Play

By Ariel Pakier

The doorbell rang.

“Pause it!” my brother shouted as he sprinted down the stairs, grabbing my wallet to pay the Chinese food deliveryman. I sat on the couch, surrounded by styrofoam containers, cheese crusted pizza boxes, empty soda cans, and packets of mustard, soy, and duck sauce.

My brother and I had made a home for ourselves in the living room, fueling up on every kind of takeout that Queens had to offer. There was no way either of us was getting up until we finished watching all the tapes. He came back up and we ripped through the brown paper bag, found our boxes of food, and pressed play.

On the screen was myself as a toddler at a petting zoo with my stroller bound brother. My mother was instructing me to leave the food pellets in my hand and let the goats come to me rather than throw the food at them.

“You’re such a moron. What kind of retard can’t even feed a goat? You look like you have Down’s Syndrome.”

“I wouldn’t talk Mr. IHaveNoControlOverMyOwnSaliva. You have a pool of drool on your shirt. You look like you’ve just gone through a round of electroshock therapy.”

She then handed the camera to my father and came into the frame to show me the proper petting zoo etiquette. This was not the first tape where my mother was on camera but her presence was still jarring. Seeing her movement, hearing her voice, it just made me think. I watched myself as a toddler, giggling at the goats, wrapped in my mother’s arms. Would I ever be that happy again?

Then, we heard a key slowly unlock the front door. “What is going on in…” my father froze, staring at the television screen. My brother and I exchanged panicked looks but neither of us moved. After what seemed like an hour of still silence my father turned to both of us and threatened, “Those tapes better go back exactly where you found them and you better not ruin any of them!” He was furious with me for going through his belongings and even more furious I had openly brought my mother’s memory back into all of our lives. From then on my father pretended that no one was in the living room and the television wasn’t on.

Two days before, while rummaging through my father’s bottom night table drawer looking for eye drops, I spotted a large sealed cardboard box under my father’s bed that I had never noticed before. I pulled the box out from the dusty nook under his bed and ripped off the tape. Inside were at least two dozen VHS tapes. I must admit I was skeptical looking through tapes I had found hidden under my father’s bed, but I read the labels anyway. Each had a year, and either mine or my brother’s name on it. I grabbed the box and ran into the living room where our only VCR was. I popped in the first tape, pressed play, and felt my stomach sink as the sound of my mother’s voice filled the room.

My mother had passed away of uterine cancer two years prior. After her passing I became obsessed with the idea of remembering her voice. I would call her cell phone and just listen to her outgoing voicemail message over and over again. My father eventually had to cancel her cell phone service, so I would try to think of her laugh, her calling my name, her on the phone, anything to keep remembering.

Watching the videos was a lot like the hours Oren and I used to spend playing Mario World. Every glimpse of my mother was like the collection of a coin, hoping that if we collected enough we would be granted a new life. We watched ourselves as toddlers. I was spunky, or as my brother put it, “a bratty little asshole.” I was a skilled artist even at the prime age of three and was sketching portraits of my cousin on an Etch-a-Sketch. When I revealed my work of genius my cousin Doug was quick to reply, “You should quit now and become a lawyer.”

“Haha look, Doug has hair!”

“Well, at least he still has his sense of humor.”

My brother was just as amusing as a toddler. In one video, my father was holding my brother, and every time my father turned his head, my brother would punch him. My father kept taking his hands, unclenching his fists, making a petting motion on his face saying, “No! Nicely, nicely.” My brother was of course too smart for this and would humor my father, continuing to pet him, lulling him into a false sense of security, and then BAM, he would punch him again. My brother and I watched this video at least four times. I couldn’t remember the last time we laughed so hard together.

Every once in a while we would catch my father stealing glimpses at the television screen from the kitchen. I wanted my father to be a part of this. I wanted him to think about her, to talk about her, at least with us.

“Hey dad, who is that guy in the background with the crazy mustache?”

“Ariel, I’m doing the dishes right now. I can’t come see.”

“Dad, it will take two seconds. Just come over here. I paused it.”

“Ariel!”

“Dad!”

“Fine! Who?”

“That guy. How can you miss the mustache?”

“Oh, that’s Chezi “

“Chezi?’

“Yeah. He was one of my best friends when I first moved here from Israel. Your mother and I used to have dinner all the time with him and his wife Monica until they went through a crazy divorce. Your mother always loved her and it was never quite the same with just Chezi. Well, is that all you wanted? You know I have a lot of work to do.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

My father came by more often, asking us what we were watching, and sitting down if he had “a spare moment.” My father began to tell us stories.

“Did I tell you about the time your mother an I went to New Orleans and a drunk man followed us screaming “’Inspector Clouseau?’”

“No, but I’m going to order some more pizza. Your treat.”

My brother and I stayed in the rest of the weekend, gorging ourselves with food, only moving from the couch when we had to go to the bathroom, answer the phone, or answer the door for more food. The videos gave us an excuse to sit down and talk. We were able to just laugh, something that seemed impossible days before. We even managed to get my father involved.

My brother updated me on life at home: the stupid things our dad did, how he found out that the crazy pot-smoking grandmother who lives in the apartment downstairs from us used to be a member of the Black Panthers, how my dad knew this and still lent her my car, highlights from his basketball games, things I missed out on being away at school. I in turn told him about college life, the time my roommate was sleep talking and menacingly said, “And no one will ever know,” about the hockey games, concerts, crazy professors, just any anecdote I thought he would love. We sat and laughed and made fun of each other for the dumb things we got ourselves in to. It felt good to laugh, to enjoy each other’s company, to smile in our apartment without feeling guilty about enjoying it without my mother’s presence.

Strangely enough, it took my mother to bring us back into ourselves, back into our teasing, our laughing, and back into the relationship we once shared. My brother wanted to convert the tapes to DVD’s and put them on his iPod. He clung to the tapes as if they were solely responsible for our happiness, afraid to put them away and lose it all again. The tapes didn’t give us anything we didn’t already have; they just reminded us it was there. It was time for us all to take our lives off pause, press play and make new memories.