Calypso

by David Sedaris

Janet’s mother is eighty-nine and is in excellent physical and mental health. “Unlike my friend Phil’s mother,” she said. “This was a woman who never missed a church service, who was an absolute pillar of her community. Then she got dementia and became a different person.” She poured me more coffee. “The last time Phil saw her, she leaned over in her wheelchair and at the top of her voice said, ‘Hitler wants my pussy.’” Jimmy stroked his biblike beard. “They say he was quite the ladies’ man.” “Who even knew that word was in her vocabulary?” Janet asked. “And how had Hitler told her? He’d been dead for fifty years by that point.”

When the time came, I was standing by the side of the road, collecting trash with my grabber. It’s generally the same crap over and over—potato-chip bags, candy wrappers, Red Bull cans—but along this particular stretch, six months earlier, I’d come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You’d think that if someone wanted a sex toy she’d go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed.

One of the differences between his family and my own is the way we’ll listen to a story. It’s hard to finish more than a few sentences at a time when talking to his mother, who likes to interrupt either to accuse you of exaggerating—“Oh, now, that’s not true”—or to defend the person you’re talking about, someone, most often, she has never met.

That night at the Sorry! board, Kathy told me that she and Madelyn had stopped by the pier earlier in the day and watched as people fed the sharks. “There must have been ten of them, some as long as five feet,” she said. “Are you hearing this?” I called to Hugh. He was sitting on the porch with his mother and sister, no doubt recalling the time they chased a hippo from their tennis court back when they lived in the Congo. God, those Hamricks can reminisce. “Kathy saw twenty-five sharks, some of them twelve feet long, at the pier this afternoon.” “Now, that’s not true,” Joan said.