The Silver Linings Playbook (19 page)

After the sun sets, when it is just about time to go into Lincoln Financial Field, I ask Cliff if I can talk to him alone, and when we walk away from the Asian Invasion, I say, “Is this okay?”

“This?” he replies, and the glassy look in his eyes suggests he is a little drunk.

“The two of us hanging out like boys. What my friend Danny would call ‘representing.’”

“Why not?”

“Well, because you are my therapist.”

Cliff smiles, holds up a little brown finger, and says, “What did I tell you? When I am not in the leather recliner …”

“You’re a fellow Eagles fan.”

“Damn right,” he says, and then claps me on the back.

After the game I catch a ride back to Jersey on the Asian Invasion bus, and the Indian men and I sing “Fly, Eagles, Fly” over and over again because the Eagles have beaten the Packers 31–9 on national television. When Cliff’s friends drop me off in front of my house, it’s after midnight, but the funny driver, who is named Ashwini, hits the horn on the Asian Invasion bus—a special recording of all fifty members screaming “E!-A!-G!-L!-E!-S! EAGLES!” I worry that maybe they have woken up everyone in my neighborhood, but I can’t help laughing as the green bus pulls away.

My father is still awake, sitting on the family-room couch watching ESPN. When he sees me, he doesn’t say hello, but loudly begins to sing, “Fly, Eagles, fly. On the road to victory …” So I sing the song one more time with my father, and when we finish the chant at the end, my dad continues to hum the fight song as he marches off to bed without so much as asking me a single question about my day, which has been extraordinary to say the least, even if Hank Baskett only had two catches for twenty-seven yards and has yet to find the end zone. I think about cleaning up my father’s empty beer bottles, but I remember what my mother told me about keeping the house filthy while she is on strike.

Downstairs, I hit the weights and try not to think about missing Jake’s wedding, which still has me down some, even if the Birds did win. I need to work off the beer and the Indian kabobs, so I lift for many hours.

When I ask to see Jake’s wedding pictures, my mother plays dumb. “What wedding pictures?” she asks. But when I tell her I have met Caitlin—that we had lunch together and I have already accepted my sister-in-law’s existence as fact—my mother looks relieved and says, “Well then, I guess I can hang up the wedding photos again.”

She leaves me sitting in the living room by the fireplace. When she returns, she hands me a heavy photo album bound in white leather and begins to stand large frames up on the mantel—pictures of Jake and Caitlin previously hidden for my benefit. As I flip through the pages of my brother’s wedding album, Mom also hangs up a few portraits of Jake and Caitlin on the walls. “It was a beautiful day, Pat. We all wished you were there.”

The massive cathedral and the plush reception hall suggest that Caitlin’s family must have what Danny calls “mad cheddar,” so I ask what Caitlin’s father does for a living.

“For years he was a violinist for the New York Philharmonic, but now he teaches at Juilliard. Music theory. Whatever that
means.” Mom has finished hanging the framed pictures, and she sits next to me on the couch. “Caitlin’s parents are nice people, but they’re not really
our
kind of people, which became painfully obvious during the reception. How do I look in the pictures?”

In the photos, my mother wears a chocolate brown dress and a bloodred sash over naked shoulders. Her lipstick matches the sash perfectly, but it looks as if she has on too much eye makeup, making her look sort of like a raccoon. On the plus side, her hair is in what Nikki used to call “a classic updo” and looks pretty good, so I tell Mom she photographs well, which makes her smile.

Tension occupies my father’s face; he does not look comfortable in any of the pictures, so I ask if he approves of Caitlin.

“She’s from a different world as far as your father’s concerned, and he did not enjoy interacting with her parents—
at all
—but he’s happy for Jake, in his own non-expressive way,” Mom says. “He understands that Caitlin makes your brother happy.”

This gets me thinking about how strange my father was at my own wedding, refusing to speak to anyone unless he was spoken to first and then answering everyone with monosyllabic responses. I remember being mad at my father during the rehearsal dinner because he would not even look at Nikki, let alone interact with her family. I remember my mother and brother telling me that Dad did not deal well with change, but their explanation meant nothing to me until the next day.

Halfway through the Mass, the priest asked the congregation if they would hold Nikki and me up in their prayers, and as instructed, we turned to face the response. I instinctively looked toward my parents, curious to see if my father would say the words “we will” like he was supposed to, chanting along with everyone else, and this is when I saw him wiping his eyes with a tissue and biting down on his lower lip. His whole body was
trembling slightly, as if he were an old man. It was the strangest sight, my father crying during a wedding that had seemed to make him so annoyed. The very man who never showed any emotions other than anger was crying. I kept staring at my father, and when it became obvious that I was not going to turn back toward the priest, Jake—who was my best man—had to give me a little nudge to break the spell.

Sitting on the couch with my mother, I ask her, “When were Caitlin and Jake married?”

My mother looks at me strangely. She doesn’t want to mention the date.

“I know it happened when I was in the bad place, and I also know that I was in the bad place for years. I’ve accepted that much.”

“Are you sure you really want to know the date?”

“I can handle it, Mom.”

She looks at me for a second, trying to decide what to do, and then says, “The summer of 2004. August seventh. They’ve been married for just over two years now.”

“Who paid for the wedding photos?”

My mother laughs. “Are you kidding me? Your father and I never could have afforded that fancy sort of wedding album. Caitlin’s parents were very generous, putting together the album for us and allowing us to blow up whatever photos we wanted and—”

“Did they give you the negatives?”

“Why would they give us—”

She must see the look on my face, because Mom stops speaking immediately.

“Then how did you replace the photos after that burglar came and stole all the framed photos in the house?”

Mother is thinking how best to answer as I wait for her response; she begins chewing on the inside of her cheek the way she sometimes does when she is anxious. After a second, she calmly says, “I called up Caitlin’s mother, told her about the burglary, and she had copies made that very week.”

“Then how do you explain these?” I say just before pulling framed wedding pictures of Nikki and me out from behind the pillow at the far end of the love seat. When my mother says nothing, I stand and return my wedding picture to its rightful place on the mantel. Then on the wall by the front window I rehang the picture of my immediate family gathered around Nikki in her wedding dress—her white train spilling out across the grass toward the camera. “I found the ‘Pat’ box, Mom. If you really hate Nikki so much, just tell me, and I’ll hang the pictures up in the attic, where I sleep.”

Mom doesn’t say anything.

“Do you hate Nikki? And if so, why?”

My mother will not look at me. She’s running her hands through her hair.

“Why did you lie to me? What else have you lied about?”

“I’m sorry, Pat. But I lied to …”

Mom does not tell me why she lied; instead she starts to cry again.

For a very long time, I look out the window and stare at the neighbors’ house across the street. Part of me wants to comfort my mother—to sit down next to her and throw an arm over her shoulders, especially since I know my father has not talked to her in more than a week and is happily eating takeout three times a day, doing his own laundry, and weathering the relative squalor. I have caught Mom cleaning here and there, and I know she is a
little upset about her plan not working out like she hoped it would. But I am also mad at my mother for lying to me, and even though I am practicing being kind rather than right, I can’t find it in me to comfort her right now.

Finally I leave Mom crying on the couch. I change, and when I go outside for a run, Tiffany is waiting.

When we finish discussing our Kubb tournament victory and Mrs. Patel’s extraordinary ability to render an exact likeness of Brian Dawkins’s bust on the hood of a school bus, I pick the black recliner and tell Cliff I am a little depressed.

“What’s wrong?” he says, pulling the lever and raising his footrest.

“Terrell Owens.”

Cliff nods, as if he were expecting me to bring up the wide receiver’s name.

I did not want to talk about this earlier, but it was reported that Terrell Owens (or T.O.) tried to kill himself on September 26. News reports stated that T.O. overdosed on a pain medication. Later, after T.O. was released from the hospital, he said he did not try to kill himself, and then everyone began to think he was crazy.

I remember T.O. as a young 49er, but Owens was not on the 49ers’ roster when I watched the Eagles play in San Francisco a few weeks ago. What I learned from reading the sports pages was that T.O. had played for the Eagles when I was in the bad place, and he had helped the Birds get to Super Bowl XXXIX, which I do not remember at all. (Maybe this is good, since the Eagles lost, but not remembering still makes me feel crazy.) T.O. apparently held out for more money the next year, said bad things about Eagles QB Donovan McNabb, was suspended for the second half of the season, and then was actually cut from the team, so he signed with the very team Eagles fans hate most—the Cowboys. And because of this, everyone in Philadelphia currently hates T.O. more than just about anyone else on the planet.

“T.O.? Don’t worry about him,” Cliff says. “Dawkins is going to hit him so hard that Owens will be afraid to catch any balls at the Linc.”

“I’m not worried about T.O. making catches and scoring touchdowns.”

Cliff looks at me for a second, as if he does not know how to respond, and then says, “Tell me what worries you.”

“My father refers to T.O. as a psychopathic pill popper. And on the phone this week, Jake also made jokes about T.O. taking pills, calling Owens a nutter.”

“Why does this bother you?”

“Well, the reports I read in the sports pages claimed that T.O. was possibly battling depression.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I say, “that would suggest maybe he needs therapy.”

“And?”

“If Terrell Owens is really depressed or mentally unstable, why do the people I love use it as an excuse to talk badly about him?”

Cliff takes a deep breath. “Hmmm.”

“Doesn’t my dad understand that I’m a psychopathic pill popper too?”

“As your therapist, I can confirm that you are clearly not psychopathic, Pat.”

“But I’m on all sorts of pills.”

“And yet you are not abusing your medications.”

I can see what Cliff means, but he doesn’t really understand how I feel—which is a mix of very complicated and hard-to-convey emotions, I realize—so I drop the subject.

When the Dallas Cowboys come to Philadelphia, the fat men’s tent and the Asian Invasion bus are combined to create a super party that again features a Kubb tournament on Astroturf, satellite television, Indian kabobs, and much beer. But I cannot concentrate on the fun, because all around me is hatred.

The first things I notice are the homemade T-shirts other tailgaters are buying and selling and wearing. So many different slogans and images. One has a cartoon of a small boy urinating on the Dallas star, and the caption reads
dallas sucks. t.o. swallows
…
pills.
Another shirt has a large prescription bottle with the universal skull-and-crossbones poison symbol on the label and
terrell owens
written underneath. Yet another version features the pill bottle on the front and a gun on the back, under which the caption reads T.O.,
if at first you don’t succeed, buy a gun.
A nearby tailgater has nailed T.O.’s old Eagles jersey to a ten-foot cross, which is also covered with orange prescription bottles that look exactly like mine. People are burning their old T.O. jerseys in the parking lot; human-size dolls in T.O. jerseys are strung up so people can hit them with bats. And even though
I do not like any Dallas Cowboy, I feel sort of bad for Terrell Owens because maybe he really is a sad guy who is having trouble with his mind. Who knows, maybe he really did try to kill himself? And yet everyone mocks him, as if his mental health is a joke—or maybe they want to push him over the edge and would like nothing more than to see T.O. dead.