Underdogging: the

tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, "sad," or failing products: "/ know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them."

"Signs?"

Mom increases the wiper-blade speed and turns on the lights. Something's on her mind.

"Oh, you've all left and come back and left and come back so many times now, I don't really even see the point in telling my friends that my kids have left home. Not that the subject ever comes up these days. My friends are all going through similar things with their kids. When I bump into someone at the Safeway nowadays, it's implicit we don't ask about the children the way we used to. We'd get too depressed. Oh, by the way, you remember Allana du Bois?

"The dish?"

"Shaved her head and joined a cult."

"No!"

"And not before she sold off all of her mother's jewelry to pay for her share of the guru's Lotus Elite. She left Post-it Notes all over the house saying, Til pray for you, Mom.' Mom finally booted her out. She's growing turnips now in Tennessee."

"Everyone's such a mess. Nobody turned out normal. Have you seen anyone else?"

"Everyone. But I can't remember their names. Donny... Ar­nold... I remember their faces from when they used to come over to the house for Popsicles. But they all look so beaten, so old now—so prematurely middle-aged. Tyler's friends, though, I must say, are all so perky. They're different.

"Tyler's friends live in bubbles."

"That's neither true nor fair, Andy."

She's right. I'm just jealous of how unafraid Tyler's friends are of the future. Scared and envious. "Okay. Sorry. What were the signs that Dee might be coming home? You were saying—"

The traffic is light on Sandy Boulevard as we head toward the steel bridges downtown, bridges the color of clouds, and bridges so large and complex that they remind me of Claire's New York City. I wonder if their mass will contaminate the laws of gravity.

"Well, the moment one of you kids phones up and gets nostaligic for the past or starts talking about how poorly a job is going, I know it's time to put out the fresh linen. Or if things are going too well. Three months ago Dee called and said Luke was buying her her own frozen yogurt franchise. She'd never been more excited. Right away I told your

father, 'Frank, I give her till spring before she's back up in her bedroom boo-hooing over her high-school annuals.' Looks like I'll win that bet. "Or the time Davie had the one halfway decent job he ever had, working as an art director at that magazine and telling me all the time how he loved it. Well, I knew it was only a matter of minutes before he'd become bored, and sure enough, ding-dong, there goes the doorbell, and there's Davie with that girl of his, Rain, looking like refugees from a child labor camp. The loving couple lived at the house for six months, Andy. You weren't here; you were in Japan or something. You have no idea what that was like. I still find toenail clippings everywhere. Your poor father found one in the freezer—black nail polish—awful crea­ture."

"Do you and Rain tolerate each other now?"

"Barely. Can't say I'm unhappy to know she's in England this Christmas."

It's raining heavily now, and making one of my favorite sounds, that of rain on a car's metal roof. Mom sighs. "I really did have such high hopes for all of you kids. I mean, how can you look in your little baby's face and not feel that way? But I just had to give up caring what any of you do with your lives. I hope you don't mind, but it's made my life that much easier."

Pulling in the driveway, I see Tyler dashing out into his car, pro­tecting his artfully coifed head from the rain with his red gym bag. "Hi, Andy!" he shouts before slamming the door after entering his own warm and dry world. Through a crack in the window he cranes his neck and adds, "Welcome to the house that time forgot!"

2 + 2 = 5-ISM: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone."

OPTION PARALYSIS:

The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

Christmas Eve. HI am buying massive quantities of candles today, but
I'm not saying why. Votive candles, birthday candles, emergency can­
dles, dinner candles, Jewish candles, Christmas candles, and candles
from the Hindu bookstore bearing peoploid cartoons of saints. They all
count—all flames are equal. At the Durst Thriftee Mart on 21st
Street, Tyler is too embarrassed for words by this shopping com-
pulsion; he's placed a frozen Butterball turkey in my cart to make it
look more festive and less deviant. "What ex-

actly is a votive candle, anyway?" asks Tyler, be-

traying both dizziness and a secular upbringing

as he inhales deeply of the overpowering and

cloying synthetic blue- berry pong of a din-

ner candle. "You light them when you say a

prayer. All the churches $ in Europe have them."

"Oh. Here's one you missed." He hands me a bulbous red table candle, covered in fishnet stocking material, the sort that you find in a mom-and-pop Italian restaurant. "People sure are looking funny at your cart, Andy. I wish you'd tell me what these candles were all for." "lt's a yuletide surprise, Tyler. Just hang in there." We head toward the sea-sonally busy checkout counter, looking surprisingly normal in our sem-iscruff outfits, taken from my old bedroom closet and dating from my punk days—Tyler's in an old leather jacket I picked up in Munich; I'm in beat-up layered shirts and jeans.

Outside it's raining, of course.

In Tyler's car heading back up Burnside Avenue on the way home, I attempt to tell Tyler the story Dag told about the end of the world in Vons supermarket. "I have a friend down in Palm Springs. He says that when the air raid sirens go off, the first thing people run for are the candles."

"So?"

"I think that's why people were looking at us strangely back at the Durst Thriftee Mart. They were wondering why they couldn't hear the sirens."

"Hmmm. Canned goods, too," he replies, absorbed in a copy of Vanity Fair (I'm driving). "You think I should bleach my hair white?"

"You're not using aluminum pots and pans still, are you, Andy?" asks my father, standing in the living room, winding up the grandfather clock. "Get rid of them, pronto. Dietary aluminum is your gateway to Alz­heimer's disease."

Dad had a stroke two years ago. Nothing major, but he lost the use of his right hand for a week, and now he has to take this medication that makes him unable to secrete tears; to cry. I must say, the experience certainly scared him, and he changed quite a few things in his life. Particularly his eating habits. Prior to the stroke he'd eat like a farmhand, scarfing down chunks of red meat laced with hormones and antibiotics and God knows what else, chased with mounds of mashed potato and fountains of scotch. Now, much to my mother's relief, he eats chicken and vegetables, is a regular habitue of organic food stores, and has installed a vitamin rack in the kitchen that reeks of a hippie vitamin B stench and makes the room resemble a pharmacy.

Like Mr. Mac Arthur, Dad discovered his body late in life. It took him a brush with death to deprogram himself of dietary fictions invented by railroaders, cattlemen, and petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms over the centuries. But again, better late than never.

"No, Dad. No aluminum."

"Good good good." He turns and looks at the TV set across the

room and then makes disparaging noises at an angry mob of protesting young men rioting somewhere in the world. "Just look at those guys. Don't any of them have jobs? Give them all something to do. Satellite them Tyler's rock videos— anything—but keep them busy. Jesus." Dad, like Dag's ex-coworker Margaret, does not believe human beings are built to deal constructively with free time.

Later on, Tyler escapes from dinner, leaving only me, Mom and Dad, the four food groups, and a predictable tension present.

"Mom, I don't want any presents for Christmas. I don't want any things in my life."

"Christmas without presents? You're mad. Are you staring at the sun down there?"

Afterward, in the absence of the bulk of his children, my maudlin father flounders through the empty rooms of the house like a tanker that has punctured its hull with its own anchor, searching for a port, a place to weld shut the wound. Finally he decides to stuff the stockings by the fireplace. Into Tyler's he places treats he takes a great pleasure in buying every year: baby Listerine bottles, Japanese oranges, peanut brittle, screwdrivers, and lottery tickets. When it comes to my stocking, he asks me to leave the room even though I know he'd like my company. / become the one who roams the house, a house far too large for too few people. Even the Christmas tree, decorated this year by rote rather than with passion, can't cheer things up.

The phone is no friend; Portland is Deadsville at the moment. My friends are all either married, boring, and depressed; single, bored, and depressed; or moved out of town to avoid boredom and depression. And some of them have bought houses, which has to be kiss of death, per­sonality-wise. When someone tells you they've just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can im­mediately assume so many things: that they're locked into jobs they hate; that they're broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they're fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It's profoundly depressing. And the worst part of it is that people in their houses don't even like where they're living. What few happy moments they possess are those gleaned from dreams of upgrading. God, where did my grouchy mood come from? The world has become one great big quiet house like Deirdre's house in Texas. Life doesn't have to be this way.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23