Short People (11 page)

For the first time in the many weeks since we’d been sneaking over to watch cartoons, Suzy’s mother was there in the playroom. Her hair was bent and knotted, weirdly cowlicky. She shielded her eyes and squinted as she stepped into the blaring light. She blinked at us, not really looking, then blinked at the TV, then blinked again at us. Her expression changed, tensed and puckered.

Suzy, her mother, Denali and I were all petrified, our bodies leaning away from each other like we were at the top of a roller coaster. The moment would come soon, we didn’t know when— right when we decided maybe it wouldn’t—for us to descend at a rattling speed. Suzy’s mother lunged and snatched my sister and me by the wrists. My back scraped the length of the molded wood banister. My ankles bounced and burned against the five carpeted steps to the front door. Suzy’s mother kicked at the screen door and, as it snapped back, it pinched Denali’s forearm. She screamed, and Suzy’s mom kicked the door again and again, bouncing it off the aluminum siding until finally she’d wrangled us onto the lawn, tripping, spinning, ashamed of our nakedness, dragging us behind her as she sped across the street and plopped us like trash bags on our own front stoop.

Juggling our clothes, Suzy chased after us. She was crying. While ringing our buzzer, her mom picked her up and straddled her on her hip, innocently, tenderly.

Suzy’s wails drowned out her mother’s words, but the contextual clues were raw and her meaning was unmistakable. The way her eyes constricted into taloned crow’s-feet. The way Dad stared off with his nose in the air, as toward the frontier, like he was trying to make out the ferocity of the storm that was about to overtake him. The way he flinched and took it as she continued hammering him.

Dad nodded gravely and raised his hand, a silent plea for mercy. A strained lipless smile passed across his face.

Suzy calmed to sniffles, and her mother ran out of things to say. She readjusted her daughter on her hip and just stood there in contempt.

“Thank you,” Dad said. “Thank you for telling me. I wouldn’t want not to know. We’ll . . . we’ll talk to them.”

“I think it’s more than talking that they need.”

“I . . . yes. Well. Thank you. We’ll . . . take care of it.”

Still, Suzy’s mother refused to leave. I wished that I had some clothes on.

“Really . . . we can handle it from here. Thanks for bringing them home safe though, um, sorry about all this.”

“What,” Suzy’s mom said, “is
wrong
with you people?”

Dad pulled his thin lips into a smile and nodded his head, imploring her to understand, please, be kind now, to please go. Shielding her bloodshot eyes with her free hand, she reluctantly staggered back across the street. Suzy, her mouth pressed to her mother’s bathrobe, peered back at us and flapped her fingers goodbye.

Then Dad ushered us into the house and around the half wall to the living room.

There was Mom, looking frightened and lost, in the rocking chair—creaking back and forth, a coil of tension. She noticed nothing.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Dad drawled weakly.

In our own ways, we all understood where she was. She’d been there before—was almost always there.

Dad barked directions. “Go get the phone book, Kat. Kids, get some clothes on—now. I don’t want to see you do anything— nothing, understand?—until we come out of that room.” He pointed toward their bedroom. “We’ll talk about this later.”

III. Mom and Dad Grow Up

So here we were, Denali and I, in oversized t-shirts, crouching for the second time that day outside their door. Making funnels out of our hands, we held our ears to the wood to listen. We could hear pacing. Muffled and tense conversation. The foghorn bellow of Mom crying. And then that single intelligible sentence: “You raped me.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was something incredibly bad. “Is that what we did?” I asked Denali, but she punched me and hissed, “Shut up,” which I guessed meant yes and explained why I’d felt so queasy while doing it. Something smashed against the wall, and when Mom sobbed, “I want to hold my children,” I wanted to shout out, “Yes, hold me, Mommy. I’m scared too,” but that seemed like a breach of a different sort. Anyway, my sister poked me—“They’re coming”—and we scurried off to find some innocent thing to pretend we’d been doing while waiting for them.

Dad, reeling from Mom’s accusation, and fumbling for something to moor him in place, picked up the pieces of the phone. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, slightly shifted, the perspective skewed, diced and cubed, and he wasn’t sure when or how this had happened. Three syllables from someone known to exaggerate shouldn’t have the power to shake a man of dry, stoic principle. The phone, though, with its cracked plastic casing and exposed primary-colored wires, was tactile, simple. If he didn’t know how to fix it, at least he knew how he had broken it. He twisted the wires farther from the casing so he could study the workings inside. Guessing where the dangling mike might fit, he tried to wedge it back into place and roughly stuffed the wires around it. He snapped the batteries into their compartment. Meticulously straightening the antenna, he tried to knead out every kink, but the dents, like cracks in ice, extended with agitation and it broke off. He gave up, placed the phone into its cradle and lumbered out of the room.

Where were the children? What further havoc were they wreaking now?

Slowly, so slowly, he moved down the hallway. This was a new depth of degradation. This was a place of self-loathing. He fell and fell. The details of what had come before this instant—his children’s actions, his wife’s, everyone’s—had been left up above on the rock face, replaced by a cold, burning sensation.

Denali and I sat cross-legged, silent, thumbing through magazines—
Omni, The Utne Reader.
When Dad appeared at the edge of the room, we overreacted—too much surprise, too much teeth in our smiles, the conspicuous, false cheerfulness that only a guilty child can muster. We tilted our heads and gazed up at him in an adoring, approval-begging way we had learned from our dog. But he ignored our plays on his sympathies.

He seemed twice as big as himself and he watched his feet as he walked. His body jerked like a car with a faulty transmission, staggering forward, in constant danger of freezing up. Finally, he sank to the fireplace hearth and sighed.

“Hi, kiddos,” he said.

A saggy, tired look of love crossed his face as he finally looked up.

I’ve been trying to understand this from Dad’s point of view. I didn’t have one of my own at the time; I was too young and was still moving forward. And if I’ve been flip, if I’ve been unfair to him, it’s only because I can’t fully erase the version of this story Mom later taught me to believe. I’ll try to be better now and look at Dad from a less biased perspective.

You could have called our family a social experiment. Dad was trying to lead us through to the next step in evolution. As much as this came from his philosophical beliefs, it was also a political act; for Dad the two were intertwined. He was convinced that all people were equal, that we were all on a journey that—if only there were quality education and truly equal rights and compassion and help for those who still couldn’t take care of themselves— would lead us to enlightenment, a universal respect for life, a better world. He aligned himself with the underclass but wanted them to be more like him, like the person he’d turned himself into. He couldn’t see this, of course. He thought of his politics as liberal and social, but he disapproved as the disenfranchised and culturally diverse masses swarmed onto the radio and TV and filled the air with a hundred conflicting backbeats. In truth, his politics were culturally conservative: he believed everyone should strive to live like the elite of yore. Thus, his bias against pop culture and his attempts to educate us in the great musty art of the past. Liberal in thought, conservative in deed.

He approached personal affairs Socratically. To his mind, mistakes came about through philosophical misunderstandings, through selfish ignorance of how we are all connected, because someone forgot to consider the effects of his or her actions. He was good at noticing this when it went on around him and equally good at neglecting his personal role in its happening, at standing back and sniping at anyone near enough to show their weakness, teaching them how to be stronger and better and more enlightened, all without ever admitting that he himself might also be partly to blame.

And right here, on this one day, I think, Dad’s contradictions finally broke.

“So, what do you kids have to say for yourselves?”

Nothing but puppy-dog smiles.

“You don’t have anything to say? Do you even understand what you did?”

Denali answered. “We were watching the TV?”

I tried my best to keep smiling.

“Watching the TV. This is funny, huh? You think this is funny.”

“No.”

“Why are you smiling, then? Why are you smiling? You kids, you act like you live in the jungle. It’s going to stop. You don’t even understand what I’m saying, do you? Right now . . . it is going to stop.” His face got red, and he jumped to his feet. “And wipe those fu—shi—dang smiles off your faces before I smack them off.”

What went through his mind in that instant?

Did his thoughts pause on his attempts to get through to Social Services? Did he wonder about the home life of the counselor he’d wanted so badly to speak to? Did he compare himself to her? His lily-white self, whose one or two dabbles in drugs had been truly recreational, part of a search for enlightenment? Did he think about the stories he read in the papers about the unwed mothers in the projects where there was no heat except when their children, no older than his, brought down on themselves a sort of heat that didn’t warm the house but left it colder? Did he make the connection between the Department of Social Services—across the river in D.C.—and the reports from the devastated neighborhoods there? He lived in the suburbs, in the upper-middle class, where the walls of his life were padded. Did he realize how infinitesimal our problems were, really, when compared to those Social Services dealt with each day? Did he realize that his quacky beliefs about the best way to live didn’t make our lives better, they just made us seem like cheapskates and freaks? Did he realize how condescending it was to the poor American underclass for him to forsake the American Dream of winning by having the most toys? And did he understand how immature it was of him to throw a tantrum and destroy the phone just because they hadn’t dropped everything to save his white ass?

Maybe. I don’t think so, though.

I think he was too self-absorbed to do any of that. I think he was blaming us, his two rugrats who just wouldn’t learn and who just didn’t care, who at their young ages had already fallen into depravity. I think he was wishing we’d never been born because then his life would still have had structure. I think he was regretting the faith he’d had in his wife’s ability to transform her life. I think he was beginning to believe she would’ve been better off in the psych ward, doped up, lobotomized, locked away from this world that was capable of hurting even sane people like him. I think he was trying to expel his anger and self-pity.

And that’s why he grabbed my sister so roughly and pulled down her panties and buckled her over his knee. That’s why he hit her and hit her with his open palm. That’s why he was out of control for the first time since his Alaskan enlightenment.

Or maybe it was because he loved us. Maybe it was because he knew he was wrong and he couldn’t lock us away from the world regardless of how ugly that world might look. Maybe it was because, in lieu of reason, he knew only his own father’s manner of discipline.

I think, maybe, he wasn’t thinking anything. Maybe he was just feeling the depths of his failure, and the wild beating he was giving Denali really did hurt him more than it hurt her.

I watched as Dad’s hand swung down and Denali winced— spank, wince, spank, wince, spank, wince, like a machine, the parts repeating the same motions over and over. I imagined what it was going to feel like when he got to me. It would sting at first, but then feel numb. There’d be pinching where, bracing himself, he roughly gripped the baby fat under my armpit. Bright red welts would appear on my behind, and they would ache for days.

Denali screamed, a sustained high pitch. But for all that noise, she didn’t struggle.

I wondered how many times he’d have to hit her before he was sure she had learned her lesson. Was he counting? And would he hit me the same number of times?

If I’d been swift, I would’ve run for some nook or cranny in which to hide, but I couldn’t move. I was stunned and confused and felt somehow deserving of my turn. I knew what we’d done wrong now. It wasn’t watching TV, it was the other thing, the one that had felt so dangerous at the time. I’d raped Denali. Or she had raped me. Either way, I was dirty and in need of punishment.

But before my turn arrived, Mom put an end to it. I’ve tried to understand her perspective on all that happened, as well. Somehow, while Dad spanked Denali, Mom had tried her arm against a much larger foe, herself, and miraculously she’d won. When she stormed into the room—at least for that moment, that day—she seemed to have ripped the tongues from her internal tormentors and escaped the country where they’d been holding her. Years of analysis hadn’t been able to achieve results like this. Dad’s shower of love, the padded room he had tried to create with his high art and classical music—none of this had helped her find a way out. Now, here she was, victorious, livid, back in reality.

“Stop it! No more. Don’t touch my—you’re gonna have to get out, do you hear me? I’ll kick you out if you lay one more hand on my daughter.”

He froze mid-swing and Denali squirmed out of his grasp and waddle-ran to her bedroom, slamming the door on us, five, six, twelve, fifteen times until I heard the wood begin to splinter and the hinges begin to pop.

“I mean it,” Mom said. She prowled warily around the room, shooting looks at Dad, growing stronger and saner as the minutes descended like rain.

It was as if they’d changed places.

Dad was a figment of his haunted past now. He stared at his hands. His face twitched. Alaska no longer existed. Or not the Alaska that had changed his life. The one after which he’d christened his daughter, the one that had taught him to see, was gone. Now there was flat land and big sky and wind. Now there was only a slushy plain through which the little he could make out in any direction was the same empty nowhere offering no escape. Watching his footsteps and testing the rock, rappelling and choosing the daunting, more treacherous, fulfilling path, he had arrived at the wasteland he’d been climbing away from. He should have known. There is nothing but wasteland.

He hid his face in his hands and cried.

“Come on, get dressed,” Mom said, steadying her palm on my head. “Tell Denali to get dressed. We’re going to Best Buy.”

Defeated, resigned, his emotions flaccid, Dad swept his bleary eyes across the room until they came to rest on Mom.

“To buy a TV.”

Nothing could touch him, not even this. He bowed his head to her, nodded and shrank.

I scurried off to Denali, but she wouldn’t open her door.

“Denali,” I whispered, “Mommy’s gonna take us to go get a TV.”

I waited.

“Come on, we get to help pick it out.”

I waited and knocked and waited and knocked.

“Leave me alone.”

“But, Denali—”

“I don’t care.”

Putting my clothes on alone in my room, I let the smile crack over my face. We were going to Best Buy to purchase a TV. Our lives would be better now.

As Mom and I left, she called over her shoulder, “If you want to, you know, you’re free to come with us,” but Dad was still surveying the mess he’d made. He stayed behind, shivering, confused, lost.