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- The Great American Short Story
- by Andrea Gollin
My name is Jane. I'm going to tell you about myself, my brother Dick, and our dog Spot. First of all, forget everything you've ever read about us before. It's all lies; I've never eaten a piece of apple pie in my life; I wanted to get a cat and name her Cleopatra but we got Spot instead; and our house isn't white with green shutters, it's puke green with white shutters.
My dad called it army green. The last thing he did before he killed himself was to paint the house three times. First he hired someone to paint it white, but he didn't like the final effect. I still can't figure that out, since it was white in the first place. The he had it painted "Spanish Salmon," but the painters made a mistake and used the next color over on the color chart. We wound up with a baby-pink house, which wasn't too hot. So my dad decided to do it himself. He picked out the color, and bought the paint and brushes and a ladder, and he painted the house.
It took him a year and a half to do it, and the day he finished he committed hara-kiri in the kitchen. He took my mom's sharpest meat knife and stuck it through his stomach. He was really into karate--he watched Bruce Lee movies all the time on TV. He used to run around the house trying to knock pictures off the walls with his feet while the rest of the neighborhood played tennis.
Dick still thinks it was an accident. I've lost track of the number of times I've told him, "Dick, people don't just stick themselves through with knives by accident."
Dick's gay. My personal theory is that Dad was gay too, but he couldn't come to terms with homosexuality. Dick says that there's no way Dad was gay, and on the off-chance that it was intentional, it was because he couldn't come to terms with Dick's homosexuality. He thinks he's worth dying for, which I've told him many times is just not true. Once I asked my mother what she thought. "No, Jane, of course he wasn't a homosexual. He had two children and two affairs while we were married."
My mother is ignorant. Actually, she's worse than ignorant; she's dumb. She's having an affair with her analyst, and he still makes her pay for office hours. When I told her to face the fact that her psychoanalyst is a male prostitute, she grounded me for three weeks and made me responsible for Spot's food, water, and pooper-scooper.
I hate Spot. He catches mice and brings them home to show us. He also has bladder- and bowel-control problems. I can't wait until he dies. Dogs are supposed to have shorter lives than people but the way it's going, Dick will probably croak before Spot. I really don't want to be around when he catches his case of pneumonia.
The other day we had a little crisis. Mom found out she was pregnant. Dick told her to get an abortion and give up the bisexual life for straight homosexuality. That was news to me. It turns out that she's also having an affair with out cleaning woman. I said she should stop paying people to have sex with her.
She consulted the psychoanalyst, and the abortion was yesterday. Dick and I took a taxi to the hospital and brought Mom home. We made a "Welcome Home Mom" card and we had a little party. I defrosted a Sara Lee desert for the occasion. It was going pretty well until Spot shit in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Dick said that tomorrow he's taking Spot to the vet to be put to sleep. I'll believe it when I see it.