Free Social Blunders by Tim Sandlin Page A

just as likely you’re my cousin.”
    “Out with it. What’s the deal here?”
    I told her the story of Christmas Eve 1949—how Paw Paw Callahan promised he would come home but didn’t, so Lydia called her friend Mimi’s brother and the boys came over and Skip injected oranges with vodka from a syringe. When I came to the rape, Gilia got real still. Before that, her eyes had been moving, watching the children on the merry-go-round, keeping track of street traffic. At the word rape she looked directly at me. I had to meet her eyes or lose credibility.
    “Dad pissed on her?”
    “That’s what Lydia says.”
    We were quiet a long time after that. She looked down at the floorboards. I could see her jaw, clenching and unclenching beneath the skin. Her hair was very blonde, right up to the scalp.
    “I don’t know Dad well,” she said. “They shipped me off to boarding school in the eighth grade. Then I was accepted at Georgetown. The last four months is the first time I’ve lived with him since I was a little girl.”
    “You went to prep school?”
    “Boarding school.”
    “You tied sweaters around your neck and wore shorts with baggy pockets for tennis balls? You played field hockey and compared boys of the Ivy League?”
    Gilia almost smiled. “The cheap preppie label comes off after your first divorce.”
    “You’re too young to be divorced.”
    “There’s no such thing as too young to be divorced.”
    She told me about the art history professor at Georgetown who could order off a French menu and recite Shakespearean sonnets, substituting his own feelings for the final couplet.
    “I’d never dated a boy over twenty-one. Jeremy was so forceful when he said Salvador Dali was a no-talent bum.”
    “You married the guy because he trashed Salvador Dali?”
    Gilia’s face was amazingly expressive. Watching her was like reading a newspaper; everywhere I looked was a story.
    “I guess so. And he was good in bed. I’d never slept with an experienced man before.”
    I almost told her about Maurey training me to get the girls off every time, but I still wasn’t certain of our genetic relationship. It’d been so long since I’d met someone I had anything in common with, the tendency was to suspect shared parentage.
    “Why did you get divorced?” I asked.
    She gave the shrug I was already fond of. “He was a humanist who believed in situational fidelity. I talked myself into not seeing it until the night he got me in bed with him and a coed bimbo. After that I had to leave.”
    “But you went through with it the once?”
    She shrugged again.
    “How did group sex make you feel?” I asked.
    “Suicidal.”
    “No sex is worth suicide.”
    “To save myself, I stopped thinking and feeling and I slithered home to Mommy and Daddy. Now I shop, swim, and watch network television. Far as I see, that’s considered normal here. Everyone in my family stopped thinking and feeling years ago.”
    A woman in a red Volkswagen bus pulled up at the other end of the park and hollered something at the children on the merry-go-round. They pretended not to hear her. The little boy fell off, picked himself up, and ran to the teeter-totter. He ran up one end of the teeter-totter and made it a couple steps onto the high side before his weight brought it down with a bang. The woman came out of the Volkswagen with her hands on her hips.
    “So I went through the motions of behaving the way I was expected to behave,” Gilia said. “Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have nothing in common with anyone I know or will ever know.”
    “That’s a good way to get depressed.”
    “Tell me about it, Jack. Then one morning when I’m in the depths of numbness, a funny-looking man walks into the family room and announces my solid-to-the-point-of-nauseating father once gangbanged a girl and this funny-looking man may be my brother.”
    “Funny looking?”
    “In a cute way.”
    “I’m funny looking in a cute way?”
    Gilia