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At the risk of sounding obtuse, we open with an acutely unearned quote from the foreboding entry to Leo Tolstoy’s labyrinthine novel, Anna Karenina: 

“All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

What Tolstoy failed to mention in this all-encompassing statement, or at least failed to specify, is that some families are a Frankensteinian conglomeration of mildly disgruntled mismatched parts, periodically forced into stifling, vaguely condescending conversation during weddings, bar-mitzvahs, and funerals. The unhappiness of most families can primarily be attributed to that age-old and paradoxically undisputed proclamation: blood is thicker than water. 

The blood of the Weingarten family: robust, thick, and vaguely Eastern European, pumped with arterial vigor around the Northeastern United States. Their general prosperity in the financial realm was ultimately attributed to its eldest living patriarch, Lev Weingarten, and his extensive collection of priceless medieval manuscripts. He made his fortune through the acquisition and later auctioning of an illuminated Gutenberg Bible. Lev, a once virile and spirited young thing was now eighty-five and presently confined to the leather easy chair where he took all of his meals and the occasional bowel movement. His accent and heritage were of dubious origin, supposedly hailing from some tiny village in some long-forgotten principality in the wilds of Germany’s Black Forest. Where his extensive collection of manuscripts came from was never determined, seeing as Lev refused to speak on the subject; the secret eventually being buried 

with him along with a jewel-encrusted reliquary containing a lock of ginger hair (unidentified), a well-worn deck of Ukrainian playing cards, a silver cigarette case, and the latest issue of the TV Guide. 

With his wife, he had two doppelganger sons, two real grizzly bears. Perhaps in some involuntary desire to establish their firmly American loyalties, Artie and Joel Weingarten grew to be six feet and three inches tall, loud, athletic and covered in coarse, black hair. Hair that clung to the shower drain, collected in dark recesses, behind furniture, found its way into dinner plates and butter pats. Two identically nasal guffaws, matching polo shirts with matching sweat stains all over their backs. They had the same way of standing out on the patio in the summertime, legs thrown apart as if perched on invisible horses like two Roman cavalry officers. Arms crossed, hands shoved securely in their armpits, scrutinizing some potential problem with the gutters, a wasp's nest tucked away in the eaves of their old house. They were three-time world champions in doubles tennis, a fact that took precedence over all else. All four stories of that battleship of a house were bejeweled in tennis memorabilia, trophies with little golden men serving beady tennis balls, medals, an endless collection of framed photographs of old teammates, rivals, heroes, locker-room candids, and painfully staged group shots on the West Side Tennis Club courts. In the entryway, hanging above the console table, was the famous photograph from the Weingarten’s first world championship win; two sweaty, radiant twenty-somethings squinting into the camera, against the sunlight, features pulled taught into two identically toothy grins. 

That both men were married and with a child each was more of a peripheral afterthought. Especially for Artie, who had done the unthinkable and eloped with a French Catholic woman, the daughter of Tennessee ranchers, named Dotty. She kept herself generally invisible and wore an enigmatic half-smile to protect against the onslaught of passive-aggressive insinuations which flowed her way in a steady and unrelenting stream. Dotty and Artie had one daughter, who in this fictive present is still a semi-gelatinous, unknowingly affected ten-year-old named Robin. 

Joel and his equine wife, Rachel, managed to produce the Weingarten’s most visually dissimilar progeny. Harold Weingarten came out white as a Swedish virgin. No one knew quite where his color palette came from, what hidden genome sequencing weaseled its way through generation upon generation of dark curls and coffee bean eyes, pushing through to the surface of a man with the facial topography of a Third Reich era caricature. Harold looked like uncooked cauliflower. He was born blind in one eye, giving his gaze an amphibious inquisitiveness. A mountainous schnoz cut across the otherwise inscrutable calm of his face. He bruised easily and was always covered in delicate purple spots, all along his white arms and bony shins. He failed to inherit his father’s athleticism or desire to perform any form of physical activity past walking to the corner store for M&Ms and Pall Malls. 

Though he had been present at all of his father’s championship wins, he remembered little. What he did remember (with marked distaste) had nothing to do with any of the actual matches, and everything to do with the hard sunlight, too much ice cream, sharp blades of grass prickling at his bare legs. A dead bird in the parking lot. It had been covered in ants. Swarms, like a cloud of wriggling black peppercorns. 

But the end of August was always a sweaty month, emotionally sweaty. Family, friends, family friends all piled into the house, four to a bed, everyone else draped over couches made up lovingly with moth-eaten bedclothes dredged up from the back of the linen closet. Cots floating around the living room like boats in a harbor. The kitchen packed full of everyone's mother, fruit spreads growing warm on the kitchen counter and half-eaten bagels hardening by the dozens. Harold always dreaded the end of August. The U.S. Open meant nothing to him but a rude puncturing of the hazy bubble in which he drifted through summer. It meant poking and prodding by distant aunts and uncles, sharing his bedroom with cousins who broke his toys, snored, stuck their chewed gum to the underside of his desk, threw his books all over the floor. Then it would be Labor Day and then sure enough he would be back in school and there would be no more peace. But it was all different now, under the cool illusion of just turning a precocious twenty years old. The firm distance he wedged between himself and his family, himself and his past. He had his own friends now, or at least a group of honest guys who let him hang around. He had places to go, occasional dates. He was just there for the ride, to show some solidarity to the father and uncle who were quickly becoming some vague characters of the past; a shadowy obligation to attend to with uncaring nonchalance. Those impish cousins were all haggard and worn-out now, some were married. One had a kid. The end of August meant a return to college, the freedom to be a completely different person. To don a different mask. To ride around in the autumnal night, squeezed into the backseat of some bastard’s hand-me-down Oldsmobile. Laughter carries differently in the fall, it pierces. In the summer it stagnates in the air, reverberates in the atmosphere lingering and ghostly, haunting parking lots and playgrounds. The cold air makes everything fleeting, there is an immediacy, the grace to exist as a pinpoint in the present, a little dot hurtling through space. 

It was through a sense of newfound independence and a steadfast desire to remain untouched by petty familial tiffs, that Harold wrestled together the grace to host his second cousin Todd, the balding gynecologist, his terribly attractive wife Terry, and their two-year-old daughter Boo Boo, in his queen-sized captain’s bed; while Harold himself slept in an ominously stained sleeping bag on the floor. He even managed to maintain stoic neutrality while Todd fished around, with his typical obnoxious sense of ownership, through Harold’s books and magazines. 

Pulling something out at random and leafing through, rather indelicately. Eliciting only the slightest under-eye twitching from Harold as he obliviously licked thumb and forefinger to turn the page of some three-years out of date copy of The New Yorker. Harold observed his cousin from his vantage point on the floor, studied Todd’s uninteresting features which were being prematurely pulled down by gravity. He was only five years Harold’s senior but looked practically middle-aged. Harold watched Terry painting her toenails out of the corner of his eye, fancying her to have glanced in his direction at least twice in the last half-hour. He contentedly pictured himself on the stair landing, on some steamy, restless night. Moonlight filtering in from the transom in the foyer. All that would illumine Terry in her thin, fluttering robe as she accosted him with some improper suggestion. He would vehemently protest, telling her to think of Boo Boo, how he could never bring himself to touch the wife of his favorite cousin Todd, the balding gynecologist. She would tearfully lament (with heaving bosom) the absence of her sexual fulfillment despite her husband’s occupation. Harold would seize her firmly, yet gently by the slender wrists would send her back to bed with no more than a valiantly sober hint that this unrequited pining might have mutual implications. Three months later the cataclysmic news would arrive; Todd was killed tragically in a five-car pileup on the Palisades Parkway. Harold would swoop in to comfort the young widow, to whisk her off to Malibu where they would reside by the beach, while Boo Boo received a world-class education at an elite boarding school in Switzerland. For now, Harold contented himself with lighting her cigarette. In his reverie, he thought he perceived a certain wanton depravity in her lowered lashes and the glint of light on a row of perfect teeth. For the first time in his life, Harold felt damned sure of himself, and despite certain shortcomings in physical appearance, was quite convinced that every neglected woman in the Tri-State area was simply dying to jump into bed with him. 

———

By nightfall, everyone was red-faced, drunk, and spilling out of the house onto the patio. 

Todd and Terry had had an argument earlier in the day, something that started out inconsequential and gradually turned into a proxy dispute, place-holding some unspoken problem which Harold tried in vain to uncover from one of his other loud-mouthed relatives. The whole house vibrated with an intensity of raw emotion that proved inescapable. Children cried, loud toasts were announced with ever-increasing fervor, tearful confessions were made in the orange glow of the kitchen while a pie burned in the oven. At some point, Terry took the car and drove back to Yonkers. Harold listened to Todd’s griping as they stood on the stair landing, trying to seem engaged, even after he determined there was no extramarital affair or cause for a divorce involved in the incident. Todd’s monotone, holier-than-thou-art posturing all at once seemed entirely artificial. He complained that she spent too much money on clothes and having her hair fixed, that he didn’t like any of her friends, that she was an irresponsible mother, she was immature, drank too much, flirted with gas station attendants, ate too many sweets, was flighty, unfocused, didn’t read enough and when she did read it was never the right thing, chewed loudly, lacquered her nails in offensive colors, talked back, wore dresses unflattering to her figure, used too many night creams and smelled too perfumy. Harold seemed to feel himself grow ill listening to it all, for the more Todd spoke of her, the more apparent it became that he simply reveled in the disdain he held for his wife. The inescapable static frenzy shivering in the air, tickling at Harold’s senses from all sides made the lights seem too bright, the noise unbearably loud, building up like some fuzzy, claustrophobic substance. Not to mention, Todd’s tie on second glance was just a hair too long. The overhead lamp glinted off of his shiny bald spot with such artistic license it looked like plastic. Harold excused himself and rather abruptly turned around, 

marched down the stairs, and slipped, unnoticed, out the front door. All at once, the noise melted away into the ambient glow of city sounds, which were so ever-present that they seemed more a living silence. Cars were parked all up and down the street, double-parked, up on the curb, backed up the driveway five deep. There was an innocent emptiness just in front of the yellow fire hydrant where Todd and Terry’s car had been parked only an hour before. He snickered to himself at the thought of Todd, probably still standing there, fondling his drink with a dumbly perplexed look on his face. 

The phantom of a cool breeze played at the ripely foliated trees, the ivy snaking up the brick face of his childhood home. Just enough to tickle at the sweat beading his upper lip. Crouched down next to the curb, Robin Weingarten watched the gutter with an unbroken look of despair in her cartoonishly large and adorable eyes. Her jumper was hiked up past her bony knees exposing a pair of blue underpants spotted with little daisies. Harold stepped cautiously off of the porch with his hands in his pockets, trying not to disturb her concentration, but not wanting to frighten her. He paced in a little circle, trying absently to catch her eye, but she continued to stare into the gutter with her mouth open slightly. She refused to breathe through her nose. Finally, Harold walked up to the edge of the sidewalk, balancing with the tips of his canvas shoes jutting out over the curb. 

“What are we looking at, Robin?” The ‘R’ in her name had a harsh rumble to it that made most adults shy away into calling her little nicknames: Birdie, Bobby, Bobo, a series of increasingly condescending and cutesy crosses for her to bear. It wouldn’t have bothered him nearly as much had it not been for an incident several weeks prior; during after-dinner drinks, Robin tucked up in bed, he had heard his own mother refer to her as “the mutt.” He wondered if she knew what everyone saw when they looked at her. 

“Those two ugly boys were salting slugs here earlier. I think it’s terrible.”

“That’s pretty rough stuff,” Harold stepped off the curb and crouched down beside her. Scattered among the leaf mold, shriveled little turd-shaped carcasses lay in a dusting of 

kosher salt. “Which boys?”

“The ones who flooded the men’s room at the club last year.”

Harold knew the boys well, not by the matching monogrammed tennis sweaters they 

were made to wear by their divorcé mother, but rather by their mother’s sensual pout and svelte legs. “Ah, I see.” He watched as Robin needled a partially dried slug with the end of a stick, 

“What do you mean by ‘ugly’?” 

“I don’t know, I suppose they’re both rather snub-nosed. I don’t particularly like how the older one carries himself, he has a sort-of stoop. His hair is always too long. The younger one is always touching himself.” 

“Does salting slugs have anything to do with it? With them being ugly?”

“I suppose on an intellectual level.”

Harold was struck by a sudden and irresistible urge to hug her, bodily. He reached out and patted her dark hair, glossy and plaited painfully taught. There was a warmth emanating from her pate as if she’d been sitting in the sun. He supposed that little kids must produce more heat than adults. Perhaps becoming an adult meant that you’d burned through most of your energy, and the rest of your life was a bed of smoldering coals. Perhaps that was why Harold’s hands were always so cold. “Do you think I’m ugly?” Harold asked. 

“Yes, but only on the outside.” 

Looking at her, it was hard for Harold to imagine what Robin would look like in ten years' time; he felt a pang of jealousy at her own ignorance to what she might turn into, that she was still young enough to look in the mirror and see an honest reflection, to know what was staring back at her and be at peace with it. So at peace that she didn’t even know it was peace. Harold’s mother was always whispering about how her eyes, so big and watery, would look juvenile in a tacky sort of way on an adult. That her teeth would give her trouble in just a few years because buckteeth stop being cute by fourteen; that she was already taller than all the boys in her class, that she’d better pray to be done growing or she’d be stuck wearing flat shoes and flat hairstyles for the rest of her life. 

“I like that you’re honest, I think I can always trust you to tell me the truth, yes?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

——— 

“I think it’s a tragedy, an absolute tragedy,” said Harold’s great aunt, tapping her ridged fingernails against a sweating mimosa glass. “Bert had a lot riding on that match, you know.” She sighed in her thespian manner, exhaling a fine mist of stale saliva into the already balmy August air. Harold listened in silent amusement from the other side of the kitchen counter, scooping lukewarm fruit into Tupperware containers. Everyone had cleared out after the match, morosely, like a funeral procession. The house was, for one last time, in a flurry of activity. Silent packing and shuffling, beds were stripped. A volcanic pile of soiled linens sat at the top of the basement stairs. The cars choking the street were gone within a matter of hours, and the only ones left besides the usual household were those lookie-loo relatives who always hang around, uninvited, in the wake of unfortunate events. Though the rest of the house was silent in mourning, the kitchen remained a flutter of gossipy activity as kitchens are prone to do. Harold 

tried his best to remain the benevolent onlooker, doing little menial tasks and smiling to himself when his back was turned. Thank you so much for all your help, Harold, putting away all of that food, Dotty had tearfully thanked him, clasping his hands in simple-minded supplication. 

Artie and Jerry were nowhere to be found; they’d sped off in the family car as soon as the reality hit. They might be halfway to California by now, Harold thought. Or getting drunk at some pub in the Village. Or maybe they’d committed joint suicide. Murdered each other by the side of the interstate. It was sort of funny to think about: two identically ugly men, drenched in sweaty tennis gear, throttling each other all red-faced as the cars sped by in a constant stream. 

“You don’t have to save those, Harold,” his mother piped in from the kitchen table, gesturing with her cigarette to the platter of cupcakes he was making room for in the refrigerator. “Birdie’s had at least three of those today. She’ll get fat if she keeps it up.” Harold turned and scraped them into the overflowing trashcan, frosting splattered over old coffee filters, bits of a broken wine glass, rotting orange peels. Dotty absent-mindedly devoured her fingernails by the window. There was something about it all, about the August morning light, the cicadas rattling out a high note in the trees, the sound of complete stillness, the absence of a breeze, and the yellow kitchen that made it all appear like some kitschy watercolor painting. Harold, in peril of turning morbidly romantic, considered that he might love these people very much.

Abbey's short story won second prize in SVA's Annual Writing Contest in the spring of 2022. She is a junior majoring in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts. Abbey uses literature and writing to inspire her visual art work and vice versa.