The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey Read Free Book Online Page B

phone when my mother wasn’t home to take his calls. With a kind of weary petulance he’d insist that his IQ was over 160, that I should listen to him and take him more seriously. Roger had a responsible job in public relations (at night he danced with a tambourine at the Free Spirit) and my parents trusted him once to house-sit while they were out of town, lest Scott trash the place in their absence. As it happened, Scott was elsewhere and I was left alone most of the time with Roger, who sat around the house in bikini underwear and one night offered me a Quaalude.
    Marlies was in a ticklish position. Her own conduct was hardly beyond reproach, as she was still in the midst of a hedonistic phase (though this was on the wane), and moreover she felt somewhat justified in making up for lost time: growing up in a burgherish German home had been stifling, whereas her subsequent emancipation in Manhattan was rudely interrupted by pregnancy and marriage. “Do as I say, not as I do” was the unspoken mantra of her parenting style. She was a great believer in temperate habits for children, the idea being that one becomes jaded if given the chance to indulge too soon in pleasures of the flesh.
    That said, Marlies was the opposite of a conscious hypocrite and refused to act shocked about things that didn’t shock her. She was less and less shocked by my brother’s vagaries, and less inclined to express whatever shock she felt. For his part Scott never hesitated to point out her own dissipation when she tried to remonstrate about his; it was the burden of their many squabbles. Also, my mother was trying hard to understand Scott, a long process of self-hypnosis that would ultimately turn her into his foremost apologist. At the time it made her less than objective. When, for example, we found him straddling the roof of our garage in the nude—he was, of course, stoned out of his gourd—Marlies good-naturedly tossed him a pair of pajama bottoms, which he proceeded to wrap around his pelvis like a loincloth. A photo of this episode appears in one of my mother’s albums over the twinkly caption “My nutty first-born!”
    One night we sat at the dinner table, the four of us, discussing Scott’s plans for his senior prom. By then he was dating a girl named Kara, who was always smirking about something, a smirk that became vague and almost vanished into politeness (ironical) when she spoke to adults. I never heard her say anything clever, so I suppose she was just zonked most of the time, a sphinx without a secret.
    Scott went over his prom agenda, smiling at the subtext of how wasted he’d be, and finally announced that he and Kara had reserved a hotel room for the night. My father’s chewing slowed and he narrowed his eyes at my brother. It might have ended there, but my mother was in a provocative mood.
    “What?” she said to my father. “You think he’s a virgin at his age?”
    My father’s lips thinned.
    “You think other kids won’t be doing the same thing? That they’re not having sex at that age?”
    And so on, and on . I suppose she meant to model a liberal tolerance of Scott’s lesser peccadilloes, or perhaps she felt piqued by my father’s rectitude, by what she liked to think at such moments was his underlying provincialism. Mostly, though, I think they were just fed up, both of them, that each blamed the other for any number of things. I looked at Marlies’s bright eyes as she baited Burck, looked at Scott’s besotted little grin, and I alone seemed to know that Burck was about to blow. I asked to be excused. My father gave me a quick nod, a flick of his chin, eager to get rid of me.
    I’d just closed the door to my room when I heard the crash. I rushed back to the kitchen and saw my father standing over my mother, her raised arms trembling slightly; otherwise neither moved nor spoke. My brother was on his feet. I fled.
    THOUGH HIS GRADES had fallen those last two years of high school, my brother was