Soft as a Feather, Light as a Rap-Rock Board
The only time I ever went to Claudia’s house for dinner, her dad gave me a tour that ended in his mancave.
“This is my band,” he said, indicating a series of photographs on the wall, “at Woodstock.”
“Woodstock ’99,” I clarified.
“Fuck you, Andy,” he said. “Where has your band played?”
“I — ” I said. I was thirteen.
“I’m sorry. That was rude. You’re just a child.” He fished change out of his pocket and dropped it with a succession of muted plinks into a swear jar that occupied one entire cubby of his bookshelf. “It’s just, everyone’s a critic, you know?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. I was aware, at thirteen, of knowing very little. I had only known which Woodstock he’d played because Claudia was always referencing it, emphasizing the year with a roll of her eyes: “He thinks he’s so cool because his crappy band played Woodstock ’99.” Sometimes, she would do a boneless, dainty lady wrist, too, when she said it.
“Well, they are. People are like that. I’m telling you.”
“Okay.”
He crossed his arms and stared dreamily into the frozen wildness of a mosh pit as he reflected, “Was Hendrix better than Limp Bizkit? Was Janis? We can’t know because they didn’t survive their fame. I did, and so did Limp Bizkit. So, are those guys the legends, or are we?”
“I thought Claudia said you were a cop.”
“Exactly,” her dad said, “I lived long enough to be that — unlike Jimmie and Janis. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
I nodded even though he wasn’t looking at me, even though I only had a dim awareness of who Jimmie or Janis were. “So, you guys were, like, famous?”
Claudia’s dad sniffed and animated, taking me by the shoulder and leading me into the hallway. “I think that’s enough of a memory tour for now. They’ll think we aren’t coming back.”
‘They’ were Claudia, of course, her stepmom and her little half-sister, Evanescence.
Typically, when we hung out, Claudia came to my house. On her last visit, though, she had looked at me and said, “Dude, you’re so lucky that it’s just you and your mom.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that having a family sucks. At least, having my family does. Why do you think I’m always over here? You have it way easier with just the two of you. None of the drama.”
“There’s drama here.” For some reason, I felt attacked.
“Yeah, like what? You two are basically the same person.”
Just because I couldn’t think of anything right then, she thought I’d proven her right. “We have things, Mom and me,” I assured her, “beefs,” and I was certain it was true.
Her smile was tight and smug. “Why don’t you just come to my house next time? You’ll see.”
“Whatever,” I’d said, and a few days later, there I was, being led on a tour of her home.
“There you boys are,” her stepmom said as we passed through the kitchen. She was dressing a salad which I hoped she hadn’t made in my honor because there was no chance that I was going to eat a salad.
“I was just showing Andy around.”
“Did he show you his photos from Woodstock?” she asked me.
“’99,” Claudia moaned in a drawn-out, quavering ghost voice like it had travelled to our ears from beyond the grave. Really, it had come from the living room where she was slouched on the sofa beside Evanescence.
Her dad gave her a look that implied that he was only holding his tongue because I technically qualified as company.
“Yeah, it was cool,” I told the stepmom.
“It’s very cool,” she agreed. “Our own personal rock star.”
“Rap-rock star,” Evanescence said. To me, this qualification seemed as demeaning as Claudia pointing out that he’d played the worst-regarded Woodstock. Her dad must not have seen it that way, though, because he only smiled at her, lovingly.
…
At dinner, I mostly had salad. It turned out to be the main course, a mayonnaise‑y seven-layer affair that was probably as many calories as actual food. As I picked out bacon bits and around peas, I longed to share Evanescence’s specialty meal of frozen chicken nuggets topped with torn squares of American cheese. She was currently scraping off the little handkerchiefs of cheese and chewing them out from under her fingernails.
“So, Andy,” Claudia’s dad said, “are you into sports?”
Claudia snorted. “Do you really think I’d be friends with a sports guy?”
“Let the man answer,” he said. “Andy?”
“Um, no. No sports.”
“See?” She was sitting to my right with her dad and stepmom facing us. Evanescence occupied the seat at the head of the table.
“Yes, darling, you’re very wise. Congratulations,” her dad said.
“Guys…” sang her stepmom in a gentle, scolding tone. Then, to me, she said, “You must be into the arts then. What kind of music do you like? Brandon is into aggressive music, obviously, but I mostly listen to lighter things — Josh Groban, Michael Bublé.”
“You don’t like dad’s band, Brenda?” Claudia asked. When I looked, her eyebrows were cartoonishly raised. Her fork was a pendulum, dangled above her bowl from her clasped hands.
“I love them, obviously. Trouser Stain was a great band, and their best songs were the ones your dad wrote.” She smiled at him, reinforcing her loyalty. “I’m just mostly a soft rock gal.”
“Bublé’s a chode. Groban too,” her dad said. “Trouser Stain was a cult favorite, a cult classic some people say. But you haven’t answered the question: what kind of music, Andy?”
“Um, I guess… I’m not that sure. I like the same kind as Claudia.”
“Claudia doesn’t really listen to anything.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “me too.” I forked a mayonnaise-covered bacon bit into my mouth and winced when it turned out to be an empty pea husk.
“Andy likes TV,” Claudia told them. “He watches, like, a ton of shows.”
“Is TV the arts?” I asked her stepmom.
She squashed her face, thinking, and then said, “Sure it is, I suppose.”
There wasn’t much conversation after that, at least not much that included me. I guess they got used to my being there, and I sort of went invisible to them. That was fine with me because it gave me a chance to observe them, like a nature documentary but about a human family that lived on the same street as me. I picked at my salad and listened. They talked about people from their work and made references that were familiar enough to them to discuss in shorthand. It was boring, mostly, except that underlying it all I perceived a tangible unhappiness, no different than if the foundation of the home had been built with the hard, compressed bricks of their unspoken resentments. Claudia expressed it through snark and sass, he dad through sniping, and her stepmom through a phony smile that grew larger and more uncanny whenever the temperature was raised by the other two. Only Evanescence seemed unaffected, perhaps because everyone treated her like a little princess as far as I could tell. I considered if Mom would ever give me that look, raise her voice that way, struggle so obviously to hold back some mean thing she wanted to say to me. No, she wouldn’t, and that pissed me off because it meant that Claudia had been right — her homelife really was worse than mine, and that meant she had won.
When I was younger and asked about my dad, Mom would only ever tell me that he had been a love-bomber, that, early on, he would smooth her hair and marvel out loud about how he had caught an angel. Her big, final line was always, “And I was like an angel — as soon as he started in on his nonsense, I up and floated away.”
“That was a good meal,” Claudia’s dad said after tossing his paper napkin onto the table, balled and battle weary.
I nodded agreement and followed Claudia’s lead when she pushed her bowl toward the center of the table. A peek at it revealed that she had eaten even less than me.
“So, Andy,” her dad said, “do you need to rush off, or can you stick around for a bit?”
“Um,” I said, looking to Claudia for guidance.
She shrugged. I opened my eyes wider, imploring her for help, and she said, “He’s asking you if you want to play board games with us.” There was an ironic joy in her voice when she asked, “Pretty please, can you play board games with us, Andy?”
“I mean, sure, I guess,” I said.
“Board games are dumb,” whined Evanescence. There were crumbles of cheese stuck to her lower lip. “I want to play light as a feather, stiff as a board.”
“She just learned that game at a sleepover,” the stepmom explained as she cleared the table.
“What if Andy doesn’t want to play that, baby?” Claudia’s dad asked the little girl. “What if his family is deeply religious and he thinks we’re black magic heathens?”
“We’re not religious,” I said like I was defending against an assault on Mom’s character. “I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try.”
Evanescence shot up from her chair. “I can teach you. It’s very magical.” She padded into the living room in socked feet, leaving us with the implicit understanding that we should follow her.
“Are we really doing this?” Claudia asked.
“You don’t want to? It seems like just the kind of witchy thing you would be into,” her dad said. This, I assumed, was a dig at the jet-black she had died her hair over spring break. She responded with a sneer that begat angry eyes from her dad and a concerned smile from her stepmom.
“Are you guys coming?” Evanescence called from the living room.
“Just a minute, sweets,” her mother said. “I need to finish clearing the table.”
“No, now!” The girl shouted.
“Save that for later, honey, would you?” Claudia’s dad said as he rose from the table. I waited for Claudia to get up before I pushed out my own chair.
Evanescence was already lying on her back on the living room carpet, her legs straight and together, her arms at her sides. “I’m the board,” she announced and closed her eyes.
“We’re the bored,” Claudia said.
“Nu-uh,” Evanescence said, not getting it.
We all got to our knees, some of us more easily than others. I ended up kneeling beside the little girl’s right shoulder, an accident that I was happy about when I realized that we had to put one flattened hand under her body. Let her parents touch her legs or butt or whatever. Claudia was across from me, probably having had the same thought.
“I haven’t done this since I was a girl,” the stepmom said. “Do we need anything else to play?”
“Just your hands,” the girl said. “And your concentration. And music. Spooky music.”
The stepmom pulled the phone from her back pocket. “Hmm. I don’t think I have any spooky music on my playlist. How about this one? It’s more sad than spooky.” Piano chords blossomed from her phone followed by the pleadings of a schlocky male singer.
“Manilow?” Claudia’s dad asked. “She said spooky music, not shitty music.”
“That’s a quarter for the swear jar, mister,” the stepmom told him. “As soon as we’re done here.”
“This music is perfect,” Evanescence said, even though it wasn’t at all spooky. She clasped her eyelids tighter, a little smile indicating her thrill at being the center of attention.
In response to the music, Claudia’s dad directed a tongue-out expression at me like one you might involuntarily make while being punished for a crime with a hangman’s noose.
“Now, you all chant ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’ and try to lift me.”
When we reached underneath her, she giggled. Her shoulder felt warm and bony on my palm. She smelled faintly of processed cheese.
Sloppily at first, and then more successfully as a chorus, we began to chant. There was a saxophone solo. The song really was trash.
My arm shook in small, restrained convulsions as I tried to lift her. Within a minute or so, the girl’s butt, propped by our group’s two strongest hands, rose a few inches off the ground. Her shoulders, with only my and Claudia’s spaghetti arms to support them, barely rose at all.
“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” Evanescence squealed.
“Yeah,” Claudia said, withdrawing her hand and causing the whole machine to fail, sending the little girl heavily back onto the carpet, “Dad and Brenda lifted you three inches. You weigh, like, sixty-five pounds. Big whoop.”
“At least I don’t weigh five hundred pounds.” She scooted out of the center of the circle, indignant that her miracle had gone unappreciated. Claudia did not weigh five hundred pounds, nowhere near, but no one corrected her.
“So, we’re done?” her dad asked.
“No!” the little girl said. “Everyone goes, then whoever rises highest wins because they’re the purest of heart.”
“I may as well not even try, then,” said Claudia.
“Brenda, get in there,” her dad said.
I felt a sudden panic. The stepmom? Bra straps and side boob and the seductive smells of unfamiliar mom lotions and powders. A horror show of my poorly understood longing.
The stepmom felt it too. She stuttered about how she didn’t need to take a turn. She tried not to look at me so I wouldn’t think that my grubby fingers were the issue, but I knew that, had she been wearing a bathrobe instead of regular day clothes, she would have clasped it at her neck to stop me imagining her body.
“Fine,” Claudia’s dad said. “But if you forfeit your turn, you lose music rights. Turn it off, babe.”
When she did, and the room went silent, he let out a sigh as if the sappy music had caused a pressure differential that had made it impossible for him to breath. “Andy, you’re up, bro. Girls, switch placed with us, and get him under the ankles. Only touch his ankles,” he reiterated, narrowing his eyes at Claudia as if she had masterminded this whole evening for the chance to get a fistful of my bony ass.
I looked at each of them pleadingly, but no one spoke up to get me out of it, so I crawled forward and laid down on my back.
“We won’t be able to lift him from his ankles,” Claudia protested.
“You will if he goes light as a feather and stiff as a board,” her dad said. “Now, for some real music.” He looked delighted as he brought it up on his phone.
“Dad, not Trouser Stain,” Claudia said.
“Andy needs to hear it,” he said. “It’s a guy thing. Our audience was always mostly men. Don’t rob him of this experience just because you don’t get it. Don’t be that kind of woman.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” the stepmom asked.
“Anything is fine,” I said to the ceiling. “I don’t think we really need music.”
“We do,” he told me. “We absolutely do. We need this music.” A racket of chunky guitars and bass and driving drums filled the room. Someone started rapping. Claudia’s dad, I presumed, from back before he was her dad. It was a horror show of a different type.
I felt his thick hand go under my shoulder. Other hands followed, reluctant hands, I was sure. In all my life, I had never felt more like a stranger then when those unfamiliar hands were touching me.
“Andy,” he said. I turned my head toward him. “This song is called, ‘Benji’s Dog.’ It was our single. I wrote it about this dog that my neighbor, Benji, had when I was growing up. Also, it’s about how we all kind of wanted to bang Benji’s mom.”
“Brandon!”
He winked at me like, you get it.
I smiled politely and then squeezed my eyes tight like this game was serious business to me and I couldn’t tolerate further interruption. I resolved to keep them closed until the indignity had ended.
The chant began, led by Evanescence. It seemed quieter than before, competing, as it was, with Trouser Stain. The lyrics were filthy, and the rapping was bad. At one point, Claudia’s dad quit the chant and began to sing along to himself, a heresy that broke the others out of the chant too.
“Daddy!” Evanescence cried.
“Turn this off, Dad,” Claudia said, “For the love of all that’s holy, I’m begging you.”
“Maybe now’s not the time, Brandon,” the stepmom said.
He ignored them all, rapping along even louder than before.
This caused another round of complaints, an overlapping burst-dam of repressed emotion. It was grating to hear them fight and yet somehow the perfect accompaniment to the aggressive and angry backing track.
“Listen to this, Andy,” he said at one point, trying to make us a team, he and I.
I was already gone, though, entranced by my desire for escape. My thoughts were on my bedroom and home, on Mom and the Hot Pockets she would have made me for dinner. As they continued to fight, their hands disappeared from beneath me. Maybe they pulled them out from under me, or maybe I just got numb to the sensation of them. I had gone invisible to them again, and they were screaming. Properly verbally sparring. I kept my eyes closed, the purest desire of my heart to be anywhere else but in that living room. They called each other names, said horrible things, but only distantly, from somewhere far away. I was an angel. I was above it all.
I floated.
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