Calypso

by David Sedaris

Now that I’ve scored a couple of decent guest rooms, it seems silly not to get a little more use out of them. 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. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.

.

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn’t it often that way?

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.

A few days later, at the big Comme des Garçons shop in Omotesandō, I bought yet another pair of culottes, a fancier pair that are cerulean blue. “What are you doing?” Hugh moaned as I stepped out of the dressing room. “That’s three pairs of culottes you’ll own now.” All I could say in my defense was “Maybe I have a busy life.”

It’s not that our father waited till this late in the game to win our hearts. It’s that he’s succeeding.

Happiness is harder to put into words.

With me, people aren’t thinking What did you say? so much as Why are you saying that?

Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”

This, with the chuckle that means “Wouldn’t it be funny if what I just said was funny?”

If you’ve come directly downstairs, this might be the first time since last night that you’ve heard this word. That doesn’t make it refreshing. Rather, it’s like being in Alaska and getting bitten by your first blackfly of the day. I am going to be bleeding by sunset, you’ll think.

“The list” is a growing collection of words and phrases we’d outlaw if given the power to do so. It includes “awesome,” of course, and “It is what it is,” which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. “Isn’t that the state motto of

My American English for Business Travelers will teach you to recognize the most often repeated words and phrases but hopefully leave room for wonder. I’m constantly surprised and delighted by some of the things I hear while traveling across the United States. I’m thinking of a fellow bus passenger who turned to me as our driver barely missed a pedestrian, saying, “See, he don’t love life.” Of a Memphis panhandler who called as I passed, “Hey, man, why don’t you buy me a Co-Cola?” Of the newsstand cashier who did not suggest I buy a bottle of water but, rather, looked at the price of my Sunday Times and said, “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

I like having a place that theoretically belongs to everyone but technically belongs to me.

It was the same when we lived in Paris. Hugh regularly read the French papers. He listened to political shows on the radio, while I was, like, “Is he the same emperor we had last year?”

I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagined her drowning off the coast of North Carolina during one of my family’s vacations.

It seemed I wanted to marry just so I could be a widower.

The battle for gay marriage was, in essence, the fight to be as square as straight people, to say things like “My husband tells me that the new Spicy Chipotle Burger they’ve got at Bennigan’s is awesome!”

“I’m not marrying you,” he repeated. I swore to him that I was not being romantic about it: “There’ll be no rings, no ceremony, no celebration of any kind. We won’t tell anyone but the accountant. Think of it as a financial contract, nothing more.” “No.” “Goddamn it,” I said. “You are going to marry me whether you like it or not.” “No, I’m not.” “Oh, yes you are.”

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.

It’s like she took English lessons from a Klan member but quit after the second day.

“You’re not giving it croutons, are you?” Hugh will say. “‘It’ is named Canfield, and I’m not forcing him to eat anything,”

Hahahaha

I want to be acknowledged as a generous provider. This is about me, not them.

my niece, Madelyn, who is twelve and has a heart made of frozen concrete,

“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.”

A person can say anything with lotion on,

“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.”

I then reminded him of the time my father came for Christmas. “It was 1998 in Normandy, and you told him to get the fuck out of your kitchen.” Hugh crossed his arms. “Again, you’re wrong. What I said was ‘I need for you to get the fuck out of my kitchen.’” “That’s not better,”

“I just feel that for guys like us, white guys our age, if we need any help—housing or food stamps or whatever—it’s the back of the line. You know what I mean?” Well, isn’t that sort of where the line forms? I

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’m in locker rooms five days a week and have never heard anyone carry on like Trump in that video,” I argue. “And if I did, I wouldn’t think, Wow, that guy ought to be my president. I’d think he was a creep and a loser.” Then I add, repeating something I’d heard from someone else, “Besides, he wasn’t in a locker room; he was at work.”

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

what Hugh wants when I’m away are letters with stamps on them.