My Brother Says “What the Fuck”
7 Minutes Read Time
First thing to understand: its rhythm. The phrase should be scanned like “résumé.”
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The fore, middle, and aft vowels are nearly identical, trafficking between the short a, e, and u—assonance achieved by way of obscenity. An R-rated schwa.
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Which is to say that in Risky Business Tom Cruise is saying it incorrectly.
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When my brother curses in earnest, his voice is at its froggiest, deepest, and scratchiest. This makes the sweeter tenor that’s been surfacing in his early thirties all the more unexpected. On the phone I have to manage my surprise at the sound of our long-dead father’s voice coming through the line.
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The question is rhetorical. He does not expect his interlocutor to reply, “I’d be happy to tell you what the fuck, sir. If you’ll refer to this short PowerPoint I’ve put together . . .”
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Our father died when I was fifteen and my brother was ten. My recollections of his cussing are confined to “Shit!” and the like, due to hammer-related injuries and televised football plays gone wrong. But I fantasize about the forms those cusses might have taken in my life if he’d lived longer: teaching us off-color ditties of his prep-school youth in his lovely singing voice and the obscenities he’d picked up over the years in French, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These and so many other legacies left unbequeathed by his early passing.
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My mother, who died a few years after my father, was partial to a Brooklyn-inflected “Goo-awd-DAMMIT.” Often at my provocation, as I could be a real teenaged cunt.
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My own cuss of choice is “motherfucker”—or, more accurately, “MUUU-ther-FUCK-er,” a pissier version of when Ving Rhames as mob boss Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction makes his measured, almost mellifluous exclamation while paused in the middle of a crosswalk, upon recognizing the traitorous boxer, Butch Coolidge, played by Bruce Willis, in the driver’s seat of the car stopped in front of him.
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“What the fuck?” I’m telling my brother about something that happened at work, something that hurt me profoundly, made me feel embittered, left me doubting my efficacy as a teacher. My brother is seventeen hundred miles away, and with the percussion of his characteristic phrase’s final “fuck,” I feel his hand on my arm.
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A photo of my brother with my infant niece in the crook of his bicep and forearm: He’s paused in midconversation with his wife, who’s just outside of the frame, and the baby is looking straight at the camera. She’s three weeks old, about the size of a large cat, starting to fill out the anchor-printed onesie that hung around her in folds the week she was born. Her body is relaxed, her gaze inquisitive; my brother’s posture is casual. They’ve already done this hundreds of times. They’re used to each other. Did my father hold me this way? Is there some similar photo of us floating around in the scattered archives of our family? Our parents’ bodies: beloved furniture we must take for granted completely.
I call my brother and ask how my niece, now four years old, is doing.
“She’s an ASSHOLE.”
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During one phone call I tease my brother that I’m going to get WHAT THE FUCK engraved on his headstone. Later I go online to see if I can get a mock-up made for him as a gag, finding numerous websites that will allow you to test out different stone colors, ornaments, fonts. I select a couple of fat cherubs to flank the words, and have my brother die on Tax Day in 3027, to be optimistic. I eschew a heavier Gothic-style script; its WHAT THE FUCK is ungainly and hard to read, diminishing its impact. I reject thinner, wimpier scripts whose letters barely seem to graze the surface of the marble. I look to see if Comic Sans is an option, just to make the whole thing more hideous, then cringe at the thought of that actually existing on a headstone: “Here lies Agatha Boonrubble, beloved mother and wife, who had terrible fucking taste.” The longer I do this, searching for the right font to perfect the joke, the less fun I’m having. I abandon the whole thing at around the seventh draft; all this is doing is reminding me how much I don’t want to outlive my brother.
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Maybe some clever parenting-book author has given a name to the developmental stage children reach when adults realize that they can’t cuss around them anymore.
Which is not, I realize, an age that many of the children in my life have reached, judging by how freely their parents still casually sling the eff-bombs around. If anything, I’m the one suddenly raising my apologetic hand to my lips like a fusty old matron if I let fly with a conversational “shit” while the kiddo is on the other side of the room. Which my friends dismiss with a casual wave, a laugh, and a sip of beer.
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My godson, three at the time, was overheard by his cheerfully potty-mouthed mother as he bent over a pill bug on the porch and muttered, “This fuckin’ guy . . .”
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“This fuckin’ guy—!” A punch on the arm, a rough hug. Sometimes I try to put on my brother’s profane swagger when I feel social anxiety rise during the small-talk knots at bookstore readings, workplace receptions. Living in the wise guy, salesman braggadocio he’s developed to cover his own admitted insecurities and discomfort. Dropping the register of my voice, taking on his cusses—not being myself, but at least being someone I’m close to.
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“Mom,” I said, almost laughing with anger when she refused to allow me to stay out late even though I, a piddling high-school freshman, had been asked to the senior prom, “Fuck you.” Grounded for a week. And yet the most unforgivable thing I ever said to her didn’t have a hint of cuss in it.
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Fuck no, I’m not telling you what it was.
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What the fuck is the look on most people’s faces when I tell them that cancer killed both our parents in the span of five years while I was a teenager and my brother was still a kid. Their expressions are a convergence of horror, pity, disbelief, and—another thing. A feeling that turns sharply inward, like a strong wind that suddenly changes direction. I wonder if they’re playing out the scenario in their heads, only with their own parents. I wish I could protect them from their empathy in that moment.
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“It sucks, Nicole, it really sucks,” my mother would say, her voice strangely high and soft, when Dad started getting worse.
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Sometimes I think the real reason why we curse as adults is out of a longing for certain parental boundaries that are long gone. Somewhere in every fuck and shit is buried the desire to be scolded by someone who loves us, whose job it is to stand between us and a too-quick encroachment of life’s irreversible initiations.
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One of the most recent photos I have of my brother and my niece was taken on a playground as he was boosting her up so she could grasp the bar of a horizontal ladder over her head. She’s several feet off the ground, and at the center of the shot is her delighted face, eyes up and forward, full of the brightness of sun on clear water. My brother takes up less than a quarter of the frame, in profile, also looking upward, but clearly focused on her small hands barely gripping the slippery bar. I see my father’s red stubble on his face and his heavy silver wedding band around my brother’s finger. His eyes are narrowed, and his arms are clasped around her legs, somewhere between letting go and clamping down harder. His face is a mix of wonder and concern, astonished by the body he holds: What the—
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