This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

Author:Jonathan Tropper
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Published: 2010-07-21T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

8:45 p.m.

The show goes on. We are all back in our shiva chairs, except for Paul, who has begged off, claiming some kind of retail emergency at the store. Alice has not been seen since the fit she threw this morning, but Tracy has reappeared, sitting off to the side, smiling graciously. The rest of us face the crowd like a rock band on tour, same set list, different town. We perform our sad little shiva smiles on cue and repeat the same inane conversations over and over again. He just slipped away, Mom says. Three kids now, Wendy says. I’m a photojournalist. I just got back from a year in Iraq, embedded with a marine unit, Phillip says. We’re separated, I say.

What happens is this. Every half hour or so, someone will ask me where Jen is. And I will say that we are separated. Then, like a game of telephone, word will quietly spread through the room, so that everyone present will know not to ask. And then, invariably, new visitors will arrive, and someone uninformed will ask me again, and the cycle will repeat. I feel bad for the ones who ask, who bear the awkwardness for the rest of the crowd.

My mother’s closer friends have known for weeks. Millie Rosen brings her daughter, Rochelle, who is twenty-seven, unmarried, and pretty in a forgettable way. She positions her right in front of me and makes painfully obvious attempts at engaging us in conversation. What pretty much every person in Elmsbrook except Millie knows is that I am not Rochelle’s type, being that I don’t have breasts and a vagina.

Mom’s older brother, Uncle Stan, has arrived with his latest senior citizen tramp, Trish, who wears her makeup like a drag queen, coloring way outside the lines with her lipstick and eyebrow pencils. Stan was an appellate court judge and married to my aunt Esther, a broad, sexless slab of a woman, for forty years. After Esther died of emphysema, Stan waited what he considered to be an appropriate mourning period, two weeks or so, and then began sleeping his way through all the willing widows in his retirement village down in Miami Beach. He’s closing in on eighty and has his pick of the litter, being that he can still drive and screw. I know this because he’s supremely gifted at working it into every conversation.

Uncle Stan is also highly accomplished in the field of flatulence, and he’s been here long enough for the room to carry the stale stench of his geriatric farts. The other visitors look around, wrinkling up their noses, searching for the source or for an escape route, but they are too polite to say anything.

Phillip is not. “Christ, Uncle Stan! That’s just brutal. How do you live with yourself?”

“It’s all that coffee I drank on the airplane.”

“He’s also on a high-fiber diet. The combination is like jet fuel,” Trish explains with a giggle. Women of a certain age shouldn’t giggle.

“Trish is a nurse,” Stan says proudly.

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