Finally, five
months after his January birthday, I got my brother to pick a time to go out to
dinner for his favorite, which is prime rib. Each of us had to get over various
geezer ailments—bad shoulder, bad legs, bad feet, mysterious other infirmities
that needed a doctor or two to say they weren’t terminal after all and to go
out and carry on.
Also moods.
We had to be
in the right mood and also the weather had to be more of one way than another.
More coolish than hottish. It took a lot of negotiation between the two of us.
But today we
pulled it off. We drove a mammoth four miles to the Black Angus where he had
once enjoyed a nice piece of prime rib. I would have that doofus wedge salad,
even though I am not fond of plain iceberg lettuce, but the wedge is decorated
with some kind of bleu-cheesy dressing with bacon bits and needs to be cut with
a knife because it’s so tall.
I added a
little steak and mushrooms, as long as we were in a meat-y restaurant. The
booth we sat in, across from each, put enough distance between us so we had to
lean in to be able to hear each other above the air conditioning and cutlery
rattle.
Or maybe it
was our old ears?
He looked
natty in his pale blue button down shirt, still my baby brother somehow,
despite how the sun has leathered his face. I am hardly recognizable myself,
far from that brown-haired little girl who used to tattle on him for getting
into my things, disturbing them from
the impeccable order I’d worked so hard to achieve.
My brother and
I, six and a half years apart, he being the kid in kid brother, have a limited
range of conversations that we can enjoy. I am the big sister so I think I know
more and he is male so he thinks he knows more. We tend, on a daily basis, to disagree
about things: vegetables, except for corn and potatoes (which hardly count in
my mind) and also, how long to keep leftovers, plus the reason for the
existence of Spam and its pinky, pretend-ham essence. Politics, Walmart, the
minimum wage. Scads more.
But the thing
we usually can count on to get us through an hour or two in close proximity is
movie stars and their movies, mostly of a time long past. And so I knew that
when he mentioned The Big Sky today right after we clinked glasses—him with a
beer, me with a margarita that was a bit shy of its potential, that we would be
okay. We are also old enough to have forgotten fifty percent of who we need to
name and have to use hand gestures, hair peculiarities and also-starred-in information to get to the names of the star.
“Oh, you know, he was in The Rifleman. Big jaw.”“Chuck Connor!”
“Right!”
“And the other one, in Ben Hur---uh, Charleton Heston. He was the head rancher. There was all this to-do about the Big Muddy.”“What was James Dean’s name in Giant?”
“I know the answer, but what’s that got to do with The Big Sky? That Tim Sultan book, Sunny’s Nights, just mentioned it—it was Jett Rink!”“Nuts, that’s too much of a made up name.”“Caroll Baker. Did she spell it with two l’s? Was in Baby Doll. She was in Big Sky, too. And then, there was Burl Ives! Mendacity!”
“Right! Mendacity, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof! Paul Newman.”“But he wasn’t in The Big Sky”.
“I know. Paul Newman was in Hud.”“But in The Big Sky, Jean Simmons was the Woman. And Gregory Peck! He was the main guy, the one who’d been at sea and they were all worried because they thought he was a greenhorn and when he went riding off, they were worried about him, but he was just fine.”“Burl Ives. Always liked him. Mendacity! The way he said that!”
It goes on. We
think our sister would know all the answers that we are struggling with, as she
is the youngest and can Google faster than either of us. But our sister is in
Connecticut, where she lives. We can’t have everything.
The last bites
get savored. The birthday surprise is delivered by the cutiepie waitress, Kim;
it’s a giant chocolate chip cookie with a dollop of not-too-hard vanilla ice
cream. There’s a little white candle that she lights with a lighter, which
doesn’t have quite the right sound, that of a big match being struck on the
side of a matchbox. But it was fine, the teeny wavery light and the silent
whatever my brother may have wished for at that moment. Kim asked the usual
questions about our state of enjoyment. Fine, very fine, delicious. Does Kim
put a star on our bill for niceness?
But during
that time in rehab, my brother used to call me and we discussed old black and
white movies we remembered from our time as kids, when tv was new. He’d gotten
home from work—he was a cook—and he couldn’t sleep, so he watched the same
movie channel they had running in our rehab facility. A state away from each
other we got to talk about Barbara Stanwyck or Jimmy Stewart or Stewart
Granger. Hardly anyone knows those names any more, just wrinklies like us.
Funny little bond, but good enough.
Happy
birthday, my brother.
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