B000FCJYE6 EBOK (4 page)

My father was drunk.

“What? I’m not going to lie to her.”

Somehow my mother was able to convey, with her back, disdain.

“Gin,” my father said.

“What’s delusional?” I watched the cards arch under his rough thumbs.

“Cut,” he said, smacking the deck on the table between us.

“See?” said my mother. “Now you’ve got her started.”

“It means he doesn’t know who he is,” said my father, and dealt. He looked once at his cards, laid them down, and went over to the bar. “Want an olive?” he asked me. I nodded, trying to organize my cards without dropping them.

My mother turned. “I’m going out,” she said.

“Out where?” my father asked.

“I don’t know,” she yelled, startling us both. “Just out, if you don’t mind.” She walked over to my father, furious, and yelled in his ear, “Out!”

And left.

I didn’t want to look at my father. I studied my cards and carefully laid down the queen of spades.

We sat there for a very long time.

“Is she coming back?” I asked.

My father nodded slowly. “I would assume so,” he said. “One never knows.”

He picked up my queen.

After a while, I asked, “Do you know how to cook?”

He looked up at me. “What?” he said. “Yeah, I know how to cook. Why?”

I shrugged. “What do you know how to cook? Eggs?”

“Sure, I can cook eggs. I can cook all sorts of things, Katie, why?” He laughed.

“In case she doesn’t come back,” I said. “Gin.”

My father tossed his cards down on the table, threw his head back, and roared. “Oh, my,” he said. “Katie, what would I do without you?” He sighed and giggled and got up for another drink. Passing me, he ruffled my hair and said, “Well, we won’t starve. I’ll tell you that for sure.”

“So she might not come back,” I crowed, triumphant.

“Naw, she’ll come back. She’d never go anywhere without you,” he said, and looked out the window, and remembered his drink. He drank the whole thing and set the glass down hard on the table. “Let’s go get ice cream.”

We stumbled to the store in the thick September night.

My brother was standing on the sidewalk outside the grade school staring up at the sky, his thumbs hooked through the straps of his blue bag.

“You’re home,” I said as we started walking.

“Looks that way,” he replied.

It was a cold day, and his cheeks and nose were red. I stopped and dug my gloves out of my bag. We hunched forward against the wind.

“Didja see it snow?” I asked. “We were at recess. It melted, though.”

He nodded. The buses passed us in a streak of yellow. He glanced down at me. “What happened to your face?” he asked mildly.

“Nothing.” I put my hand to my cheek where the wind stung it, just under my left eye.

“Looks like someone scratched you.”

“So?” I scowled. Sara Mortinson had a bump on her head where I whacked her with my reading book when she said, loud, that my brother was crazy. I wasn’t really sure what order things happened in, whether I hit her or she scratched me first, but we both sulked in the nurse’s office with ice while the nurse whisked papers.

“So nothing. Just asking.”

“Are you better now?” I asked after a while.

He shrugged. “Guess so,” he said. He nudged me with his elbow. “Let’s go down to the creek.”

We rustled through the thick trees and dropped our bags in a pile of pine needles. We crouched by the creek. The September rains had come and gone, and the water was clean and high.

“What was it like?”

He picked up a long, narrow branch and snapped it into tiny bits.

“Slow,” he finally said. “Everything was slow.”

“Is everyone crazy?”

He shook his head. “Not really.”

“Why are they there?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Just sad, I guess.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t seem crazy.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t feel crazy.”

“What’s wrong with you, then?”

He swept his bits of pine branch into a careful pile with his hands. “I feel too fast,” he said, sounding confused. “And I have dreams that I can’t tell whether I’m sleeping or not.” He scratched his nose. “And I get scared.”

“What did you do there?”

He was silent for a minute. “I don’t remember,” he finally said. He made a shape with his hands, a sort of oval he seemed to be holding gently, like an egg. “Your dreams got better there. It’s like you’re dreaming all the time.” He considered the oval he was holding. “It’s nice.”

I had collected a handful of pine needles and was sorting through them. “Are you going back?”

“I dunno,” he said.

“Were you homesick?” I wanted to know if he missed me.

He shrugged.

I got to my feet, angry, and said I was going home.

Later that evening, Esau and I were playing Monopoly. From the kitchen came my father’s voice: “Esau, come take your medicine.”

Esau stayed where he was, organizing his properties into tidy piles. My father took a few steps around the corner. “Esau?” he said. “Kiddo, come take your medicine.”

I rolled the dice. Esau continued, unnecessarily now, to tap the edges of his piles on the table. I moved the dog onto Park Place and sighed; Esau owned it and had covered it with hotels.

My father set a glass of water and two large pink tablets next to Esau’s elbow.

“I don’t want it,” Esau said flatly.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” said my father. “You gotta take it.”

Esau picked up the water, stood to get some leverage, crushed the tablets with the base of the glass, and brushed the powder onto the floor. I hesitated, counting out what I owed Esau, then kept counting.

“There’s plenty more where those came from,” my father said, “but if you do it again, it’s coming out of your allowance.” He leaned against the bar with one hand and dropped ice into his glass with the other.

“I don’t care,” Esau said.

“Let me explain something to you,” my father said patiently, taking a drink. “Every time you stop taking your medicine, you get sick. And every time you get sick, you wind up in the hospital. And every time you wind up in the hospital, I wind up further in debt.” He walked back into the kitchen and came out with two more pills, holding on to them this time. “Eventually I will run out of money,” he said, his voice rising. “Do you follow? And there won’t be any left for hospitals or medicine or your mother or your sister or your sorry ass, for that matter. So you’re going to goddamn take your medicine if I have to force it down your throat.”

Unexpectedly, his voice broke. He leaned down and awkwardly touched his forehead to Esau’s hair, his drink resting on Esau’s shoulder. Esau, who was holding the dice, waited until my father straightened up and then put his hand out for the pills. He sat looking a little sick after he swallowed them.

“Can I have some milk?” he asked.

My father brought him a glass of milk. He drank it, then got up from the table and sat down on the couch. My father sat down next to him. From the back they looked like the same person, only different heights. Esau’s head dropped onto my father’s shoulder and I knew he’d fallen asleep.

I stood up and went over to them. My father was looking out the window, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was too dark.

Maybe it was the same night, maybe another. It didn’t matter. I woke to the sound of voices in the living room. I cracked open the door.

My mother’s legs were crossed and she held a glass of wine. My father’s elbows were on his knees, his drink dangling between them, catching the light. He was crunching ice. In the silence it sounded like he was chewing on glass.

“He’s not any better,” he said.

My mother didn’t answer for a moment. “He is. He’s a little better.”

My father shook his head. “Claire,” he said, “we’re just biding time.”

She said nothing. My father sat back in his chair.

“So what, then?” she said. “So we’re just biding time. Do you have a better idea of what we should do?”

It was hard to tell sometimes whether my mother was being mean, what with the smooth southern drawl that rolled along under her words like a low tide. Her words came out soft and slow when she was telling me stories, and they came out soft and slow when she said to my father,
Oh, honey. Go on to hell.

“You think it’s my fault,” my father said.

I wondered what my mother was looking at. She was staring steadily ahead. She sat with her back straight, her fingers playing around the stem of her glass.

“No,” she said eventually, her voice neutral. “Not your fault, exactly.”

My father looked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Exactly?”

She sipped her wine.

“It’s sort of my fault, then? A little bit my fault?”

“Arnold,” she sighed. “It’s not your fault. Is that what you want to hear? It’s no one’s fault. That’s what the doctors said.”

“But that’s not what you think.”

“I don’t think anything.”

“Of course you think something. You think that whatever I touch turns to shit. You think whatever’s wrong with the world is somehow the direct effect of me.”

“Arnold, don’t be dramatic.”

“Claire, you are a true bitch, you know that? You really are.”

“Yes, you’ve told me.”

My mother took a sip of wine, and my father stood up to freshen his drink.

The night fights were as familiar and expected as breakfast in the morning and church on Easter. They fought almost companionably, as if it were as good a way as any to converse. But later I would riffle through the fights in my head, trying to find the one fight that set it all off, the one where they turned a corner, the one where it was no longer a quiet, ever present cruelty but something more. For years I was sure my mother’s slow, cruel words made my father do what he did; and then for other years I was sure my father had done something to make my mother say what she said. Now I think that certain things just tend toward their own center, and implode.

It’s interesting that two people can sit in a room, doing nothing more than being precisely themselves, and, in each other’s eyes, utterly, generally fail.

“I’m going to bed,” said my mother, not moving. “Are you coming?”

It would occur to me, older, that this was an invitation.

“Not right yet,” said my father, picking up a deck of cards and dealing himself a hand of solitaire.

And it would occur to me, older, that this was a kindness of sorts, not flatly saying
no.
Letting a woman get into her nightgown, lotion her hands, fall asleep with a book and the bedside light still on, having forgotten to hope.

My mother was angry. I stood on a chair by the stove, waiting for a pot of water to boil and listening to her bang.

“Where’s Dad?” I finally asked. It was getting dark out. No one had been home when Esau and I came in from school. Last I checked, Esau was sitting at the writing desk with his head in his hands, trying to do his homework.

“How should I know?” she snapped. I got off the chair and walked out of the kitchen in a huff.

“Katie?” she called.

I sat down on the couch. Esau was looking out the window and didn’t notice. My mother’s head appeared around the corner.

“Katie, come help?”

I didn’t look at her. She sighed and went back into the kitchen.

“Dammit!”
she yelled, and something got thrown. She came out of the kitchen, pulling her apron over her head and throwing it on the floor. She went over to the bar, poured wine into a flowered juice glass, and lit a cigarette. Esau turned half around in his chair. He and I watched her pace back and forth in front of the windows.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Oh, it’s not you. It’s that rat-bastard father of yours. It’s nothing. Never mind.” She sat down in a heap next to me on the couch.

Esau started to giggle. I could see him biting the insides of his cheeks. He turned around again and put his head down on the desk. His shoulders shook.

“What’s so funny, may I ask, mister?” asks my mother, starting to smile. He put his hands over his ears, which were turning red.

“Did you take your medicine today?” I asked, feeling important.

“Yes,” he said, giggling. “Rat bastard!” he finally shrieked.

I looked at my mother, shocked. She laughed.

Esau apologized, and said, “Don’t tell Dad I swore.”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t tell him I called him a rat bastard,” she said, setting Esau off again. I giggled and picked at the soles of my shoes, looking sideways at my pretty mother.

The front door opened. “Claire!” my father called. Esau stopped laughing abruptly and looked at his books. My father came into the room and surveyed us.

“Are you growing a beard?” I asked. He put his hand up to his stubbled face and looked as if he was considering it.

“Sure,” he said, and turned to the bar. “What’s for dinner?”

“Nothing,” said my mother, and took a sip of wine.

My father nodded. “Okay,” he said, and headed into the kitchen. “There’s water boiling over in here,” he called. “Were you planning to cook something in it?”

“No,” called my mother. “I just wanted to boil some water.” She went over to the bar and brought the bottle of wine back to the couch, wedging it between the cushions.

“Well, then,” my father said, coming back into the room and sitting down. “We’ll starve, then.”

“Most likely,” she agreed.

“Claire.”

“Yes, Arnold.”

“Go make dinner.”

“Make it yourself.”

My father stood and looked out the window, then turned and pitched his highball glass against the north wall.

“Claire.”

“Go to hell.”

“Claire.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m drunk and hungry. And I’m getting annoyed.”

“That’s a shame. Go sweep up the glass.”

My mother poured more wine for herself. I realized they were both drunk. I was hungry too. It seemed like a bad time to move, though, so I stayed still.