Calypso

by David Sedaris

All of us had pulled away from the family at some point in our lives—we’d had to in order to forge our own identities, to go from being a Sedaris to our own specific Sedaris.

How long has that been in there? I wondered. It’s scary the things that come out when you’re mad at someone.

You couldn’t say she hadn’t nailed us. Still I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing. It’s so funny to be called an asshole by someone who doesn’t know you, but then again knows you so perfectly.

Still, it seemed incredible to me that something like this could happen, for we were middle-class and I’d been raised to believe that our social status inoculated us against severe misfortune. A person might be broke from time to time—who wasn’t?—but you could never be poor the way that actual poor people were: poor with lice and missing teeth. Your genes would reject it. Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn’t your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet? Then there’d be friends, hopefully ones who went to college and might at the very least view you as a project, the thing they’d renovate after the kitchen was finished. At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?

I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time. You might be best friends with one brother or sister, then two years later it might be someone else. Then it’s likely to change again, and again after that. It doesn’t mean that you’ve fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you’ve merged into someone else’s lane, or had him or her merge into yours. Trios form, then morph into quartets before splitting into teams of two. The beauty of it is that it’s always changing.

“But he didn’t used to be this nice and agreeable,” I complained to Hugh. “Well, he is now,” he said. “Why can’t you let people change?” This is akin to another of his often asked questions: “Why do you choose to remember the negative rather than the positive?” “I don’t,” I insist, thinking, I will never forget your giving me such a hard time over this. Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright?

I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me, I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

I suppose I could have asked him questions about his job, or his childhood, but it already seemed too late to get into it. These were the sorts of conversations that should have begun years earlier. They needed foundations built brick by brick, and not just thwacked down whole. He could have asked about my life, but I don’t know how articulate I would have been.

What do other fathers and sons talk about? I’d ask myself, shifting the worklight from one hand to the other. There was never any problem making conversation with my mother. That was effortless, the topics springing from nowhere, and we’d move from one to the next in a way that made me think of a monkey gracefully swinging through the branches of a tree. The silence my father and I inflicted on each other back then is now exacerbated by his advanced age. Every time I see him could be the last, and the pressure I feel to make our conversation meaningful paralyzes me.

Our mother was the one who held us all together. After her death we were like a fistful of damp soil, loose bits breaking off with no one to press them back in.

I can see him doing the same thing I am, trying to make some sort of connection. We’re like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other’s hands and missing every time. Meanwhile the stage crew has gathered below us and begun to roll up the safety net.

Being her confidant made me feel special: only she and I could truly understand how stupid the people in my family were. The downside, I discovered, was that no one was safe. It was hurtful the first few times her criticism got back to me. (“I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with that Raquel Welch poster.”) Then I realized that it didn’t mean anything. Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.” An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.

I want to laugh. Then I want him to laugh and say, “Just kidding!” But he honestly believes all this and is frustrated that I won’t believe it as well. “Wake up!” he says.

I join my family on Emerald Isle for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.