Lords of the Flies

My wife let the word "bullshit" loose at the dinner table at my parent's house last night, and my mother was hysterical with laughter.

"She's really one of us now," I said, and my mother laughed even harder.

"What?" Mrs. Apron asked, the picture of innocence.

"I've never heard you talk like that before!" my mother exclaimed, laughing still, in her gray sweatsuit-- her Sunday evening, don't-care-a-damn outfit.

"Oh, please," I said, "her mouth is as filthy as any of ours."

(It's thanks to me, of course.)

Mrs. Apron was born to a family where swearing was not tolerated. It is not tolerated by her mother. I recall a visit to her parent's house several years ago and her father made the mistake of telling his wife that he was going in the backyard, "to pick up dog shit."

"THE WORD IS 'POOPIE!'" Mrs. Apron's mother shouted with strained vocals.

The word, my friends, is poopie.

At my parent's dining room table, the swears fly like, well, flies.

"What the fuck is with all these goddamned flies?" I asked my mother, swatting the air in front of me, brushing aside yet another savage little black bastard.

"They're coming from the sink," my father said, "the plumber asshole is finally coming over on Tuesday."

"Does he have to come on Tuesday, for Christ's sake?" my mother yelled, "the baby's here on Tuesday!"

"Uggh, please! The baby is here-- who give a shit if the baby is here? We have to get rid of these fucking flies! The plumber is not going to be banging on pipes! FUCK!"

"I DO NOT WANT HIM HERE WHEN THE BABY IS HERE TRYING TO SLEEP!" my mother shouted. It worked.

"Okay, I will tell him to come Wednesday. Jesus Christ."

Coming home can be entertaining at times, and, at times, it was entertaining even last night, but even I have to admit that it was kind of gross sitting around the dining room table, trying to enjoy sugar cookies and coffee, with flies in the air. You try to ignore them, or pretend that you didn't just see one on the wall by the door to the porch, or on the table, or on the floor, or on the fake plant in the corner. My mother poured my father a glass of orange juice and nonchalantly placed her hand over the top of the glass and held it there.

"Are you fucking serious?" I asked her.

"What?"

"If you don't do that, is a fly going to kamikaze itself down there?"

"Well, would you want to find out if that were your orange juice?"

She then placed a paper plate on top of my coffee mug.

It was kind of gross. I mean, my parents aren't poor people. Last night, there were two Volvos and two BMWs parked outside. Admittedly, the BMWs are bottom-of-the-line, and leased, at that, but still, we do okay. We're not driving Oldsmobuicks anymore. And yet, last night, I felt like I was sitting around a table in Ethiopia. All of a sudden, my parents' dining room felt like a Sally Struthers commercial. I feel dirty even as I sit here, in my own home, devoid of all discernable vermin and pestilence. Filthy, in fact. I'm scratching my hair periodically, eyeballs scanning the air in front of me for any sign of a fleeting little bugger.

It's easy to picture us-- sitting around, cursing like pornography-peddlers or homeless troglodytes with big, steaming piles of doo-doo surrounding us as we scoop heaping spoonfuls of beans or fingernails into our hot, steaming swear-wielding gullets.

But that's not us. Swear to fuck.

The Glass Table

On Monday, the day that most Americans had off from work, I was put through the paces at home. Not in my grown-up man home, but in my little boy/pained adolescent home. The home of my remembering.

It’s changed a bit, but not much. My childhood home isn’t a strip-mall now, like my father’s childhood home is in Israel, and it isn’t some other family’s home, like my mother's childhood home is in Northeast Philadelphia either, that I have to drive by, wondering who they are, what they are doing as they peter out their little lives in the rooms where we all laughed and cried together.

My parent’s house was built in 1955, and the contractor who built it lived there for two years until my grandparents came along and bought it. Those walls have ensconced fifty-three years worth of the same family’s bullshit and love.

My family, as full of love and bullshit as the next.

The interrogation room, some people call it the “living room” is exactly the same as it was when I went away to college, and when I came back four years later until I couldn’t take it anymore, moving out after a few months. The peach carpeting is still there, the gray leather couch is still there. The enormous Ben Shahn painting that my eldest sister was convinced would make us all rich and maybe even sane is still there, hanging on the wall, looking down on us with its own palpable Jewish austerity. Some new pictures have been added in the last ten years—notably among them are photographs from our wedding, and pictures of my nephew, undeniably the biggest, and smallest, force of good in the entire brood.

It is because of my nephew that the circular glass table has been removed from its unforgiving metal frame. The round circle of thick-beveled glass, easily four feet in diameter, sits inert against the wall, and a huge space in the middle of the room exists now, and, on Monday afternoon as I waited for my parents to arrive at the agreed-upon meeting time, for the first time ever I walked through the space where the glass table used to reside. The carpet was absurdly fluffy under my feet, for it had never been walked on before. We’d had that table longer than the peach carpet—it used to be white with yellow borders.

My middle sister almost blinded herself on that glass table when she was a child—doing handstands on the sofa, she fell backwards and smashed her face against either the glass or the metal supports that held it up, slicing a gaping hole above her eye, and the scar that interrupts her eyebrow is there for all to see. I don’t know how you clean blood out of a carpet, but my parents did it.

I stood, for a moment, in the center of the interrogation room, where I had never, ever stood before, and I checked my watch.

2:59pm.

It was so… odd. It didn’t feel natural, or right—- it was like I was standing on the surface of the moon, or on somebody’s face, or their dog, or their country. It almost made me laugh because it was all so stupid. There I was, in my old house, in the room where I had done battle with my parents countless times, where I had cried out for help on so many occasions, where I had passionately defended my beliefs and my desires and my, well, my own particular, peculiar bullshit, and everything was the same except that the glass table had been upended and there were a couple of new pictures, and yet I felt like I was in a foreign place. My head started to spin as I saw my mother’s car pull in front of the house. Instinctively, I rolled my eyes inside my head and schlumped down into the sofa. My mother walked into the foyer first. She glanced down at her wristwatch.

3:02pm.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said with a small smile.