My dad comes out of the bathroom and gives me a suffocating squeeze. He’s a brawny man, tall and totally bald and always, no matter the weather, wearing a flannel shirt. I sometimes think he doesn’t realize his own strength when he hugs so tight.
“You look too skinny,” he says, eyeing me up and down.
“We don’t say things like that to people anymore,” I point out.
“You therapists and your sensitive language,” he laughs, and I resist the urge to tell him that it’s not just therapists who want people to stop commenting on women’s bodies. But again, intentions. So I let it go. “Do you know if your mom got the duck?” he asks, wandering off to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” I say, hoping that my assumption is true.
I hear the door open, and turn around to see my brother, Ike, stride in. Yes, my mother’s name is Tina, and yes, she named her son Ike. She oscillates between saying she named him that to be “funny and subversive” while simultaneously claiming that she “just liked the name, who would’ve known.” So that is what it is.
“I’m here,” he says, heading straight to the bar and pouring himself a bourbon. He gives me a pointed look, and I try to give him my most understanding smile back.
Ike and I both eschewed our parents’ creative career paths—I went into therapy and Ike became an accountant—so I like to think that at some point soon we’ll be on equal footing as responsible adults. But no matter how much time goes by, we never seem to shed the little brother / big sister dynamic.
He’s five years younger, and for the majority of our childhood, I was the surrogate parent, the de facto babysitter. Both my parents worked in advertising before retiring—my mom as an art director and my dad as a graphic designer—so they always made work excuses for why they needed to go to parties or shows or wherever. They were generallypresent and loving parents, but if I didn’t want a dinner thrown together from leftovers of wilted lettuce and stale taco shells, it was on me to make it happen. Itallfell to me to make normalcy happen for Ike. My pencil sharpener did double duty as I marked up two sets of homework; I had to drag my mom into a kid-clothing store when Ike’s pants were looking too short; I held out my arms as his little feet slapped against the slippery pool deck to make sure he didn’t fall in prematurely while he attempted cannonballs without real adult supervision.
So now, even though we’re both fully fledged grown-ups, there’s still this expectation from all three of them that I’m handling things. The residual emotional exhaustion of that is something I’ve never quite been able to shake.
And Ike doesn’t see it, because he’s never had to. When I nudge him toward coresponsibility, he sits back and lets me take the lead. Those are our entrenched roles, and at this point it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever change.
He’s been feigning busyness for weeks to get out of having this conversation. And because he’s him and I’m me, it worked for a while. I completely understand his urge to take a break from our parents. But I couldn’t hold off any longer.
My parents come in and coo over Ike, like he’s a long-lost baby bird. They practically pinch his cheeks, they’re so excited to see him. He hugs them both and acts as though his absence was entirely obligatory, and they eat up the excuses. It’s sweet if you ignore that it’s masking his suffocation and avoidance.
“Well, the food’s hot, Fischers,” my dad says to everyone, as though we’re some kind of unit. “So let’s sit and eat.” He grabs the take-out bags from the counter and spreads them out on the table. It’s been long enough that I’d probably describe the contents as lukewarm rather than hot, but I know it’ll all taste good.
We go along for a while in a sea of simplicity, everyone talking over everyone else so no one has to actually engage.This beef and broccoli is always so good. Did you see the Rangers score? What summer travel do youhave coming up?Ike is always a superior buffer. They lower their guard around me, for whatever reason, but with Ike they like to behave a little better. It’s almost as though they know he can distance himself when he wants to in a way I never could (or would).
I wish I could be annoyed at him for it, but mostly I’m simply jealous of his ability to set better boundaries and the positive results that yields for him. I’m fighting the low-key buzz of sensory overload, and he’s just eating some duck.
The Waldos sit under the table, hoping for whatever scraps will inevitably fall from my mother’s clumsy fork. George has been napping, elevated on a beanbag chair, for the entire evening, deliberately safeguarding himself from potential interlopers. As always, I wish I could be more like George.
But when it’s clear dinner is over, I know I have to bring up the topic I’m dreading.
“I had my annual chat with my financial adviser,” I start. I can see Ike tense a bit, but thankfully my parents don’t clock it. They’re oblivious. Which I guess is why we have this problem in the first place. “And as you know, my financial adviser also does your planning as well,” I say, hoping that they might start to realize this conversation is going to be about them.
“Right,” my mom says, “that’s so nice of her.”
She smiles at me, and I want to roll my eyes but I don’t. It’s notnicethat my financial adviser does it. I pay my financial adviser to do it, because ever since my parents retired early for no discernible reason, I’ve been justifiably worried about their finances. And my parents, who have no sense of propriety or embarrassment—which I suppose for this at least is good—thought it was a great idea at the time.
“Right,” I repeat, taking a deep breath. “So she’s concerned. Again.”
At that, my parents look at each other. I wish the look was of theuh-ohvariety, but I can tell what’s passing between them. It’s theiroh, Nora, always worryinglittle commiseration. That annoys me enough to barrel ahead.
“As you know,” I repeat, “she tracks your spending and what you have in savings. She’s been a little concerned generally since you retired, as she’s mentioned, but she wanted to talk to me on this particular call specifically about a few large purchases you recently made. She said you made some rash stock market investments that immediately tanked and that you also spent ten thousand dollars on something from a place called PetWorld?”
At that I see the light bulbs finally light up. “My tank!” my mother exclaims happily. I shoot her a confused look, but I don’t have time to ask before my dad starts talking.
“I admit the stock thing was a little foolish,” he says. “I’ve been enjoying talking to some folks on this website—it’s called Reddit, and it’s really wonderful.” I can see my brother roll his eyes from the other side of the table, and I have to look away so I don’t laugh. “I started going on there because your mother and I got very into that showOutlander, and I wanted some people to talk to about it. Did you know there’s communities to talk about just about anything? I’m now in subreddits on ancestry, and sous videing and the East Village, and of course myOutlanderfriends. Anyway, I somehow got into a group looking at stock recommendations, and I thought they knew what they were talking about, the way people seem to know everything aboutOutlander.”
I try to nod along in the hopes that if I say nothing, this wild yet entirely predictable story (which is roughly what I imagined it would be when my adviser said a large chunk of money was lost in the span of a few days onE*Trade) will end. And true to form, when I say nothing, he doesn’t continue. But then my mom butts in.
“You do have to come see the fish tank, though,” she says, making me relieved that at least the word “tank” refers to a fish tank and not some inexplicable weaponry, because I wouldn’t put anything past her. “I just felt like our room needed more movement, and Shelley said she and Dave got a fish tank and it was actually very sexy and soothing.”
Ike puts his head in his hands. I wonder if it’s frustration or the need to never hear his mother refer to anything as “sexy and soothing” again.
“It’s four hundred gallons!” my mom continues gleefully, as though the size is the best part.
