Family and Other Accidents Read online

  He and Jack may look alike, have the same black hair and eyes, but when Jack smiles he looks like such a yearbook-handsome, all-around good guy. Last weekend Jenny gave Connor doubles of photos her parents took before homecoming, and he noticed his own smile looked not only forced but pained—more like he was squinting from a migraine than genuinely happy.

  Upstairs Connor’s bedroom door is closed, and he wonders if that means Jack brought Brenda Starr upstairs or planned to and didn’t want her to see the mess—sheets and comforter on the floor, college application parts scattered across the quilted mattress, clothes and shoes and school stuff blanketing every square inch of the carpet, skis and poles creating a dangerous obstacle in the middle of it all. When the maid service came last week, the uniformed girl just shook her head and said she wouldn’t touch the room. There was nothing she could do. He’ll have to make them clean it next Saturday so he and Jenny can have sex; the dull stomachache.

  Connor’s bedroom is really Jack’s old room. But Jack had been staying in their parents’ room since he came back from Philadelphia after their mother died. Last year Connor had switched to Jack’s room because it was bigger and had a double bed. But he never got around to taking Jack’s old stuff off the walls—an Indians poster with a home game schedule from eleven seasons before, framed photos of Chagrin Falls Jack’s high school girlfriend gave him for Christmas a decade ago, and the huge JFK poster over the desk. At first Connor had hated the poster with its intense eyes, but he grew used to being watched by someone with more authority and experience. Now he finds Kennedy oddly reassuring. With Jack hardly ever home, Connor has started running things by Kennedy, just to get a second opinion. Generally the poster doesn’t say much. Though Kennedy didn’t object when Connor said he wanted to leave flat Ohio, with its strip malls and burger chains.

  Downstairs, the front door opens and closes, and Connor watches through the window. Jack is holding Brenda Starr’s hand, walking her to her car. Looking around to make sure nobody is watching, Jack leans in to kiss her, and their faces disappear behind her hair. Body contouring to fit the car, back arched, she has one hand on the metal frame for support, the other against Jack’s chest. Still holding her hand, Jack starts to walk away but then they’re kissing again, then apart, together, apart, together, like scissor blades. Connor looks away. From the wall, Kennedy suggests Connor need only watch and learn.

  Thirty-three hours before the scheduled sex, Connor finds a box of condoms in Jack’s nightstand drawer, exactly where he thought they’d be. Pocketing two square packets, he puts the box back in the drawer on top of coffeemaker instructions, a broken watchband, cellophane-wrapped restaurant mints, and a picture from Jack’s college graduation that Connor must have taken because Jack and their mother have no heads: tall bodies (their mother’s in some turquoise wrap dress, Jack’s in a black gown) against a redbrick building somewhere in Philly.

  Picking it up, Connor wonders why Jack kept the photo; they have better pictures from Jack’s commencement—a good one of the three of them is in a silver frame downstairs. Yet there is something interesting about this shot, where the hands have become the focus. Both sets of fingers long and tapering—Jack’s hold the box with his diploma, while their mother’s clutch her leather handbag. She had used her hands when she’d talked, and his mother had talked a lot, always exaggerated and fast.

  She’d been a member of Coldwell Banker’s Five Million Dollar Club for fifteen years. Other than constantly telling Connor he needed a haircut, his mother had hardly been around to offer sitcom-mom witticisms. But a few months before she died, the two of them had been in a booth at Slyman’s, quickly eating sandwiches before she had to show a house. “You know about sex and love, and all of that, right?” she’d asked from nowhere, reaching out to put her hand on his. He’d looked down at his corned beef and nodded, anticipating the horrible conversation he’d seen in movies. “Good,” she said, focusing again on her turkey sandwich. “Just try not to be careless with people, okay?” That had been the extent of his sex talk. He wonders now if she meant careless with girls like Jenny. Careless the way Jack is careless.

  Lying back on the bed, Connor stares at the ceiling and thinks about the girls Jack has brought home who’ve shared the view. Other young Jones Day associates, an MBA student at Case, his married high school sweetheart, other childhood “friends” who live in more exciting places but come home to Cleveland for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He wonders what they thought looking at the ceiling, what they expected—if they knew they were just there for a little while. Wonders if the reporter has seen Jack’s ceiling yet. Since meeting her the other night, Connor started reading Brenda Starr again—not a whole lot has changed for Brenda: she’s still chasing Basil, still wandering into zany situations. He hopes Jack’s reporter hasn’t looked at the ceiling, hopes she really is different than the sleek-skirted girls, and that the nervous laugh and freckles across her nose are real. He wonders how Jenny really feels about him, why she wants to have sex with him, why she wants him to be her first.

  A car chugs down the cul-de-sac, but Connor is certain it’s not his brother. Some company Jack isn’t allowed to name is being bought this week; and he has been getting home after midnight. Congested and cranky with some flu, Jack just grumbles up the stairs and goes to bed when he does come home. Connor has barely spoken with him since last Friday’s driving debacle. Still Connor puts the photo back in the drawer and goes to his room, where he puts the rubbers in his own nightstand drawer next to mix tapes Jenny made him, his less-than-stellar SAT results, and Penthouse magazines he and some friends stole from the Little Professor in Beachwood Place a few years ago. From the wall over the desk, Kennedy makes a snide comment about how he never stole condoms from Joe Jr.’s room.

  “I don’t have a car,” Connor says.

  Five hours before Jenny Greenspan’s pills should start working, Connor draws a face with squiggly hair on the cover page of a University of Colorado application. He’s having trouble concentrating because the pre-sex stomachache he’s been having has been bad all day and because Jack, who’s in denial about being sick, has ratcheted the heat up to ninety.

  “I’m taking Mona to dinner at nine.” Across the kitchen table, Jack is wearing all kinds of clothes—another pair of generic pants, another blue button-down (business casual acceptable on weekends), a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt, and a stocking cap Connor is sure is his. Even though it’s Saturday and he just got home from his office, he’s going through a mammoth box of contracts, highlighting the word “buyer” with a fat yellow marker. His job is absolutely nothing like lawyers’ on TV; Connor can’t believe Jack went to seven years of school to be such a minuscule cog in the workings of the Man. “Do you need a ride anywhere?”

  “Jenny can pick me up,” Connor says.

  It’s been snowing all afternoon, but half an hour ago he gave up trying to convince Jack it was too hot in the house and so he just stripped to boxers. He shifts to unstick his sweaty thighs from the wooden chair. Jack starts coughing, keeps coughing, and continues coughing while Connor wonders if someone can die from coughing. Getting up, he has the impulse to smack Jack’s back, the way their mother used to. Instead he runs the faucet, fills a glass of water.

  “You should go to bed.” Connor hands Jack the drink. “You sound like you’re choking on a cat.”

  Jack nods, takes a sip. Connor thinks he should tell Jack about the sex—discussing that with older brothers is industry standard, even older bothers who tell you there’s no time to use the bathroom. He’s about to say something when Jack winces, rubs his chest, points to Connor’s applications.

  “Those things would look a lot better if you typed them,” he says.

  Connor shrugs; Jack highlights more words, starts coughing again. Something yellow-green and unpleasant flies from his mouth and lands next to Connor’s drawing on the manila paper. Connor just stares at it; he hadn’t realized he was drawing Brenda Starr.


  “Does the reporter want to write novels?” Connor asks, looking at the sketch with its linked circles for hair. “I feel like most journalists I know really want to write books.”

  “How would I know; we’ve been on one date.” Jack cocks his head. “And what other journalists do you know?”

  “I just think it’s funny she’s a reporter, because she looks like Brenda Starr.”

  “The woman who sings ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’?”

  “That’s Bonnie Tyler,” Connor says. “Brenda Starr is the comic strip; it’s in the Plain Dealer.”

  “You’ve thought about this an awful lot.” Jack smiles, eyes narrowing into something between a shared joke and ridicule. “Do you like her?”

  “No.” Connor looks at the squiggle next to the drying snot. “I just thought she seemed nice.”

  Jack nods. “Did you call the driving school?”

  Connor says nothing.

  “Good to see you’re really on top of this.” Jack coughs again. He winces and rubs his chest again. “You might think about doing that Monday.”

  But Connor doesn’t want to think about Monday because that’s after tomorrow, which is after tonight, which he’s still thinking of as something distant and abstract—something happening to him that he has no control over, like turning into a werewolf or the Incredible Hulk. Blood vibrates in his temples; the dull stomachache. Maybe he’s getting sick.

  “Do you think what you have is contagious?” he asks.

  Jenny’s pills are probably working, but instead of having sex, Connor is picking globs of melted cheese from waffle fries and celery out of a tuna melt in a booth at Yours Truly. Across from him, Jenny is playing with bread crusts she cut off her BLT.

  “I had a really big lunch,” he apologizes to the defeated sandwich.

  Actually he had half a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats and a couple cups of coffee, but his stomachache has progressed to the point of distraction. Gesturing toward the dishes between them, he asks if Jenny is finished.

  “Yeah.” She smiles, dimples popping into creamy cheeks. “We don’t want to get too full and prevent other activities.”

  He takes the check to the register and surveys the display of gum, mints, and antacid tablets. Growing up, Connor rarely saw his father, but one of his few distinct memories he has is of his dad eating Tums the way other people chain-smoked—a heftier, grumpier version of Jack popping them off the roll and into his mouth with a smooth, practiced motion. Connor buys a package and chews the first three. Putting the change in his wallet, he looks at his long fingers—cuticles shredded, knuckles scabbed and red from rock climbing at Headlands before it got too cold—and wonders what his mother would have thought of Jenny. The Tums have an odd peppermint flavor; he’s pretty sure he doesn’t love her.

  “Ready?” Jenny comes up behind him and takes his hand, leads him to the station wagon in the lot.

  Lake-effect snow is still falling—each dandruff flake turning to water as it hits the pavement. She gives him the keys, assuming he’ll drive her mother’s car, which he does without question, even though it’s snowing and dark and he has been trying not to drive in bad weather since the accident. But he makes it home safely and kills the engine in the driveway. As the car loses heat, he stares at the big brick colonial where he has lived his entire life—the giant elm in the front lawn almost completely bare.

  “Come on, Conn.” Jenny squeezes his fingers. “You still want to do this, right?”

  From his bedroom window, where he left the lights on, Kennedy says it shouldn’t be a question.

  “The torch has been passed to a new generation,” Connor says, and Jenny laughs, tells him he’s weird.

  When the garage door rolls open, the BMW is gone, and the Sentra is in the same place it has been for a week.

  “Why is it like three hundred degrees in here?” Jenny asks as they kick slushy snow off hiking boots, shimmy out of down coats, scarves, and gloves.

  Explaining about Jack being sick, Connor spins the thermostat down twenty degrees, and the heat chugs to a stop. Jenny leads him upstairs to his room, which has been vacuumed and straightened—blue sheets tucked into crisp corners, pillows fluffed. Even though Jack isn’t home and would never come in without knocking, Connor locks the door behind them. They sit on the edge of his bed, and he looks at their feet, then at Kennedy on the wall, puts his hand on Jenny’s thigh.

  “I made a mix.” She grabs her backpack, unzips the front pocket, and puts the tape in the bookshelf stereo.

  Other tapes she gave him have themed names—“Fourth of July Mix,” “Three Month Anniversary Mix,” “Road Trip Mix”—all written in her curly, girlie handwriting, and he wonders if she called this one “Sex Mix.” The first song is Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” which is reassuring. Relaxing, he brushes her long hair behind her shoulder, kisses her, tasting bacon and tomato.

  “You taste like Tums.” She licks her lips; he stops kissing her.

  “I’m sorry.” He wants Jenny to say she’s nervous, too, that her guts are knotted and clenched, legs and arms distant and tingly.

  “My mom takes them for calcium,” she says.

  Kennedy probably never had sex that started this way. Kissing again, his hands on her waist, hers on his shoulders. He notices a faint blond mustache above her lip, realizes he doesn’t know her father’s first name or if she believes in God.

  “We should take off our clothes,” she says.

  Sweaters and turtlenecks are wrestled overhead and jeans are wiggled from slim hips. Bra and boxers are removed with quick, deliberate motions. Finally they take off their socks, because they look dumb wearing nothing but socks. He met Jenny in a red bathing suit and flip-flops, but being naked with her embarrasses him, especially with the light from the overhead fixture, especially with Kennedy watching.

  “You’d make a good junkie.” She points to the thick blue-green vein running from the underside of his wrist to his elbow. Another one of those things she says that he isn’t sure there’s a good response to.

  But it doesn’t seem to matter, because she’s easing herself down on his bed (Jack’s old bed), pulling him close. Two fingers in her panties, he kneads the folds of flesh, waits for her to moisten. Below them the garage door opens and closes; footsteps and muted voices—Jack and a girl, probably Brenda Starr. By the closet, the vent sputters to life, spewing additional hot air into the sauna of his bedroom, where the window is already fogged.

  “That’s good,” Jenny says. “Are you ready?”

  And he is ready, physically, he’s ready.

  Touching his lips to the bones in her knee, he’s flushed and sweaty because he wants to be inside her, and because he feels guilty wanting that when he doesn’t love her, and because it’s too hot in the house and he might be coming down with the Jack flu. Two sets of feet sound on the stairs along with the laughter that makes Brenda Starr beautiful. Jack’s door closes across the hall.

  “Maybe now?” Jenny says.

  Finding the condoms in his drawer, Connor slides one on, climbs on top of her. Trying to line his cock up with her pussy, he thinks of it in terms of a puzzle piece or a finger in a glove. Only it’s not working like that—more like forcing a plastic spoon into a block of cheddar cheese. Beneath him her face screws up—certainly more like pain than happiness. She gasps and jerks her body away from his. Pulling out, he looms over her on hands and knees, casting shadows on her smooth belly.

  “Why’d you stop?” she asks.

  “I thought I was hurting you.”

  “It’s supposed to hurt the first time.”

  “I don’t want to do it if it hurts you,” he says, and means it. He wonders about Jack next door who does this all the time with all kinds of girls, girls he hasn’t known half as long as Connor has known Jenny. “Maybe we should wait?”

  On the wall, Kennedy rubs his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and shakes his head—just like Jack does—but Connor might just be delusional f
rom the heat.

  “No, I want to,” Jenny says. “Maybe you should go down on me a little? Make things wetter?”

  So he’s back under her raised knees, where things never tasted all that great to begin with. But now she’s bleeding, the metal mixed with a strange rubbery taste from the condom. George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” comes from the mix tape on the stereo, which is just stupid. Connor’s digestive tract digests itself; he might get sick, is rapidly losing his erection.

  Across the hall, Jack is coughing again over Brenda Starr’s soft voice, her words indecipherable. And even though he doesn’t want to, even though it’s not fair, Connor closes his eyes and imagines the reporter—her hair, the freckles across the bridge of her nose, her cold hands. Things stir again. He thinks about Brenda Starr staring at the smooth plaster of the ceiling in Jack’s room, about her pale skin on Jack’s gray sheets. About Jack reaching into his nightstand drawer for the box of condoms.

  “I think I’m ready now,” Jenny says, but she’s not Jenny anymore, she’s Brenda Starr, and maybe he’s not Connor, but Jack.

  Silky and sure, he swings his leg over her, pressing himself inside. Things tear, and he feels her become stiff and rigid underneath him.

  “Stop,” she says, pushing on his chest with open palms. But he can’t stop because he’s finally inside, and it’s not really something he can control anymore—he truly has become the Incredible Hulk. “Connor, you’re hurting me. Stop, please!”

  “I can’t yet,” he mumbles, kisses her tear-streaked cheek. “All I need is a minute, Brenda.”

  Trying to soothe her, he smoothes her hair from her face. He expects red curls, and is surprised when his hands connect with fine long strands. Still it’s enough; everything in his lower body tightens to loosen.

  “I’m not Brenda,” she says. “Stop, please.”

  Then it’s done. Panting and drained, he tumbles off of her, feeling relief not unlike the feeling that comes immediately after puking.