The Anglophile (14 page)

“Yes, I like him
a lot.
So maybe we should keep the dirty family laundry locked inside the den, whatever's left of it.”

“I didn't say anything
that
bad.”

“Let's go to the videotape.”

“Ragging on your family is accepted the world over. Get over it, priss.”

 

The exit numbers Gene's printout from MapQuest says we're supposed to see coming up are not matching
in the least.
We're miserably lost. I'm betting we went wrong somewhere earlier on the Bronx River Parkway, and say so.

“We're lost,” Gene barks, “that's what I think.”

Kit tries his best to be invisible in his seat.

This does not bode well for our afternoon drive. Gene does not like to be lost, ever. “This can't be fucking right,” he says a minute after his last outburst. “This is making me very nervous. Fuck. Christ.” He pulls out at the nearest exit and asks a young gas station attendant for directions.

“He said we're too far. We have to take the Taconic back to Exit Fifteen. Shari, keep your eyes peeled for the first left.”

We soon find ourselves once again aimlessly driving down a long stretch of highway.

“I think that little turn out of the petrol station was to the left,” Kit says quietly.

We take another desperate exit and there's not a business to be found. We're maneuvering up and down hilly roads in a residential neighborhood, town unknown. I have a charley horse going on my left leg, but who would complain in this environment? I quietly shake it out.

“Okay, that's it,” Gene says testily. “We're going in that diner and someone is going with me if we are getting to Dot and her skunk on time.”

“I'll go,” says Kit.

“No, the someone is Shari. And then, when Shari has written down the instructions, this time we'll all be looking for the right signs.”

“C'mon, Gene. I'm the worst person for navigation, you know that.”

“All you have to say to yourself is ‘I am not pathetic' ten times and you'll be okay.”

I take the punch again. I hate him so much when he gets road rage, but he needs to calm down if we're not going to let Aunt Dot and my mom down.

We enter a local eatery with a lonely, forlorn-looking exterior. The sad look continues inside. The only visible staff is a world-weary cashier with an orange-hued tanning salon tan; she's mid-discussion with an elderly female customer.

“Is that really the right amount?” the customer asks suspiciously.

“It is.”

“I'm not blaming you. It's the machine. It cheated me twice already. The machine. Not you. Please check. Yesterday the other cashier charged me for two muffins. I'm not saying it was his fault. It was the machine. I'm not blaming you. Can you check?” Next she turns to Gene and says, “I'm not blaming the cashier, you know. It's the machine. Twice it cheated me.”

Gene says nothing. He points her back to the exasperated cashier who's looking over the bill.

“Sorry, ma'am, that's how much it is for coffee and poached eggs,” she says. She shakes her head angrily as the old woman gives up and walks away murmuring.

I watch outside of the window where the customer is walking past the parking spaces and toward the open road. Gene pokes me. “Your job here is to listen!”

I see the anger management course Jill the Ex insisted he enroll in didn't do much.

The cashier assures Gene that she can get him to where we need to be. I borrow a Bic propped up against the cash register and write everything down on the back of a catering flyer.

“How did it go?” Kit says when we're back in the car.

I answer for the both of us. “Well, this lady sounded like she knew more of what she was talking about.” I carefully read my notes out. “Down to the bottom of the hill, past the train tressle.”

“Trestle,” Kit corrects with a sharp letter
t.

I glare at him. “Not the time for an English lesson.”

Kit and Gene look at each other conspiratorially.

“There's the tress-
t
-le,” I say pointedly a minute later. “Okay, make a left to Taconic South.”

“Aha! So it's not so impossible for you,” Gene says. “This is the year Shari is going to stop looking at the world in autofocus.”

When we're safely on the highway I respond. “This is rather empowering.”

After a silent tense stretch of road the whiff of a road-kill skunk overwhelms us.

Kit zings a perfectly timed tension buster: “We must be near Galoot now.”

Gene breaks into a smile before me. “Maybe we can scoop him up and chuck him in Galoot's grave for a bereavement buddy.”

After I laugh, too, Gene says, “So what do you do in England for fun?”

“The usual,” Kit says. “Drink a bit, watch a bit of telly.”

“Sounds like me,” he laughs. “You like to fish? I've been getting into fishing lately.”

The only fish Gene knew about last time I checked was gefilte fish, Nova lox and herring.

“I'm an angler,” Kit says.

“Me, too,” my brother says.

“Angling?” I say to Gene, with an amused look. “Is that so?”

“Hey, you, fuck off again. Don't insult the driver.” He then directs his voice toward Kit, “And you, listen good, there's some of the best fishing in the world two hours away in the Catskills Mountains.”

Kit listens attentively. “Really? Two hours outside of Manhattan? What town?”

“The best is in Roscoe.” Kit writes the town name in his memo book. “You planning to go?” Gene follows up, amused.

“No, no, I just keep a travel journal.”

“Yeah, well good thing as it's the wrong season of course.”

“But still, angling two hours from Manhattan. Brilliant.”

Gene turns around and smiles at me. “Told you I was brilliant. And everyone said it was you with the clever head.”

“Don't get too excited. Every word out of his mouth is
brilliant.
”

“Look at the arrogance I put up with here,” Gene says to Kit. After a momentary slide of conversation, he adds, “You like music, Kit?”

“Of course.”

“What're you into? What's on the special compilation?”

Kit thinks. “Wagner is my favorite composer. Vivaldi. Special? I guess Bach's Minuet in G deserves a spot on the list. What about you?”

I nervously await Gene's response. Classical was never played in our house, and I imagine this answer will threaten him as much as it threatens me.

Gene simply asks, “You like the Beach Boys? I heard they were incredibly popular in England.”

“They are. They still tour all the time. But I just know a few songs.”

“They're my boys. The Beatles are Shari's boys.”

“I thought Colin Firth was her boy,” he says, and leans back toward me to check on my smile.

“Who?” Gene doesn't wait for a reply. “Did my sister tell you she is the biggest Beatles freak in New York City?”

“I'm pretty far gone,” I say, “but there are Beatles fans who know what minute John's mother went to the hospital for labor. I'm freak-lite.”

“I never got the buzz off them,” Gene says. “I saw some documentary on cable of when they were young. I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying.”

“Liverpudlian is hard,” Kit says, matter-of-factly. “First time I ever heard George talk—when I saw
A Hard Day's Night
—I thought he was saying ‘Can I have a jam butty?' but I wasn't sure at all.”

“What's that?” Gene clucks.

“It's a jelly sandwich,” I say to Kit. “Jam on buttered bread? Correct?”

“Yes, that's it.”

“You knew that?” Gene says with glee in his voice. “What did I tell you about her? The whole earth likes ‘Yesterday,' and, well, what is the name of that crazy Beatles song you said is your favorite?”

“I just said I like it, I've never said it's my favorite.”

“What was it?” Kit asks.

I hate when Gene goads like this. I hesitatingly lick a back tooth. “Blue Jay Way.”

“What?” Kit asks. “I didn't hear you.”

“Blue Jay Way,” I say, louder. “Even you might not know it,” I address Kit. “It's a bit culty, a drug-addled stream-of-consciousness song written in the flower-power era. You know, ‘There is a frog upon the lake…'I think it's on
Yellow Submarine.
”

“Magical Mystery Tour,”
Kit corrects. “The Beatles had three albums that really were kind of rubbish, they had leftover scraps. But I like that song, too.”

A black Corvette dangerously cuts ahead of us. “Jesus!” Gene says after he gives the bonehead an angry honk. “‘Blue Jay Way,' yeah. Shari could write a second dissertation on them Beatles.”

I cringe at the unwelcome
D
word. My dissertation. Oh fucking yeah. How can I face the shame when I tell my family my research has come to a sudden halt? Man oh man. I'll wait until I'm back from England. Not having a passport in my hands is stressful enough.

“Every obscure Beatles song,” Gene continues. “Yet somehow she doesn't appreciate the genius of the Beach Boys.”

“Well, as I said, I don't know much about them either,” Kit says. “I know their hits of course—”

“Your lucky day! I have a CD I burned. Can I play it?”

“Brilliant. I look forward to the liner notes.”

“Okay with you, sis?”

“Brilliant,” I say, and Kit pokes me on my neck from the back seat. Gene's wrong. I've always enjoyed the Beach Boys. It takes a far bigger snoot than me to dislike the Beach Boys. But he's teacher now, and why undercut his authority?

“It's right on top of the glove compartment, Shar, can you get it for me?”

I hand it to him, and while the door is open I quietly shuffle through his books on tape collection,
Winning Every Time, The Da Vinci Code,
and the bottom one he quickly tugs out of my hand and puts back,
Mars and Venus in the Bedroom.

It's not long before we fall under the spell of the Beach Boys' most singalong pop.

“‘Can't remember what we fought about,'” Gene sings along to Brian Wilson's falsetto in “Kiss Me, Baby,” and Kit even joins the party during “California Girls.”

“‘Wish they all could be California girls,'” he sings in his own Oxbridge take on falsetto.

After “Help Me Rhonda,” Gene leans away from the steering wheel and dramatically pauses and says, “When I first heard this next one it made me cry.”

“Let's hear it then,” Kit says congenially.

It's a song that's always destroyed me a bit, too. “God Only Knows.” As Carl sings that as long as there are
stars above he will always love the nameless listener, a lump forms in the back of my throat; I know what's to be sung next, the bit about how if the person in the song ever leaves, life would still go on, but it would really suck.

“It's really breathtaking, isn't it?” Kit says to me at song's end.

“Yes,” I say. He's surely noticed that the song has me in knots. I'll explain my mood shift later. Gene probably links this song to some woman he dated, but I relate breakup songs to the loss of my father's life. I wrote my entrance essay for Binghamton (and Yale), and summarized:
My father exists somewhere between the vivid minutes and the vaguer minutes, his true self in the unknowable spot between a dead man's invented greatness and reality.

Gene manages to joke despite his wet eyes. “Brilliant?”

“Brilliant,” Kit says after a little laugh. “But for the record, what do you like about it specifically?”

Gene holds back a sniffle and says, “It's very clever musically and it's also good pop.”

“It's a smashing song on any level,” Kit says.

“It's more complex mathematically than you think. If you learn music you can't help notice things like that.”

“You noticed.” I try very hard not to let anyone see my one telltale tear that has stubbornly managed to drip. “And you never learned music.”

“I play piano now,” Gene says quietly. As he did during the song, he once again stares straight ahead at the road.

I look at him, more than surprised. Dad, who was also great with math and engineering, played the baby grand
piano that just fit in the nook at the far end of our apartment. Add that to his way with a joke—that he was a surprisingly okay pianist. An image pops back into my head: Gene's face when the neighbors Mom sold it to came by with two movers. As the “man with van” drove off, Gene stood silently under the door, his face chalky-white in this latest of many sad developments that year. Dad had no formal training, but he could work with a fake book, and he taught Gene the most basic songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “Yankee Doodle.” I'd thought Gene never touched ivories again, even electrified ones.

“Doesn't surprise me,” Kit says. “You've heard that math and music are connected halves of the brain?”

“Yeah?” Gene says. “I have heard that. You're backing up the theory?”

“Yes,” Kit replies. “One of my mates in Cambridge was doing a lot of work in that area.”

Once again I'm convinced that Gene will make a crack about privileged existence. Instead he really surprises me with what comes out next: “The lyrics always remind me of my father. He died when we were still kids.”

“There's the exit,” I say quietly.

So him, too? That's the reason for tears in my stoic brother's eyes?

“Did Shari tell you we lost our father when we were kids?”

“Yes,” Kit says. “She did. I did, too, you know.”

“Did what? Lose a father?”

“Yes.”

“It really fucking sucks when it happens, doesn't it?” Gene says shakily.