You Don't Have to Live Like This by Markovits Benjamin

Author:Markovits, Benjamin [Markovits, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Retail, Fiction
ISBN: 9780062376602
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

21

There was a message on my answering machine, but I didn’t listen to it till I went to bed, which was early, about nine o’clock. My brother wanted to know if I was coming home for Christmas. He couldn’t get away with the kids (he has three of them) and the house in Baton Rouge was too small. Andrea had put her foot down, and Mom didn’t want to commit to Christmas in Houston until she had heard from me. Of course, I was welcome to sleep on his couch if I wanted to, but regardless, I should let Mom know. I should call her anyway, just give her a call, he said. She’s building this whole thing up into something it’s not. It’s stressing her out.

My father offered to pay for my flight. Walter and Susie had also invited me to spend Christmas with them, but life seemed pretty tense downstairs. She was under doctor’s orders to stay in bed until the baby was born. Her due date was six weeks off and Walter not only had to run the kids’ workshop himself but also look after her—clean house, go shopping, bring her meals. She was taking this bed rest thing very seriously and shuffled around instead of walking, when she had to go to the bathroom, for example. I said once, how do you feel, do you feel weak, does something hurt, but she said, looking up, I just feel worried. Worried people can walk, I thought, but didn’t say anything. Walter looked strung out. So I took my dad’s money and flew home.

Home felt weird to me, too. My mother made meat loaf the night I got in, because it was my favorite thing to eat when I was twelve years old. After she went to bed, my dad offered me a shot of Jim Beam. We sat up watching TV and both got a little drunk. That’s what we did every night—watch TV. I didn’t tell either of them about Gloria, but all week long I had this Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner fantasy going around my head. For some reason I liked to imagine their reaction.

Gloria and I called each other practically every night. I sat in my old bedroom like a teenager, with the door closed, talking quietly, except when I was a teenager I didn’t have a girlfriend. One night I even went through my bedroom closet, looking for shoe boxes—the ones I had stashed my lead soldiers into a couple of weeks before going to Yale. They were still there. I unwrapped a few of the figures from their squares of kitchen towel, feeling a sort of abstract sadness. It struck me that all of my childhood interests and enthusiasms could be explained as displaced sexual energy.

On Christmas morning, while my mother got the dinner ready, my dad and I drove down to the racquet club and played squash. I could beat him easily these days. His hair, which was yellow, had become yellow-white.

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