Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Put a Lid on It

I N A BATHROOM at La Guardia Airport I watched a man take a cell phone from his jacket pocket, step into an empty stall, and proceed to dial. I assumed he was going to pee and talk at the same time, but looking at the space beneath the door, I saw that his pants were gathered about his ankles. He was sitting on the toilet.

Most airport calls begin with geography. “I’m in Kansas City,” people say. “I’m in Houston.” “I’m at Kennedy.” When asked where he was, the man on the phone said simply, “I’m at the airport, what do you think?” The sounds of a public toilet are not the sounds one would generally associate with an airport, at least not a secure airport, and so his “What do you think?” struck me as unfair. The person he was talking to obviously felt the same way. “What do you mean, 'What airport?'” the man said. “I’m at La Guardia. Now put me through to Marty.”

A short while later I was in Boston. My sister Tiffany met me in the lobby of my hotel and suggested we spend the rest of the afternoon at her place. The bellman hailed a cab, and as we got in I told her the story of the man at La Guardia. “I mean he actually placed a call while sitting on the toilet!”

Tiffany is big on rules but allows a pretty wide margin when it comes to mortal sin. Rape, murder, the abandonment of children: these are taken on a case-by-case basis. What riles her are the small things, and in denouncing them, she tends toward proclamations, most beginning with the words “A person doesn’t.” “A person doesn’t just go around making things out of pinecones,” she’ll say, or, “A person doesn’t use the word weenie when talking about a hot dog. It isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. It isn’t done.”

In telling Tiffany about the man on the toilet, I expected a certain degree of outrage. I expected a proclamation, but instead she said only, “I don’t believe in cell phones.”

“But you do believe in placing calls while sitting on the toilet?”

“Well, it’s not a belief,” she said. “But I mean, sure.”

I thought again of the La Guardia bathroom. “But can’t people guess what’s going on? How do you explain the noise?”

My sister held an imaginary phone to her mouth. Then she scrunched up her face and adopted the strained, broken voice commonly associated with heavy lifting. “I say, 'Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to get the . . . lid off this . . . jar.' ”

Tiffany settled back against the seat, and I thought of all the times I had fallen for that line, all the times I had pictured her standing helpless in her kitchen. “Try tapping the lid against the countertop,” I’d said, or, “Rinse it in hot water; that sometimes works.”

Eventually, after much struggle, she would let out a breath. “There we go ... I’ve got it now.” Then she would thank me, and I would feel powerful, believing myself to be the only man on earth who could open a jar over the telephone. Appealing to my vanity was an old trick, but there was more to it than that. Tiffany is an excellent cook. Shortcuts don’t interest her, so I’d always assumed that her jar held something she had preserved herself. Jam, maybe, or peaches. The lid released, I had imagined a sweet smell rising to meet her nose, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that ultimately comes from doing things “the ol’ fashioned way.” I had felt proud by extension, but now I just felt betrayed.

“Daddy’s been thinking about things a little too hard,” she said.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You.”

“Nobody calls me Daddy.”

“Mamma does.”

This is her new thing. All men are called Daddy, and all women, Mamma. At the age of forty she talks like a far-sighted baby.

My sister lives in Somerville, on the ground floor of a small two-story house. There’s a chain-link fence separating the yard from the sidewalk, and a garage out back, where she keeps her bike and the homemade rickshaw she regularly attaches to her bike. It’s a cumbersome, chariot-like thing, with a plywood body and two wheels taken from a scrapped ten-speed. There are a lot of rules involving the rickshaw, most decreeing what a person can and cannot do upon seeing it. Laughing is out, as are honking, pointing, and tugging at the corners of your eyes in an attempt to appear Chinese. This last one is a lot more popular than you might think, and it irritates Tiffany the most. She’s become fiercely protective of the Chinese, especially her landlady, Mrs. Yip, who encourages her to defeat fat by rhythmically pummeling her thighs and stomach. Every morning my sister turns on the TV and stands in the living room, beating herself for half an hour. She claims that it keeps her in shape, but more likely it’s the bicycle and towing that heavy rickshaw.

“She’s got a beautiful voice,” my father says. “I just wish to hell she’d do something with it.”

Asked what that something might be, he says that she should put out an album.

“But she doesn’t sing.”

“Well, she could.” He speaks as if not releasing an album is just laziness on her part, as if people just walk in off the street, lay down a dozen or so tracks, and hand them over to eager radio stations. I’ve never heard Tiffany sing so much as “Happy Birthday,” but when it comes to speaking, my father is right — she does have a beautiful voice. Even when she was a child it was smoky and full-bodied, lending even her most banal statements a cunning, slightly sexual undertone.

“A person needs to use their best assets,” my father says. “If she doesn’t want to put out an album, she could maybe be a receptionist. All she’d have to do is answer the damned phone.”

But Tiffany isn’t looking for career advice, especially from our father.

“I think she’s happy doing what she’s doing,” I tell him.

“Oh, baloney.”

When she was thirteen Tiffany got braces, and when she was fourteen she tried to remove them with a set of pliers. She was on the lam at the time, a runaway trying to distance herself from the class photo my parents had given the police. In trying to track down my sister, I spoke to one of her friends, a tough-looking girl who went by the name of Scallywag. She claimed to know nothing, and when I accused her of lying, she opened a Coke bottle with her teeth and spit the cap into her front yard. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not the enemy.” But she had heard stories, and knew not to trust me.

Following her capture, Tiffany was put in juvenile detention and then sent away to a school my mother had heard about on one of the afternoon talk shows. Punishment consisted of lying bellydown on the floor while a counselor putted golf balls into your open mouth. “Tough love” this was called. Basically the place just restrained you until you were eighteen and allowed to run away legally.

After her release Tiffany became interested in baking. She attended a culinary institute in Boston and worked for many years in the sort of restaurant that thought it amusing to flavor brownies with tarragon and black pepper. It was cooking for people who read rather than ate, but it paid well and there were benefits. From midnight to dawn, Tiffany stood in the kitchen, sifting flour and listening to AM talk radio, which is either funny or spooky, depending on your ability to distance yourself from the callers. Tommy from Revere, Carol from Fall River: they are lonely and crazy. You are not. But the line blurs at four A.M. and disappears completely when you find yourself alone in a tall paper hat, adding fresh chives to buttercream icing.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Tiffany asks our cabdriver, and before he can answer, her cigarette is lit. “You can have one, too, if you want,” she tells him. “It won’t bother me in the least.” The man, who is Russian, smiles into the rearview mirror, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth.

“Whoa, Daddy. We know where you bank,” Tiffany says, and I start to wish that one of us knew how to drive. Like our mother, my sister can talk to anyone. Were I not here and were she in a position to afford a cab, she would undoubtedly be sitting up front, complimenting the man on his signaling abilities and then, just for good measure, making fun of his ID photo or the name printed beneath it. Growing up, she had a reputation for dishonesty, and her relentless, often inappropriate truth telling is, to her, a way of turning that around. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she’ll say, forgetting that another option is to simply say nothing.

As we cross from Cambridge into Somerville, Tiffany points out a few of the other places she’s worked over the past fifteen years. The last was a traditional Italian bakery staffed by aging war veterans with names like Sal and Little Joey. Throughout the day they’d invent excuses to fondle her rear end or run a free hand across the front of her apron, and she let them do it because: “(a) It didn’t physically hurt, (b) I was the only woman, so who else’s ass were they going to grab? and (c) The boss let me smoke.”

The money wasn’t what she was used to, but still she stayed on for close to a year, until the owner announced he was going on vacation. His extended family was holding a reunion in Providence, so the bakery would close for the first two weeks of October and everyone would go without pay. Tiffany has no credit cards or long-distance service. All her money goes toward rent and cable, and so she spent her vacation in front of the TV, pounding her empty stomach and growing progressively angrier. At the end of the two weeks she returned to work and asked her boss if he’d enjoyed what she called “your little Woptoberfest.” She’s usually a pretty good judge of just how far she can push someone, but this time she miscalculated. We pass the bakery and she tosses her cigarette out the window. “Woptoberfest,” she says. “I mean, how could someone not find that funny?”

After the Italians came the rickshaw and a return to the vampire hours she’d held years earlier at the fine bakery. These days while the rest of the world sleeps, my sister goes through their garbage. She carries a flashlight and a pair of rubber gloves and comes across a surprising number of teeth. “But none like yours,” she says to our driver. “Most of the ones I find are false.”

“Most?” I say.

She digs into her knapsack and hands me a few stray molars. One is small and clean, most likely a child’s, while the other is king-size and looks like something pulled from the ground. I tap the larger one against the window, convinced that it must be made of plastic. “Who would throw away a real tooth?” I ask.

“Not me,” says the driver, who’s been in and out of the conversation ever since Tiffany gave him permission to smoke.

“Yeah,” she says. “Well, we know about you. Anyone else, though, anyone American, would say their good-byes and toss it. In this country, once something’s out of your mouth, it’s garbage, Daddy.”

In addition to the teeth, my sister finds anniversary cards and ceramic ponies. Angry letters written but not sent to congressmen. Underpants. Charm bracelets. Small items are stuffed into her knapsack, and everything else goes into the rickshaw and, subsequently, her apartment. Someone dies and she’ll make three or four trips in a single evening, carting away everything from armchairs to wastepaper baskets.

“Last week I found a turkey,” she tells us.

I wait, thinking this is only half of the sentence “I found a turkey . . . made of papier-mâche. I found a turkey . . . and buried it in the yard.” When it becomes clear that there is no part two, I start to worry. “What do you mean, you found a turkey?”

“Frozen,” she says. “In the trash.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“Well, what do most people do with a turkey?” she says. “I cooked it and then I ate it.”

This is a test, and I fail, saying all the boring things you might expect of the comfortable: That the turkey was undoubtedly thrown away for a good reason. That it had possibly been recalled, like a batch of tainted fish sticks. “Or maybe someone tampered with it.”

“Who would intentionally fuck with a frozen turkey?” she asks.

I try envisioning such a person, but nothing comes. “Okay, maybe it had thawed and been refrozen. That’s dangerous, right?”

“Listen to you,” she says. “If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.”

That’s not what I meant at all, but just as I try to explain myself, she places her hand on the driver’s shoulder. “If someone offered you a perfectly good turkey, you’d take it, wouldn’t you?”

The man says yes, and she pats him on top of the head. “Mamma likes you,” she says.

She’s gotten him on her side, but unfairly, and I’m surprised by the degree to which it enrages me. “There’s a difference between someone offering you 'a perfectly good turkey' and finding a turkey in a garbage can,” I say.

“Trash can,” she corrects me. “God, you make it sound as if I’m back behind the Star Market, burrowing through their Dumpster. It was just one turkey. Ease up, will you.”

She has, of course, found valuable things as well and formed relationships with the sort of people who are wont to buy them. These are the guys you see at flea markets, men with beards and longish fingernails who scold should you refer to a certain color of Fiesta ware as “orange” rather than “red.” There’s something about them I don’t trust, but when asked for a reason, I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything beyond their general unfamiliarity. When meeting a friend of Amy’s or Lisa’s, I feel a sense of recognition, but the people whom Tiffany hangs out with are a completely different breed. I’m thinking of the woman who was shot seven times while evading the police. She’s lovely, really, but evading the police? As my brother would say, “That’s some outlaw shit.”

The closer we get to her apartment, the more my sister engages the cabdriver, and by the time he pulls in front of the house I am left out of the conversation completely. It seems the guy’s wife had a hard time adjusting to life in the United States and has recently returned to her village outside of St. Petersburg.

“But you’re not divorced,” Tiffany says. “You still love her, right?”

On paying the man, I sense that she would be much more comfortable were he the guest instead of me. “Would you like to come in and use the bathroom?” she asks him. “Do you have any local calls you need to make?” He politely declines the invitation, and her shoulders slump as he pulls away from the curb. He was a nice-enough guy, but more than his friendship she’d wanted a buffer, someone to stand between herself and what she sees as my inevitable judgment. We climb the few steps to her porch and she hesitates before pulling the keys from her pocket. “I haven’t had a chance to clean,” she says, but the lie feels uncomfortable, and so she corrects herself. “What I meant to say is that I don’t give a fuck what you think of my apartment. I didn’t really want you here in the first place.”

I’m supposed to feel good that Tiffany has gotten this off her chest, but first I need to make it stop hurting. Were I to ask, my sister would tell me exactly how much she has been dreading my visit, and so I don’t ask and comment instead on the cat brushing its big rusty head against the porch rails. “Oh,” she says. “That’s Daddy.” Then she slips off her shoes and opens the door.

The apartment I imagine during our phone calls is not the apartment that Tiffany actually inhabits. It’s the same physical area, but I prefer to envision it as it was years ago, back when she held an actual job. It was never extravagant, never self-consciously decorated, but it was clean and comfortable and seemed like a nice place to come home to. There were curtains on the windows, and a second bedroom made up for guests. Then she got the rickshaw, and as her house became a revolving junk shop, she shed all traces of sentimentality. Things come in, and as rent time nears, they go out, the found kitchen table sold alongside the serving bowl once belonging to our great-aunt or the Christmas present you’d given her the year before. For a time certain objects were replaced, but then she hit a rough patch and learned to do without such things as chairs and lampshades. It is this absence I try to ignore on entering her apartment, and I do pretty well until we hit the kitchen.

The last time I visited, Tiffany was pulling up the linoleum. I’d assumed that this was part of a process, phase one to be followed by phase two. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a one-step procedure, the final product a tar-paper floor. Combine it with bare feet and you’re privy to the pedicurist’s worst nightmare. My sister has appendages connected to her ankles. They feature toes and arches, but I cannot call them feet. In color they resemble the leathery paws of great apes, but in texture they are closer to hooves. In order to maintain her balance, she’ll periodically clear the bottoms of debris — a bottle cap, bits of broken glass, a chicken bone — but within moments she’ll have stepped on something else and begun the process all over again. It’s what happens when you sell both your broom and your vacuum cleaner.

I see the dirty rag covering the lower half of the kitchen window, the crusted broken-handled pans scattered across the greasy stovetop. My sister is living in a Dorothea Lange photograph, and the homosexual in me wants to get down on my knees and scrub until my fingers bleed. I’d done it on all my previous visits, hoping each time that it might make some kind of a lasting impression. Gleaming appliances, a bathroom reeking of bleach: “Doesn’t this smell great!” I’d say. The last time I was here, after scraping, cleaning, and waxing her living-room floor, I watched as she overturned a wineglass onto what amounted to six hours’ worth of work. It wasn’t an accident, but a deliberate statement: I do not want what you have to offer. She later phoned my brother, referring to me as Fairy Poppins, which wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t so apt. I am determined not to get involved this time, but without the cleaning, I have no purpose and don’t know what to do with myself.

“We could talk,” Tiffany says. “That’s something we’ve never tried.”

Haven’t we? I think. If I talk to Tiffany less than to my other sisters, it’s because she never comes home. We spent months persuading her to attend my brother’s wedding, and even when she agreed, we didn’t really expect her to show up. She and Paul get along very well, but as a group the family makes her nervous. We’re the ones who idly sat by while she was having golf balls putted into her mouth, and the less time she spends with us, the happier she is. “Don’t you get it?” she says. “I don’t like you people.” You people. As if we’re a collection agency.

Tiffany stomps her lit cigarette onto the tar-paper floor, and as she sits on the countertop I notice the smoldering butt still clinging to the bottom of her right hoof. “I’ve been doing a lot of tile work,” she tells me, and I follow her finger in the direction of the refrigerator, where a mosaic panel leans against the wall. She started making them a few years ago, using the bits of broken crockery she finds in the trash. Her latest project is the size of a bath mat and features the remains of a Hummel figurine, the once cherubic face now reeling in a vortex of shattered coffee mugs. Like the elaborate gingerbread houses she made during her baking days, Tiffany’s mosaics reflect the loopy energy of someone who will simply die if she doesn’t express herself. It’s a rare quality, and because it requires an absolute lack of self-consciousness, she is unable to see it.

“A woman offered to buy it,” she tells me, genuinely surprised that someone might take an interest. “We set a price, but then, I don’t know, I feel wrong accepting that kind of money.”

I can understand thinking that you’re not good enough, but no one needs cash more than Tiffany. “You could sell it and buy a vacuum cleaner,” I say. “Lay some new linoleum on the floor, wouldn’t that be nice?”

“What is it with you and my kitchen floor?” she asks. “Who cares about the goddam linoleum?”

In the corner of the room Daddy approaches my sports coat, kneading it with his paws before lying down and curling into a ball. “I don’t know why I even bother with you,” Tiffany says. She’d wanted to show me her artwork — something that truly interests her, something she’s good at — and instead, like my father, I’m suggesting she become an entirely different person. Looking at her face, that combination of fatigue and defiance, I am reminded of a conversation I annually hold with my friend Ken Shorr.

ME: Did you get your tree yet?

KEN: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees.

ME: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead?

KEN: I just told you, I’m a Jew.

ME: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for a cheap wreath.

KEN: I’m not looking for a wreath at all. Leave me alone, will you.

ME: You’re probably just tense because you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping.

KEN: I don’t Christmas shop.

ME: What are you telling me? That you make all of your presents?

KEN: I don’t give Christmas presents period. Goddamit, I told you, I’m a Jew.

ME: Well, don’t you at least need to buy something for your...

KEN: They’re Jews, too, idiot. That’s what makes me one. It’s hereditary. Do you understand?

ME: Sure.

KEN: Say the words “I understand.”

ME: I understand. So where are you going to hang your...

I can’t seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen. “Yes, your Tiki god is very handsome, but we’re here to talk about Jesus.” It’s no wonder Tiffany dreads my visits. Even when silent, I seem to broadcast my prissy disapproval, comparing the woman she is with the woman she will never be, a sanitized version who struggles with real jars and leaves other people’s teeth and frozen turkeys where she finds them. It’s not that I don’t like her — far from it — I just worry that, without a regular job and the proper linoleum, she’ll fall through a crack and disappear to a place where we can’t find her.

The phone rings in the living room and I’m not surprised when Tiffany answers it. She does not tell her caller that she has company, but rather, much to my relief, she launches into what promises to be a long conversation. I watch my sister pace the living room, her great hooves kicking up clouds of dust, and when I am certain she’s no longer looking, I shoo Daddy off my sports coat. Then I fill the sink with hot, soapy water, roll up my shirtsleeves, and start saving her life.