O, Brother!

         My brother and I go back to the beginning. This is both an oxymoron and a revelatory truth.

         I’ll explain.

         Phil’s birthday is today. I bought him a ceramic coffee mug. Inscribed on the mug is happy 70th. you’re old. get over it.

         That’s not the only thing I got him, of course. We have our jokes. Inside the mug is a gift certificate from L.L. Bean. We’re fly fishermen. Bean has fly fishing stuff.

         I’m seventeen months older than Phil. That means I got to use the car first. I went off to college first. Like that. Our mother had just the two of us. Pop’s been dead over forty years. Mom died on Mother’s Day—it’s the truth—two years ago. We’re what’s left, not to exclude the kids, of course, and the grandkids on Phil’s side. Mom did my birthday in October and Phil’s in March. It was all family for Mom. Phil and I wanted to keep it going. Phil lives in the Bay Area. I live in the Central Valley. Now it’s March. Phil is seventy today.

         We meet for lunch at Spenger’s, a Berkeley seafood grotto that goes back farther than Phil and I do. Pop took us there when we were kids. A corporate chain owns it now, but it’s the same outside, and Grandma Spenger still lives upstairs. The bar’s the same, the teak wheel in the middle of the room, the chairs between the spokes. We corner the wheel. Phil brings his girlfriend. I bring mine. Whatever kids can attend come. Phil has three. I have two. This time, however, it’s only me. My son has to work. My daughter is in Seattle. She never comes. Ellen, my friend, is busy.

         So I drove over.

         We sit around the wheel. It’s been only a couple years, but already there’s a pattern. We don’t order lunch. We order appetizers, plates of appetizers. We order beer and wine. We share. It’s a common meal. We dip our fingers and eat. It must have been what the ancestors on Mom’s side did in Lebanon.

         Seventy years. What’s to say? We talk about fly-fishing. We plan our trips to Montana and Idaho. We’ve gone to Alaska, Canada, New Zealand, and Chile. It’s what we do. Fly-fishing. That’s the oxymoron.

         Let me explain.

         Pop was a fly fisherman. He taught us in the high Sierra, when hardly anyone was doing it. Campsites along the Mokelumne. Up at the crack of dawn, down river with the two fly dropper system. Black gnat on the bottom. Royal coachman on top. No one fishes that way anymore. We fished that way. We spread the trout we caught upon a coarse, woolen blanket. I have the photographs. They were in Mom’s hall closet.

         Nothing matters when you’re ten years old and have the dropper swing. I wasn’t learning anything from Phil. What was Phil learning from me? Everything was big, outside, certainly, but big, and all we wanted was to go there and live where everything was.

         Then you’re seventy.

         Revelation.

         I’ll explain.

         Who else do you spend a childhood with? Who else survives that time but a brother? There wouldn’t be any wife. Not even a girlfriend. There’s just a brother. You sleep in the same room. You eat the same food. You see the same thing. You go to the same places. Your parents drive. You’re in the rear seat. A bond forms, deeper than blood. You listen. Even with a seventeen-month lead, everywhere you are, there he is too, your brother, like an extra brain or heart. It’s the foundation for understanding. The years pile on. You’re seventeen months ahead. What can you say? Maybe something happened or you did something. But he’s not where you are. He’s there, of course, but he’s never going to catch up.

         That’s the illusion.

         That’s the oxymoron.

         So Phil is seventy, sitting beside me between two spokes of an enormous wheel, only now, who can tell the difference? We’re gray-haired old men. His children and grandchildren are here. They surround him, like petals on a wooden flower. I kid him about Viagra. He kids me about Lipitor. We order the appetizers.

         “So I’m tying plenty of grasshoppers for the Boulder,” I offer.

         “Good,” he replies, looking at me out of the corner of his eyes. “It’s going to be another drought year in Montana. We’ll need plenty of grasshoppers.”

         “Sure knocked them last year, though, didn’t we, Phil? The ol’ hopper with a dropper.”

         He frowns and plunges his fingers into the calamari. “You and that damned competition. What if you did get the biggest rainbow? I got the biggest brown.”

         “Unverified, though,” I say. “Definitely, unverified.”

         “You were downstream.”

         “Well,” I laugh. “What’s with the competition thing? I take your word for it. Just clean fun. They’ll be bigger this year. You watch.”

         “Ever the optimist,” Phil says.

         Something drops in me, like a rope bridge between rock walls. I struggle to be a twin, but how can there be equilibrium, not with that seventeen-month lead, which asserts itself subtly, temperamentally, at any time, with no choice on my part. It makes the entire room push away. It leaves me with my fingers in the calamari, alone in the desert.

         Candace, his girlfriend, sits to his left. She is busy with control, passing the plates as they arrive, seeing to the drinks. She’s not like Marian, his ex-wife, but she is, if you know what I mean. There’s that thin, hard edge behind the eyes whenever she doesn’t get her way. Phil has made the same mistake.

         But my divorce was first, naturally. Phil said, with my house in the country and my kids in the private school where Cheryl, their mother, taught kindergarten, “I thought you had it made.”

         The competitive thing.

         I didn’t have it made, of course, but the remark told me that things between Marian and Phil were tenuous. Then he had the affair, which, in a reflex of guilt—a carryover of our Catholic upbringing—he confessed to her one bleak night in winter. Marian got hysterical. He called me. I drove over on the interstate and practiced a kind of brotherly therapy, from the vantage point of seventeen months. Marian was furious. Phil wept. I pointed this out to Marian. She was mollified. They reconciled. Phil looked at me gratefully through shining eyes. I gasped. I felt something there, out there, from the one person who had been around from the beginning. Had Phil come up to speed?

         No luck. Six months later they were divorced. I was where I was, and Phil was over there, specifically and metaphysically.

         So much for a foundation of understanding.

         Phil opens his presents. He tears at the wrapping paper. He yanks at the ribbons. The floor is littered. Crap is piled upon the wheel in front of him. He shoves the shrimp and calamari aside.

         A collapsible wading staff. Shirts from Nordstrom. A landing net. Polypropylene socks. A baseball cap that says trout bum. A box of See’s chocolates. Three dozen lottery tickets from Larry, his son, who is a house painter. A digital camera from Candace. Books. A blue sweat suit from Candace (sweat suits are all he wears now). A gift certificate from a restaurant in Santa Cruz, where his daughter lives. My coffee mug.

         He has it to himself. No shoving from me under a Christmas tree. No waiting his turn behind seventeen months. It’s delightful. I sit back. I watch. It’s Phil. It’s Phil’s goddamn birthday, one day out of the year. It’s Phil’s seventieth birthday. I cross my arms. It’s funny. This is my family, my extended family, to be exact. I include Candace. Phil and Candace have been together more than twenty-five years, more than Phil had been with Marian. She doesn’t go back to the dessert, of course. No black hair. No black eyes. But what the hell? Aren’t we all ancestors, digging our fingers into life? One big, happy family?

         That’s the oxymoron.

         The waitperson brings the dessert tray. She is the same waitperson who did my celebration seven months ago. Her name is Ginger. So we call her Ginger. We look at the chocolate, caramel and cream-filled things arranged in a circle. I don’t want dessert. Dessert has plugged the arteries. But it’s Phil’s birthday, for christsakes.

         Candace orders one of everything.

         Fate intervenes.

         We drink coffee and put our forks into the desserts Ginger brings. The desserts go around the table like edible jewels. I take my share.

         When Mom was alive, we had these parties at her place, a small, two-bedroom house we rented for her on Poplar Street. She always made more than one dessert. Pumpkin pie and chocolate cake and brown sugar fudge. There was a lazy Susan. We sat around and dipped our fingers. Mixed nuts, M&M’s, potato chips, York mints, caramel chews wrapped in cellophane. She made raviolis and fried chicken. She always had a bowl of green beans. We called her Green Beans. She got old. Then we went out for dinner. Chinese. Indian. Mexican. But she always managed dessert and the lazy Susan. We’d go back to her place after the Chinese or whatever. It was timeless. She was ninety-six when she died. I found her, legs crossed, lying on the dining room floor in an eternal nap. I carried her into the bedroom and called 911, just before Phil arrived from the Bay Area. We stood together looking down at Mom before they took her away. “We’ll be closer now than ever,” I said. He agreed.

         That was Mother’s Day, two years ago.

         Why is everything a life story?

         So we sing. Ginger brings over some of her waitperson buddies. They stand above Phil. Everybody sings.

         “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Phil-l. Happy birthday to you.”

         Ginger has a vanilla cupcake with a candle. Phil blows it out. Ginger fills the glasses with champagne. We finish the desserts, down to the last crumb.

         Then it’s over. We sit around wondering what to do. Candace goes outside for a cigarette with Jean, Larry’s wife. Phil and I pay the bill. I have a couple of cigars. I give one to Phil.

         We stroll up the street from Spenger’s. The women look into the shops. We sit outside and puff.

         “I hope the water isn’t too low on the Boulder, though,” I say.

         “Just low enough for hoppers,” Phil replies.

         “I’ll have them all ready,” I say.

         “That’s good,” says Phil. “We’ll need them.”

         There it is.

         Your brother sleeps in the same room with you. He eats the same food. He sees and hears the same things. Your world is his world, but only, it seems, in some arcane, historical way. The same events occur, but they’re not recorded in the same way.

         A lot of my friends are leaving too, who, if they don’t go back to those first days, have been around long enough for me to have learned something. Their names appear in the paper. I’m experiencing not so much a mourning as an odd resentment that they have slipped away, and I did not know them. But your brother is your brother. There is no other brother.

         That’s the oxymoron.

         That’s the revelation.

         When is a story a story and not a commentary? The containment of time by drama is necessary if we are to live, but what holds the narrative together is hidden irrevocably by a seventeen-month lead.

         Life does not imitate art.

         All the trout in the world, behind dark stones at the bottom of the stream, don’t mean a thing if you can’t go there and breathe. Caged, with eyeholes and a mouth to eat, you spend your days alone feeding and end up starved.

         It’s enough to make you believe you have a soul.

         “So, what do you say, Phil?”

         “About what?” he replies.

         The girls are coming up the street. The Berkeley air is crisp and clean and smells of the sea. I clap him on the shoulder and stand up.

         “Oh, nothing,” I laugh. “It’s time to go.”

         He is my brother. It is foolish to expect anything more. Don’t misunderstand. I am not a fatalist. But I refuse to dust the furniture.

         I’m first.

         That’s the way it is.

         Still, I would give anything I own to know what my brother will think, looking for me on that last day.

Richard Dokey