A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  Maybe I should be careful. Maybe I shouldn’t call him dead. It might stimulate something dormant inside him.

  I PRAYED. DEAR God, please protect my mother. Please make her stay healthy in her mind and please make her stay home. I caught myself just in time, because I could be punished for asking a favor of God. I could be granted what I asked for, not knowing that what I asked for was the wrong thing to want. Only God knew what should happen, so I revised my prayer. Please, God, protect my mother and whatever you think should happen, make that happen, but please make the best thing turn out.

  The shift in direction of my prayer gave me a tiny comfort, made me feel I had prayed correctly, smartly.

  And then I thought to pray for one thing more. And God? If you would, please keep an eye on my father.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T HAVE any real friends at school. I was teased some for being “weird,” but mostly I was left alone. I did, however, enjoy writing plays. Every month or so when I wrote one, the teachers let me put it on in the school library. Even kids who were normally hateful to me would slide up and ask if I had a role for them. I didn’t write plays about farm animals with magical powers or garden vegetables that could sing and dance. I wrote plays about mothers and fathers who fought, children caught in the middle. In one of my plays a ten-year-old girl was given up by her parents for adoption. “There’s just something sour in you, little girl—always been that way. Best as I can figure it, you got combined with a seed from a lemon inside my belly when I was pregnant with you.” I was thrilled when this play made so many of the girls cry and ask me if it was true that a little girl could be combined with a lemon seed during pregnancy. “Not only is it true, but I know a set of twins and one of them has a stalk of corn growing clear out of the center of her head, just exactly like a horn. Sometimes, it doesn’t show until you’re older.”

  My teachers sat me down and told me not to write plays that upset the other children, but secretly, I thought they liked this one the best.

  I was bad at math and didn’t seem to have an ear for languages. But I loved writing plays and skits, and this was my focus, until Damian came along.

  Most of us kids had been together all our lives. It was rare to have a new kid join the school. And when little Damian showed up for class one day, the class rejected him the way the body rejects a skin graft. Damian was small for his age but really, he was small for any age. He was a tiny, thread-thin boy and he had a sweetness about him that made him an instant target. That first day, some of the older kids pretended to buddy up to him, then they led him out beyond the soccer field and pulled his pants down. I watched from a distance as they shrieked, egging each other on. “Get him! Get him!” They took branches and whipped him across his naked legs and then kicked him in the stomach.

  Even though these kids were bigger, and even though I wasn’t brave, I ran as fast as I could and when I reached them I said, “Leave him alone.” I took Damian’s hand in mine and pulled him up. I led him away, carrying his pants in my other hand.

  It was a mystery to me why they let me rescue Damian. Easily, they could have ganged up on me, whipped me with sticks, too. But I knew that if they tried, I would take my own stick and I would poke their eyes out. And maybe they knew this, could smell my intent the way a dog smells fear.

  I helped Damian get dressed over by the jungle gym and from that moment on, I was his hero.

  I’d never been a hero before and the feeling was empty. Damian was nice enough but he wasn’t bright and we could never really be friends. But I was fond of him and when anybody picked on him, I put an end to it.

  My one true friend didn’t go to my school because he was a couple of years younger than me. Greg Fanslow lived two doors down and with his blond hair and fair skin, we could have been brothers. As a matter of fact, as far as we were concerned, we were brothers, joined at the finger by the blade of a knife and a drop of blood.

  Greg was younger, but he was smarter. He knew the name of just about every bug, plant, and flower and he always had ideas.

  Most days after school, we hung around together in the woods. We went exploring, following old hunting trails or trying to find bear prints in the soil. We made forts from branches and piles of stones. We rode our bikes the seven miles to South Amherst to get cold sodas from the tiny old store near the railroad tracks and, sometimes, we slept outside in a tent in his backyard.

  Greg never came inside my house. Although he wouldn’t admit it, I knew it was because his mother told him not to. His mother warned him that there was something wrong with my parents. He didn’t have to admit this to me, I could see the truth in his eyes.

  Behind our houses was a path and then a stream and then more woods and there was no reason to keep walking back there, deeper into the woods, because all you’d see was more trees.

  Except once, Greg and I did just exactly this. We walked straight back, crossing the stream and then beyond. And suddenly, we came across a perfect and perfectly real little house. A shack, really. But with a door and windows and a peaked roof. It even had a chimney made out of silver pipe. The door was padlocked but when we fiddled with it, we discovered that the lock was not engaged.

  We entered the tiny house and saw a platform where a person could unfurl a sleeping bag and sleep very well. There were a couple of cabinets, a window in the rear that opened and closed and locked. There were curtains.

  It felt like a miracle. We didn’t know what to do so we sat down on the floor in the center of the room, which was the whole house, and we thought about what to do. Should we tell somebody? Should we tell our parents?

  We decided we didn’t have to do anything. It was enough to know that it was there. And it was okay for us to keep our knowledge of the cabin a secret.

  After this, the cabin became a regular part of our lives. We didn’t spend much time inside of it, but we visited it frequently, I think, to make sure it was still there. To make sure we hadn’t imagined it. We never could quite believe it was real.

  Privately, I liked knowing the cabin was there. I liked knowing that if I had to, I could run deep into the woods, far from home, and not be at the mercy of nature and all the creatures in it.

  EIGHT

  MY MOTHER WAS in the hospital.

  My father said she was there because she was “nervous” and needed “some time to herself.” Two weeks had passed and I wanted my mother. Already I’d begun to worry because I could not conjure her face. What would happen if I forgot what she looked like entirely?

  I spent hours in her office in the rear of the house. I was a stowaway inside her closet where boxes of her papers, her knitted cape, and belongings she’d had since childhood were stored. It was where I felt her essence was most concentrated.

  My brother was on a camping trip that seemed to last for months.

  It was the first time I’d ever been alone with my father. The day he brought her to the hospital, he came home and slipped into my room as silently as a snake. I looked up and saw his face in my mirror and I flinched. “Well, son, it’s just the two of us now,” he’d said, “I hope we’ll be okay.” Then he forced a smile and turned around and left. I wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that “I hope we’ll be okay” remark. There were a couple of ways you could think about it and I didn’t like either one. I made a decision right then and there: I wouldn’t think about Ernie and I wouldn’t think bad thoughts. The days passed slowly, silently. And despite myself I had a terrible thought: if she died, I would have to run away from home.

  WITHOUT MY MOTHER there, the house was dark. My father insisted on turning off every light to save electricity. Only the dim bulb above the stove illuminated the entire front of the house. Being November, it was dark by five o’clock.

  My father roamed silently at night, checking the locks on the doors, pouring himself another drink. Or he would sequester himself in the bedroom downstairs for the entire day watching football.

  In the morning, my father woke me
for school by knocking on my door and calling my name in a peculiar, singsongy voice that didn’t even sound like him. “Wake up, Augusten.”

  But I was always already awake and dressed, sitting on my bed. “Okay, thanks!” I called out. I stayed in my room until the last possible minute, then ran outside and down the driveway to catch the bus.

  When I returned home, he was never waiting for me at the door with a kiss, like my mother. He was downstairs in the bedroom or at the kitchen table grading papers, not to be disturbed.

  Some evenings he didn’t come upstairs to make dinner. I wouldn’t see him at all and when I looked down the stairway, it was fully dark. On these nights, I opened a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and ate it unheated, straight from the can.

  We said almost nothing to each other. Occasionally, he stood in the hall and dabbed at his bleeding psoriasis-covered hands with the thin, worn handkerchief he always kept in his back pocket. He smiled at me when he saw me. The whites of his unknowable eyes were yellow. I looked away.

  One Saturday we went grocery shopping together at the Stop & Shop. My father carried a Bic pen and a small pad with him everywhere he went. On this pad he’d written a list and ticked the items as we put them into the cart. We shopped in silence, my father occasionally pausing at a shelf and tapping the keys of his Texas Instruments calculator to determine which product was the better value. When I tossed a package of cookies into the cart, my father halted and stared at the package, the muscles of his jaw clenching. “Do not, I repeat, do not add things to the cart which are not on the list.”

  I quickly put the cookies back on the shelf. “Okay, sorry,” I said, eager to have the incident behind us.

  But he continued to stare at the space in the cart the cookies had briefly occupied. And without looking up he continued, “First, it will be the cookies. Next it will be crackers or some such thing. And before you know it, we’ll have a cart filled with all these foods we can’t possibly eat and they’ll all spoil and need to be thrown away.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t want them anyway, I’m sorry.”

  And now, he looked at me. It was a hard, intense stare. “Maybe next time you should wait in the car or just stay home. I don’t want every shopping trip to turn into some out-of-control nightmare with you throwing all sorts of things into the cart and me having to then go all through the store putting everything back.”

  I didn’t say anything, I just nodded once and set my eyes on the floor.

  But at the checkout my father was suddenly very light and sociable to the clerk, smiling and making small talk about the price of corn, how it was “a terrific value” to get so many ears for a dollar. He even told her he’d started to buy gas out in Sunderland because it was almost four cents cheaper. He offered to write the name of the station on a page of his little notebook for her. She laughed and said she didn’t want him to go to any trouble and my father said, “Why, it’s no trouble at all. See? I always carry my pad with me.” He pulled the pad out of his shirt pocket and held it up to her as proof. He licked his finger and turned the page to a fresh sheet. Carefully, he drew a brief map to the Sunoco station on Route 5. He tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to her. “There you are. Now, I hope they haven’t raised the prices. I’d hate to send you all the way out there on a wild-goose chase.”

  I’d never in my life heard my father use the expression “a wild-goose chase.” He was—the only word that came to mind—bubbly.

  He was so pleasant and outgoing that for an instant, I imagined something had changed in him. Even his face itself seemed somehow different. It was hard to exactly put it into words, but as I watched him while the clerk rung up our items, I was amazed at the transformation, at how perfectly nice and warm and normal my father appeared. I took advantage of what I saw as a remarkably good mood and, as we loaded the groceries into the back of the car, suggested we go across the street to Friendly’s for ice cream.

  My father said, “Ice cream hurts my teeth.” And I saw that his face had changed, once again. Gone was the kind, open expression; now his face was a mirror again. His features were completely blank, his eyes absolutely dead.

  I thought of the few times we’d gone to the university together and how he’d taken me around and introduced me to his colleagues. He’d seemed like such a dad that I’d wondered what was wrong with me to always feel so suspicious of him. I remembered thinking how, in the light of day out in the world, my father was just like anybody’s father. But as soon as I was alone with him again, Dad was gone and dead was there in his place.

  Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men—one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw.

  In my bedroom late that night I thought I heard him laughing downstairs in the basement. It was a soft laugh, more of a throaty chuckle. And then he stopped and I heard nothing. I didn’t investigate. I knew he wasn’t laughing because something was funny. It was basement laughter. And there was something crazy about it.

  BLOOD STAINED THE seat of his threadbare pajama bottoms and when I asked him if he was all right he replied, “My skin has been acting up, that’s all.” And when he took his jacket off after work, there were bloodstains on his white shirt.

  One night, instead of grading papers, he sharpened every knife in the house. He sat at the kitchen table in the near darkness and drew the blade across the gray sharpening stone. I could hear the steel singing from my bedroom.

  I was very nervous and my stomach hurt. A few times, when I wiped myself there was blood on the toilet paper. I slept with the hot water bottle and wished for my mother, wished I were thirty.

  And when I woke up in the middle of the night and heard my father in the kitchen speaking a language that couldn’t be real, gibberish, moon-talk, when I held my breath and closed my eyes and listened to him speaking in tongues to himself alone in the kitchen, what I wished for was to be dead.

  NINE

  AND THEN THE men came. It was like the rains had arrived to quench the earth at last.

  The men came with their machines and within the desert of my motherless month, I feasted on their most extraordinary arrival. We were to have a new septic system.

  At first I was wary, afraid of the equipment. The bulldozer was like a giant poisonous yellow spider tearing apart the land to lay its eggs. Dump truck, bucket loader, an arm with a toothy head attached that mindlessly clawed at the land—the appalling noise these things created made me believe they were breaking up more than just the yard; they had the power to destroy the family.

  But I was spellbound. I felt that if I could make friends with these men, I might be able to talk them into digging a small swimming pool for me.

  Standing on the front steps, I stood up real straight and tall, hoping to double my age by doing so. I was so shy and especially afraid of strangers and men. But I was also completely fascinated and wanted to watch every move they made. So even though it took all the courage I had in my body, probably even the extra emergency backup courage a person stores in reserve within those bumps along the spine, I managed to remain on the front steps and not run inside and peek at them from behind a curtain.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. And gradually, I began to calm down. My heart crawled out of my skull and went back down into my chest. And when the beasts turned to look at me, I didn’t even blink.

  I began to appreciate the beauty of these steel machines that were under strict control. I studied them and saw that as a knob-topped lever was pulled forward within the cab, the bucket of the loader was raised up in the air. When another lever was pushed away, the corresponding blade of the bulldozer would lower and scrape. I wanted to clap my hands.

  With the likelihood of attack all but removed, I was quite happy to sit and watch. After a while, I saw that this pack of men had a leader. Large in all directions, he would have cut a terrifying figur
e were he not enclosed within the glass-walled cab atop his machine. Even his voice was giant, as now and then his head would pop out of the window and he would shout at the others, “To the left, to the left!” or “Back it up!” The pack obeyed immediately, thoroughly.

  The men took occasional breaks for smoking, mashing sandwiches into their mouths, and stretching exactly like dogs, with their backs arched, tossing their heads from side to side, sweat flying. During one of these breaks, the leader stepped out of his machine and I got a good look at him. His hair was the exact color of the dirt he scooped from the earth. It appeared he had tougher skin than normal, more like a hide. He had a thick, bristly mustache, woolly eyebrows, and green eyes that glittered like faceted stones in a tarnished setting. He was mesmerizing and I could not look away. I hadn’t even realized he was staring right at me until it was too late to look away.

  “Hey,” he called, “you wanna sit up here?” He slapped the seat of the bucket loader.

  Suddenly realizing that he’d caught me watching him, I panicked. I couldn’t think of what to do, so I scurried inside and stayed away from them for the rest of the day. But I watched from my bedroom window, making sure to keep only the top of my head and my eyes exposed above the windowsill. I saw him glance around a couple of times looking for me.

  I was just not accustomed to large, grown people asking me if I wanted to share in what they were doing. The moment had been thrilling, too thrilling. I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl. Fleeing had been an act of self-preservation, not shyness in this case.