Cousin of the Bride

To understand my uncle Mike’s cough, all one has to do is visualize squeezing a tube of toothpaste. In the same way a person squeezes the tube at the bottom and moves to the top, my uncle Mike begins coughing in the tips of his toes. The muscles in his shins and thighs quiver as a wave of spasms makes its way from his feet, across his barreled chest, and up to his throat. Finally, when every last bit of phlegm and grit in his entire body has been brought into his mouth to be ejected, my uncle Mike promptly swallows it back down and lights another cigarette. I watched this while holding a piece of drywall over my head with two quivering arms and said, “Uncle Mike… you know, you really ought to quit smoking.” The room was hazy with sheetrock dust and cigarette smoke. I sneezed harshly, and left two v-shaped streaks on the front of my shirt, like jet contrails.Slapping me solidly on the back instead of using his screw gun to secure the piece of drywall over my head into the wall, my uncle Mike coughed again. “Don’t worry, BC. I’ve been coughing like that for years.” He swallowed at the end of the sentence, and I winced at the mental horror of the blackish-green thing that must now be making its way into his esophagus.

Instead of complaining about the weight over my head that had reduced my biceps to limp strands of spaghetti, I coughed through the dust and smoke asking, “Isn’t that just all the more reason to quit?” My uncle Mike laughed in response to my foolish query and, just as one of my arms seized in a painful cramp, secured the drywall slab over my head into the ceiling with a loud electric whir of his screw gun. It was all I could do to keep it secure with the other arm.

“Watch it, BC. Gotta hold onto them till the very end.” Massaging my arm, I complained under my breath and glared at my friend Dale. Dale Trevin was captain of the high school football team and generally a hell of a nice guy. I had on occasion tutored him through subjects in school that he was having trouble with. In payment for my friendship, he had been watching me hang drywall for half an hour with folded arms, a grin, and a barely repressed chuckle. He claimed his arms were for throwing footballs, not doing construction.

I moved my shoulder in a slow circle, massaging my bicep. Dale trembled with laughter. “Oh, just laugh now, fucker. Wait till the Hamlet test comes up. See who’s laughing then.” Dale’s chuckles slowed then stopped like a motor that had run out of gas. The humor ran out of his face, until his mouth resembled the inverted umbrella of a basset hound’s jowls. I raised my eyebrows in truculent success. “That’s what I thought, asshole.”

“Whoa there, BC. Don’t get so cocky. Next thing you know, you’ll turn into your father,” my uncle Mike warned.

Not particularly pleased with my father for sending me over to my uncle’s to hang sheetrock, I quipped, “I’ll need to get married three times before I can start doing the job justice.”

Uncle Mike laughed loudly, which for several minutes I confused with one of his colossal coughs, until I realized his nostrils were flaring. “Hell, BC you better marry your second wife’s cousin too.” Overtaken at the cleverness of this, my uncle Mike laughed so hard speech became impossible.

I paused in the action of grabbing another piece of drywall. “Wait… what did you say?”

I had to wait for his laughter to stop before he could continue. Wiping tears out of his eyes, he explained, “I said you should marry your second wife’s cousin too. Might as well go all the way, BC.”

“When the hell was my dad married to my mom’s cousin?” It had only been three years prior that I had learned my father had even had multiple marriages.

Laughing even harder at the sudden realization no one had ever let me in on this bit of my ancestry, my Uncle Mike bent in half and wheezed with his cigarette in his hand for a full minute. His nostrils flared and relaxed with the frequency of a turning jet engine. “You mean NO one has ever told you? NO one?” When my uncle Mike’s laughter took him to the floor, his face was so red and he was shaking so badly that I thought the heart attack his body had been threatening for so long had finally happened. Dale, taking my uncle’s sudden laughter attack as a signal that it was okay to resume his own laugher, joined in. “Jesus BC, your family is so fucked up.”

With two burly men to either side of me, and a Caspar white layer of gypsum dust on my skin, I shouted, “Will someone please explain what the hell is going on here?” In response my uncle Mike rolled on the floor, pounding it beneath him.

“He doesn’t know!” Hot tears rolled from his eyes, running down his cheeks through the craters of his mirthfully contorted cheeks. Some five minutes later, when I thought he had ran all out of laughter, he crawled to his hands and knees, took one look in my face, and fell back down to the ground. Finally, more from the abdominal pain of having laughed so hard for so long than from not finding the situation funny any longer, my uncle Mike leaned against the wall and mouth breathed for a long while. He looked like a man trying to prevent hyperventilation.

Dale’s laughter had also taken him down, and he was crawling around on the floor like an African lion recovering from heat stroke. “Fuck BC… this is fucking unreal.” I kicked some dust at him in annoyance, which caused his laughter to transform into choked, gasping coughs.

“Uncle Mike, can you please explain what the hell is going on here?”

Holding a stitch in his side with both of his hands, he panted, “Okay… just… hold on.”

I waited. Uncle Mike panted. Dale crawled around on the floor, too weak to do anything. Finally, my uncle Mike told me the final family secret I had not been privy too. Or so I solemnly hope.

“Her name was Regina, and she loved your father madly. Even though they had been together for years, she would have done anything for him. Well one day, Regina’s dad comes around, all fire and brimstone and tells her and your dad that ‘cohabitation is a sin.’ So your dad, Einstein that he is says, ‘We’d get married if we wanted to get married. Want me to prove it? Hey Regina! Want to get married?’

“Since God hates your father, she said, ‘Yes Gary, yes I do.’ ”

Temporarily ignoring that it appeared my father had gotten married on what basically amounted to a dare, I interjected “Wait… Aunt Regina?”

“Yeah, you got it,” Uncle Mike wheezed.

A mystery of years suddenly became clear to me. “No wonder she always gives me the stink-eye at family reunions!” My uncle Mike made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite laughter, but a sound which could have very easily blossomed into laughter had he not been so exhausted. He had to close his eyes until it went away.

“Anyhow, so your dad’s hanging out at the wedding, when he looks over at the bridesmaid, and decides, ‘Hell, she’s a looker,’ and figures he’ll take off with her.

“Well, your dad being your dad, he can’t have sex with someone without ending up falling madly in love with them.

“So six days after he married Regina, your dad got the marriage annulled and hooked up full-time with the bridesmaid: your mother.” If I were to sit down with a panel of world experts, bent on creating a situation that would result in the most social awkwardness for the most people, I could not have come up with a more devastatingly awful scenario.

Dale let out a single toned note that held the place of laughter and pounded his fist against the floor. My uncle Mike’s whole body flexed with mirth.

I looked at my Uncle Mike. I looked at Dale. “I need to go home,” I announced and walked away.

When I entered the kitchen, I found my father, and asked him why. Why had he divorced a woman who loved him so obviously for a woman who was so obviously out of her mind? He looked at me somberly from across the kitchen counter. His words had the haunted quality of a war veteran recalling a horrific battle. “She used to pack my lunches for me. She used to give me oranges all the time, so I told her to stop because I didn’t want to peel them. Do you know what I saw in my lunch box the next day?” His eyes flashed ominously.

“An orange?” I asked, perplexed.

My father nodded gravely, looked from side to side as though afraid someone else might hear, and whispered, “And she had peeled it for me.”

I saw my father in a whole new light. “You’re fucking crazy.”

He nodded in complacent agreement.