Pharmakon (39 page)

“Fine, but you’re not going to like his answer.”

I was summoned out of the kitchen. My mother smiled at me as I stood between them. My father was suddenly positively cheerful; he loved a test. There was not a touch of intimidation in his tone when he said, “Now, Zach, I want you to answer us honestly. Speak from your heart.” My brother and sisters crowded in the doorway to hear my judgment. “Would you rather your mother go to your play or go to Europe and see all the things she’s always wanted to see but never had the chance? And help me with my work, which, by the way, is what pays the bills around here?”

My mother knew what I wanted. I’d been pestering her to help me learn my part for days. There was no question my heart was set on her being front and center as I charmed the rats and led the children into the mountain after the townspeople had cheated me. Just as I was about to say “Stay, don’t go, I need you,” my father smiled at me with a warmth as real as a heat lamp. Knowing and fearful that that smile could be replaced by a look so cold and withering you felt like the sun had excluded you from the privilege of its warmth, I answered, “I think you should go with Dad.”

My mother was shocked. “You don’t really mean that.” I didn’t. I missed her already, in fact. But more than anything, I missed that look that was now on my father’s face. When I added, “Dad’s right, you should listen to him,” my father chuckled and winked at me.

“Smart boy.” His hand was on my shoulder, but I was in the palm of his hand. My father always called me his friend; now I was his accomplice. We had our own spiderweb of connection.

My brothers and sister cheered the same way they had when Casper was captured. My mother was puzzled and relieved. The last battle was over. “You know you can change your mind about this if you want to, Zach.”

“I don’t want to.” I had disappointed her; I was her last excuse from complete immersion. I had also disappointed myself, and yet I was happy. To please my father was a rare and wondrous thing, like an eclipse.

And so Willy and I were left in the care of my sisters, which was not unlike being suckled by benevolent wolves. My mother had left the kitchen so heavily stocked you would have thought she was anticipating a natural disaster.

Breakfast for me was a candy bar, dinner, pizza ordered in. The casseroles my mother had precooked were never served. Willy surprised us; as soon as my parents left for the airport, he took all his Oreos and flushed them down the toilet. Stranger still, he then ran to the supermarket (Willy was not a big runner) and bought chicken breasts and heads of broccoli. Back home, he weighed out four-hundred-calorie portions, and every day for the next two weeks, that was all he ate.

Freedom from my parents meant different things to each of us. I fell asleep in front of the TV and stopped bathing. Every night was date night for my sisters. Boys roamed our house as if it were a Boy Scout jamboree, and Chubby Checker records were played at full volume.

Curiously, the one area where responsibility was not shirked was my third-grade class play. Lucy helped me memorize my lines, Fiona made me a costume of green-and-yellow satin. Gray the parrot supplied the feather for my cap. Together they taught me how to play a four-note tune on the recorder. They all got dressed up and sat in the front row. Everybody clapped, even Willy. And afterward I heard my teacher say I was the best Pied Piper they’d ever had, and then add with a sigh, “It’s a shame how his parents suit themselves.”

It was strange how much better we all got along without my parents there. Thirteen days later we spent the whole day vacuuming and Windexing and gluing together the stuff we had broken. And that night, after we watched
77 Sunset Strip
on TV, Fiona and Lucy said good-bye to their short-lived freedom by having a beer and smoking the last of their cigarettes. Lucy blew smoke rings. “We have to get our stories straight.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, we can’t tell Mom we missed her.”

“We didn’t miss her.” Willy volunteered.

“Exactly, but if Mom thinks that, she’ll get upset, and she won’t go away again.”

Lucy chugged the last of her beer and belched. “I got it. Just tell Mom, it’s not the same when you’re not here.”

“What do we tell Dad?” I asked.

Fiona thought for a minute. “That you learned a lot about yourself.”

They all thought that was really funny. After that they began to trade anecdotes about, as Lucy put it, “how totally bonkers Dad is.”

The TV glowing before us like a campfire, Willy, Lucy, and Fiona shared stories in the darkened room about their childhood. Some I’d heard but never really listened to, others happened before I was born or too little to remember. I listened as they tried to top each other about who Dad had done the most twisted thing to.

Fiona started out recalling the bowl Dad had filled with tadpoles caught in the shadow of Sleeping Giant. “He put it right by my bed and told me, ‘If you look at them every morning when you wake up, one day you’ll get a surprise.’ And sure enough, one day I wake up and look over, and they were all dead. And when I ran to Dad and told him, ‘The tadpoles are dead,’ he said, ‘I told you you’d get a surprise.’ ”

“So what?” I didn’t get it.

“He wanted me to look at them every morning so I’d see them turn into frogs. Like a science class experiment. And when they died, he acted like that was what he had wanted me to see.” What I could see was that it bothered Fiona.

It was Willy’s turn now. “When I was three, Dad told me I could have anything in the world if I peed standing up.”

“If you were three, Willy, you wouldn’t remember,” I interjected. Their stories were scaring me.

“This happened,” Lucy assured me.

“And after I peed standing up, I asked for a broom so I could be just like Mommy. Then you want to know what Dad did?” Willy was practically shouting.

“No.”

“He bought me a pair of boxing gloves and told me I was going to need them if I was going to act just like Mommy.”

But Lucy won the prize. “Remember the dead mouse in the orange juice bottle?”

“It was a milk carton,” Fiona reminded her.

“Whatever. When you were little, Zach, Mom was an unbelievable slob.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, she just seemed tired all the time, and took naps, and let the dishes pile up, and left food out. Used to drive Dad crazy. One day—”

Fiona interrupted, “Don’t tell this one, Lucy.”

“It’s not that scary. One day, he’s making us dinner—”

“Dad made you dinner?” I’d never seen my father cook.

“He used to do stuff like that when Mom was depressed.”

“Mom was depressed?”

“Let me finish my story. So, he’s making us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—”

“They were ham and cheese,” Willy corrected her.

“Okay, ham and cheese sandwiches, and he sees a mouse running along the counter. And Dad takes the knife and throws it.”

Willy, smiling, nodded “yes” to the story. “Amazing shot. Stabs it from like three feet away.”

Lucy continued. “And then he picks it up and holds it up in the air. Its legs are still wiggling. And then he opens the refrigerator door . . .”—Lucy leaned close to tell this part of the story— “. . . and he puts it in a milk carton. He tells us, ‘A little surprise for your mother in the morning.’ ”

“Then what happened?”

“Mom never noticed it.”

“Why did Dad want to do that to Mom?”

Fiona took a deep drag from her cigarette, then exhaled through her nose like a dragon. “I think it was a crude attempt at shock therapy.”

I decided it was safer not to ask what shock therapy was.

When my parents came home the next day, they had hugs and kisses and presents for us. Eventually, my father took a long, hard look at my brother and said, “Willy, have you lost weight?”

Willy said, “No,” even though he’d shed ten pounds.

Every few months after that, my mother and father would leave for a week or two, sometimes three, on a pharmaceutical junket. Strangely, I missed them most when they came back home.

Casper didn’t trick the surveillance cameras or knock out the guards or send us ominous, creepy warnings. He never escaped from Needmore. But there was no escaping him. Even in his impregnable isolation, he had always been, and still was, the force that drove our lives.

If it had not been for Casper, we would never have made our forced march south to the pharmaceutical wilderness in New Jersey, settled on the PCB-polluted Raritan, or tried to call a place like Greenwood home. I think my father, during all those years of hiding out on Harrison Street, knew that Casper would one day catch up to him. The gun in his bedside table, the dogs that were encouraged to bark at strangers, losing the street number from the front of our house, my father had been so busy looking over his shoulder, he couldn’t enjoy what he had. He had spent so many years waiting for the past that haunted him to take corporeal form for a final reckoning that when the thing he feared most did happen, and he and we, much to his amazement, survived, my father had forgotten how to relax.

It was clear my father and mother both believed there was no longer any physical threat from Casper. The front door was now left unlocked. The dogs were defanged with leather muzzles that left them prey to the bullying of neighborhood cats. The revolver was taken out of the bedside table and hidden in the top drawer of his dresser in the closet. Not even my father’s reach was that long. And had they had the slightest fear Casper could escape the life sentence my father had given him, they never would have left us alone for weeks at a time.

But still my father could not shake the idea that catastrophe was just around the corner. Though Casper had been recaptured, simply by existing Casper was a constant reminder that bad things can, do, and probably will happen if your name’s Friedrich. Part of my father’s lingering paranoia stemmed from growing up on a farm. He was full of stories of boys and girls who had been strangled by scarves caught in the gears of farm machinery or mutilated by thresher blades and runaway tractors, and of entire families murdered overnight by a hidden army of bacilli in a mason jar of stewed tomatoes that should not have been brought up from the cold cellar. Coming of age in the Great Depression, he knew money couldn’t be trusted. But it was Casper who made him think life was out to get him.

No matter how hard my mother tried to distract him with herself and work, my father had a way of steering the conversation, especially at dinner, around to the subject of calamities and how to avoid them. Willy gagging on too large a bite of steak prompted a lecture on how to perform a tracheotomy. I still remember his guiding my fingers on his throat to demonstrate the ribbed ridges of the windpipe that we were instructed to slice open with a steak knife, as opposed to the jugular, which would cause you to bleed to death, even if you happened to have needle and catgut on hand. The menu of hypothetical disasters in the restaurant of life was long and varied. Petting a neighbor’s pet rabbit was an invitation to tularemia. Eating from a slightly dented can of tuna fish was a death wish via botulism. No question, if there were game show called
Worst Possible Scenarios,
we would win: poisonous snakes, spiders with necrotic venom, tics that could kill you with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Willy maintained that my father warned us about everything so that they wouldn’t have to feel guilty if one of us died while they were gone.