The air was a warm, dewy blanket left overnight to be ravaged by ants after a picnic.
We inched up the Garden State Parkway, bumper to foggy bumper. A dull headache from the traffic fumes and another summer weekend night of aimlessly staying up late watching re-runs of The Nanny on Nick @ Nite consumed me. I tried quietly singing along with The Temptations on the car radio. I had just woken up and was groggily nursing a box of orange juice. I sounded like a dying sheep. I promptly decided to remain silent.
Mom and Dad were bickering about how to get to her cousin’s apartment after the Hoboken exit. Last on the line.
“It’s under the that bridge thing, you turn left, then it’s like we have to a U-turn, but really it’s a right turn — I have it, here, here, right here, stop screaming at me!”
“You know, Deb, if you would just get print the fucking directions the night before instead of making yourself all flustered in the morning when you’re rushing to do your hair, to put your make up on, choose the right fucking coat for a rainy day, this wouldn’t happen, ok? I didn’t even want to go to this fucking thing, I’m doing you a favor here, your family annoys the shit out of me, ok? Your own brother isn’t here, is he?”
“No, he’s not.”
“Exactly, but I am.”
My sister Leah swallowed loudly and quietly turned the hundredth page of her fantasy novel. She slunk down in her seat and sighed heavily, shooting me an eye-roll I chose not to return. I tersely smiled. A brief, painful twitch of my mouth, really. Too wound up to let my eyes roll loose like that. I squinted out the window into the bright grayness of the day and tucked my legs into my chest.
“Left, left, left! I said left!”
“Left here?!”
“Le — wait I don’t know, I don’t know, don’t ask me- you’re the driver!”
“You motherfucker — I said don’t do this to me! I’m ready to go home, I’m fucking going home.”
“Fine, you wanna leave me here on the side of the road to rot? That’s just fine, Rick.”
I let my chilled hand slip on top of my sister’s for a quick moment, feel the warmth of her palm. She went to hold it, but I grabbed it back and tucked it safely into my sweatshirt pocket. No, nevermind. I furiously picked at the ragged cuticle on my thumb with my pinkie nail.
We parked up a winding, sloped street. Parallel. Barely an inch from the curb.
“Sarah — get the cookies. Come on, come on, help your mother out, get her an umbrella, she’s old and she can’t do shit by herself, let’s go! Ugh, I knew we brought too much dessert. You’re mother always overbuys for this family shit.”
“So whatever, it’s more to bring home for us. Ugh, I can’t take this attitude, you know? Thank you sweetie.”
I put up my hood and scuffled behind the black raincoat outlines of my family, overstuffed bags of oatmeal and chocolate chip offerings underneath each arm. We buzzed into my mom’s cousin’s apartment building overlooking the New York skyline. We knocked on the wrong door.
“I thought they lived on the second floor?” my sister commented, looking curiously up and down the hallway. “And the end?”
“So, someone knock!”
“Dad, I don’t want to be embarrassed if it’s not the right one!” Leah scoffed, lightly slapping her book against her thigh.
Mom let out a bitter chuckle.
“Oy, well, I don’t have any of their numbers except for Michael, I think…so…”
Dad knocked loudly three times upon the door, impatiently jangling the keys hooked on his jean loop.
“Hello, it’s the Holtzmans! Any Schneiders in there?”
“Let’s try the third floor,” I tossed out halfheartedly into the silence following our grand bellowing declaration.
Five minutes later we were engulfed in hors d’oeuvres. Pretzels, pita chips, cheddar cheese chunks, vegetable platters dripping with ranch, and heavily salted peanuts were hoarded onto a coffee table in the center of the room. A fertile island around which the 20 or so estranged cousins many times removed, friends of family, and my mother’s cousins and their kids guarded like sharks on the hunt.
Hugs and kisses and high-pitched greetings were aggressively exchanged.
“So, where you go again, Leah?”
“It’s Sarah, Leah’s over there by my mom…But it’s North–“
“Oh right, sorry, sorry, Northeastern, right?”
“Northwestern, no worries. Out by Chicago and stuff.”
My mom’s cousin Michael smiled widely, shook his head slowly.
“Nice, nice! So you think you’re the smart one in the family, huh?” he said with chuckle and patted me on the shoulder, a new bowl of salsa and fresh plate of corn chips catching his eye on the coffee table.
“Oh! It’s my girls, it’s my girls! It’s my beautiful wonderful fantastic sexy girls!” shrieked Cookie, another cousin my mom had grown up with in Brooklyn.
She scooted towards my sister and I in spiked heels and tight pink pants, her matching magenta lipstick smile spreading rapidly across her tanned face. She hugged us collectively and dotted us with affectionate kisses. I accidentally petted her bouncing blond ponytail.
Our great-grandmother once removed, Aunt Bea, slowly inched her way to a chair by some long plastic tables against the back wall of the room peppered with bits of wayward salad from faulty serving. Leah and I saw our opening and took it. We planted a couple of beige metal fold out chairs on either side, and settled in to chat.
Aunt Bea still had the delicately arched eyebrows, perfectly waved hair, and straight nose of a 1940s movie starlet. For this and her ability to say the right thing at the right time, I genuinely liked her.
“Ah, look at the three most beautiful girls in the world! All in one place. Right by where dinner’s going to be served! Smart!” dad laughed heartily at his own joke, warmly rubbing Aunt Bea’s back. He liked her too. Reminded him of his mother and his sanity.
We sequestered ourselves in this corner as my mother obligatorily chatted her way throughout the living room. Oh, but you chose the perfect drapes for the bay window! You know I can get your daughter in touch with the alderman if you like — poli sci is a hot major today and internships, I’m telling you where it’s at. So did your dad ever move to a new retirement home?
She’s a master.
“Yeah, but I figured out that Puerto Rican women are real hot but too dramatic to date, you know? So I dumped her and now she’s been trying to call me, god knows why,” crooned Michael to my mother’s calmly understanding face.
The loud streams of conversation were suddenly interrupted by Cookie tapping a karaoke microphone with her manicured pointer finger.
“Uh, hello! Hello! Pay attention family!” she slurred. I noted the kitchen counter littered with empty wine glasses and beer cans.
I had migrated to the couch to teach another cousin, Gary, a couple of chords on his new 25 dollar guitar. I struggled with the cheap plastic strings and thick neck and strummed lightly with my thumb.
“So that’s a C chord there, and you can add the pinkie on this fret if you want a more bluesy sound like that.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh — play I Wanna Hold Your Hand! Or, uh, Yellow Submarine!” he shrieked, closing his eyes gleefully and grabbing the guitar into his lap laying it flat like a keyboard and violently brushing its strings.
Cookie glared in our direction, leaning her weight forward with a hand on her hip.
“Now listen! I’ve thought of an idea — we’re gonna have a family roast! Because we all hate and yet really love one another, right?! Right, right!”
My eyes frantically darted to my mother standing across the room. She laughed at my horrified expression, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head as if to apologize for bringing us.
My sister brought her hand to her forehead and groaned as my dad flippantly quipped, “That’s a stupid idea.”
“Oh Sarah!” Cookie sing-songed, “You first, since you want to make so much noise when I’m talking!” letting out a shrill laugh that eerily reminded me of the witch from the Wizard of Oz. Where were the hugs and urging to eat, eat, and also, eat?
Visions of a panic attack I had in high school while delivering a simple speech in my psychology class washed over me. Instantly my stomach dropped and palms were clammy, cheeks flushed as Cookie instructed me to introduce myself and tell the crowd of hooting and hollering vague relatives jumbled on the leather couch what I wanted to do with my life.
Really? Right now? I can’t even tell anymore. I’d been dragging the weighty length of summer vacation like an iron ball and chain with every step I’d taken since mid-July. Since school got out, my biggest accomplishment was ridding my bookshelf of Dr. Seuss books and reading some David Sedaris novels on our deck.
I mumbled through an unenthusiastic, bland account of wanting to make documentaries and travel the world. My first mistake was including that I wanted to focus on women’s issues.
“Why, yah got experience as a woman or something?” shouted Gary.
“Yeah, I think you should do some research on that before you start!” added Michael. The crowd roared. They were the Schneider’s own Abott and Costello.
“I’ll look into it.”
“What if you fail?” Gary asked, cocking his head to the side and silencing the entire room with an awkward seriousness.
“Then I will?”
“Yeah, but what will you do?” he pressed.
Well, I had planned on becoming a prostitute and contracting a potent STD, subsequently forming a rabid addiction to cocaine that would lead me down a E! True Hollywood — worthy path of self-destruction and criminal involvement until I shockingly turn my life around to become a motivational speaker for D.A.R.E. and pro-abstinence in high schools across the nation.
“Something else.”
I bowed and took my exit to stage left. I ended up in the kitchen next to a three quarters full bottle of white wine. My armpits dampened and adrenaline still soaring, I determinately grabbed the bottle and made a bee-line for the porch.
Leah followed me outside.
“You gonna-“
“Yep.” I poured myself a brimming Solo cup and proceeded to gulp.
“Uh-huh.”
She patted me on the back and kissed my cheek, and with a curt smile went back inside. The discomfort of the rain-soaked back porch chairs drove me back into the kitchen within a few minutes, already buzzed and relaxed.
I haphazardly plopped down in a living room chair with the crowd, bottle at my hip. My dad, his own cup waving about in his hand, got down on his knees next to me.
“Whatcha doin’ kiddo?” he said with a quiet, almost embarrassed laugh.
“Just hanging out, enjoying the good vibes. You?”
“The same, the same…look, I’m gonna cut you off from that soon, ok?”
“Sure, sure.”
“You know I love you so, so much, right? You’re the light of my life, you know that right?”
“Aw, gee.”
“Really,” he said, looking me in the eye and rubbing my knee. The forcefulness of the this motion combined with my rapidly deteriorating lack of balance caused me to rock side to side in my chair, spilling a couple of dribbles of wine on my shirt.
“Shit!” I said, holding the “i” too long and loud for any social situation, “Sorry, everyone, excuse the language!”
I took another lengthy sip from my cup. How nice to be plugged into a veritable IV of this, I thought, casually laying back in the uncomfortable fold-out chair as if it were a downy cloud.
A couple more cups, some pacing back and forth to the porch, an imitation of Katherine Hepburn, and some heartily shouted “Boo”’s and “here, here”’s later, my Dad graciously escorted the wine bottle and now chewed and bent plastic cup away from my greedy grasp.
I suddenly thought how ironic to develop alcoholism whilst not only at home for the summer as opposed to college, at a bubbling family affair no less. As I absent-mindlessly began to shove cookies from the dessert tray into my mouth, my stomach turned violently, and I became simultaneously disgusted and amused with myself.
I practically laughed myself out of the apartment, Mom and Dad supporting either side of me like cushioned pillars.
“Let’s go home, my darlings,” mom chirped to the four of us, all stooped and drained.
“I’m just so hungry, hungry, hungry!”
“Mmm-hmm you can eat more things when you get home.”
“That’s right, let’s just get there,” Dad punctuated, speeding ahead with the car keys in hand.
I nestled my head into Leah’s lap and promptly dozed off. When I awoke I was at the top of the stairway in front of my bedroom. My mom helped her nineteen-year-old child into pajamas. My dad fetched me a fresh face towel for washing up. My whole family bustled around the sleepy house, shutting blinds and lowering shades as the rain rhythmically echoed in a gentle song on the roof.
“Don’t worry — I’ll never make you go again,” Mom cooed, tucking me into a comforter too warm for a summer night.
She turned off my bedside lamp and I was left reveling in the dark.