BIG FAT DEAD PEOPLE LIVE AND UNPLUGGED AT THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN SAG HARBOR, NY

I found a box full of old tapes. They were each labeled REVEREND CHRIS GRIMBOL, SERMON. That was my mother. She had died when I was eighteen, a week after I lost my virginity on a golf course to a temperamental Greek girl. 

I had not heard my mother’s voice in years. I missed her most of the time. Just not right then. Right then I didn’t miss her or the way things used to be or any of that. But I felt like I should listen to the tape anyway.

 After drinking a giant bottle of diet coke,   I got in my golden minivan, drove to the beach and waited for the sun to set. I wanted this moment to be perfect. I wanted to listen to my mother’s voice and cry and have everything be beautiful. I wanted it to be like the scene from a movie. I wanted to cry so hard that it would win me an Oscar. Or I would settle for the type of scene that would be in a Hallmark movie.

But I got impatient. It took too long for the sun to set. I decided to play the tape while looking at an ordinary sky.

The tape started with the church singing a hymn. It sounded awkward. Most of the congregation was just mumbling the song. It didn’t sound like singing. I fast-forwarded to my mother’s sermon.  

I had imagined my mom’s voice being deep and wise, like a fat female version of Malcom X. But her voice was nasally. She sounded more like Roseanne Barr. Her voice was high pitched. Something had to be wrong with the tape. I put on another tape, it sounded the same.

This was just what my mother’s voice had sounded like. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten her voice.

After her sermon they sang another hymn. It sounded awkward. It was as if no one in the church wanted to sing. Then I heard one voice over the rest. It was my mother. She sang each hymn like she was in an old timey opera. It was beautiful and obnoxiously loud. It made me laugh.

After I listened to the tape, I drove to my fathers place. It was only two in the afternoon and he was sitting on a lazy boy eating a popsicle.  His flannel mumu was hiked up and I could say too much leg. But at least his balls were hidden. Sometimes his mumu would get hiked up so far you could see his massive ball sack. It was unsettling.  

“Are we having another ice pop marathon?” I asked.

The old man could eat a dozen icey pops in one night.

“They are only two weightwatcher points,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Yeah, but you aren’t on weight watchers.”

I used to love how fat my mother was. I thought it made her cuddly. But I hated my father being fat. I was convinced the next icepop was going to kill him.  

“Did you come here to fight?” he asked.

“No.”

I sat down on the couch. He turned on the tv. His new wife, Patty, tried to get us to watch General Hospital.  My father didn’t like that show. He snagged the remote and started flipping through channels. I got bored and went to the kitchen and found myself an ice pop. It was delicious.

Eventually my father started watching some show on fashion. He was the least the fashionable guy in the world but he liked to pretend like he was some sort of style master. I grabbed the remote from him and started flipping through the channels. Reruns of Roseanne were on.

“We’re going to watch this,” I said. “And if there is another episode on, we are going to watch that to. You got it?”

“Fine,” my father said. “Why are you so moody?”

     “Just watch the show,” I said.