassingly petty. I parry his observation. I turn on him: "Fine comment coming from someone whose entire sense of life begins and ends in the year his own parents got married, as if that was the last year in which things could ever be safe. From someone who dresses like a General Motors showroom salesman from the year 1955. And Dag, have you ever noticed that your bungalow looks more like it belongs to a pair of Eisenhower era Allen-town, Pennsylvania newlyweds than it does to a fin de siècle existentialist poseur?"

"Are you through yet?"

"No. You have Danish modern furniture; you use a black rotary-dial phone; you revere the Encyclopedia Britannica. You're just as afraid of the future as my parents." Silence.

"Maybe you're right, Andy, and maybe you're upset about going home for Christmas—"

"Stop being nurturing. It's embarrassing."

"Very well. But ne dump pas on moi, okay? I've got my own demons

and I'd prefer not to have them trivialized by your Psych 101-isms. We're

always analyzing life too much. It's going to be the downfall of us all.

"I was going to suggest you take a lesson from my brother Matthew,

the jingle writer. Whenever he phones or faxes his agent, they always

haggle over who eats the fax—who's going to write it off as a business

expense. And so I suggest you do the same thing with your parents. Eat

| them. Accept them as a part of getting you to here, and get on with life.

i Write them off as a business expense. At least your parents talk about

Big Things. / try and talk about things like nuclear issues that matter

to me with my parents and it's like I'm speaking Bratislavan. They listen

MUSICAL HAIRSPLITTING: The act of

classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska."

101-ISM: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.

I

indulgently to me for an appropriate length of time, and then after I'm out of wind, they ask me why I live in such a God-forsaken place like the Mojave Desert and how my love life is. Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear."

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23