Someday_ADE by Lynne Tillman Read Free Book Online Page A

kept eating.
    The coup de grâce, I guess you’d call it, was dessert. In the kitchen, someone decided to dye the milk blue. The cake, coffee, and blue milk were brought to the table. We served the blue milk in a glass pitcher. No one said much as the pitcher went around the table. Your friend watched silently. When it came to him, he stared at the pitcher and poured the blue milk into his coffee. This time, he said nothing. Nothing. At that point I ran into the kitchen. I couldn’t control myself.
    Later, you told him. After dinner, when you were alone with him, you told him. But I’m wondering, after all these years, did he ever forgive you? What happened to him? Does he still play the trombone?
    You were good, Ollie. But somehow, in “regurgitating the past and moving on,” I’m “the reckless prankster” whose “promiscuous heart” you broke. The only thing in that house you ever broke was your musician friend and crazy Roger’s green plates.

    Whatever,
    Lynne Tillman
    NEW YORK, NEW YORK

But There’s a Family Resemblance

    There’s a story in my family about Great Uncle Charley, who didn’t know, until he was eighteen and married Margaret, that women went to the bathroom. It’s always told with that euphemism. My father, whose uncle Charley was, told it to me when I was thirteen, in a father-son rite of passage, his three brothers told their sons and, later, even their daughters, when they loosened up about girls.
    When Charley and his brothers were kids, they made up their own basketball team in the Not-So-Tall League, they were all under 5’ 8”. They even had shirts made up; there are six photos of that. I’m named after Great Uncle Charley, they say he guarded like a wild dog. My dad’s generation is taller, mine even taller, except for my twin sisters. They’re short, in every snapshot they look like dwarfs. I pored over the family albums starting when I was a kid; I think it was because I was the youngest and needed to get up to speed fast. I knocked into furniture all the time, too, because I raced around, not looking where I was going, running from everything as if a monster would get me. I’m still covered in bruises.
    When I think about Great Uncle Charley’s shock at seeing his blushing bride, Margaret, on the can for the first time, I can visualize it, like a snapshot, but I never knew him, he died before I was born. They say you can’t know the other, you can’t know yourself, and sometimes you don’t want to know the other or yourself. I’m sick of trying and failing. But when I imagine my namesake, I can see a smile and a robust body, because of the family pictures, and I always ask myself: could Uncle Charlie have had any kind of a sex life after that?
    I don’t know why they named me after him, I’m not like him, according to my mother, but I feel implicated in his sexual ignorance. Families do that, implicate you in them. There are the twins, and one boy ahead of me, he’s the oldest, and we’re separated, oldest to youngest, by six years, so my mother was kept busy, but my father was the boss at home and in the world. He owned a paper factory, and I developed a love for paper, because he’d bring home samples; I liked to touch them, especially the glossy kind, photographic paper, which I licked until one day my mother shouted, “Stop that. You’ll get cancer.” So I stopped.
    After Charley died, a terrible secret exploded on Aunt Margaret, who had a near-fatal heart attack and became an invalid, and then she died when I was ten. My parents still won’t tell me what happened. Neither will Stella, Charley and Margaret’s only daughter, tall and willowy, and strangely silent about everything. Maybe she doesn’t know.
    I have a doctorate in cultural anthropology and am a tenured associate professor—the big baby can’t be fired, my brother likes to joke—and teach my students that a family’s implicit contract is to keep its secrets. They’re essential to the