My brother-in-law is too dense to figure out that dishes – and by dishes I mean glasses made of glass, plates and bowls and cups made not of plastic but of porcelain – will not sustain being shoved and crammed and sloppily stacked with zero regard for their size, their volume and their degree of durability. And so they break on their way into and out of the dish rack beside the sink, the dish rack that is a perfect, perfect metaphor for my sister’s marriage. Last weekend it was three of the bowls my mother bought years ago, each painted with a different fruit. Saturday morning the bowl with the apple, the one with the pear and the one with the plum were broken. I predict the juice glasses are next. While it may not sound unreasonable to expect the father of two children to figure out that if the back of the dish rack is wide open, putting small glasses at the rear of the tray, where they’re beneath the pressure of dozens of other dishes to the point where lifting a single thing out of the tray will cause the entire haphazard, half-assed arrangement to collapse and, as a result, force the glasses to crash out of the back, which, as I said, is wide open, it is, in fact, unrealistic to expect my brother-in-law to comprehend.
Two camps formed when my father died two years ago. One eulogized him as a folk hero, the other as a maniacal asshole. While I "trend" toward one side more than the other, I'm basically a centrist. Without a single stall that I’m aware of, my father detested my brother-in-law from the moment the two met. In the most ill-advised, misguided maneuver I’ve ever participated in, we deeded the house to my sister after my father died. Thanks to the fact that Missouri insists upon recognizing opposite-sex marriages, the state-sanctioned union occupied by my sister and my brother-in-law dictates that what is hers is his as well. That means, of course, that he automatically owns half the house that my father’s signature bought four days after I was born. Perhaps I am dancing with the dead on this one, but it did occur to me that my brother-in-law is settling the score, if you will, with his wife’s father. Every month, for 30 years, my parents wrote a mint-green check to Boatman’s Bank (my mother signed those), and now my nieces’ father can trash the structure and its contents because, well, hell, because it’s his.
One of my nieces is now13 years old. It’s January in Missouri, it snowed twice while I was there, I don’t believe the temperature got above freezing, yet every time we left the house with the children – and you must always take the children with you, everywhere, every time – my sister had to ask her daughter to put her shoes on. Not once, not twice, not three times, but (and yes, I counted) up to five times. It begins: Put your shoes on. Then: We’re leaving, so put your shoes on. And: Put your shoes on! And: Dammit, put your shoes on! I have never missed my father’s presence in the world more acutely than I did when I imagined my niece – as she was pretending to have not heard her mother tell her, for the fifth time as the rest of us waited, to put her shoes on – pulling her situational hostage-taking bullshit with her grandfather. Good luck with that, little princess.
I think of my sister’s family structure as a xylophone. Sometimes, my sister and her husband stand on the bars in the middle and their daughters slam the hell out of the bars on either end, and at other times my sister stands at one end and her husband at the other and they bang it so hard the vibrations pulse through my nieces as they stand in the center. Like the reality it depicts, there is zero grace or finesse in this analogy: Whomever slams the xylophone the hardest, whomever makes the most noise, whomever manages to shake it so violently that someone in the middle falls off, that person wins.
My mother loathed clutter. Her four favorite words, it often seemed, were “Get rid of it.” There were rugs in our dining room when I was growing up that one of her aunts brought back from China in the 1950s that, while old and going threadbare, were quite beautiful. She rolled two of them up once and put them on the curb the night before garbage day because they were “in the way.” The household is no longer managed that way. The piano is a shelf for the girls’ shit. My brother-in-law’s shit is crammed in with more of the girls’ shit on top of radiators, on top of an exquisite Japanese desk in the front hall, on top of a dresser my mother refinished that’s now in the upstairs bathroom. The kitchen table is covered with all kinds of shit, so the girls and their father usually eat either in the dining room or in the living room, where each of them seem to take up more space than any one person should require, boorishly shoveling in shit-quality food while they look at stupid shit on the television, which – though you’d never know it if you relied exclusively on your sense of hearing, since there is no end to the screaming and yelling and shouting back and forth of “What?”– is constantly on.
When I was growing up, sarcasm was like a currency. So it should not be difficult to imagine why, for a split second, I had a good laugh at a magnet on the refrigerator in the kitchen of the house where I grew up. Offered up by some exclamation point-happy group of parents who are not employed outside the home, the title of the magnet is “50 Ways to Praise Kids.” I sipped my coffee and tried to imagine anyone saying to either of my nieces with any degree of sincerity whatsoever things like “You’re incredible!”, “Very brave!”, “Way to go!”, or “You’re amazing!” Just thinking about it made it impossible for me to keep a straight face.
