Family Affair (4 page)

“Yeah, I’m working on that. It’s not easy. People aren’t hiring brilliant, charismatic what-have-yous.”

“‘What-have-yous’?” I question. “Is that how you’re marketing yourself these days?”

“Not all of us know what we want to do from the age of two, Layla. Not all of us are still living our high-school glory days.”

I always know Brooke’s annoyed with me when she says my name. Any other time she’ll call me “Lay” or “bee-yotch” or “dude.” “Layla” means business. I also know because now she’s taking potshots at my marriage to Brett.

As I figured out my career path, Brett wasn’t too far behind. There was only so long he could hang out and watch Trish and me play with animals—and only so long we would put up with him distracting our subjects with a pepperoni Hot Pocket just seconds before we got the perfect shot. Following his dream, albeit humbly at first, Brett went back to Hamilton High, our former high school, and got a job assistant-coaching with his old mentor. Frank Wells suggested that he’d now stick to offense, his true passion, and he’d name Brett defensive coordinator as well as JV coach. Brett accepted. And after a beginning rough patch of their combined approach, there was a fairy-tale quality to their success. Together they brought the team to the state championships three years in a row. Then they both moved up to coaching at UCCC, which was—unsurprisingly, given the record I mentioned earlier—looking to head in a new direction.

You know how that turned out. Winners.

Brett. As you now see, he’s a great defensive coordinator and coach. If not a father, he’s at least a wise older brother to most of the team. Of course, what most sets Brett apart—and also some would say is his greatest flaw, given the craziness of his visions—is that he’s always thinking big picture. Always. That’s why he pushes his boys at academics as well as athletics: He knows there’s always a place for both, and that in the best of all worlds, the two complement each other. He dreams bigger than blocking drills and impromptu Gatorade showers.

It’s always been that way with him. He’s always been a mixture of goofball and prodigy. Through high school, he was star of the football team—and when I say star, I mean he was Sol itself, with everything else revolving around him. He was certainly the most highly recruited player in our high school’s history. You know, he was the kind of kid you read about in the newspaper, whose parents are sitting down for meatloaf with a new college recruiter virtually every night and fending off midnight phone calls from those without the good fortune to And a seat at the dinner table. But he was also secretly editor-in-chief of a weekly pro-football scouting report that he self-published and distributed from his parents’ basement until the NFL sent him a cease-and-desist order; some of his insights were so dead-on they suspected him of having informers in every locker room in the league. They didn’t get that Brett’s not the kind of guy who needs informers.

In college, he might have been on a path to playing in the pros but was spared a likely future collecting Super Bowl rings, knee scars, and fortunes in endorsements by a complete tear of his Achilles tendon. I think that, for the rest of his life, somewhere inside he’ll be running down an imaginary sideline, waiting for a perfect spiral that he’ll catch and carry into life’s end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

He certainly tried after the injury. A perfect example of his
big-picture thinking getting him in trouble was the illegal protein-bar concession he ran out of the campus rec center. Fosterbars, he called them. He researched healthy ingredients and with some other kids created a snack that everybody, quite literally, ate up. It was extremely successful. At least it sold well in the area until the school’s athletic director somehow ended up with a tainted bar and shut the operation down. Brett was a victim of his own grand schemes in that case. He tripped himself up by attempting to meet soaring demand with materials sourced from a questionable vendor selling product out of an unmarked semi. Turns out it was expired government-surplus granola. He should have known better. Who in the government eats granola?

But that debacle’s all in the past. Now he’s on top of his game. He coaches like a whirling dervish, a latter-day Knute Rockne with enough Joe Paterno to be a player favorite, and he also indulges his entrepreneurial side. He’s playing around on Craigslist, trying to get some designers to help him. Or at least he’s been talking about it. He believes the next big thing will be his value-priced athletic underwear, coming soon to a big-box retailer near you—the first truly affordable Under Armour competitor.

Yup, he’ll likely be successful. He’s successful in whatever he does. Great guy, fun-loving, good at everything—you can see why I wanted to “team up” with him and his family. And you probably still don’t really see why I’m annoyed with him.

At least Brooke gets it. Sometimes she gets it a little too well. She points things out that I’m trying to let slide. And I know she’s just looking out for me. But in case I don’t, she reminds me that she loves me when she hugs me good night. And then she flips me off.

I’m not saying she should go back to wearing the hat with the beak jutting out the front of it. Frankly, that thing was always a little much. But when your wife is sneaking out of games and thinking you’re not gonna notice? That’s like me not noticing when Layla claims that she’s twenty-seven. How ’bout we make that twenty-nine? We’re both teetering on the edge of the big three-oh, and hiding from it won’t help. I don’t know what it is about chicks and their age, but none of them ever want to give you a straight answer.

Tell you what: Take the current year, subtract the year you were born, and there’s your age. There’s no three-year curve, there’s no two years off for good behavior, and unlike most other situations, your boobs don’t count for anything.

How is it that every girl I went to school with is now two years younger than me? You want honesty in every relationship, and the first thing you do is lie about your age? Is it a mortality thing? Do you think the Grim Reaper isn’t going to double-check? You lying about your age is the same as us lying about our income or penis size: Eventually the truth is gonna come out. Not that I lie about that kind of stuff.

But I do lie—I mean, you have to lie if you want to stay happily
married. People who say you need one hundred percent honesty have never been in a lasting relationship—and by “lasting,” I mean the kind where both people are actually speaking to each other after the first three months. It’s immature and frankly insulting when people peacock with that moral “I never lie” high ground. And I’m not just talking about the standard “No, you don’t look fat in that,” “No, your friend is not hot,” and “Yes, I will always be attracted to you, even when you have three hairs growing out of your chin and tuck your boobs into your pants.” That stuff’s a given. I’m saying you have to lie through your fucking teeth if you want to avoid a life of pure hell. Especially when your family is involved. And Layla? She’s a
lot
more family than your average wife. She’s probably more family than anybody’s wife in the history of marriage.

Layla is to my mom what my lesbian sister, Trish, can never be: girly, giggly, and, most important, in need of a mother. Trish and my mom have a fine relationship, but it just isn’t the quintessential mother-daughter bond that Layla and my mom share.

And Layla is to my dad what every corny, bad-joke-telling average Joe needs: an audience. And not an audience that will consistently groan and roll its eyes as blood relatives tend to do. Layla really thinks my dad’s lame jokes are charming, and she’ll genuinely laugh at them every time. Sometimes she’ll even request that he tell one again, which he sets on like a dog with an errant chunk of sirloin.

My little brother, Scott? He worships her. He didn’t look up to me the way little brothers look up to their football-star big bros for advice on dating or school or CD collections; he thought that Layla was a goddess, and he couldn’t believe she’d settle for a mere mortal like me. Of course, he’s still living at home, playing World of Warcraft online and drawing half-naked demonesses with her face—for his classes at Medina Art College, he swears. God love him. I guess I do, too, the little perv.

I may sound like an asshole just point-blanking this stuff, and
yeah, I’ve certainly made more than my fair share of mistakes, but isn’t that how we’re supposed to grow? By learning from our fuckups? Character is defined by the choices we make under pressure. And lately the soundtrack in my head has Bowie’s and Queen’s song of the same name on a constant rotation.

I don’t need silk underwear—I mean for
her
to wear, not me, and frankly neither arrangement has even come up for discussion. But there’s some abstract notion floating around my pesky little brain that tells me Layla’s nighttime uniform of my old boxers and a stained T-shirt isn’t meant to turn me on. I’m not sure when exactly the switch flipped and she went from buying those sexy matching bras and underwear to this. And of course she doesn’t have to put on some barely there number and do a dance for me every night before bed. But there was a time when she
did
. So how am I supposed to not notice when it stops?

It’s not just the lack of frilly things—honestly, I don’t care. If I had to pinpoint the one factor that’s been making me crazy lately, it’s the way she is around my family. Or rather, the fact that she’s always with at least one of them at any given time. I know it’s partially my fault. I always encouraged her to spend time with them. But there’s a difference between spending time and becoming one with. I guess Layla never got the memo.

I mean, aren’t you supposed to hate your mother-in-law? This isn’t natural. Isn’t it against the laws of physics somehow? When I was growing up I got in a fight with my little brother every day. She’s never gotten in a fight with him. Not even once. Well,
once
she got in a fight with him: He was mad because she got a better present for my dad for Father’s Day. And seriously, while we’re on the subject, how did she know my dad would love that electric tie rack? He watched that thing spin for hours, like it was a mobile and he was an infant.

It didn’t used to be like this. I didn’t used to resent her. In fact, I used to feel invincible around her. My football team was a disaster a couple years ago—losing nonstop, which was a real blow
after Coach Wells and I came from winning with our high-school program—but somehow she made me feel triumphant. You might think it odd that the miracle we were waiting for was a close loss on a crazy play I dreamed up, but when you’re a small school with a program that can’t use scholarships as bait (damn Division III rules!) and you don’t have one recruit who’d be even third string on many of our competitors’ teams … well, you take what you can get.

Some had been saying, “Yeah, every time the Condors get this close, they find some new way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Not Layla. She had me feeling like anything was possible. She’d be there, directly behind me on the sidelines, wearing that red-and-mustard jersey that always stood out in a sea of green and gray. And a hat with a beak on it. She has a heart big enough to make everyone around her wish they were her. And a body that makes just about every one of my college boys wish they were me.

All around her, always, like a personal choir, are four people who think the sun shines out of her—well, who love her sometimes, it seems, almost more than I do: Mom, Dad, my sister, and my brother. Layla would get them to come to my games even though our record losing streak wouldn’t exactly have them racing to the car. She’s the type who’s so purely good you almost resent it because you look so crummy by comparison.

I remember once, after a particularly hard loss—another game when we’d got sort of close to winning—she gathered a selection of our most die-hard fans and had them waiting right outside the locker room to give the team an ovation as they filed gloomily past. As they got onto the bus, I could swear every man on that team held his head a little higher.

When my grandmother was dying, Layla was the one who sat in silence with an understanding smile on her face as Mimi cussed out the shit-brain Democrats, the dirty Europeans, and the nurse she thought had stolen her favorite wig. After six months of that,
everybody else in the family gave up. Layla kept on for another year. That’s right: a year. Twelve months. You try it.

Once, she got it in her head that the team needed a different kind of talking to, and she organized a sit-down with them. She’d listened to what I was trying to do, and she told them they weren’t playing like a team—and that they needed to air their grievances so they could move past them. I was about to laugh my ass off, imagining football players ready to “share their feelings,” when suddenly I heard some freshman guys saying they were pissed that they never got to play, other freshmen complaining about the pranks, seniors mad at certain guys who were only out for themselves … and lo and behold, the players actually started communicating. After that they all came together behind John Simms, our fullback, after that one goal-line fumble—well, I’m not certain that one powwow wasn’t what turned the team around.

Yes, she was always there, behind me, backing me up. And I have to say it helped knowing that in the end, win or lose, I got to go home to the sweetest, kindest, craziest, hottest woman in the entire crowd. Sounds corny, I know, but seriously, how lucky was I that she happened to be my wife?

I met Layla in high school. She was pals with my friend Doug. She had dark, wavy hair and this arch of freckles across the bridge of her nose, which I thought were adorable and which she hated—the freckles, not the adoration. Her eyes had little flecks of gold that matched her hair when the sun hit it. And her smile? It’s like she’s in on some secret and you’re desperate to find out what it is. I fell for her instantly, which was romantic to Layla but not nearly as endearing to Claudine DeMarco, my girlfriend at the time.

I wasn’t going to cheat, and I wasn’t going to lie (teaching me early on what a mistake that is, as you’ll see), so I sat Claudine down after fifth period and broke up with her. She screamed bloody murder for a minimum of a half hour. I was very late to geometry. I sat and listened—it was the least I could do—as she
wailed and sobbed and wiped her runny nose on her sleeve and yelled at me some more. Tears spilled down her mascara-streaked cheeks, and she kept at it until her eyes were slits and her voice sounded like she inspired the word “hoarse.” It was madness. Finally, it stopped. She blew her nose, regained her composure, and looked seriously at me for a moment. Then she shrugged her left shoulder and calmly tossed out, “I guess I should have given you oral, huh?”