Calypso

  “What do you say when someone cuts you off in traffic?” I asked a woman in Copenhagen whose book I was signing.

  “We’re not big on cursing,” she told me, “so the worst we’re likely to come out with—and it’s pretty common—is ‘Why don’t you run around in my ass?’”

  There are asses in America where that might not be much of a threat. This is to say that, though it would be dark in there, and it probably wouldn’t smell so great, at least you’d have some room to spread out. It would be more like a prison cell than, say, a coffin.

  I’d asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you’re more apt to bring a disease into it. “Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it’s normal to call them a cholera sufferer,” a Dutch woman told me. “Either that or a cancer whore.”

  I’d never thought of stitching those two particular words together. “A cancer whore?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m pretty sure it comes from The Hague.”

  The following day I checked out her story with a woman named Els, who said, “Oh, sure. Cancer whore. I hear it all the time. You can also say ‘cancer slut.’” She added that the words are pretty much the same in Dutch as they are in English. “We say ‘slet,’” she said. “Kanker slet.”

  “Would you ever call someone a…I don’t know…a diabetes slet?” I asked.

  She looked at me as if I were missing out on something so fundamental, it was a wonder I could dress myself in the morning. “Of course not,” she said. “The disease has to be terminal.”

  “So, like, AIDS whore?”

  Again she seemed exasperated. “AIDS? Never. Those poor people—that’s not funny! If you want to be creative you say something like ‘dirty typhus Mongoloid,’ which you hear a lot lately.” She paused. “Is that the right word, ‘Mongoloid’?”

  “We would say, ‘person with Down syndrome,’” I told her. “But I guess that when joined with the words ‘dirty’ and ‘typhus,’ it would be too long. Especially when you’re passing someone on the highway.”

  They’re strange, the Dutch. After talking to Els, I met a man who frequently calls his eighteen-month-old daughter a “little ball sack.” “Because, I mean, it’s what you do,” he explained.

  “What do you mean ‘it’s what you do’?” I said. “It’s not what I do or anyone in my family does. I don’t even call my ball sack a ball sack.”

  He shrugged, Dutchily.

  In Vienna, I returned to my original question: “What do Austrians yell out their car windows when they get angry?”

  “Well,” a young woman told me, “sometimes we will say, ‘Why don’t you find a spot on my ass that you would like to lick and lick it?’”

  I’m guessing this is quicker to say and less awkward-sounding in German. Even so, it lacks a certain something. “You give them a choice of where to lick your ass?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like much of a threat, given that they could pick a spot on the side or up top, where it’s basically just your lower back.”

  She agreed. “And sometimes if the bad driver is a female, we will call her a blood sausage.”

  “Is that because a woman has a period?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  Later that night I met a Bulgarian. “In my country, you say to someone you hate, ‘May you build a house from your kidney stones.’”

  Well, finally, I thought. This is essentially wishing someone an eternity of gut-wrenching pain, all for taking the parking space you wanted or not turning his blinker on. I’ve had three kidney stones in my life, each the size of a small piece of gravel you might find at the bottom of an aquarium, and each excruciating. The thought of passing enough of them to build an entire house—even if it was just big enough for a termite to live in—is unfathomable. Those Bulgarians don’t fool around, though no one can come close to the Romanians.

  At a book signing in Boston, I met a woman from Bucharest. “My publicist is Romanian,” I told her. “Not full-blooded like you, but still she can speak a little. Her favorite saying, taught to her by her grandmother, is ‘I shit in…’ God, what is that?…‘I shit in…’ ”

  “‘I shit in your mother’s mouth’?” she asked. “That’s probably what it was. It’s a very popular curse.”

  The woman walked away, and I thought, Well, I can see why. “I shit in your mother’s mouth.” Does it get any nastier than that?

  I discovered a year later on my first trip to Bucharest that, actually, yes, it does. “What’s the absolute worst thing you’ve ever heard?” I asked from the stage at the end of my reading. People lined up with answers, and I learned that, as in all Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries, the most popular target when on the attack is the other person’s mother. Thus: “I fuck your mother’s dead, I fuck your mother’s Christ, I fuck your mother’s icon, I fuck your mother’s Easter, I fuck your mother’s onion, I will make skis out of your mother’s cross,” and “I fuck your mother’s memorial cake.” This is something you bake when a loved one dies, and there’s a lot of cursing centered around it, the absolute worst being “I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.”

  A young woman told me this, and when I repeated it to the fellow who drove me to the airport the following morning and who had previously been chatty, he fell silent.

  “That is total devastation,” he eventually said. “I mean, wow. What kind of a person told you this? Was it a girl? Was she pretty?”

  The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. “What have you got for me?” I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna.

  “Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit,” she offered.

  I was stunned. “Anyone else would say, ‘Shove your hand up my ass,’ and then run out of imagination,” I told her. “You people, though, you just keep going. And that’s what makes you the champions you are.”

  Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to drive, I thought, watching as she walked out the door and onto the unsuspecting streets of Vienna, this poet, this queen, this glittering jewel in a city of flint.

  The Comey Memo

  It was mid-August on Emerald Isle, and so far no one had drowned or been attacked by sharks. This was good news for the local Realtors, one of whom, a cheerful woman named Phyllis, had become a family friend. Hugh dropped by to see her the day after we arrived and returned an hour or so later with a flushed face.

  “Guess who’s staying twelve houses down? James Comey, that’s who! He came into the office earlier this week and had his picture taken with Sherry.”

  I went out to the deck, where Gretchen was hanging up her wet swimsuit. “You’ll never believe who’s staying eight houses away. Jim Comey.”

  She pulled a clothespin out of her mouth. “Wow, you’re kidding!”

  Next I told my niece, Madelyn, who is fourteen. She looked up dully from her phone and said, “Who?”

  The woman behind the counter at the post office responded the same way.

  “You know,” I told her. “The guy who’s all over the news lately?”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “How long has he been here?”

  I had no idea but didn’t want to sound like I was out of the loop. “Five days. And he’s only a few houses away from me!”

  I could practically hear the phone being dialed as I left. “Guess who’s on the 7400 block of Ocean Drive?”

  “You what?” Hugh said when I told him I’d told the postmistress. “Now everyone will know!”

  I wrote my friend Lynette and was about to write our neighbor Lee when I found Hugh writing him. “It’s my news, not yours,” he hissed.

  Late that afternoon we rented a golf cart. The girls took it out just before sunset and turned around in James Comey’s driveway. “At least I think it was his,” my sister-in-law, Kathy, reported at dinner that night. “There was a black SUV with Virginia plates and dark windows parked o
ut front.”

  After eating we all jumped into the golf cart and drove by the house twice. “Look, lights are on!”

  Rental units turned over at noon the following day, so we never got a chance to see him, this former director of the FBI whom we all hated until someone we hated even more fired him.

  “Oh well,” Amy said. “It was fun to be excited for a while. Now we can all go back to doing nothing.”

  Aside from Jim Comey, the big topic that week was our father, who was supposed to join us but had to cancel when his ride fell through. He’d lost his license earlier in the summer, and we’d all heaved a collective sigh of relief. Now we learned that he’d returned to the DMV with a letter from his eye doctor and gotten it back. “I followed him home from a dental appointment last week and couldn’t believe it,” Kathy said late one evening, lighting a cigarette on the deck that overlooks the ocean. “He has double vision and was all over the road. It’s a miracle he didn’t hit someone.”

  My father lives on his Social Security. He won’t touch his savings or investments, which are substantial, as he wants to leave as much as possible to his children. It’s what kept him alive during the Obama years, the hope that whoever succeeded him would eliminate the estate tax. It would be the perfect irony, then, for him to get into an accident and lose everything in a lawsuit. Lisa’s fear is that he’ll kill a child. None of the rest of us have gotten that specific, though I suppose she has a point. Killing a toddler sounds a lot worse than killing a fellow ninety-four-year-old.

  “I’m getting regular calls from the neighbors now,” Amy told me. “So are Paul and Lisa. ‘Y’all need to be doing more for your father,’ they say. ‘He’s too old to be living in that big house all on his own.’”

  I thought of the last time I’d visited him, two years earlier. Hugh and I were driving from Emerald Isle to the Raleigh airport and thought we’d drop in before flying back to England. I phoned again and again to say we were coming and left any number of messages. He hadn’t responded, though, and because of his age, I started to wonder if maybe he was dead. On the three-hour ride to his house, I considered how probable this actually was. “Why don’t you go in first?” I said to Hugh when we got to the house.

  “Hello?” he called, sticking his head in the door. I stood behind him and looked through the window to see my father scuttling around the corner. “Hey, now, this is a surprise!”

  I followed Hugh into the kitchen. “I left five or six messages,” I said, relieved by how relieved I felt.

  I’m guessing he’d set his air conditioner on ninety-eight—two degrees cooler than it was outside—which I didn’t even know was possible. The heat and stillness made everything I saw look worse. My father’s stove stopped working years ago, so he used his microwave to boil water and make us cups of instant coffee. We stood by the refrigerator, sweating. Then he asked if Hugh would advise him on a painting he had. “It’s just here, around the corner,” he said, grabbing a flashlight and stepping into what used to be a hallway but now had a chair and a table loaded with papers in it.

  “Is the overhead light out?” I asked. “Want me to change it?”

  “No, it’s fine,” my father said.

  “So you use the flashlight…?”

  “To save electricity,” he explained.

  We saw the painting my father was referring to the way a burglar might, the beam roving from spot to spot before sliding to the floor.

  “If he won’t move, why won’t he at least get a housekeeper to come in once a week?” Hugh asked after we’d left and were on our way to the airport, me so depressed I was finding it hard to breathe. “Better yet, he could hire someone to live with him.”

  “That person might rip him off,” I whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” Hugh asked.

  “So the people in the next car won’t know there’s a broken stove at my father’s house they can steal.”

  Even if conditions hadn’t grown worse over the past two years, my father would need to make some sort of change. “What I can’t understand,” I said to Amy on the beach one afternoon, “is not wanting to move! Who wouldn’t prefer a new environment, a clean slate? He can afford to keep his house exactly as it is—could pay someone to drive him over every day and wait outside while he stacks up junk mail.”

  “You’re trying to convince me?” Amy asked. “The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?”

  According to Kathy, Lisa took my father to look at two different retirement communities not far from his house in Raleigh. “Not nursing homes,” my sister assured him. “There are people as young as sixty-five living here.”

  “Your dad said he liked the first place, but when an apartment opened up he claimed he couldn’t possibly move until he fixes up the house he’s living in.”

  “He’s been saying that for fifty years,” I told her.

  Amy reached for her water bottle. “Dad refuses to move, and when I tell his neighbors that, they say, ‘Well, then, you need to make him.’ They’re all thinking we don’t care, but how do you make Dad do something?”

  “Part of the problem,” I explained to Hugh, who was stretched out beside me with a floppy hat over his face, “is that our father hates old people—always has. If everyone else in the retirement home was twenty, he’d be a lot more likely to give it a try, especially if they were all girls and all they were allowed to wear were bikini bottoms.” I rubbed some sunblock onto my reddening forehead. “I can’t believe we missed James Comey.”

  Two days later, Amy, Hugh, and I headed to Raleigh, the plan being to drop by my dad’s place before continuing on to the airport. At a Starbucks a few miles from his house, we picked up four cups of coffee. I was holding one for myself and another for my father when we walked through his front door. “We’re here!”

  He wasn’t in the kitchen, so after pausing to note the pair of briefs balled up and lying on my mother’s beloved butcher-block table, we moved down the hall and looked into bedrooms I hadn’t seen in years. Each was in the same state. His first step is to move in a table he can use as a desk. This will eventually be piled so high with papers that the stacks will topple onto the floor or, likelier still, into boxes that sit on the floor and have even more papers in them. The beds will have towering stacks upon them as well, and the various mounds will continue to grow until he crowds himself out and moves on to the next bedroom. There are five of them, including his own, which is at the end of the hall.

  “Dad?”

  Ten years earlier, my father, Amy, and I attended a wedding in Florida and stayed at a hotel in Delray Beach. “How did you sleep?” I asked over breakfast the next morning.

  He thought for a moment. “I slept like a doll.”

  Perhaps he meant “I slept like a baby” and it came out wrong, but ever since, it’s what everyone in my family says: “I slept like a doll.”

  My father so loved his bed at the hotel that Amy and I bought him one, explaining that what made it nice wasn’t just the mattress but the sheets, which were high quality and, more important still, clean. The bed my father slept on in Florida would have vomited its stuffing had it seen its filthy twin in North Carolina. There was a narrow space for a person to lie on, but the rest of it, like the rest of the room itself, was piled high with bank statements, along with catalogs and belts and pages torn from newspapers. It was hard to pick out any one thing—rather, it blurred into a continuous mass, sort of like a glacier.

  Overlooking it all, balanced atop a stack of twenty-year-old golf magazines on his highboy, were a half dozen photos of the family taken on Emerald Isle in 1981 and arranged under glass in a single frame. In them, Lisa looks amazing. All us kids do. It was that moment in a family’s life when everything is golden, literally. Our tans were phenomenal, but so was our outlook. Ranging in age from twelve to twenty-four, my brother, sisters, and I gazed into the future and saw only promise.


  It’s not like we don’t see it now. We’re not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you’re more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award. That our younger, cuter, infinitely more hopeful selves oversaw such total chaos made it all the sadder. I was just wondering what the house would look like had my mother been the surviving parent when I noticed my father on the deck just off his bedroom, staring into a tree. I’d last seen him a month earlier and had noticed how hunched over he was—not bent into the shape of a question mark, the way some people his age are, but still it made him look frailer. “Hey!” he said as I opened the sliding glass door. “There you are!”

  He wore white tennis shorts with a beige T-shirt and matching socks. Everything looked too big on him: his watch, his glasses, even his teeth—which is odd, as they’re completely his own. When he stepped forward to hug me, I noticed four mean-looking bruises on his arm. They weren’t purple but black, and had cotton balls over them held down with masking tape.

  “We brought you a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “Fantastic!”

  The living room is the last semi-presentable patch of territory in my father’s house—the only one without a desk in it—so we retired there. “Gosh, you all look terrific,” he said, taking a seat on the sofa. “So tanned and healthy.”

  “What happened to your arm?” I asked.

  “I fell,” he told me, waving away my concern. “It happens sometimes when I turn around too quickly.”

  “So you fall, and then what?”

  “I crawl around for a while until I come to a chair or something, and then I lift myself up.

  “Hey,” he said to Amy, no doubt eager to change the subject, “I pulled out a few things I thought you might like.” He gestured to a pile on a low table beside the sofa. “There’s a straw hat that belonged to your mother and some pocketbooks.”