Reading Super Sad True Love Story, I ran into a passage I didn’t understand to my satisfaction:

When we were walking home, our stomachs filled with garlic and chili, the summer heat without and the pepper heat within covering our bodies with a lovely sheen, I started to ponder what Eunice had said. It was sad, according to her, that the Asian man did not have a wife or girlfriend to tell him not to drink Coca-cola. A grown man had to be told how to behave. He needed the presence of a girlfriend or wife to curb his basest instincts. What monstrous disregard for individuality! As if all of us didn’t lust, on occasion, for a drop of artificially sweetened liquid to fall upon our tongues.

But then I started thinking about it from Eunice’s point of view. The family was eternal. The bonds of kinship could never be broken. You watched out for others of your kind and they watched out for you. Perhaps it was I who had been remiss, in not caring enough for Eunice, in not correcting her when she ordered garlicky sweet-potato fries or drank a milkshake without the requisite vitamin boost. Wasn’t it just yesterday, after I had commented on our age difference, that she had said, quite seriously, “You can’t die before me, Lenny.” And then, after a moment’s consideration: “Please promise me that you’ll always take of yourself, even when I’m not around to tell you what to do” (Shteyngart 166-167).

So I took off my clothes, to better feel the air conditioner on my back and butt, and to free myself of the coarse fabric, which sometimes drew an itching, burning blush across my skin, and stood, holding Super Sad open in my left hand, my right fingering the page, head down, skin hot and naked in the light, ponderous next to my father’s old upright piano, trying to figure out, precisely, what it could all mean.

Eunice was asking Lenny literarily to live for her, to stay alive for her. This was his obligation: to take care of himself, for her sake. And now, staring at the uneven keys of the piano, I thought of my parents. My mother always on my Dad about his weight, guilting him for eating that hefty French dip at La Boulangerie or for ordering a Starbucks’ whole cream latte, all in the effort to diminish his almost perfectly round belly, which he nicknamed “the hemisphere,” or “hemi” for short. ¹

And even more fundamental, their eternal argument, Dad’s OCD. My mom incessant: he must try to get a handle on it, the stress will give him a heart attack, it’s ruining our marriage, his life, our friendship, he’s becoming abusive, dysfunctional, he can’t even leave our house without us attending to him. And, of course, always the question. The question that germinates in the most selfish and selfless part of ourselves (which I imagine resides somewhere at esophagus’ end); the one that spreads tension across the chest and plucks, as if a cord, at our breathing; the question I knew my mother had asked herself because I had asked myself: Why, if he loves me, won’t he make the effort to control it?

I thought of recent incidents, long after my Dad had moved into his own house a few blocks down the street. I thought of his frequent visits to my house (which I think he still considers his home), and how the night would end.

Always the same ritual.

First, the hour-long stare at the stove, body poised at the head of the kitchen as far away as possible from the shiny black knobs that govern the gas flow to the burners. His arms held carefully away from his body, wrinkles forming just above his nose lifting the bridge of his glasses, he would watch the knobs like a goose watches a fox, ever ready for flight. This desperate vigilance to prevent the cooking gas asphyxiating me and my mother in our sleep.

Then, a long motionless listen to assure himself that the air-conditioning had been turned off; the noise might keep awake the neighbors; who knows, one of them could be a surgeon and slaughter his patient on the table the next day due to lack of sleep.

 And next, his caress of our sleek Apple airport, to certify that it was, indeed, free of printer paper; the damn thing got so hot it might just burst the 8½ by 11 kindle aflame, and then the whole house would go up.

Either my mother or myself would escort him out the front door. I let him out most nights, as I felt myself the necessary cushion that allowed my father and mother to remain so close. But on rare nights, often winter nights, I would say, “No mom, you do it. I’m tired. I always do it. You do it for once.” And alone in my bedroom I would shake my tie-dyed comforter, spread the feathers, clinging in a thick roll at one end, evenly beneath the cloth, hoist myself onto my ridiculously tall bed, wrap the feathers and sheets around me, and curl up righteously on my stomach. I would hear them hug, exchange a voiced “Love,” the hinges swing and the door thud. Then my dad would check that the door had been locked.

Clunk, clunk, clunk. Clunk, clunk, clunk. The unsatisfying waltz he tugged from the handle, the heavy oak door straining against its frame, and the vital winter air, which I knew remained in the foyer after his exit, amassing its chill across the slate tile floor.

Pull, pull, pull. Clunk, clunk, clunk. In all my memory this waltz never achieved its final cadence. “I can’t take it anymore,” would cut it short, my mother shouting in exasperation, a little wild with concern, and a thimble of hostility prodding her voice into wavering. “OK OK I’ll go home,” he would say through the door, through the cold. And the beat would cease before its end. Dad would drift off the porch to linger in front of my bedroom window. I could divine his bulk through the screen: wisps of hair waving from his head, his shoulders broad with worry, his pants tucked into his socks, and his stomach, his hemi, bulging taught and circular. He would stand alert and silent, a dark eminence against the pine trees, growing in our dark and silent soil.² He would stand against the spicy wood exhaust flowing from the next-door chimney, and against the security light affixed to the garage across the street. Thumbing my ipod, I would pause the playback of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or All Creatures Great and Small (the British accent always a reliable anesthesia), and twisting my elbow into the sheets, resting my head on my palm, I would say, “Dad?”

A breath.

Then, “Yes?”

The situation, this sixty-year-old man lurking in the yard outside my bedroom, I would laugh.

“What?” Dad would say. And his chuckle would be rendered as precisely as right angles on drafting paper.

“Go home Dad. You need to sleep.”

Then, after three and a half heartbeats, “OK, OK.”

“Dad, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’m really busy tomorrow. I have a meeting with the lawyers in the afternoon.”

“How about coffee in the morning?”

“Yeah…yeah that should be OK. Just don’t call me too early. I won’t be able to sleep if I think you might call and wake me up.”

“I won’t call. How’s ten sound?”

“Ten’s good. Right. OK. Ten. At Starbucks.”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Good. Ten O’clock.”

“Yeah.”

“At Starbucks.”

“Yes.”

“Ten O’clock.”

“Go home dad.”

“OK OK OK. Front door locked?

“Yes.”

“Phone on the hook?”

“Dad, you need to sleep.”

“OK. OK. You’re right…It’s just I don’t want the cats lying next to it on couch and getting cancer.”

“Good night.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Good night…Love.”

“Love.”

I wouldn’t tap the play button again until I could hear his engine, see his taillights glow like a red UFO through my window. Then I would turn my face to my pillow, the familiar smell of sweat in the heat of my blanket, and sleep.