Chapter 7
7
NOW
“SO, BOOSE,” SAID CALEB.
At the sound of my name, I jumped. A small wave of water splashed out of my cup.
“Tell us about your job.”
I straightened. I was childish to be so excited by the prompt, but I couldn’t help it. It was finally my chance. My turn to talk. Why yes, ladies and gentlemen, I did land a job right out of high school. I am self-supporting at the age of twenty-one. And no—I didn’t use a dime of our drug money to do so!
“Well.” I raised my voice. Tried not to think about the spit still clinging to the burger on my plate. “Blossom is pretty amazing. It’s a startup that—”
“Wait,” interrupted Karma. “What exactly is your job title, again?”
“Global Content Manager.”
“Which means…?”
“She’s a copywriter,” said my mother proudly, as if she had any idea what that meant.
Karma waved a hand. “Which means …?”
“It means she writes the jingles that brainwash you into buying expensive toothpaste,” said Clarence.
“No,” I said. “What I do is—”
“And how did you get that job?” Karma asked. “Don’t copywriting positions usually require a college degree?”
“They do.” I nodded. “But I started at the bottom at Blossom. Assisting other writers or doing admin work for the executives. Getting coffee, answering emails. That sort of stuff. But I worked really hard, and after two and a half years—”
“Personally,” interrupted Caleb. “I think what Boose is doing is awesome. I mean, just look at how packaged organic products are disrupting the food industry.”
“Yes, well,” Clarence responded. “It’s hardly surprising that you would approve of Boose’s job, seeing as you only ever think about pumping money out of patients and insurance companies.”
“Oh, is that so?” Caleb asked. “And what do you say to yourself, Clarence, after looking in your bank account and seeing a pile of money you made thanks to buying up patents that you can then shield from the rest of the research community?”
Clarence sat back in his chair and smirked. “You mean, the same money that you’ll inherit as soon as Dad dies?”
“That’s different,” said Caleb. “At least I make a real, everyday difference with my patients. All you do is peddle Prozac and Cialis, while perfectly viable cures for cancer sit on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust—”
Caleb kept talking. I sighed. There was no point. Nobody actually cared.
“I care,” said a low voice to my left. A voice that rumbled straight through my body, sending sparks all the way down to my toes.
Drat. Of course I said that out loud. Of course Manuel heard.
My eyes darted over to his before looking quickly away. “Never mind,” I said, voice breathy, fake. “Just joking.”
Disappointment seeped off Manuel. He turned slowly back to his French fries.
For a moment, as I watched the eagerness leak from his face, I wanted to break. To tell him everything. To tell him that, in preparation for my job, I had studied hundreds of products—at supermarkets, online, in the spam filter of my email inbox—and in almost every case, I found the same thing: truly talented copywriters are literary chameleons. You have no idea they’re there. They separate themselves from their words. Think as their medium would. They don’t ask, What would Eliot say about this packet of almond flour? They ask, What would this packet of almond flour say about this packet of almond flour?
Yet again, I didn’t. Yet again, I was too afraid.
It’s only four days , I thought. Keep things polite. Keep things on the surface. Don’t listen to that dangerous little thrumming inside your chest. Don’t give in. It’s for his own good. For everyone’s own good. Four days, and then you’ll never have to see him again.
You can do this.
Be a copywriter. Separate yourself from your words. Think as your medium would. Take on the voice assigned, leave no trace of your own. Because once the bones are assembled, once they’re wrapped in shiny plastic skin and sent off into the abyss to become plastic wrappers or tin cans or email marketing or blog posts or whatever the fuck, that’s it. They’re gone. Your words no longer belong to you. In fact, they never did.
All the research I did added up to one conclusion: to become a copywriter, I didn’t need to learn a new voice; I needed to get rid of my own.
And that?
That I could do.
—
AT THE END OF THE meal, after the sun sank behind the lake’s horizon and the plates had been scraped clean (Karma) or picked at until only the spit-stained half of the burger remained (me), the conversation settled. At the head of the table, Mom had surpassed the number of champagne flutes required to believe you absolutely must give a toast—right now, right this very second. She tapped the edge of her fork against the glass, filling the air with three loud, clear pings .
Ping, ping, ping.
“Everyone!” called Caleb. “Listen up. Wendy wants to talk.”
“Teacher’s pet,” Clarence muttered.
Mom stood. “Everyone stop and look around.”
Everyone stopped. Everyone looked around. I studiously avoided looking to my left, though I could feel his eyes on me. At the opposite head of the table, Speedy nodded off over his dinner.
“When is the last time we were all together?”
“If memory serves,” said Karma. “It was just after the annual sacrifice.” She turned to Clarence and asked, “Who’d we go for that year? Aunt Kiki?”
“ These moments ,” Mom continued loudly, as if no one had interrupted, “don’t come often. Take it in.” She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, her features had settled into serene contentment. She raised her flute and said, “To having the whole family together.”
No , I thought as we raised glasses and began the complicated dance of connecting with every flute around the table. Henry’s smiling face flashed through my mind. Not the whole family. Not quite.
When we finished toasting, I took a long drain from my champagne glass. I was going to need it to get through the rest of this dinner.
“Frankly,” Clarence said, putting his empty flute down, “I think it’s quite dangerous when we all get together.”
“Damn right.” Karma nodded. “Too much collateral damage toward unsuspecting outsiders.”
“Hotel managers, flight attendants, schoolteachers”—he winked at Helene’s parents—“in-laws.”
They looked at him with obvious alarm.
“Speaking of hotel managers”—a grin spread across Karma’s face—“remember the Petri Dish?”
“Holy hell .” Clarence slapped the table. “You mean the place we stayed at in Moscow during our biennial Trek of Chaos? How could I ever forget?”
Ah, yes. The Trek of Chaos. My siblings’ fond nickname for the weeklong excursions we took every two years to an exotic locale selected by Wendy—Rome, London, Stockholm, Tokyo, Budapest, Seoul. In theory, the trips were a dream. In practice, they mostly amounted to the six of us trying to pull each other’s hair out in the lobbies of various Four Seasons resorts.
As she so often did when telling stories that took place “before my time,” Karma turned to me specifically, providing context to a story I couldn’t possibly remember. “Speedy and Wendy crammed all six of us—you included—into this one room on the top floor of the tiny hotel where we were staying in Moscow. Which would have been fine, but all the AC units up there were broken. Place was hotter than the inside of the devil’s ass crack.”
“Except for that one floor fan,” Clarence corrected.
“Which you spent every night hogging.”
“Until you , my loving little sister, tried to smother me in my sleep.”
“And Boose howled so loudly that we covered her crib with a wool blanket we found in the closet, remember? The one with Rasputin’s face on it?”
“Oh yeah. She kept shaking the crib, making it look like Rasputin was having a seizure.”
“And every five minutes,” Karma added, “we heard the pshhh of a bottle being opened, and we’d look over and find Taz holding yet another Coca-Cola he’d taken from the mini fridge—”
“—which he would only drink two sips of before he’d put it down, forget about it, and open another one five minutes later.”
Karma grinned wryly. “Remember the KGB pocket watch?”
“Ho- ly hell.” Clarence grinned. “You mean the one that Taz begged Wendy to buy him at the first stall we visited in the street market? The one about which he said, ‘This is it, Mom. I need this pocket watch. It’s the only thing I’ll ask for this entire trip.’?”
“And then”—Karma was starting to hiccup with laughter—“and then as soon as we got to the next stall and he saw all the vintage coins—”
“—he said, ‘Mom’?”—Clarence screwed his face up into an exaggerated pout—“?‘did I ever tell you I’m starting a coin collection?’?”
Karma and Shelly howled with laughter.
And they were off. I already knew what the rest of dinner would entail: Karma, Clarence, Taz, and Caleb splitting the talking stick, telling stories of their childhoods. Stories of hijinks and hilarity, pranks and mischief. Stories I desperately wished I could remember.
But such is not the lot of the youngest.
To my left, a low, familiar voice spoke up, startling me. “You never answered my question.”
All my muscles seized up at once. That voice. It was like a warning, like a memory. It rattled straight to my bones, shaking loose long-buried sensations that were once as familiar as the beating of my own heart.
I half turned to Manuel and cleared my throat. “Which question?”
“What’s life like in the big city?”
“Oh.” I mushed the prongs of my fork into the dirty end of my burger, the one that Karma’s spit had landed on, leaving little imprints behind. “I mean…I’ve been there for three years now. There’s a lot to tell.”
“Well,” he said, “why don’t you just start from the beginning?”
The beginning?
Where begins the beginning?
Is it the first moment my feet hit Seventh Avenue? When Penn Station spat me out onto a yawning city block at five p.m. eastern time, the very peak of rush hour? Or does it begin even earlier, with a string of rejection letters from every college I want to attend? With watching my best friend get into Harvard? With it —the incident that happened the night before he left? With lying flat on my back in the sweaty box of my childhood bedroom every day for a week afterward, refusing to eat, refusing to pack, refusing, even, to turn on the air conditioner?
Any of those moments would have been a suitable place to start. But in the time I had spent trying to craft an answer, my siblings’ conversation had died out. They were now looking at me. All of them. Waiting to hear my answer. And I found I could not begin anywhere.
Family isn’t about telling the truth. It’s not about starting from the real beginning. To your family, you tell the story they need to hear. And I knew that my family didn’t actually care about the crowd of humanity that had swept me and my two suitcases down Seventh Avenue, about bobbing up and down in their current, gasping for air, praying I was moving in the right direction, whatever that direction might be. They didn’t want to know that all I saw in my first few moments in New York City were a sea of legs and a sky bathed in concrete.
What they wanted to know was: Is it working out?
At my job, have I been promoted?
Have I been fired?
Do I regret it yet? My little indulgence? My little experiment in adulthood?
From: Memory [email protected]
To: Conscious Mind [email protected]
Subject: A Beck family dinner (before Henry died)
(cont’d) Birthdays are my favorite. On birthdays, everyone gets a chance to tell a story about the birthday boy or girl. The same ones resurface every year, but it doesn’t matter that we’ve heard them all before. We still laugh just as hard.
The stories move clockwise, and eventually the entire room will turn their focus to me. My body still shakes, this time as much from nerves as delight. I want desperately to make this opportunity count. These stories…they aren’t idle chatter. We aren’t reciting the same boring details year after year. We’re building an oral history. What is told will be remembered, what is not may never have happened at all. Each time we tell the story of Karma and the Great Wet Willy, we chisel it deeper into the family stone. To not participate is to have no say over the history we leave behind.
I want to come forth with something riotous, something that proves I’m as much a member of this family as anyone. But I’m just a child. I’ve had far fewer years and far fewer opportunities to gather stories worth telling.
And there’s so much I’ve missed as the youngest. So many fights. So many tears and secrets and lies. Moments that form the backbone of our family history but can’t be shared at a birthday. Moments that can’t be shared with the youngest at all. Instead, they choose moments of laughter or moments of horror upon which we now hang our laughter like lights on a Christmas tree.
These stories create my reality. The family I think I know. I think, This is how we were, and this is how we are. We are a good family. We are a happy family. We are an open family. We have no secrets. Not us, with our raucous, bare-it-all family dinners. Not us, with our private island and our pile of money and our separate bedrooms. Not us.
The circle complete, everyone turns to look at me.
Silence around the table. Seven pairs of eyes.
I take a deep breath, and finally, finally , I tell my story.