A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  “What is it?” she said, her eyes burning with intensity.

  She frightened me. I didn’t understand what was happening. Where were we going? But I only said, “What about Ernie?”

  I watched her eyes slide to his aquarium, then back at me. “It’s okay,” she said. “Leave him right where he is. Your father will take care of him. He’s staying.”

  She started to leave but before she could I rushed in with another question: “But where are we going? Why?”

  I thought back to the Amherst apartment, Mexico. I didn’t want to go. It was like she was asking me to come with her back in time.

  “We’re just going to a motel, that’s all. Just for a couple of nights. Now hurry up and pack.” She turned and left.

  I did as she said, retrieving my small suitcase from the closet. I opened it on my bed and put in a pair of jeans, a few shirts, socks, underwear. I glanced around my room wondering what else I should take but then I heard the car start up outside my window. I closed the case. “Okay, Ernie, be good,” I said. But he was sleeping. And I wouldn’t dare wake him up for this.

  Carrying my suitcase, I stepped as softly as I could down the hallway to the front door. I didn’t see my father or my brother. The front door was open, so I just stepped outside and closed it behind me. My mother was in the car, the dome light illuminating her drawn, gaunt face. She looked frightened and this made me worried. Something was wrong.

  I placed my suitcase in the back, then climbed into the car, feeling like I was in some sort of fever dream, where things aren’t quite right somehow; colors too bright, sounds unnatural, the scale of things all messed up. “What happened?” I asked after I settled myself in the seat.

  She put the car in reverse, looking wild-eyed over her right shoulder as she backed down the driveway. She shifted into drive and we set off.

  “Your father and I had a fight and I don’t want us sleeping at the house tonight. He’s very drunk and I don’t think it’s safe.”

  Something heavy shifted out of position within my chest. There was that word again, safe. We hadn’t been safe before and we’d had to live in an apartment. “Are we going back to Amherst?” I couldn’t help asking, and my voice sounded younger to my ears, and I felt younger, too. Things were terribly wrong and I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I wasn’t actually dreaming, sick and high-fevered, shaking in bed.

  “No,” she said, “we’re just going away for a night or two. Three at the most. Just until your father settles down and we can work this out. Don’t you worry,” she said, looking over at me.

  “What about my brother?” I asked, wondering why he wasn’t coming with us, too.

  “Your brother’s fine, don’t worry,” she said. “He’s staying at home with your father.”

  Why was he safe and we weren’t?

  The question remained unasked and unanswered. My mother crushed her cigarette into the ashtray, which was overflowing with butts, and immediately lit another.

  • • •

  WE CHECKED INTO a Holiday Inn just off Interstate 91 in Northampton. The first thing I did was stand on the bed and touch the rough, sparkly ceiling. I could just reach it. As I drew my finger across the coarse, prickly surface I enjoyed a sense of relief and fulfillment—it felt exactly as I knew it would. Sometimes, I would be sitting next to my mother in the car looking out the window when I saw a fence or a stone wall. “Pull over, please,” I would cry and my mother would slide the car over to the shoulder. I’d been watching the fence or the stone wall and imagining running my fingers across it, could almost experience what it would feel like to the touch. And I simply had to see if I was right, if it felt the way I thought it would feel. It was like this with the ceiling.

  My mother grabbed the telephone and carried it over to the bed. She made a pile of pillows behind her back, lit a cigarette, and settled in.

  I turned on the television and my mother automatically made a motion with her hand, lower the volume.

  She called her friend Gayle and spoke in a weary, fatigued whisper. “I took Augusten and left the house.” She pulled on her cigarette and blew the smoke above the mouthpiece of the phone. “Yes, exactly,” she said. “That’s what I was worried about. So we’re fine now. We’re here and I’ll phone the doctor in the morning. Hopefully he can work on John.”

  It was hard to focus on the television and not eavesdrop on what my mother was saying. I began worrying about Ernie. Would my father just give him his regular food, or would he remember to give him treats? He had been the one who’d first given Ernie some carrots, so I wasn’t too worried.

  My mother didn’t stay on the phone for long. She hung up and told me, “I have some dimes if you want to run down to the vending machine for a snack.”

  The vivid paisley print of my mother’s hand-sewn cotton dress nearly throbbed in the drab room, which was lit only by a single lamp, its shade yellowed and stained. Now, being alone with her again, on the run, unsafe, I felt as though everything I knew was folding in on itself. My stomach faithfully cramped. “I wish we’d brought a hot water bottle,” I mumbled.

  “Oh, is your stomach bothering you again?” she said, and just the way she said it soothed me.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  She pulled me close and placed her warm hand on my stomach. “Shhhh,” she said, gently kissing my forehead. “It’s okay.” And even though I knew that it wasn’t, I let it be.

  She smelled like metal.

  I wanted to sleep.

  We slept.

  In the morning, my mother called my school and told them I would be out for a few days.

  We breakfasted on eggs over easy and dry white toast at a diner. The parking lot was filled with tractor trailers.

  My mother smoked and pushed her plate away untouched.

  “Did you sleep, Mom?”

  “A little.”

  “You look so tired. Are you okay?” Her cheeks appeared hollow and gaunt, and her eyes, bloodshot, had a haunted look that I didn’t like at all.

  Almost under her breath she said, “Finish your eggs, at least the white part.”

  I looked at the sprig of parsley on my plate and wondered if Ernie would eat it. I wanted to fold it into a napkin and bring it home for him. But when would we be home again?

  By the evening of the second night my mother had seen her psychiatrist and spoken to my father on the phone. I’d remained close to her side, except at the doctor’s office, where I waited for her in the reception room.

  “We’ll go home tomorrow,” she told me.

  “Can we go tonight?”

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  Finally I asked her, “What happened?”

  She looked thoughtfully at me and then seemed to decide something. “Your father has been drinking very heavily lately, and the other night when we were having that fight he wrapped his hands around my neck. I managed to kick him in the knee and free myself.”

  I just watched her.

  “So I didn’t think we should stay in the house anymore. I was worried that he was dangerous. Your father needed some time to settle down,” she told me.

  I held the word in my mouth before letting it out. “Dangerous.” What was this unspeakable danger, which had the quality of a dream evaporating just after waking? A name, but no shape. What was it about him that made me wary even when he wasn’t drunk? And whatever it was, did I have it within me, too?

  She stared into my eyes and her face held an expression as articulate as the words: you know.

  I could always read my mother by looking at her eyes. Whether she was happy or sad or frightened or upset, it was just right there. I thought of my father’s eyes. And how they revealed absolutely nothing. When I looked at him, I saw only my own questioning, searching gaze reflected back at me.

  • • •

  WE DID NOT go home the next day. Or the day after that. We stayed away from home for seven more days.

  My mother saw her psychiatrist each afternoon, s
ometimes joined by my father. I was watched by Mr. Rice who managed the motel or simply locked in the room and told not to open the door for anyone. I remained out of school, growing so far behind I would be forced to repeat the third grade the following year.

  I longed for Ernie and begged my mother to let us get him. “We can’t, Augusten. He has that huge aquarium and besides, we can’t have pets at the motel. Your father is watching him. Your father said Ernie’s very happy and he’s getting plenty of attention.”

  “You asked him?”

  “Yes, I did. And he said Ernie is fine.”

  “But I want to go home.”

  “I know. And we will, soon.”

  The days lost their definition for me; morning and evening were identical because I spent both staring at the television. I took naps and then had trouble sleeping at night. I woke up confused, unsure of where I was. I almost never left the room and if I did it was only to walk along the concrete landing to the vending machines where I would buy a Coke or peanut M&M’s. The days seemed to double in length and there was nothing to do but wait. I felt suspended, like when the swing reaches the top bar and pauses in midair, or when you think you’re going to sneeze but don’t.

  And then finally, my mother told me to pack. “We’re going home.” And as suddenly as we’d left the red house, we returned to it.

  When we pulled into the driveway, I started to bounce in my seat. The weight of all the previous days evaporated and I was just happy to be home. I opened the door before my mother had come to a stop.

  “Don’t,” she shouted. “Wait until I’ve parked.”

  The moment she stopped, I leaped out of the car. I bounded up the front steps and opened the front door. My father was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, a smile on his face. “Well, hello there,” he said. His voice was low and steady, but there was something curious in his tone.

  “Hi,” I said, not sure if I should go to him and try and hug him or just walk past him to my room.

  “Did you have a fun trip?” he asked.

  I stood ten feet in front of him and replied nervously, “I guess.”

  My mother appeared behind me, closing the door. She walked past me, faced my father. He turned sideways in the doorway, allowing her to pass. She strode past him, went to the cabinet, and retrieved a glass. She filled it with water from the faucet and drank thirstily, the knob of her throat rising and falling.

  I turned, then ran down the hallway, opened the door to my room. “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie,” I called in the playful, nasal voice I often used with him. “ErnieErnieErnie.” His name, spoken in this way, created a noise that sounded very much like the sound he emitted when the refrigerator door was opened or he saw me enter the room with a carrot.

  My room was dark, the curtains pulled tight. I turned on the light.

  The glass walls of the aquarium were glazed with filth; crusty brown feces, rotten, liquefied lettuce. Claw marks were etched onto the glass walls, all over in a frantic, crazy pattern. The floor of the aquarium was filled with an inch of festering black fluid; rancid cedar chips and feces floated on top. His water bottle and food bowl were empty.

  Ernie, his hair matted, crispy, lay rigid in the sludge, his feces-caked mouth open in a scream. His eyes were white and cloudy.

  I started to shake. I couldn’t control myself. Even my legs were trembling and my teeth began to chatter, like I was freezing cold. I let go of my suitcase handle and it fell onto the floor. The thud made me flinch. I ran from my room.

  My father watched me walking toward him. His arms down at his sides, he smiled, his eyes unreadable. “Did you say hello to Ernie?”

  Still trembling, I stared at his mouth, his crooked, stained teeth, rotten in front. When I finally spoke my voice was broken, rough. “Where is my mother?”

  “She’s gone out to visit her friend, Gayle.”

  My father turned away from me and walked into the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of iced tea from the brown plastic pitcher that always sat next to the dish drainer. He carried his drink downstairs to the basement.

  AND IT BEGAN.

  Hate unspooled within my chest. Hate bloomed within me, unfurling like the supple petals of a deadly flower—oleander, foxglove.

  My childhood was over now. A part of me had died. But another part was born.

  And I knew that whatever badness my father had within him, I had within me, too. Before, I was afraid that I might grow up to be like him. Now, I knew that I already was. Because what he had done to Ernie I knew I could do to him.

  My father did not deserve to breathe.

  SEVEN

  AS LATE AFTERNOON light filled the room with melancholy pink and gold, and long shadows reached across the floor pulling darkness into the room, my mother stood at her old easel, its fine wood grain humbled by gouges and splotches of long-dried paint. The easel stood in front of the sliding glass doors in the living room. She wore another dress she’d made herself: red cotton with a scoop neck. She was barefoot and wore no jewelry but for her wide gold wedding band. In her left hand she balanced her wooden palate, stained with thick, glossy oil paint—cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, purple madder, quinacridone magenta, raw umber, and sap green. A years-old Maxwell House coffee can filled with brushes and a turpentine-soaked rag rested on the old red chair she’d dragged up from the basement. The chair had belonged to my father’s grandmother, Dandy’s wife “Mamaw,” a name that to me always eerily evoked a praying mantis in a black dress and hat. The chair had once been part of a set around her kitchen table but the others were long gone. My mother had painted it first blue then red, and briefly it had been in my bedroom, where I had discovered just how uncomfortable it was. Now it held paint supplies.

  “Honey, guinea pigs don’t live for years and years like dogs. They die. It’s very sad, but they don’t live a long time. Ernie had a very good life, he was a happy little animal.”

  I stood beside her, begging for attention, anxiously clenching my fingers into fists. “But Ernie didn’t die naturally. My father killed him. He starved him and didn’t give him water. You saw his cage. Why did he do that?”

  “Your father didn’t kill Ernie, Augusten. He took care of him, fed him, and gave him water. Ernie was probably sick and we didn’t know it.”

  “Mom,” I cried in frustration, stamping my feet, desperate for her to understand, “Ernie was not sick, I would have known. His cage couldn’t have become so”—and I pictured the cage, the unspeakable filth—“dirty in just a day!”

  “Look, your father was very upset when he found out Ernie was dead. He said he had no idea, he’d checked on him just that morning and Ernie was walking around in his cage making noises.”

  It was a lie. My father had killed Ernie and my mother was too preoccupied to see this.

  On her canvas a face was beginning to emerge, the features outlined softly in pencil. Paint had been applied only to the background, the ruffled collar and shoulder of the dress. An old black-and-white photograph of her grandmother was attached to the upper left corner of the canvas with a piece of masking tape.

  My father was downstairs in my parents’ bedroom, watching television. Earlier, he’d carried the heavy aquarium into the woods, dumped its contents, then carried it back into the front yard, where he’d hosed it out. The clean aquarium was now downstairs in the basement.

  I would never step near it again.

  My brother, as usual, was barricaded in his bedroom, the scent of his soldering iron filling that end of the house as he welded tiny electronic components together to create something no one could understand.

  Everybody was behaving as though nothing was shockingly wrong and it was making me crazy.

  “Augusten, I’m sorry your pet died, but death is a part of life. Now, let me get back to my painting. If you want to stand here with me and watch, that’s fine.” She smudged the line of the jaw with her finger, then stood back from the canvas, squinting and cocking her head. “Did I ever tell you ho
w I met your father?” she asked, not taking her eyes off her canvas.

  Ernie didn’t die naturally and I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.

  “Hmmmm?” she said, glancing over at me.

  “Yes,” I said distractedly. She’d told me the story of how she met my father so many times it felt like my own. Much of her repeated lore had taken on that quality.

  I only wanted her to understand what had happened, what my father had done. If she would only sit down and focus, if she would only listen.

  But then, I decided I did want to hear the story. I wanted to curl up and close my eyes and just listen to her talk and talk and talk.

  “Okay,” I said in a small voice, “tell me again.”

  She leaned into her canvas and, with her brush loaded with the palest blue, began to paint a pearl button onto the high collar below the subject’s chin. “Well, we were both freshmen at the University of Georgia. This would have been in 1952. Our first class was English and the class was seated alphabetically, according to our last names. My last name was Richter and your father’s was Robison, so we sat right next to each other. I looked to my right and there was your father. Of course, I didn’t know this when I looked at him.”

  She glanced down at me and smiled, a brush in her right hand like a wand, as though she’d just used it to conjure me.

  This was the part of the story where I always felt the most amazement. What if somebody at the university had spelled their names wrong on the sheet? Or left out a letter? Would I still have been born, though perhaps missing an ear?

  “Your father said hello to me. And after class, we walked together and talked. We started dating. Your father had very good manners. He had ambitions of becoming a minister.”

  I stared at her hands. The way she could make just a tiny splotch of paint look like a pearl that you could reach out and touch. With her finest brush tapered to a hair-thin point she added a small window of white to the blue and gray of the pearl, creating a perfect reflection.