Читать книгу My Father’s Keeper - Julie Gregory - Страница 7

I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.

We weave our little fingers together;

Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.

When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.

“Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.

Ooooga-ooooooooga.

The other car would honk back and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.

Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.

Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.

Danny was too small to remember the cool car so he didn’t know what he was missing. But Dad lived so vicariously through my little brother’s Matchbox car collection, expounding big plans for the day he would build us our own classic car, that Danny became as obsessed with the idea of us getting one as I was nostalgic over the loss of the one we’d had.

The outside of our used trailer was dingy white and had interior features Mom referred to as “top of the line.” Doorknobs and bathroom fixtures were cast in gold plastic, some with a marble swirl and little crankout handles jutted from windows far too narrow to let the light of day in, let alone the tang out.

Our mother’s rampant decorating saw us pasting up orange velvet wallpaper and painting accents with gold leaf on everything from the drain stopper to the little plastic clips that held the mirror to the bathroom wall. When the sink faucet she’d spraypainted silver began to fleck, we’d dab at it from a luminescent jar of my brother’s model car paint. Bark art from the Circleville Pumpkin Show displayed a riveting image of Tecumseh’s Last Stand, which was shellacked onto a slab of stained and charred wood and fitted with a toothy mount on the back, suitable for display. Needless to say, the trailer, and all that was in it, was rightfully Mom’s domain. Tan press board was eventually sided up over the aluminium of the exterior and the shutters were drenched in chocolate brown paint.

My mother, wanting to give our trailer some European flair, ordered a plastic cuckoo clock from the back of The Swiss Colony catalogue and hung it next to the hutch that held my father’s blue felt coin collecting books, to which the best years of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters were pressed after being panned from a large clear plastic pretzel barrel that sat wedged in between the couch and the wall. The cuckoo clock chimed on the hour and two plastic birds, one blue, the other yellow, popped out a miniature barn door and circled on a track. The clock’s long chains cascaded down the wall and moulded plastic pine cones dangled at the ends of them, inches above the carpet.

Just like Arizona, time was spent with either Mom or Dad, but rarely both. Even at Christmas, when my father parked in the living room to watch us open presents, Mom scurried through the trailer tending to forgotten tasks. It was as if a hotplate existed just underfoot and began to heat up whenever they landed in the same room together.

Only one photo exists of my father on Burns Road in his boyish state, taken just after we’d moved in. It is a picture of me, Danny, Dad and his two best buddies from the base where he worked. Rolly Polanka and Tommy Templeton were happy, good-natured men, just like my father. Always happy to see us and a joy to be around, they cracked jokes with Dad about gas and crap and never tired once of the same ones. Danny and I laughed just because they did. Excited in their company, we snuck up on the couch and jumped on their heads, rough housing with them for attention.

Life with my father is resurrected as much in memory of our place on Burns Road as it is in the pain found at the end of it. Our one-acre yard was a sea of brilliant lush grass that surrounded the trailer like a moat and I remember riding on a tractor mower in a lime green bikini, leaning into curves around weeping willow saplings, planted to give an air of permanence against the transience of our home. Yellow insulators hung on an electric fence and billowy seeds of milkweed drifted lazily in the summer breeze. A faded canvas halter tied up with baling twine hung just inside the tack shed, next to thick braided reins draped over rusty nails. The call of a lone bobwhite haunted the early summer dusk when I’d pad out in my bare feet and lock the shed doors to keep the raccoons out. A rusty horseshoe dug from the loose earth was haphazardly balanced over the mouth of my father’s garage, a treacherous structure at the edge of the driveway he had cobbled together with twelve-foot-long pieces of rusted sheet metal nail gunned over rough frame.

The garage itself was a dark maze of car parts, milk crates overflowing with a jumble of tools, hand saws and claw hammers dangling from hooks overhead. And back in the dimmest, eeriest corner, in a place no child or budding teenage girl would ever willingly wander, lurked my father’s long metal workbench. The solo fluorescent light that lit his cave buzzed like a fly zapper from where it hung by a dog chain from the low ceiling to shine a five-foot radius on the concrete floor. But even on the brightest of summer days, there were parts of this creepy edifice that remained pitch black.

Our hollow held the kind of raw beauty a band of wild hill children might—shy and innocent, but you could never quite trust them. You weren’t scared of the woods down on Burns Road; you were scared of who might be in there with you.

With the passing of each season, memories of civilization faded and life dwindled to a crawl. Where once I hummed songs from the Sunday schools we used to go to, the lines and eventually the chorus were washed over by the jingles of toy commercials that rang through the trailer on any given Sunday’s worth of television: Mon-chi-chi-Mon-chi-chi, oh so soft and cuddly my pretty po-nee, she gives me so much love Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. Danny and I strung them back to back, changing key and pitch to mimic the TV as Dad clicked through the three country channels again and again and again, waiting for a new rerun to start.

By the time I was twelve, my father had grown to be one with his chair, plopping down in it from the time he came home from work until well after the late evening news. And, although I knew where he was physically, I couldn’t for the life of me find the dad I once felt so close to. He was still happy to see me when he walked through the door but, once he sat in his chair, efforts to reach him were futile. When I could, I’d sit on the couch for hours just to be there should he wish to talk to me. But he didn’t. I would rack my brain, think, think, trying to come up with something that might turn his attention from the television set. But the parting of my mouth, sensed out of the corner of his eye, would elicit a shush or be met by the swish of a forefinger in the air as he winced, leaning forward to piece together what he might have missed. As a last resort, I watched with him, anchored to whatever time we could have together. But even though I didn’t have the right things to say, I believed with all my heart that if I could find the secret words or right way to be, I could unlock the mystery and win back my father. We were so close when he broke his arms, surely I could find a way to resurrect our bond.

“Who’s the King?”

“You are, Dad!”

“Who’s the King in this house?”

“Dad is!” Danny and I ring in unison.

“That’s right. I’m King and you better obey.”

My father cackles with good nature while my brother and I disperse from the end of the couch to carry out orders. Dad’s throne was his La-Z-Boy chair and the food that piled up around it—corn nuts, pork rinds, almost empty boxes of popcorn, bags of corn chips—was the gold on his altar. The empties surrounded him like gilded gifts to be fingered when he needed reminding of his total reign. His was the authority to yell from the seat of his throne and have anything within a five-hundred foot radius delivered to him, without complaint and with total servitude by us kids.

“Fix me some toast Sissy, would you? I want the good jelly, not any of that marmalade shit your mother gets.”

And I would drop whatever I was doing and trot off to make the toast, trying extra hard to get it right.

Our mother, with her ears like a bat, never missed a chance to pot shot him.

“That’s right, Dannnn,” her voice spat from somewhere beyond the thin wall of the living room. “Turn the kids into your niggers. Make them wait on you hand and foot.”

“You just go back to whatever you were doing, Dingbat,” my father would shout, then turn his head to snigger at us, his face scrunched up like a little boy and we’d snigger back, because we knew no better.

If our mother was at least two rooms away, Dad called her the names of the wives and hated mother-in-laws he picked up from television sit-coms—Dingy, Dingbat, Dummy—all gauged by how thin her voice was as it hammered through the panelling. Otherwise, if she yelled from the open kitchen behind his chair, he squirmed from the embarrassment of being caught and fiddled with the remote.

I didn’t mind running for Dad. The errands were usually quick and painless and he responded with exaggerated thrill to receive the fetched item—often making it into a game.

“Let’s see how fast you can run out to the car, Sissy, and get me the bag of gumdrops on the seat. If they ain’t there, check the floor. Okay…ready, set, go!”

“Whoa, you did that in 60 seconds?” he’d shout when I returned breathless with the bag. “Way to go, Sis!”

It was only on the rarest of occasions when we were lucky enough to be left at home with our father and without Mom around, that a bit of the veil would lift, lightness would blow in the skinny windows and trailer life didn’t seem so bad.

My father bellows out the kitchen patio door. Danny and I hold hands and jump from the deck into the gem green water of the pool, flourescent from the double cups of chlorine we dump in at random to clean it.

“Don’t you guys go pee-pee in there.”

“Dad!” I shout, “That’s gross!” But I can see my little brother, soaking to his neck in the water like a little snow monkey. “Danny!”

Home alone with our father, we are just kids. When Mom goes to town on a shopping trip, she claims our time with a list of chores to do before she gets home. We follow her to the car, faces drawn. But as soon as she rounds the first bend, Danny and I run in the trailer and shriek down the hall to change into our bathing suits.

My father slaps his hands together in jubilation, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!”

He loads up a ham sandwich with sweet pickles in the kitchen and, as we run past, we beg him to watch us dive off the deck into the pool.

“Dad, Dad, Look!” I dunk my brother, who lurks just under the surface ready to spring up on my shoulders and push me under.

Dad stands on the porch in his stocking feet and cut-off jean shorts and waves to us with a mouth full of food. He trumpets his nose on the hem of his shirt then pins one nostril with his finger, blowing the rest out. It bolts like a slash against the side skirt of the trailer, painted tan to coordinate with the plastic brown shutters. I can see it from the edge of the pool, where I hook my elbows over the side to watch my father.

“You kids have fun, I’ll be in the garage if you need me.”

“Dad, Dad, can we listen to some of your records?”

“Yeah, Sissy, put on Sergeant Pepper!”

I was eight, and the trailer was still in my future, when I first discovered the coolness of my father’s extensive record collection. I lay on the floor after school, bobbing my feet above me, panning through the long stack of albums leaned up against the wall, relegated to the one room in the house that Mom let him keep his things. At first I pulled out all the albums with the cool covers but there was only one I listened to all the way through: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles were my father’s favourite band and John Lennon was his hero. If we were lucky enough in the car to catch Hey Jude on the radio, my father would stretch his arm back over the seat and wiggle his fingers for me to hold his hand. He sang through the verses, growing ever more melancholy. As the song neared its end, I would catch my father looking at me in the rear view mirror, his eyes glassy with tears.

“Sing it with me, baby. Na, na, na, nananana, nananana, Hey Jude.”

I leaned forward to sing along with my father and saw in the mirror that a tear had run down his face. He squeezed my hand as his cheeks grew shiny, his voice cracking in song. A lump rose in my throat and I could feel my own tears falling down my face. I held my father’s hand as tight as I could and laid my wet face against it, showing alliance. I did not know why I cried or even what the song was about, but such was the power of my father’s tears.

Now that we’re stuffed into a trailer with no extra room, Dad’s record collection has been delegated to the last tiny corner left. The only time a record of Dad’s gets on the turntable is when Mom is gone; otherwise she says it’s the devil’s music.

I run in the house dripping wet and lug one of the big stereo speakers all the way out the patio door to the edge of the deck. I dry my hands and carefully place the record on the turntable, making sure to only hold the album between thumb and forefinger, and lower the needle ever so delicately as Dad has shown me. Then I crank up the volume. The crazy calliope guitar of the first song on the Sergeant Pepper album hits the still air and we know it can’t be heard for a country mile.

The sun beats down on my tan shoulders and I bask in a plastic tube chaise longue in the yard, painting my toenails, bobbing my head to the beat. Danny mock sings on the deck of the pool, using an inflatable duck ring as a microphone. He jumps off sideways and a great tsunami wave careens over the side. Life is good. But even better than the rock and roll booming through the yard on a country summer Saturday, is knowing that Dad is listening right along with me all the way in the garage.

At the first sign of fall, my stomach drops. Pressed Wranglers lie stiff on my bed, paired with back-to-school tops from K-Mart. The impending first day of school brings with it a flurry of anxiety as spiral notebooks and ring binders are picked out with painstaking care, knowing that one false move could destroy your entire year. If you pick the Hang in There, Kitty and everybody else has the pack of galloping horses, you might as well forget it.

“Kids are cruel, honey,” my father pep talks me as I cry in frustration. “And if you opened your eyes, you’d see that half of the school is making fun of you behind your back. You don’t need those kids. Stick with Daddy, I’ll be your friend.”

And for a moment things don’t seem so bad.

Mom takes her fork and perforates another slice of pumpkin pie. The pan is dotted with black lava-like bubbles of carbonized pie juice after being baked at a scorching heat.

She unbuttons her trousers, the pink skin of her belly rushing down her zipper like a flashflood. Mom throws down her fork in a huff. “Dan, you shouldn’t have let me eat so much. God, I’m stuffed.”

I sit on the couch in the living room while my father tips back ninety degrees in his chair. He looks over and rolls his eyes. He flicks a chunk of black crust off his own piece of pie and whispers in conspiracy, “I don’t know why your mother has to fucking cook everything on high.”

Early in life we had to develop a taste for our mother’s tendency to scorch food, and to eat of its ruin without flinching—crispy spaghetti, seared chilli and rubbery hot dogs permanently watermarked from being boiled on high for an hour.

“Jesus, Julie, look what you made me do, talking to me when I’m trying to cook, taste this—is it scorched?” and she’d shove a spoonful of charred chilli to my lips.

“No, it’s good, Mom, you can’t taste the scorch at all.”

It’s best to lie to my mother, with her quick hands that strike like lightning. A brutal woman, with nothing gentle, romantic or mysterious about her, she would backhand me in the grocery store and bloody my nose, then walk off with the cart leaving me to feel embarrassed like it was my fault. So we ate our crisp salmon patties moulded out of a can of fish and an egg without gripe or complaint, quietly pressing the soft cylinder bones to the roofs of our mouths until they burst.

At school, I bummed quarters from the kids in my class to buy potato chips and snack cakes but on the weekend I was left to fend for myself inside the dank avocado-coloured refrigerator, overstocked with a mixture of stale meat soaking in its own blood, expired dairy products and vegetables left in there so long they had turned to algae in their respective produce bags. Any hunk of cheese I discovered came with its own layer of green mould.

“Just cut it off,” Dad would yell from his chair when I’d protest. “Hell, that’s all cheese is anyway, good mould.”

I’d rummage through to find the only item safe enough to eat: single-sliced, individually wrapped, processed American cheese. Even if there was some kind of dripping or weird indistinguishable smear on the plastic, it still meant this cheese was sealed for my protection. I’d peel the sticky wrapper off and voila, the perfect food.

My brother and I lay our torn-off pieces of cheese on stale tortilla chips and microwaved on high. We cracked the molten shape of cheesy chips off the paper plate and broke it into equal shares and were left to scrap for bits of petrified cheese sunken into the grooves of the paper plate. It did not matter if there was a bit of paper melded in; this was still a breakfast of champions.

Besides, Mom’s cooking was worse than faring for ourselves in the refrigerator or navigating the greasy orange interior of the microwave. A staple at her dinner table was chipped beef on toast made from packets of lunch meat. Stirred with lumpy gravy, our mother cooked it on high until it was scorched to a brown paste, then scooped it out onto toast we had to decarbonize by scraping the black off with the edge of a butter knife.

Breakfast was even worse. Mom would whip up an industrial-sized box of powdered milk, pour it into empty plastic milk jugs—still with a milk ring curdled sour around the rim—and stick them out in the 40-cubic-foot freezer in the garage.

When we ran out of milk, we would have to lug out one of these frozen ice blocks from the freezer depths and let it thaw on the counter. With the half-thawed milk floating in the jug like an iceberg, Mom would pour the thin liquid over breakfast. Our Saturday morning bowls of exciting cereals—the Sugar Smacks and Fruity Pebbles we’d begged for so laboriously in the supermarket aisles—now sat lifeless in their watery tombs. We spooned them to our lips with trepidation, the magic of the commercials long gone.

But when Dad snapped his chair upright and said, “Get me the mitts,” excitement filled the air.

“Dad’s cooking!” Danny barrelled down the hall, shouting at the top of his lungs. I’d run back down with him, equally overjoyed and we’d stand attentive as Dad gussied up in preparation to turn the stove burner on.

Dad was the best cook—even if it was like prodding a large slothful animal with an electric zapper to prize him out of his chair long enough to get him to the kitchen. But when we did, it was magic. Suddenly, in my father’s hands, food became edible and delicious. There was not a film, rind or fleck of black carbon you had to remove from your dish before you could put it in your mouth. There was not a cluster of strands from our mother’s hairpiece to pick off your tongue. You just forked up the food, thought nothing of it and ate.

Granted, we had to stay in the kitchen with our father and do nearly everything except stand at the pan. But it was worth it. We’d beg him to make his special spaghetti recipe and he’d sprinkle sugar in the sauce. We’d beg him to make bacon-and-egg sandwiches, and he’d sprinkle sugar on the bacon as it sizzled in the skillet.

Everything my father touched turned golden and delicious. When we ate we did so with rapture, urgency, as if we could not remember the last time we did so and did not know when food like this would ever come again. There were never leftovers. When my father cooked, I squirrelled away every last thing he made. It was the only material proof of him I could take with me.

My father sits in a cloud of his own gas. Mom stands at the kitchen counter, rolling pin in one hand, the other cocked and loaded, a dusting of flour on her hip.

“For God’s sake, Dan, would you get up off your lazy ass and give me a hand in here?”

A tuft of my father’s hair pokes from over the top of the La-Z-Boy, his back to the open kitchen. A commercial is on.

“I told you, Sandy, when a commercial comes on.”

My father sneezes cataclysmically; everything exists for him large.

My brother does a proper table setting, circling round and round the table, setting our cheap flattened silverware on picnic napkins as carefully as if they were damask.

We all sit down to say grace. Dad scratches his head with the prongs of an up-flipped fork.

“Dear heavenly Father,” he starts.

Mom flicks my wrist with her finger, “Stop smacking your lips or I’m gonna smack them for you.” Her eyes still closed in prayer.

Dad continues, “We thank you for this delicious food. Amen.”

“I want to know, Dann,” Mom starts, “when you’re going to get the addition built on? I’ve been hounding you for what, I don’t know, eight months now? We’re running out of room for my stuff.”

“Sandy, you don’t need to be buying any more clothes.” And it was true. Mom had so many shoes she had bought a horse trailer, parked it in the yard and begun throwing in black bin bags of shoes until they were piled to the top.

“It’s not just my stuff, it’s the kids’ shit and your shit too.”

“If you stopped buying it, we wouldn’t need more room to put it.”

Mom follows Dad from the kitchen as he plops in his chair, Danny and I clear the table, clanking dishes into the sink. Mom positions herself across from the TV.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d just be tickled pink, you know? I mean, I wouldn’t know how to act, if you would just for one fucking second talk to me. Communicate.”

My father hiccup-belches. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything!”

“Can we do it later? I’m letting my food digest.”

I pinch off a lug of cheese in the fridge and soften it in my fingers, roll it into a ball.

“Later never comes, Dannnn. We have got to talk now, pronto. If we’re going to stay married, you have got to talk to me like man and wife.”

My father shifts in his chair.

“Are you listening to me?”

He tucks his hands between his legs.

“Godammit, Dan, I’m talking to you!”

He laughs at a commercial.

“You motherfucking rotten son of a bitch,” Mom screams, “How dare you ignore me to watch the same commercial you’ve seen a million times.”

“Sandy, leave me alone, will ya? We don’t need to talk about anything.”

“Oh, we don’t, huh? We don’t have to talk about what a loser you are? Or how you can’t keep a job? Or that your kids don’t respect you? Or how you sit there night after night like a lump on a log? Yeah, right,” Mom snorts, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

My father grips the side handle. “I don’t have to take this shit,” he shouts, and jettisons from the chair. But Mom tries to block him and they scuffle at the door. He knocks her against the hutch and crashes out of the house.

“Dad!” I yell from after him, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to hell, Julie.” He storms off the deck. “Straight to hell.”

“Julie, you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand.” Mom holds up a few fingers, demonstrating. “I do and do and do for people and here I am, 39, and what do I got to show for it? Nothing!”

Mom hyperventilates into a brown paper bag. In between breaths she takes a silver table spoon from the freezer and presses its curved back to the swollen puffs of her eyelids.

The fights that started in the trailer and ended when Dad stormed out often saw Mom chasing down the road after him in the spare car. She’d return alone later that night, her red face red streaked with tears.

“Julie, let me tell you something,” she says. “The one you love at 20 is not the one you love at 30.”

The kind of crying Mom did lasted hours and by morning her eyelids were nearly swollen shut. She’d splash water on her face, compress a cold washcloth to her eyes or scrub on kohl eye liner but it just made her look like a raccoon. The only thing that reduced the swelling was a tablespoon from the silverware drawer run under the cold tap and stuck in the freezer until it froze into a thin, rounded ice cube. She would corner me in the kitchen and stand by the counter with the cold curve of the spoon pressed into the hollow of her eye socket. I leaned against the refrigerator, my hands tucked behind me, sliding them up and down the smooth wood-grain sticker she’d applied to the silver handle.

“Does it look better now?” she’d ask as she lifted the spoon from her eye. It didn’t.

“Uh, a little bit.”

“How about now?” she’d say, raising it again, her eyeball popping up.

“Maybe a few more minutes.”

I vacillated wildly between first feeling sorry for my father and then Mom. I hated how she cornered him but I would show alliance to her even as she called him vicious names. I shared an understanding with Dad but hearing Mom sob through the night and seeing her face the morning after, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. What Mom feared most was Dad walking out and no longer being the breadwinner. She painted a bleak picture of life without his pay cheque; no more shopping, no horses, no nice knick-knacks ordered from the catalogues to set around the trailer—all things our mother wanted that didn’t really matter to me. But I was scared when she said she’d have to pull us out of school to live in a shelter for homeless women and if that didn’t work, give us up to foster care. Mom would turn on her best behaviour to win Dad back, but once the threat was over, she unleashed a vengeance for her dependency that cast darkness over our family for weeks. And when Dad lost another job, the cycle of regular fights accelerated to almost daily shouting matches over money.

“Dan, what are we going to do? I can’t pay the mortgage.”

“Let them take the fucking place, I’ll go live in the garage.”

“And what about us?” Mom seethed. “You expect your kids to live in that filthy rat trap with you?”

“They can if they want to,” Dad reasoned.

In the weeks that followed my father’s last pay cheque, Mom was supposed to budget to stretch out the money but instead went on rampant shopping sprees, buying up the outfits she had her eye on. The cheques bounced at the bank and piled up with fees and penalties and Mom, in a dramatic display of righteous indignation, would stand at the window of a teller and bang her fist on the counter trying to get the charges reversed until they escorted her out.

As for Dad, he never saw a dime from his pay cheques anyway. The only thing he had that was of any importance was his record collection.

But without the money to fuel Mom’s fantasy, her world tipped on its axis and rolled straight down to crash into my father’s.

Mom’s hair is a wild windstorm of stray hairs that stick out from the jet-black hairpiece she has wound up into a cone on top of her head. She stomps through the kitchen, slamming plates down on gold-flecked Formica.

“You go tell that good for nothing, son of a bitchin, no good motherfucking father of yours, Dannnn, that his dinner is ready.”

“Hey, Dad,” I sing-song, approaching the dark lair of the garage, “Mom says she’s fixed up your favorite dinner. She’d love for you to come in and eat with us.” I hold my breath, staring into the black abyss of the garage. I can just make out my father’s shadow, stooped on a milk crate sorting through the junk under his workbench.

“Please, Daddy.”

“Well, you go tell your mother that she can just kiss my rosy fucking ass, will you?” he shouts. “It’s going to take more from that lunatic than her slop to get me to step back inside that hell-hole.”

“Okay.” And I crunch back down the gravel walkway.

“Dad said he’ll be in in a few minutes, he’s gotta finish what he’s doing and clean up. He said to tell you that he loves you, Mommy.”

Back and forth, lobbing my own lies, rinsing the filth from theirs, until five to six trips later Dad reluctantly opens the aluminium screen door and tromps back down the hall to soap his hands with a goop of orange hand cleaner.

He looms like a giant at the yellow plastic vanity, with its dainty shell soap dishes scalloped right into the sink. He shakes his hands off on the fake marble of the counter, peppering the mirror. Dirty froth and water streak down the bowl and pool on the counter. Dad stomps out, turning down the hall and I slip in, wiping the basin clean with the guest towel and rinsing the dirt down the drain. I toss the towel into the long cabinet behind my mother’s wigs and pads and the secret stash of Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues she orders them from. I mean, who’s going to use a guest towel in our house?

The threat of divorce hung in the air thick as burning bacon and was a constant force being prepared for in various forms of execution. Mom made a big production of having us load clothes into a paper sack and keep it in the back of our closets for anytime she thought we may need to flee under cover of night. That she announced it loudly while pacing in front of Dad and the TV seemed to defy the intended secrecy of it all, but we followed orders.

And after dinner when she railed on him as he lay beached in the chair, my brother and I sat crosslegged on the floor in the back of the trailer as we once did playing church. But this time we were perfectly still, straining our ears for the recliner footrest to snap shut. If it did, we’d have to bolt to the living room and get between them in their physical fight. Every shout or stomp ricocheted though the trailer and vibrated the glass panels of the hutch, so just as Dad read Mom’s proximity to him by the strength of her voice through the walls, we read the levity of their arguments by the needle on our own internal Richter scale. There was no way to stop them and just as you’d think Dad’s attention might make Mom back off, it only fuelled a desire to make him pay.

“What do you want me do to Sandy?” my father would plead, “I’ll do anything just to get you to stop. Stop, Sandy, I’m begging you to stop.”

My father stands trapped in the vortex of the trailer where the living room, hallway and kitchen all meet. He keeps his eye on the front door but Mom blocks the exit, her arm strung out, gripping the edge of the hutch.

“Dan, you are going to stand here, face me like a man and deal with this.”

My father sighs.

Mom cuts, “Stop acting like a little boy, Dannn. I want to be married to a man.”

Danny and I sneak down the hall to stand guard.

Mom and Dad wedge into the tiny archway opening, my father’s face dropped in defeat. Mom reads our presence as allies and edges in.

“C’mon, Dannn,” she taunts, “What are you going to do? Huhhhh?”

“I’m begging you, Sandy,” my father says quietly, “Please leave me alone.”

“What!” Mom mocks, “I can’t hear you little boy, going to stand there and cry?”

Mom points to us crouched in the hallway. “The kids aren’t going to help you, are you kids? They’re here because they know how crazy you are.”

“Please Sandy, please let me go.” My father looks up from his hand, exasperated. Mom leers with a smirk, “You’re going have to talk louder if you want me to hear you.”

“Mom,” I whisper. “Please.”

He can beg, we can beg but she will not stop.

Her smile fades, “You son of a bitch.” And she gains steam, “You rotten, good for nothing son of a fucking bitch! I do and do and do and do for you and what do I get? You got nothing here, you destroyed this home. I hate you, these kids hate you.”

Danny squeaks, “We don’t hate you, Dad.”

“We love you both,” I plead.

We emerge from the shadows; Danny latches onto the seam running down my father’s jean leg, I slip in against my mother’s hip, placing myself between them. Mom sneers like a heckler in his face, Dad holds his head in his hands inches from her spitting mouth. Pressed against Mom, I can feel my father’s rage building. With a sudden flare his head jerks upright. His fists shoot out of nowhere and he rushes, tangling his hands in her hair, smacking her gutted mouth. He catches her jaw in the crook of his palm, gripping her cheeks. She folds her chin to her chest like a child being tickled.

My father squeezes.

“Helllp! Heeelp me Juwelly, Denny.” Mom’s eyes are as wide as golf balls, pleading over the top of my father’s hand.

“Let her go!” I screech.

“Call her off, Julie,” Dad screams, “Make her leave me alone!”

“I will, Dad, I promise, I’ll make her stop!”

Dad shoves her from his grip; she crashes into the crevice of the couch, separating it from the wall. The pretzel barrel tips and coins spill like a jackpot over my father’s feet. He heaves his foot out of the pile to haul back and kick her and I desperately tug the belt loops of my mother’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, trying to pull her from the slit of the sofa. Dad’s drawn boot hits the wall, tangling in the chains of the clock, a pine cone whips around his ankle. He catches himself against the hutch as heirloom mail-order plates crash from their plastic holders. The clock flies off the wall, crashing at my mother’s feet. My brother rips from his death grip on the seam of my father’s pants and crumples to the floor, crying. We break in the swirling vortex of the trailer, catching our breath. The jostled hands strike the hour and the little birds pop out the door of the clock, lying on its side, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!, they circle on the track.

School was full of kids whose parents were divorced and returned to class with stories of fun-filled weekends spent with either their mom or dad. I envied them. The only reason my parents fought was because they were together. Instead of getting the best of them like the kids of divorced parents, we got the worst of both. We could handle being with one or the other so the only thing stopping the harmony was the fact that they would not split. But while together, Danny and I lived each day with antennas tuned to the brewing of fights that ran in cycles day by day. And they always ended by the same formula; Dad taking off in the car with Mom in hot pursuit, or Dad pummelling Mom until she finally grew silent.

Despite us begging and pleading, cornering them separately or tag teaming them together, the sweet relief of divorce never came. My brother and I sat in one bedroom or the other, secretly plotting how happy our lives would be if only for the love of God they would just separate. Danny cries bitter tears, his lip buckling under the weight. He cannot stand the fighting, the shuffling back and forth between Mom and Dad to smooth them out, the way they pit us against each other and force us to take sides. We focus instead on the future and talk with excitement about the good times to be had once we are with just one of them. Mom or Dad, but never them both. Please, God, we pray together in our pyjamas on the floor in the dark, please never them both.

The only good thing that came of the fighting was the sporadic new beginnings Dad insisted would lead to a happy home life. Convinced all would be forgiven if we just attended church, Dad donned his blistermaking shoes and Mom had a legitimate reason to try on half her outfits. We headed out early Sunday morning for one of the small country tabernacles that dotted the dirt roads throughout the county, the car ride heavy with tension.