The original problematic short story that prompted this quest

The novel idea was based on when I just started writing a short story that went way too long. Here is the story, published in the Spring issue of the Yale Literary Magazine when I was a Senior.

What I want to save about this version is the question that ends the story. If you don't have the patience to read this, read the last paragraph. The story is problematic in its pacing, in its rushed character descriptions, in the general rushed nature of the telling. This, of course, is what "going long" fixes.


The Oswego Suggestions

A guttering comes up from the drive, from the huffing exhaust pipe of a van wheeling into its third attempt to parallel-park alongside the koi pond, where the whiskered mouths of gentlemanly goldfish latch open and closed to swallow mouthfuls of grey air. Through the scrim of palm fronds that hide the house from the street, the backing vehicle can be seen to read “Maid-4-U” in hopeful lettering, bold and red. Hired by the studio to swing by on the Thursday before shooting is set to start, this is the first sign that anything in our lives is capable of change. Predictably, I can be found only through the second story-window nitched above the portico, drooling into my rumpled duvet; still asleep.
In my dream the muffled footsteps of maids treading the carpets register as rainstorms; their Ecuadorian banter ricocheting off the bath tile comes across as the clacking of Morse code; and the long, slow sighs of the vacuums sound like the breathy skirting of subway trains braking into underground stations. So it isn’t until 1.37 p.m.—when a tentacle of buttery afternoon light edges across the wall-to-wall carpet to hit me in the face—that I open my eyes to the doorframe silhouette of a slouchy figure, holding forth a SwifferSweeper as if it were a Trident. For a tense moment, we both say nothing. Then, simultaneously, we mumble faint apologies. I pull at the duvet. The door closes (she closes the door) and she is gone. And I am in the dark again.
Maybe a half an hour later, mom walks down the hall with the svelte way of walking I can recognize by ear, due to the specific rhythm of the swish-boom boom of her hips and something about the crush of heels on velour piling.
She throws open the door—“Really, Jareth. It’s two o’ clock. Children are leaving school and standing at bus stops”—and pulls her neck back out into the hall.
A dream later and I can hear Cynthia tripping down the stairs on her cell. “Yes, pages forty-two and forty-three—one through thirty-one, just the odds.” Back from school.
I lie starfished on the bed for a moment longer. The prospect of awakening holds little to no joy. Even in the near darkness I have seen what mom is wearing; the first indication that she is strung tight today, that things are bad. It’s a lipstick-pink double-breasted Azzedine Alaia shoulder-padded 1987 “power suit,” speckled with buttons of brass, each holding the imprinted seal of a rope-wrapped anchor. Meant to invoke the splendor of multi-million dollar yachts, which themselves are meant to invoke the lives of gruff, seafaring gents from the 1830s, the buttons seem to me to be only images of sinking, of being sunk. Mom wears it to seem “classy.”
Forget the suit. There’s nothing to do but go downstairs, and I pad down in my pajamas (Halloween-print boxers, Bart Simpson tee) past a chorus-girl row of maids wiping the stairwell posts. Amy and Cynthia lie splayed out on the couch, clicking through channels. In the kitchen, the SubZero holds only the asparagus en croutte left by the caterers two nights ago, the dregs of a Chardonnay I am sure Mom has been sucking, and two shelves of diet sodas in prim airplane-sized mini cans. I close the fridge and immediately notice two things.
1. All of the carpets in the house (perceivable to me over the kitchen’s granite island) have been vacuumed in neat, straight rows, so that the blank carpet retains the sort of tessellating pattern mowed in to baseball stadium lawns.
2. On the outside of the SubZero’s door, a sheet of paper has been hastily taped (the wood-paneling expels magnets, so we keep a roll of 3M beside the fridge) and at the top of the sheet, mom’s over-worked, over-wrought all-caps reads, “OSWEGO FAMILY NOTICE” below which is written: “Things we don’t want cameramen to see / things to HIDE”:
French Muzzy “learning tapes” (Cynthia’s writing)
Diet Nestle Quick—pantry (Cynthia)
Computer guides for dummies (Cynthia)
MY closet (Cynthia)
Cynthia’s Madame Alexander Dolls (Dad)
Dvds, family room cupboard (Dad’s hand)
The garage (Dad)
Rock&Gem mag. Collection (Dad again)
Everything related or pertaining to me and my life including your lives (Amy)
Mom has not written anything. I suspect she has already hidden whatever it is that she is going to be hiding. I look at the carpet again, at the lines in the carpet the maids are writing with the suck-mouthed vacuums. Over the white-noise, I yell out, “Hey Amy,” and pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper (mini-size). “What’s with this list?”
Amy does not look away from the television (Will & Grace, Season 6, Episode 9: Strangers with Candice), but I hear her just fine, as in one gutsy, dorky breath she says, “We’re going to be on a reality TV show that’s basically just about our family and the cameramen come tomorrow so you need to hide what you don’t want them to see and no one told us until today because they thought we wouldn’t approve.”
All I can say is, “What, really?” and smirk over at her with a sort of stupefied smile. I set down my Diet Dr. Pepper on the speckled granite of the central island.
“No, that was a lie.”
“Wait, was it?”
“No, it was true.”
“So we really are going to be on TV.”
“Got it.”
So we really are going to be on TV. Huh. I look at the mini soda can, sitting lonesome on the precipice of the kitchen’s solitary island, and I am not looking at the can, I am seeing myself. I am newly made aware of how I would look to a television audience. Perhaps this outfit would incite the whoops and hollers of an afternoon special laugh-track: I’m wearing Halloween print boxers, the faces of ghouls plummeting down to the hem in a factory-mistake diagonal, and I’m drinking diet Dr. Pepper, a B-list soda in second-rate form. This is breakfast, no less, and it’s 2:39 p.m. So it’s understandable that the first thing to come to mind is not what I will hide (the cliché litany including my gay porn and my grandmother’s ashes—which ended up in my room balanced on the unused NordicTrac). The first thing I think is how all time will divide into two eras: the era wherein I walked downstairs in boxers whose easy-access fly often made my flaccid penis momentarily viewable, and the coming era of history—the era in which I will don Diesel jeans and get recognized by thirteen-year olds in New Jersey malls. The Jack Osborne narrative. Oh, god.
Cynthia and Amy and I spend the rest of the day sitting in front of the big TV, staring blankly, shifting routinely like patients with bed-sores, quieting the volume on Antiques Roadshow when a lone maid enters the scene in search of dust around the curios on the armrest end-tables. The maids have come, Amy explains, because reality TV necessitates that the house be pristinely clean. (“That’s reality.”)
I have never even really noticed the curios around which the maids are dusting. Now I take note of them as objects that a camera would locate in the foreground of an establishing shot, to lend the unfolding scene a hint of irony. I imagine, behind the tiny porcelain figurine of a maiden towing a drunk-looking lamb, how Cynthia’s mascara would look as it runs through her tears during just another break up scene. I see Mom and Dad fighting behind the foreground placement of a framed photograph of them in sixties wedding outfits (mom in a white mini, dad with a tuxedo tee) holding hands and smiling blindly into the flash.
At one point Cynthia’s cell rings (Gwen Stefani ft. Akon — “Sweet Escape”) and she jumps up and slides the glass door closed behind her, and fifteen minutes later her boyfriend’s face is pressed up against the same glass door, peering in past the glare to look for Cynthia. She hops up and then they’re gone and it’s me and Amy.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
But before The Simpsons has even ended (it goes until 6:30), Mom is throwing open the door that from the garage to the kitchen, and asking, “Did TakeoutTaxi come yet?”
“Nope,” Amy says. “Where were you?”
“They’re bringing General Tso’s for you. Where’s Cynthia?”
“Hospital. Brothel. Cemetery.” Pause. “Boyfriend’s.”
“Right,” Mom says, slipping out of her pumps and hurling them on the granite kitchen counter, alongside three slurped-out diet sodas and the crumbs of the asparagus frittata crusty quiche thing. “Family meeting at seven. Where’s your father?”
“Haven’t seen ‘im.” Amy says. Then The Simpsons is back on for the final few bars until 6:30, and then there’s a re-run of Seinfeld (“Big Hands”) which we quietly watch as the sun sets over the lima-bean shaped pool. The pool is now barely visible through the plate glass sliding doors, as in the growing darkness, the broad expanses of glass reflect more and more clearly an image of ourselves. I look tired. I’ve only been awake for four hours but I am completely exhausted. The whizzing sighs of the vacuums are dying down, and at about 6.53 according to the digital clock on the face of the DVD player, I can hear the maids’ van start up and buzz off.
A few minutes later we hear Dad’s Miata parallel parking in the now-vacant spot adjacent to the koi pond. He walks straight in, throws his keys into a bowl by the door (ping!) and enters the living room with assumed bravado. “You fat, lazy bums,” he says, speaking of the bedraggled population on the mussed couch. “I work all day to keep you in business.” By the time we look up he’s already halfway in the refrigerator. “Nothing here but bean curd,” he says. “Cranberry Snapple—grrrrrrhhhh!”
“It’s not tofu. It’s quiche or something,” Amy says. “Pretty good.”
“Chinese for dinner, though,” I chime in. “It’s supposed to be here.”
“Where’s your mother?” Dad asks, as he extracts the quiche and closes the fridge door. And then there’s what’s on the door. “Fuck,” Dad says. “This goddamm list gives me a headfuck.”
* * *
After “family-meeting dinner,” wherein we discuss the general tso chicken (too sweet) and mom calls Cynthia four times on the girl’s cell before giving up, there is a bzzzzzz at the security doorbell outside the gate, and mom trots up to the beige intercom, and buzzes someone in. There’s shuffling on the walk. Mom strides out to the foyer to get the door, and her voice plashes over from the other room.
“Cynthia’s not here,” she says, cheery. “But otherwise they’re ready.”
“You look lovely Mrs. Oswego,” relays the confident voice of an MTV VJ. “Is that an Alaia?”
The man whom mother ushers in to the dining room has the trim, petite physique of a Wimbledon ball-boy. Arrayed behind him like a “V” of trailing geese is a team of five dudes, universally assembled in blazers, polos, distressed jeans, five-o’-clock shadows, and miniature beer bellies surging over the precipices of cinched leather belts. A pair of aviator shades peeks out from the lapel of a suit jacket formerly accustomed to holding folded pink kerchiefs. They nod toward the table, and mom seats them down one-by-one around us, making small-talk: “Great watch, Gregory. Cartier?”
“For Christmas,” Gregory says, tapping the watch-face. “It ticks.”
Mom giggles, sighs, looks around.
Amy says, “In cinema, clocks are symbolic of tension.”
There’s a pause.
Dad says, “Who the fuck are these men,” and pushes his chair back from the table. “Are you fellows the camera boys?”
“I’m the producer,” says the trim ballboy, extending a hand. “Leslie.” Mom introduces the other men: Gregory, Carl, Karl, Mike, Carl II. Then she introduces us: “My son Jareth. My daughter Amy who goes to Harvard. My husband, Rudy Oswego. And Cynthia’s up to no good somewhere.” She chuckles lightly at her own exaggeration.
“Well, Cynthia’s the star, so we can’t go tooooo long without her,” Leslie says, beaming.
“How long has Cynthia known about this?” I ask. But it’s unclear whether I have asked this question of my mother or of the man just introduced as Leslie. From the motion in the room—it cannot be discerned. Both ignore me. Carl One takes the opportunity to extend a fatty hand towards dad saying, shyly, “It’s an honor…an honor to meet you, Mr. Oswego.”
“Call me Rudy,” dad says. An hour later they’ll probably be talking about the new Shure57 mics in dad’s basement studio but for now we listen, glum, as the producers explain the concept: Wealthy family, famous father, party-animal kids. And Amy says, “Doesn’t this all sound a little bit like The Ozzbournes but less Goth?” and Mom bursts into muffled tears that she keeps contained from her mascara with a gloved hand, and Dad says, “Well, fuck it, because we ran out of money.” And I say, “Maybe if you had like, spent a single hour at the office and bought one less Miata for—” and Dad says, “Shut it you scrawny lazy gay—“ and Leslie says, “Hold it right there.” And we stop. We look upward.
Leslie is standing table-side, legs spread like he’s stretching his groin, the frosted spikes of his haircut illumined like a halo by the track lighting, and he is holding his hands up frozen around each other with the palms facing us, making in the negative space at the center of his hands a tenebrous, round-edged rectangle of proportion similar to a 35mm film frame. And he says, “Wow, this is great TV.”
Amy backs away from the General Tso, pushes away from the table, and says “Well, I refuse to be on it.”
“Oh, Amy,” Mom says, twisting an anchor on her blazer.
“Oh, Amy,” Dad says, “how unpredictable. How bold.”
* * *
Dad has prided himself on being bold. And on sarcastically commenting on the predictable behavior of others. He’s equally insufferable to watch television with (“If Maury Povich were alive in ’69, we’d have led him to the guillotine”) and he does not get along with Amy because they are too similar. In 1963 Dad founded a band that made music. He liked making music, and people liked listening to him, and people bought his records and he toured the country and the world and he keeps the pictures he took then in un-albumed boxes that teeter in the closet on the third floor. But in 1983 he and mom moved semi-permanently to LA—Roy from the band lived out here, and so did Shirley, so they would do gigs every once in a while, but could more-or-less live on what they had already made. Mom loved just having a house. She bought curtains (the wrong size, actually, all eventually replaced by a ballsy interior decorator), she “raised us kids” as any other private-school pick-up-line SUV mom raises her children, and Dad tried to “keep things stable.” He saw the diets that mom was always on, and so he invested the bulk of his estate in those little baby blue packets of fake sugar (Equal: dextrose with maltodextrin, aspartame). But this was right around the advent of another little packet—a little yellow packet called Splenda (sucralose) and within four months Dad had lost over 75 percent of his estate and five pounds by replacing his sugared coffee with “that mutherfucking chemical sludge.”
Yes, Dad swore a lot for the first couple of days. He went bowling with Larry, the loud caterer mom had once fired after baking too fatty a lobster bisque. Dad went out and came home wasted, then fell asleep face-down on the couch to the mournful tune of late-nite Ren & Stimpy reruns. Cynthia gave an oral presentation in school on the topic “What my parents do,” and concluded with a one-liner: “Some days,” she said, choking back (a laugh? a tear?) “we can only try for sweetness, and we can only taste pure shit.” It was a line the thirteen-year-old had heard her father say while, from a second-floor balcony outside the master bedroom, he had pissed into the lima-bean-shaped pool below in a flawless arc.
Cynthia’s maxim rang in through the ears of one boy sitting at that classroom who later that night would repeat it over the dinner table to his sputtering, laughing father—the president of ABC-TV, LA, who was at that moment looking for something to kick the pants off CBS’s now lame-ass Survivor, something a little more Ozzbournes and a little more old-school.
The show, Leslie explains over General Tso’s, will solve dad’s financial crises with a $250 million payoff for the first season, which would focus on how Dad deals with the fame of his past and the family of his present. The show would also follow dad on his newest business venture—the production and fiscal support of a new brand of calorie-free sugar-substitute sweetener. Would the product succeed? Find out next week. In the pilot, Carl One says, huffing excitedly, we will see him pacing the factory floor, smelling everything and sweetly.
* * *
But at 7 a.m. the next morning nothing seems so sweet. Wimbledon ball-boy Leslie is tugging at my achilles tendons while I moan, “It’s not fair, Amy gets to—“
The duvet is a crumpled croissant of pure warmth. My bedroom is a batcave of pure darkness. Leslie tugs me up and walks me straight to the shower.
“I don’t shower in the morning,” I say. “I shower at night.”
“Today you shower in the morning,” Leslie says, slamming the bathroom door behind me.
I stand in the bay of the shower with my clothes on—same Halloween boxers, different tee (“Mixology”) and I think that if there’s one time to take a shower with your clothes on, this is that time. It is an experience we should all have before we die, right? I turn the water on and the clothes cling to me like an extra, thicker layer of skin. When I exit the bathroom Leslie is sitting up straight on the lip of my bed, giving me a once-over. I’m still in my sopping PJs with a towel thrown around my shoulders—like a coat thrown over the body of a local teen saved from a fall through the ice. Straight-faced, Leslie says, “You took a shower with your clothes on.”
“I took a shower with my clothes on.”
Leslie only looks at me and sighs. Then he looks down at my feet, at the dripping water that is spreading out to soak the carpet. When I think back on the McMansion we lived in then it is this I think of—there is the vague feeling of being strangely watched, and the distinct sensual memory of the synesthetic residue of air-conditioned carpet, felt beneath squishing toes.
Despite my naturally showy nature (inherited genetically, natch), the prospect of starring in my very own reality drama becomes a lot less vainglorious when I consider that I will be seen only in terms of my relationship to my family. Amy is the lucky one—backing out completely, refusing to “ruin an academic career that exists solely through the denial of this family.” And so though her body drifts through various episodes, ghost-like, her head remains obscured by the muffled clouds of an editor’s dodged blurring. In a later episode, her ghost-head drifts above the very Bart Simpson tee I never again wore, for I have exchanged that rumpled, sleepy outfit for what the wardrobe girl, calls “a signature look”—jewel tone tees and velvet blazers, plum-wine Barneys Co-Op sweaters of cashmere, all topped with golden, imitation silk cravats.
Cynthia wears what she has always worn. “Cynthia’s the perfect child,” Mom says, as she rifles through racks of baby-doll dresses walling the spare bedroom that Leslie’s people have converted into a green room. “She’d look great in any of this stuff.”
“Stop it, Ma,” Cynthia says in a mockcountry drawl, “You done too much good by me.” Cynthia sits in a swiveling chair, puckering her lips before the illumined mirror, and I become aware watching her that I knew nothing of Cynthia. That she is a girl to me like a girl on TV.
* * *
Being on the show—I mean, really, being the character on the show—is like being at a coffeeshop with your friends and seeing someone cute or cool, or whatever, who is quietly studying and also quietly listening in on your conversation, and at some point you and your friends—I mean, the friends at the table sitting right by you—you all almost unconsciously begin to talk louder, to tell the stories that make you look good, daring, grown up. Your gestures toward eachother—elbow jabbing, shoulder-shrugging—become pronounced and play-acted. Yet the presence of that person is nearly unnoticeable.
The analogy is almost too similar to even be an analogy. Actually, both situations are exactly the same. Clearly, the camera is the quiet stranger, sipping a skim latte and brooding over their Tristram Shandy as you and your cohorts loudly replay last night’s brawl in the line outside Sirkus. “Did you see those guys doing coke on the windowsill?!?”
“Naaaaaah.”
For instance, Jerry—one of my favorite cameramen, whose beat forces him to stay in the kitchen—will be standing by the island, chewing on a sandwich and suddenly I’ll walk in the room, and he’ll pace toward the refrigerator, snaking to follow my everyday path, to film me as I look inside. I must now choose between the Rutabega Squash salad or drawers of sandwich meat and yellow American cheese. And though normally, I might have just grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper, I find myself making elaborate, inedible sandwiches formed of layers and layers of meats and cheeses. It isn’t dishonesty—I want the sandwich, I really do—it is a dishonesty of effort. Who cares about an added layer of flavorless lettuce unless it is to be eaten before millions of viewers, Rachael Ray-style—chewed through a smiley grin?
Leslie is supervising my wardrobe change after a fellow teen’s local birthday party (I need an effortless transition from swim trunks to cocktail attire), and he starts giving me notes. They’re written on a list, like the kind we had taped to the fridge, but his list reads “The Suggestions.” For instance, the producers don’t like it when I talk to Amy. She’s not even supposed to be seen, Leslie explains to me, so each time I approach her is a moment they cannot show on camera at all. They also don’t like it when I sit around all day and watch TV. “You don’t watch TV,” Leslie says “You are TV.”
“Leslie,” I say. “Cynthia can watch TV.”
“Cynthia is Cynthia,” he says.
“I am me,” I say. “I fish therefore I am.”
“Look, Jareth,” Leslie says, leaning down over the greenroom chair, like Santa over the lap of some idiot believer. “In all of the good, true movies, there is a misanthrope—a jaded, cynical soothsayer type who hobbles around spreading bad omens. He goes ‘blagh bleugh, you’re all gonna die and get fucked.’”
“Yes?” I say.
“This is what we want you to be.”
“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what’s with the cravat.”
“Yes,” Leslie says. “That is what is with the cravat.”
* * *
It’s easier to be the jaded, cynical misanthrope than someone actually involved in the action. In most scenes, I am standing off to one side, eating a gourmet, many-layered sandwich as my parents yell across the room, as Cynthia gets punched out by her boyfriend and cries herself to sleep, as Dad does shrooms in the basement with the bass player from the Moody Blues and Larry, caterer extraordinaire, man of steaks and seasonings. I learn to lean against a countertop suggestively, in the sixteen-year-old imitatio of the James Dean slouch.
On my half-birthday (February 2nd), Dad and I drive to a theater in the valley to see a screening of Day for Night (my pick). On the way we stop at a 7-11 on so Dad can buy cigarettes to smoke out of the window on our way down there and back. (He’ll have to hide them—they don’t fit with his new, cleaned up, Moby-esque Vegan rocker image.) And in the 7-11 I see a picture of my face, in the lower right hand corner of an issue of CosmoGirl, an orange-y glossy whose cover bears a model, frozen mid hoola-hoop. I steal it, and in the car I rifle through to the article about me. It takes up a single page.
“Meet Jareth Oswego,” it reads. “Why, hello Jareth Oswego,” I say. “How are you doing?” I show the mag to Dad. He grabs it hastily, and throws it out the window.
Craning my deck like a wind-hungry dog, I can see the magazine fluttering 200 yards behind on the 405. “You littered,” is all I can think to say.
“Good riddance,” Dad says. “Let’s just have a nice six hours away from your mom’s bullshit.”
“So the show is mom’s bullshit,” I say, looking out the window faking a forlorn angst I’m not sure I really feel. Sure, the houses and trees and cars are passing by, and sure they’re unknown to me—separate spaces reigned by strangers, separate worlds to which I can never go, to which I will never escape. Sure, I feel misunderstood, but it’s also fun to toy with Dad, to make him think I’m some idiot teen who really feels this angsty.
“The show is everyone’s bullshit,” is Dad’s reply. It’s impossible to know, just looking at Dad’s profile against the Hollywood Hills, what he is really thinking when he thinks of me or of mom. Even in the car, just the two of us, I catch myself watching his face like I watch his face on the show. When I watch the show, I watch to learn about him. I want to see some sidelong glance of his at Cynthia or at me, to see him in a moment where he isn’t sure I’m watching. I watch out of fear. Because I’m afraid of what he’d think of me, the scrawny son with the—what is that, a cravat?—the scrawny son with the cravat, who is watching a bright spot hundreds of feet back on the highway, from which the pages are still unfurling.
* * *
It is fourteen months since they started shooting when mom finds Cynthia in the pantry with one of the cameramen. I am sitting on the couch reading the funnies when mom says “This sandwich needs Dijon” and then the next thing I hear is mom saying, “You’re fourteen.”
Over the crinkling of the newspaper I hear Cynthia say, “I’m sixteen” and I hear the cameraman say, “Weren’t you supposed to be eighteen?”
I put down the paper to see Cynthia stomping out of the pantry and up the stairs, the cameramen in tow trailing black electrical cords, whose snaking movements rewrite the lines of the carpet. They are all serpents.
The cameramen are all gone now except for one doing exterior establishing shots through the double doors by the lip of the pool, who must not have heard the commotion through the glass. Mom’s sandwich rests before me on grandmother’s Fresca-ware. I pick it up and start eating. Sure, it is dry. Sure it needs some Dijon, maybe, but I am lazy and it is a Sunday and I am reading the funnies so I just sit there, soaking it all in: Cynthia’s cries upstairs; the deliberate misspelling of the noun “lasagna” in this week’s Garfield strip (“Lasan-YA”); the dry sandwich, sans lettuce, sans Dijon.
I am made painfully aware by the absence of cameras here, and by the shrill noises coming from upstairs, that I am not the main character of my own life. That the main character perhaps, of all of our lives, is Cynthia or Mom or Dad. Yes, perhaps Dad, who just entered the fall-from-innocence scene from stage left, carrying the prop of an elaborate juicer I recognize from infomercials, and delivers a line lifted from the last ten minutes of any hour-long TV office drama: “Why’s everyone so quiet in here?” He stops in front of the kitchen stairs, where, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, he runs in to mom, who is barreling down with two cameras towing her as she slips out of each pump, walks through the double-glass doors, sees Bo, Cynthia’s boyfriend, on a longchaise, waves toward him, and dives swiftly into the pool with all of her clothes on. Bobbing back up, keeping her nose above the water, she shakes her head with the cold. “That was fun, Jareth. You were right.”
Pretty soon we’re all in the pool, our clothes on, the water streaming everywhere in our shoes, in our ears, in our limp and sagging underwear. I can see in Cynthia’s upstairs bedroom, how the four cameras swing from her to gather, clumped, at the window that looks over the pool, to aim down on us.
* * *
The following Sunday we go to church. “What do they want us to go to church for,” I ask. “It’s Easter,” Amy says. “Cynthia’s narrative needed an element of rebirth, re-awakening.”
We drive up to a little church I’ve never seen before, with a stone tower and a plastic lamb nailed into the lawn like a trailer park flamingo. Men and women are gathered on the lawn outside the church, wearing the colors of springtime M&Ms and shifting from leg to leg like horses rubbing up against the fences.
“This is so not our scene,” Amy says, slouching.
“Look, Cynthia, there are cute Christian boys standing around everywhere,” Mom says. “And they’re bored to tears.”
“Aren’t we Jewish?” Amy asks.
“We’re Irish Catholic,” I correct.
“We’re atheists,” Dad says, and Dad’s word is final.
The church, it turns out, is Protestant. The minister talks about the saviour being reborn within each of us, as though an epic drama is being played en loop before us all on miniature TV sets, like the type affixed to the backs of airplane seats. I look down the row of my family, barricaded on four sides by “civilians” in the pews, holding bread-box sized cameras and grunting with the heft of them. At the end of the row is Cynthia, with flaxen gold hair. I can see her as the camera would see her—an innocent, a Paris Hilton circa Simple Life, a girl we see in “reality” before the bad things have been done to her. And then there’s Amy and then there’s me. I realize that if I were watching, I would not choose to love myself.
* * *
Cynthia. She is mother’s favorite because of the way, I think, that she lies in chairs. She has a certain rigidity to her expressions: her face is tight and glowering, her nose upturned, her hair swept in a certain sine-wave around the heart-shaped head. But her body sprawls, lollygags over chaises. When we do not know where Cynthia is she can be found in a longchair by the pool, a glass of half orange-juice/half seltzer set down on the concrete beside her, an Oprah’s book club novel in her lap, permanently opened to page 38 (for she’ll read no further).
Mom comes out and often makes small talk. She asks re: schoolwork. Re: boyfriend. But Cynthia’s replies are cryptic and badly managed. “Oh, it’s good,” she’ll say, then come home with a C+. “Oh, we’re fine,” she’ll say and come home crying, sobbing into a Barney’s sweater he bought for her in the wrong shade—plum wine. The excuses and re-explanations take twice the time-lapse as the original lies, and Amy sighs with the sighs of a beleaguered twenty something who may not have found happiness, but has better achieved a way to cover it up. Cynthia’s inability to cover up has perhaps made her the star of the show.
We, as a family, have professed to having never watched a single episode (Mom was on The View last week saying as much). But secretly we’ve all seen snippets of the program—it would be an absolute denial of the universal human condition (narcissism) to say otherwise. I hug my knees to my chest the first time I see myself on the unavoidable promos, and say, to Amy: “Do I really have that big of pores?” and Amy says, “Is my head really so blurry?” And we both laugh, good naturedly, but laughter still that is tinged with a certain darkness—a darkness that suggests yes, you really do have large pores as it simultaneously suggests yes, Amy, you really are so empty. Cynthia, however, seems to leave the show unscathed. When she arrives in Episode 1 after a trip to the mall with her boyfriend, and appears somewhat upset, and is shown (as I have earlier alluded) crying into a sweater box, the camera seems to neigh closer, pitying her. The sweater is shown to be the wrong color—the shot zooms in and out, in and out, to the tune of a sort of jack-in-the-box “Blaaaaayng” of absolute comic error. Cynthia is shown, everywhere, to be in the right.
Amy and I have seen the show, but not en totale. So when Mom and Dad are out (mother is at lunch, Dad at “work,” and Cynthia somewhere upstairs with Bo, the BF), we decide to watch the entire first season on the main living room television. At the first bar of the theme music, I can hear cameramen in the other rooms start to hum. The song is catchy—it’s one of Dad’s band’s old songs—“Saving Grace”—whose lyrics are about a female nurse who sleeps with dying patients. But the tempo has been sped up and re-hashed with a sort of jangly banjo to serve as an interlude between our awkward “reality” scenes, and on hearing the song the cameramen begin to wander over.
“We can’t work with the music,” one of them explains to the questioning, upturned snarl of Amy. “Even in the establishing shots they’ll hear it,” says Argento—the 23 year old film student someone hired to do only establishings. (He’s responsible for those long shots of leaves in the pool, of unmade beds, of the exterior of the house and the koi pond.)
“Isn’t this Meta,” says Jerry, my sandwich filmer. “I wonder what would happen if I filmed you watching yourselves being filmed.”
“Psychedelic, man,” Argento says. “Goes on and on forever…”
Jerry says: “Anyone else want a sandwich?”
* * *
When mom comes home from Fred Segal’s at 6:37, her grand entrance goes un-filmed. “I’m home,” she toots. “I’m home!” She wants someone to see her new Derek Lim platforms, her new oversized Proenza Schoeler tote. It’s the money from the show that’s fueling these purchases and by god, it’s these purchases that are fueling the show. She’s working here, people.
By the time she’s said “I’m home” the third time she’s already in the living room, a mute witness to the sight of me and Amy occupying the couch amid a minefield of cameramen and sandwiches (sans Dijon, a faux-pas in this house) spread about the turf around us. On the screen ahead she sees her own haggard face, the lines drawn around her eyes as if drawn by a stick in the sand.
“It’s on DVD now,” I explain, as if explaining. “There’s Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge.”
Mom puts down her bags. “Why isn’t Cynthia here for this?”
* * *
A: Because Cynthia is still outside by the pool, an unread copy of Sojourner Truth spread spine-up beside her, as she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, Bo, who is completely nude. Leslie walks in, his headset fuzzing with a lot of static. “Let’s just not cover it,” he says. “Tasteless.”
“Taste?” Argento asks. “I need a paycheck.”
“This isn’t about you,” Leslie says. “I’m in love with her.”
Then everyone starts laughing.
“Cynthia,” mom yells out at her daughter, over the lip of the chardonnay bottle she’s tugging at. “Come in soon for dinner.”
* * *
We all eat dinner beneath the halogen lights, the umbrellas of reflected fluorescents beaming down on the catered porkchops stranded on beds of wilted lettuce. The sneering cameramen scan Cynthia’s face for guilt and my father’s face for amusement, but find nothing registered on either. It is Amy whose blurred face perhaps reveals the most: she is sipping her wine, or biting her lip, or stifling back a chuckle. I am too type cast to be an effective force of comic relief: here I am in a plum cravat, trying to spear a pea with a single fork tine.
It’s dark enough for the windows to have turned in to mirrors, reflecting back to me only myself, only Amy, only Dad, Cynthia, Mom. Staring over our dinners, we look like bottom-feeders, like koi sucking pond edges for algae, like the suck-mouths of vacuums squeezing over the bright carpet, eeking out illegible lines to mark our travel.
I give one of the cameramen a long stare and loosen my cravat, a gesture that seems to ask the question, Do you have everything that you want?
The recording light flickers off. The other cameras leave. But as they turn away, they seem to force another question, the central question burning beneath the clothes at the bottom of the pool, beneath the wilted magazine on the 405, beneath Cynthia’s hands, folded in her lap in the gesture of a prim shepherdess. The cameras seem to ask the question lovers ask: What do you see when you see me?