Born Weird by Andrew Kaufman Page A

to come home.
    No one made dinner. Nine o’clock came and their mother wasn’t home. Then it was ten and she still wasn’t there. Just before midnight Richard turned on the television.
    “Triple Terror,”
he said.
    Every fourth Friday Cable 57 aired a show called
Triple Terror
. Starting at midnight they’d play three monster movies back to back to back. Under normal conditions the Weird children would wait until their mom and dad were sound asleep and then they’d all creep downstairs. They’d sit close to the TV and keep the volume low. They’d watch all three movies. Anyone falling asleep would be punched awake. They loved it if the movie was black and white. They loved it even more when you could see the strings on the flying saucers. But the ones they loved the most were the movies where the monster was obviously a man in a costume.
    The night of their father’s accident they watched all three movies. None of them fell asleep. After the monster movies they watched an infomercial and then the national anthem played and then the station began to broadcast a testpattern. They muted the television but they did not turn it off. They fell asleep, together, on the couches.
    When they woke up the next morning, their mother and grandmother still weren’t home.

R ICHARD , L UCY , A BBA , A NGIE and Paul stood on the lawn, looking up. After the board games came dishware. Then record albums. Then dress shoes. Once the siblings and Paul retreated to the sidewalk objects ceased being chucked from Angie’s former bedroom window. They all stood at the end of the driveway, staring at the dilapidated house.
    They had failed to anticipate that both the house and Kent would have slipped into such disrepair.
    “Where are we going to sleep?” Angie asked.
    “Can’t we get a hotel?” Paul said.
    “That’s so New York, Sir Spendalot,” Lucy said.
    “Hey,” Angie said to Paul. “They’re treating you like family!”
    “If we leave the property, so will Kent,” Richard said.
    “And we’ll never see him again,” Abba said.
    “Then maybe Paul and I can go?” Angie asked.
    “That’s not fair.”
    “Agreed.”
    “If one of us has to stay, we all have to stay.”
    “But I’m pregnant!”
    “That is really getting old, Angie.”
    “What about the camping stuff?” Abba asked.
    “Do you think it’s still there?” Angie asked.
    “Maybe Kent sold it,” Lucy said.
    “Or gave it away,” Abba said.
    “It’s a pretty safe bet that Kent hasn’t used it,” Richard said.
    In the mid-nineties Besnard had impulsively purchased camping equipment with the hopes of making them a tighter family unit. The gear had never been used. After several weeks of sitting in the front hallway, the equipment had been stored in the attic of the coach house. Which is exactly where they found it, perfectly preserved. There was a Coleman stove, a large cooler and three tents. Lucy and Abba shared one. Paul and Angie were given the second and Richard got one to himself.
    It was a perfect one-night solution. However, Kent showed no signs of venturing out, and so his siblings spent the next five days roughing it in the grassless backyard of Palmerston Boulevard. Taking shifts, one of them guarded the front door while another watched the back. This was done twenty-four hours a day. Those not standing guard were free to do as they pleased. Which turned into sitting around the picnic table in the backyard, drinking wine and playing cards. Except for the fact that their father was dead,their mother was institutionalized and their youngest brother occasionally threw objects at them from above, they were finally having the camping experience that Besnard had always envisioned.
    But four nights spent sleeping on an air mattress was all Angie’s pregnant body could take. On April 16, four days before Grandmother Weird’s birthday, she commandeered the coach house and sent Paul to IKEA to buy a bed. Just after 3:00 p.m., as afternoon sunlight