Calypso(56)

“I know that a lot of men such as yourself also like their testicles waxed,” Amy said. “If that is of any interest to you, sir, I can get my trainee, Madelyn, right on it. Maddy, you up for this?”

It’s so subversive, not just insisting that our father is gay but that his twelve-year-old granddaughter might want to rip the hair off his balls.

Before the clay is rubbed into our faces, we’re outfitted in shower caps, and afterward, while it dries, we lie back with cucumber slices on our eyes. Paul programs his iPad to play spa music, or what passes for music in such places, the sound of a waterfall or rustling leaves. A whale saying something nice to another whale. A harp. This year I lifted the cucumbers off my eyes and saw Lisa and Dad stretched out like corpses, fast asleep. Paul was out as well, and Gretchen, whose legs were shin-deep in the warm whirling bath, was getting there.

It seems there was a perfectly good explanation for all the butterflies in our Sussex house the previous winter. From what I’d read since Amy brought it up, they flew in through our windows in early autumn, then passed into a kind of hibernation. Hugh and I were away until right before Christmas, and when we returned and cranked up the heat, the butterflies, mainly tortoiseshells—dozens and dozens of them—awoke, wrongly believing that spring had arrived. They were on all the second-floor windows, batting against the panes, desperate to get out.

As symbols go, they’re a bit too sweet, right for Lisa but all wrong for Tiffany, who’d have been better represented by something more dynamic—crows, maybe. Two big ones flew down the chimney of my office that winter and tore the place apart, systematically overturning and then shitting on everything I cared about.

What, I wondered, placing the cucumbers back over my eyes, would my symbol be?

The last time I saw my sister Tiffany was at the stage door at Symphony Hall in Boston. I’d just finished a show and was getting ready to sign books when I heard her say, “David. David, it’s me.”

We hadn’t spoken in four years at that point, and I was shocked by her appearance. Tiffany always looked like my mother when she was young. Now she looked like my mother when she was old, though at the time she couldn’t have been more than forty-five. “It’s me, Tiffany.” She held up a paper bag with the Starbucks logo on it. Her shoes looked like she’d found them in a trash can. “I have something for you.”

There was a security guard holding the stage door open, and I said to him, “Will you close that, please?” I had filled the house that night. I was in charge—Mr. Sedaris. “The door,” I repeated. “I’d like for you to close it now.”

And so the man did. He shut the door in my sister’s face, and I never saw her or spoke to her again. Not when she was evicted from her apartment. Not when she was raped. Not when she was hospitalized after her first suicide attempt. She was, I told myself, someone else’s problem. I couldn’t deal with her anymore.

“Well,” the rest of my family said, “it was Tiffany. Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all know how she can be.”

Perhaps, like the psychic, they were just telling me what I needed to hear, something to ease my conscience and make me feel that underneath it all I’m no different from anyone else. They’ve always done that for me, my family. It’s what keeps me coming back.





And While You’re Up There, Check On My Prostate



The summer after I turned sixteen, I took driver’s ed from a coach at my high school and quickly realized that this was not for me. Turning invoked a great deal of anxiety, as did staying in my lane, and parking—oh, parking—that was the worst. I suppose I could have tried harder to overcome my fear and discomfort, but I didn’t, and as a result I have never gotten a ticket, made a car payment, or called anyone a fucking piece of shit asshole through an open or closed driver’s-side window. It’s not that I never get angry, just that I never get angry the way people behind a wheel do. My fury isn’t poetry, just greeting-card prose: “Go to hell, you.”

“What do you say when someone cuts you off in traffic?” I asked a woman in Copenhagen whose book I was signing.

“We’re not big on cursing,” she told me, “so the worst we’re likely to come out with—and it’s pretty common—is ‘Why don’t you run around in my ass?’”

There are asses in America where that might not be much of a threat. This is to say that, though it would be dark in there, and it probably wouldn’t smell so great, at least you’d have some room to spread out. It would be more like a prison cell than, say, a coffin.

I’d asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you’re more apt to bring a disease into it. “Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it’s normal to call them a cholera sufferer,” a Dutch woman told me. “Either that or a cancer whore.”

I’d never thought of stitching those two particular words together. “A cancer whore?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m pretty sure it comes from The Hague.”

The following day I checked out her story with a woman named Els, who said, “Oh, sure. Cancer whore. I hear it all the time. You can also say ‘cancer slut.’” She added that the words are pretty much the same in Dutch as they are in English. “We say ‘slet,’” she said. “Kanker slet.”