Sedaris, David - Calypso by Sedaris David

Author:Sedaris, David [Sedaris, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

That night, we went to a restaurant Lisa and her husband, Bob, are fond of in the town of Atlantic Beach. I put on a shirt and tie, Amy debuted a new dress, and my father wore a T-shirt with white tennis shorts. His legs used to be hairy, but now they’re as smooth as a child’s, the result, he says, of wearing knee-high socks for all those years at IBM. He rode to the restaurant with Hugh and me, and perked up when, halfway through the twenty-minute drive, we passed the condominium complex we often stayed at in the 1980s. “Hey,” he said, “that’s where we used to go when we were a family.”

“Well, aren’t you still a family?” Hugh asked.

“I meant when Sharon was alive.”

Though I hated hearing him say that, I couldn’t deny the truth of it. Our mother was the one who held us all together. After her death we were like a fistful of damp soil, loose bits breaking off with no one to press them back in. When she was around, we came to the beach every year. The place we’d just passed was set in a complex of twenty or so units, arranged around a pool. There are pictures of us all standing on the deck, my eyes and those of several of my sisters bloodshot from all our pot-smoking. I think of the meth-fueled sandcastles we built and the dinosaurs made of driftwood the year we could afford cocaine.

“You’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” our mother used to say when we’d return from our midnight walks on the beach. She knew what was up, while I don’t think our father had a clue. The condo we rented was arranged over five floors. When my sisters brought boyfriends, they had to sleep in separate rooms. It was the same at my parents’ place in Raleigh. “It’s my house, so you play by my rules,” our mother used to say. The sole exception was me, for some reason. I said to my father not long ago, “The only sex you and Mom allowed under your roof was gay sex. Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

“Well, there was us,” he said.

“Us?”

“I mean your mother and me.”

I covered my ears and vomited a little in my mouth.

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