Calypso

by David Sedaris

behavior, “We’re

It’s not the snippets of conversation that betray him as the subject but rather their voices, which, almost a decade after his death, are still brittle and reverential, full of loss and longing.

When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves.

That’s only about seven miles! Not bad if you’re on a business trip or you’re just getting used to a prosthetic leg.

It’s so funny to be called an asshole by someone who doesn’t know you, but then again knows you so perfectly.

Mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they’re involved with. They move. They’re visible in direct sunlight. But because they don’t have access to our emotional buttons—because they can’t make us twelve again, or five, and screaming—they don’t really count as players.

The main reason we asked Gretchen to join us is that she understands shopping. That is to say, she understands there is nothing but shopping

“That’s five dollars, baby. You OK widdat?” Or of the pilot who somberly said as he turned off the seat belt sign at the end of a flight, “All rise.” Now that’s what I’m talking about.

It’s hard to get ahead in this game without occasionally sending a fellow player back to start. “Sorry,” you say, sincerely at first, and then in a way that means “I’m sorry you’re the sort of person who deserves this.”

The Christmas that Paul brought his family to Sussex, she presented me with a Sorry! game of my own, and though we pulled it out a dozen or so times, it never felt urgent, the way it does at the beach.

The writers she prefers are long dead and were on the wordy side.

My family, on the other hand, is always happy to hear about how horrible someone is.

I turned to Madelyn, who had drawn a ten and, instead of moving forward like a normal, sweet sixth-grader, employed the card’s other option and took one step back, thereby returning my pawn to start, though I posed no threat to her whatsoever. “You will grow up to be a terrible person,” I told her. “I mean, more terrible than you are now. If that’s even possible.” “He didn’t mean that,” Joan called from out on the porch.

The authors of the letters often cry, perhaps because what they’ve written is so poorly constructed.

Sobriety would not have stopped the cancer that was quietly growing inside her, but it would have allowed her to hold her head up—to recall what it felt like to live without shame—if only for a few years.

He helped me into the house and upstairs to our bed. Then he brought me a bell that I rang every ten or so minutes for the next sixteen hours. “Can I have some water?” “I think I need a glass of ginger ale. We don’t have any? I bet the store does.” “Bring me my iPad, my laptop, the memoir in my office by a man who had both his feet chewed off by a panda cub. You couldn’t find such a book? Maybe I dreamed it. Where’s that tea I asked for? Can you change my socks for me?”