The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page B

nightgown reminded me of my brother, all underbelly. Pale and slack, without muscle, soft and vulnerable.
    The night before the operation, when the swelling in my brother’s brain had finally gone down enough, Judy Judy had the whole mismatched family to dinner. The Methodists didn’t drink, of course; my parents did. Here’s what Judy Judy had: a casserole that was made with skinless chicken breasts on the bottom, then a layer of canned asparagus, then a sauce of cream of mushroom soup, the whole thing covered with a layer of corn flakes. I had been to Lutece. I had been to Grenouille. I was sure it would be revolting. I was wrong. It was absolutely delicious. I was ravenous. I couldn’t get enough of it.
    Judy Judy, who was later to go crazy in her own particular way, imagining a ravaging breast and/or cervical cancer she didn’t actually have, even going around the country giving brave lectures about living with a deadly cancer, driving her perfectly ordinary,nice husband to fall to pieces and hate her and, finally, to leave her, was then a blond, amusing woman with enormous breasts who adored butterflies. She was covered in butterfly jewelry, some costume and some real; all the magnets on her refrigerator were butterflies; the paper napkins had butterflies on them. The plates had butterflies on them. The sofas and chairs were covered with needlepoint butterfly pillows. In the bathroom, the toilet paper was covered with little butterflies. I’m not kidding. Aunt Minnie Lee Lee, who before I met her I had assumed was Chinese but who in reality had married silent Mr. Lee twice, said she thought Judy Judy and the butterfly thing were strange, although she was just being conversational. For a Methodist, she was not afraid to express her opinions.
    Aunt Minnie Lee Lee had the habit of saying, whenever anything had pleased her particularly, or even when she just felt like being cordial, “Well, now, my, that was a refrasher.” She thought Judy Judy’s chicken casserole was a real refrasher.
    But nobody in the South ever thinks that anything done by a family member is really strange, or rather, their strange deeds are merely more endearing. Judy Judy called everybody
dawlin’
as though she really meant it, and she probably did, and she just said the butterfly was her personal symbol. It gave her hope.
    As dinner parties on the night before your brother’s brain operation go, it was a huge success. My parents had their bourbon. The teetotalers had their soft drinks and iced tea. Judy Judy had her butterflies. Everybody got along. The chicken casserole gave cornflakes a whole new and magical aspect. We knew that tragedy had struck. We couldn’t escape the image of my sedated brother lying over there at DeKalb General in head restraints. You don’tforget that kind of thing just because the chicken casserole was yummy and nobody screamed at anybody else about religious issues and burning in hell for drinking bourbon whiskey. We knew that by the next night it could all be better or it could get a lot worse and there was the camaraderie of the terrified to hold us together. I was so afraid.
    The operation was on Memorial Day. It was decided, since the hospital was less than a mile away, and because waiting in the waiting room with the Methodists was so grim, that my family would wait it out at my brother’s place, where they could smoke and have access to the bourbon. I drove to the hospital early in the morning, the warm early summer breeze blowing through the Alfa. I had the top down, feeling smart. In the parking lot, I saw his surgeon’s stainless steel gull-wing DeLorean. Brain surgeons think they’re God. So did DeLorean. I once saw him try to cut in line at the movies in New York, only to be shouted down by the angry crowd. It seems sort of quaint now, waiting in line for a movie. Kind of sweet.
    My function was to run back and forth all day, carrying news from the