Free The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

time staying awake. A pair of checked, institutional-looking trousers hung loose and filthy around Scott’s bony pelvis; a patchy beard sprouted amid the pimples. At some point he began talking about a Utopian society he wanted to found on the bottom of the sea. My father offered to pay his way home on the condition that he see a psychiatrist, kick the drugs, and go back to school (or get a job), in that order, but Scott wasn’t ready yet. He thanked him all the same.
    My father told me about this visit only once, some twenty years later, and I may be misremembering certain details. By then we only spoke of Scott once or twice a year, while a kind of gas filled the room until we could barely breathe unless we changed the subject. Before that happened, usually, either he or I would have found some fresh detail or story, a bit of colored glass to add to the mosaic of my brother’s life. It was a work in progress on our part.
    MY MOTHER’S LIFE in Norman was purposeful and pleasant, a relief from “the fugitive distress of hedonism,” as Cyril Connolly would have it. Her visits home, with us, became more and more a matter of duty. For a long time she’d craved escape from the chaos of Scott’s presence, but now the house seemed, if anything, rather forlorn and pointless. I myself was rarely around; I resented her desertion and almost made a point of keeping away during her rare visits. Our dogs were dead. As for my parents’ marriage: since Sweden they’d adopted a greater openness, a kind of enforced candor that entailed discussing their love lives in elaborately casual detail.
    For Marlies, then, coming home meant getting drunk with old friends who’d long ago begun to bore her. One day she and Phyllis (“ Chlo-eeee! ”) and Marilyn (an alcoholic doctor) and Marilyn’s brother (the proprietor of a scuba shop) were having a long boozy lunch in the basement of the Tiffany House apartments near the intersection of May Avenue and Northwest Expressway. I’m unsure what the Tiffany House looked like in 1979; nowadays it’s pretty grim, part of the nondescript suburban badlands—a painting by the misanthropic love-child of Norman Rockwell and de Chirico. After three or four hours in the Tiffany House, the scuba guy said he needed to get back to his shop, and Marlies offered him a lift. It was only a mile or so. They were sailing along in her massive Caddy when the guy said his shop was coming up on the right, so Marlies abruptly turned right and sideswiped a woman trying to pass. My mother drifted back into the left lane, waited for what she would always insist was a seemly interval, then swerved right again—“and lo and behold,” she remembers (indignant unto the present day), “that damn broad was there again!” They all pulled into a parking lot, and the scuba guy went into his shop and called the police, whom Marlies berated, gaily, from the backseat of their squad car (“for catching me instead of the stupid broad that insisted on passing me even though she could clearly see that I was trying to make a turn into the right lane . . .”). She also begged for cigarettes, but the stolid cops wouldn’t budge, explaining that it would affect her Breathalyzer test. “All the more reason!” she cackled. Later, in jail, she managed to bum a smoke from her cellmate—a weeping woman who’d been caught stealing from the Dollar General—and used the smoldering match to write “Marlies slept here” on the underside of her cellmate’s cot.
    Four hours later my father arrived. “What kept you so long?” my mother snapped at him, and Burck calmly replied that he’d considered leaving her there overnight in hopes of teaching her a lesson. Otherwise he didn’t reproach her. Indeed, he was glad to be of use. He hired an old friend to handle her case, a man whose alcoholism (then in abeyance) had left him somewhat washed up as a lawyer. He was glad for the work but didn’t do a very good job, according to