Chapter 1 Bad Luck’s Human Conduit #3
“Man, what in holy fuck must it be like at the Fosters’?
” my brother, Spencer, asked me on the phone later that night, thinking aloud in a fashion that, knowing him, I’m confident he regretted as soon as he gave voice to the rumination.
But I had wondered about that, too. I understand now that the frontal lobe develops more slowly than the rest of the brain, which is why adolescents can be both reckless and narcissistic.
Nevertheless, even then I was not so wildly self-absorbed that I was oblivious to the reality that my pain that evening paled before Kenny’s parents’ or his sisters’.
“I know,” I agreed. I was sitting alone at the kitchen table, the pink phone cord stretched so far that the tight coils looked like a clothesline.
“He has siblings, right?”
“Two younger sisters.”
Spencer was three years older than me. That summer he had an internship at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce in the capital. He would soon be a senior at Princeton, our father’s alma mater, and on track for a job about as boring as our father’s—though, in all fairness, the director of the lobbying group where he was working that August had an eye patch that made him look like a Republican pirate, and so even at eighteen I knew I should not be so confident that I had the slightest idea what anyone really was doing. Heaven knows, I had my own secrets.
“When Dad called, he seemed very focused on the legal ramifications. Intellectually.”
“Of course he was. And he was worried about you,” I said, allowing a dollop of bitterness to creep into my voice.
“Worried about me? What the fuck for?”
“He didn’t want it to upset you so you weren’t your usual perfect self and tanked your internship or your future.”
“I’m sure he’s worried about you more.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Come on, you know our father. He’s just…”
“Go on.”
“He’s just…he doesn’t get daughters. He never did understand Mirror Land,” said Spencer.
When I’d been a child, I’d created a world with my Barbies, stuffed animals, and naked plastic trolls that I had called Mirror Land.
The name had its origins in the long Woolworth’s mirror I’d placed horizontally along the bottom of a bedroom wall to expand the little universe I was creating—an inspiration that I know had come to me courtesy of Lewis Carroll, since I had christened my favorite Barbie “Alice.” My anal-retentive father was never able to fathom the cross-pollination of my toys, or why I’d allow a stuffed zebra into the Barbie Dreamhouse.
And while I had explained, with all the pronunciative distinction I could muster at five, that the creation was called Mirror Land, he had heard Mira Land, as if I had named the world after myself.
Afterward, anytime I did anything that my father might view as nonsensical, unpredictable, or simply perplexing, he—or my mother or Spencer—would say I was off in Mira Land.
Later, when my friends heard my mother or Spencer use the expression, they glommed onto it, too.
“Daughters?” I said. “He doesn’t get people.”
“Probably true,” he agreed. Then, a glimmer of incredulity in his tone, he continued, “I’ve never seen anyone die.”
“I hadn’t until today.”
“Awful?”
“Yes. But the worst…no, not the worst, just one of the many awful parts of the moment…was that, at first, I laughed. I think I did, anyway.”
“Oh my God, you laughed?” he asked, and he was laughing himself at the notion. “Why?”
“I don’t know! But it was kind of like a Looney Tunes cartoon or maybe a Jerry Lewis movie.”
“Or Animal House.”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“You haven’t seen Animal House?”
“It only opened last week,” I reminded him defensively.
“Okay, at this point, don’t. A guy gets hit in the head with a golf ball.”
“Does he die too?”
“No, because he’s wearing a helmet.”
“Why is he wearing a helmet on a golf course?”
“They’re not on a golf course. Two guys are just driving golf balls on the college campus—”
“Really? Driving golf balls?”
“And the guy who gets hit is in ROTC—the character is. That’s why he’s wearing a helmet. But the golf ball spooks his horse, and he falls off and is dragged around the campus by the animal.”
“And he’s really not killed?”
“Of course not. It’s a comedy, so he only winds up with one of those neck koozies. You know, a beer koozie, but it goes around the neck.”
Our dog, Harvey, wandered into the kitchen, sniffed around for crumbs near the floor-level cabinets, and collapsed into his dog bed in a corner beside the kitchen table. He looked up at me, suddenly sensing my anxiety and sadness, which were now even more interesting to him than food.
“Nothing kills you in cartoons and comedies,” I observed. “But in real life, a golf ball can do the trick.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he reminded me, and I nodded even though he couldn’t see me.
I would be thirty-four years old before I would finally have the courage to go to the local video store and rent Animal House.
When I got home and pressed the cassette into the machine, however, I couldn’t bring myself to press Play.
It would be a decade later, when I was forty-four, that I would finally watch the movie in its entirety.
By then, thank God, I had years of therapy behind me.