A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  The next day, though, I returned to my perch at the top of the stairs. It didn’t take long before he invited me up into the seat again. “C’mon, kid, it won’t bite.”

  This time, I nodded and stepped forward with confidence. I wasn’t afraid anymore, not in the slightest.

  After the men had left the previous evening, I’d crawled all over their machines. I sat in the bucket loader seat and put my hands on all the knobs. I bounced from bulldozer to dump truck and wished we could keep them. I even petted the bucket loader’s bucket and rubbed the dirt from its teeth.

  As I placed my foot on the first step, the man ruffled my hair, then pushed me up with a surprising grip—so firm and powerful that I knew he could pull trees out of the earth with just his arms. I was tempted to let go and experience the sensation of falling, then being caught by him.

  I managed to climb inside the cab and sit on the seat, bouncing once or twice. “It’s neat,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he asked. “You like it up there?”

  I did. I nodded.

  “Good, then maybe someday you’ll grow up and drive one.”

  I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn’t say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

  I swung out of the cab, stood on the top step, and decided to jump. I landed harder than I expected and stumbled, clutching my ankle. “Thanks,” I said, probably blushing from my clumsiness. I headed back toward the house but paused, turning around once again. I smiled. Then ran up the stairs and back into the house, which seemed dark now that I’d been outside in the bright sun. I quickly walked back to my bedroom and went to my window to watch. After a while, I returned to the front porch.

  The man noticed I’d returned and he smiled at me, hitched his jeans higher up on his hips.

  I waved at him, but the small, friendly wave disguised my complete fascination with him, my confusion, the sad longing I felt when I was near him. I would have felt better being away from him, but I could not leave him, not while he was there for only a few days.

  In just the two days he’d been at our house, the man had given me more attention than my father had, maybe for my entire life. There’d never been anyone to compare my father with, and suddenly here was this dirty, smiling man. And his constant glances in my direction, the easy way he ran his fingers across the top of my head, the way he invited me up into his monster, these small things hit me with tremendous force.

  That night, I thought about him. I lay awake for hours, imagining myself walking down the street with him, sitting beside him in a car. I imagined him tucking me into bed at night and could almost feel his mustache tickle my forehead as he leaned in to kiss me.

  The next day, I was already waiting for them on my steps when they arrived. Prior to this, I had come outside only after I heard their engines start.

  Seeing me, he walked over. “Hey kid, you know what? I don’t even know your name. What do I call you?”

  I looked down at his shoes, and said, “Augusten.”

  He laughed, as though what I’d said had been funny, a joke. “Augusten? But that’s a boy’s name,” he said.

  Furious and humiliated I admitted, “Yeah, that’s what I am.”

  It was terrible to see the complete shock somersault behind his eyes. He stammered, “You’re a boy?”

  My face flushed bright red, I just knew it, and I was so mad I wanted to bite his finger off.

  He walked away.

  He did not glance at me again.

  I’d been mistaken for a girl before. With my long, curly blond hair and fair skin, I didn’t have the rugged look people are accustomed to in a boy. I was quiet, shy, and reserved; qualities one associates with a girl. But this had been more humiliating than one of my mother’s dippy poetry friends thinking I was my mother’s daughter.

  Though I continued to sit on the steps, determined to be brave and not hide, he never again invited me up on his bulldozer, he didn’t pet my head good-bye. I had disappointed him, disgusted him. He wanted nothing to do with me.

  I could think only of revenge. I wished I had a dress and entertained the idea of putting on one of my mother’s. Then I would sit on the steps dressed like a girl and I would call out to him, I love you! Come give me another kiss! And his friends would all think I was the cutest, prettiest little thing, and they would tease him for having a new little girlfriend. Go on, give her a kiss. Don’t be so nasty, she’s got a little crush on you, they’d say. And then he’d have to come over to me. He’d probably whisper through his teeth, Knock it off, kid. But I’d jump up into his arms and kiss his cheeks. I’d scream, When I grow up, I’m going to marry somebody just like you. It would serve him right. Oh, I wanted to play this trick. Or, even better, I could put my hair in pigtails and knot my shirt above my belly button like the girls at school. And I could shout to him, Hey, Mr. Sir? Show me your thingie again, like before. Then, the other guys would look at him in a whole different way.

  Just like that, I was no longer upset. I sat there on the steps, thinking up ways to get him back for calling me an icky girl.

  I WAS STARTLED awake in the night by my dog Brutus standing on the bed over my body so that I looked up at his belly. He was facing the door and growling into the dark. A deep, threatening rumble was coming from him that I had never heard before. He sounded almost like an engine, like one of the machines that ripped the yard apart. I could feel him trembling, all his muscles were tensed. As though he would not be able to hold himself back from lunging for much longer.

  That’s when I saw him. My father, standing in my room at the foot of the bed. “Dead?” I whispered.

  He said nothing, just watched.

  Deeply asleep, then abruptly awake, beneath the growling dog, my father standing in eerie silence—it was all so confusing that I wanted to put my head back down and close my eyes.

  “Dead?” I said again.

  He turned and walked out of my room.

  Gradually, Brutus sank back down to the bed, his tense, powerful muscles relaxing. But now, he was awake, on guard. He faced my bedroom door. I could not see his face clearly in the dark, but I could see his eyes clear and wet, wide open.

  I’d been dreaming of fish hooks. And my father had been in my dream. I didn’t remember what happened. But I knew I’d had the dream before. It seemed to me, maybe, I had the dream every night.

  When will my mother be home? I wondered.

  MY FATHER WAS chopping wood out back, getting ready for winter. After he had a big pile of split logs, he stacked the wood under the deck and covered them with plastic. All the ice had melted in the glass of iced tea next to him on the stump. He held the ax above his head and he winked at me and smiled, but it was his other smile.

  The one he only used at night when he caught me alone. The one nobody else ever saw, except maybe my mother. Perhaps this was the smile he gave her when he proposed.

  I’d never seen it before in the daylight and I didn’t like it.

  He brought the ax down hard and the log divided, flew in two directions at once. I could read his lips: “Very much I love you.” The phrase we spoke at night to each other before I went to bed. By speaking it like this, with that smile, he was distorting it, redefining it in a way that had nothing to do with love.

  I stood still, looking at him.

  He was exhilarated. But why?

  That word, again, came into my head: wrong. Something tightly wound within me uncoiled. It was knowledge. It was the knowledge that my father was actively missing an essential human part.

  That can’t be, I thought.

  But it was, I knew.

  WHEN AT LAST my mother returned home, she was so sapped of energy and appallingly thin that I straight away worried all her most essential qualities had been left behind in the ward. I could so easily imagine a nurse’s aid seeing a dark, tangled mass on the floor and sweeping it into a dustbin, not reali
zing it was my mother’s spirit.

  I was awfully tender around her, whispering and calm. Not once did I drag her pocketbook into the room, drop it at her feet, and suggest she search the bottom for extra change for me.

  I feared that if I yelled or startled her in any way she would tuck into a ball and hide under the dining table, babbling until the hospital men came and put her back in the mental wagon. I worried she might shatter before my eyes into so many silvery pieces, which could never be reassembled into my whole mother again.

  My father, too, was careful around her. He paused behind the sofa to rub her shoulders, just three or four quick squeezes, when normally he wouldn’t touch her. He also brought her drinks: iced tea with mint plucked from the yard. He brought her tall, sweating glasses of Tab. Sometimes, he brought her a block of saltine crackers, wrapped in their wax paper wrapper. When she brought a cigarette to her lips, he would lean forward from his rocking chair to light it for her with his silver Zippo.

  On these occasions, I would then pick up the Zippo and open the lid and press the mechanism to my nose, inhaling. I loved the smell of lighter fluid, and had long ago decided that I would be a chain-smoker.

  With my brother away on his camping trip, and no opera on the stereo, the house was oddly silent. I could hear boughs from the pine trees scrape their needles over the shingled roof and it sounded like mice running from cats.

  I listened for cars coming down the road. For me it was a game. Saabs, for example, were easy to identify because they made a whining sound like no other car. Small economy cars sounded very much the same and it was difficult to tell them apart, but a Buick Skylark sounded nothing like a Ford Granada and the fact that I could tell them apart by sound alone made me feel somewhat superior.

  Mostly, my father did the grocery shopping and the cooking. He made meals from cans—salmon formed into patties with bread crumbs and egg, fried in corn oil, and served with Jolly Green Giant corn niblets. Or tacos, which we assembled ourselves from ingredients he laid out on the counter. Sometimes, he made canned ham, instant mashed potatoes, and green beans.

  My mother wouldn’t eat his food. She would consume only her saltines and the occasional can of smoked oysters.

  I certainly offered to liven things up. More than once I suggested a family outing to Child’s toy store in Northampton or a swimming trip to Lake Wyola. But no. They were having too much fun staring at the empty fireplace.

  After a few weeks of my mother’s new cemetery mood, I just couldn’t stand it. I finally broke down and asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

  She held my gaze for the longest time before replying, “Well, I certainly hope so.”

  I didn’t like this answer one bit. It was a question for an answer, a life jacket that might not fit.

  I breathed in her scent, as though filling a near empty tank. “I missed you so much,” was the only thing I could say, so I said it over and over. “I missed you so much.”

  “I missed you, too, sweet boy,” she said.

  I didn’t ever want her to go away again. “I love you.”

  “I love you,” she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.

  TEN

  MY FATHER WAS sitting at the kitchen table grading papers and listening to the broadcast of a distant country on his shortwave radio. “Seis miembros terroristas de la Facción del Ejército Rojo han agarrado la embajada de Alemania del Oeste en Estocolmo, demandando que funcionarios liberen a miembros encarcelados de su grupo . . .” I sat in the chair across from him and twisted the hem of my shirt around my fingers. “Dead?”

  Without looking up he answered, “What is it, son?”

  “Grover has a growth in his mouth. It’s in the back, on his tongue, and it’s big.” Even though Grover was not allowed indoors, I snuck him inside sometimes, because it didn’t seem right to divide the dogs—the family—into “indoor” and “outdoor.” I was rubbing his belly while he wriggled and scratched his back on the rug, mouth hanging open, when I saw the growth.

  “Well,” he said, marking a blue student examination notebook with his red pen, “I hope it’s nothing serious.” He put the booklet aside and took another from the pile.

  I was worried. The growth was webbed with veins, and so large that it spread over his rear molars. It created the illusion that Grover had a plump, hairless rat in his mouth and was just holding it there in the back of his throat, saving it for later.

  “Can we take him to the vet?” I asked.

  My father said, “We’ll keep an eye on him.”

  I heard the crackle of gravel in the driveway. “My mother’s home,” I said, pushing my chair back and running to the front door.

  She pulled up to the steps, climbed out of the car. “I’ve got a dollhouse in the back of the car here,” she said. “You want to help me unload it?”

  Barefoot, I walked across the gravel to the rear of the car. Turned over on its broad side was a small house. Together we hoisted it out of the car.

  My father appeared in the doorway, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Well, what have you got there?”

  “It’s a dollhouse. Meg was going to just throw it away so I took it for Augusten.”

  I was flushed with humiliation and excitement. Nothing in my mother’s tone of voice suggested it was odd in the slightest to bring her son a dollhouse.

  “Help me,” she said, lifting it, knocking the wood against the car’s rear liftgate. I quickly reached for the other side and together we hoisted it out, stood it upright beside the car.

  It was a three-story colonial held together with the thinnest nails. Perhaps it had once been white, but now it was filthy, the paint smeared with dirt and rubbed away in spots revealing bare wood.

  My father smiled. “Well, look at that,” he said, oddly pleased.

  Neither of them questioned the dollhouse.

  “It needs a good cleaning,” my father said. “Don’t bring that thing in the house until you’ve cleaned it up.”

  My mother said, “Her girls are grown now, it was just sitting in the garage like trash. It seemed a shame.”

  She clutched her car keys and walked inside.

  My father said, “Oh boy, it’s hot out here,” and walked inside, too.

  I uncoiled the hose and turned on the water. I sprayed the dollhouse, flooding its rooms. Then I dragged it to the edge of the yard near the woods to dry.

  It should have gone to some little girl, I thought. Not just because I was a boy, but because I didn’t really play anymore.

  THE GROWTH OVERTOOK Grover’s mouth and he could no longer eat. “Please,” I begged my father. “He needs to go to the doctor.”

  “Well, we’ll see how he does,” he said, waving me away.

  Out in the yard, the four piles of woodchips delivered three years ago still hadn’t been spread. Weeds were waist high. The trunk in the Chrysler had rotted away years ago because my father hadn’t swept up the split bag of road salt he kept back there. The first three steps leading up to the deck were rotten; planks of the deck itself were so soft you could poke a finger through them. If he didn’t do something soon, the entire deck would rot and fall to the ground. Grover had to go to the vet.

  God? Please, make my father take Grover to the vet.

  I needed my mother to take my side and insist that the dog be taken to the vet, but she sat on the sofa reading Emily Dickinson and penciling notes in the margins. “ ‘Pretty people in the woods,’ ” she said to no one, looking up from the book. “Isn’t that a remarkable phrase? I suppose that could almost describe us.”

  My father was in his rocking chair reading a textbook.

  Because Grover lived outdoors, I worried that something about the outdoors had caused his tumor. Maybe he’d eaten a squirrel and a bone had pierced the roof of his mouth. Maybe the tumor was a mushroom that had taken root in the dark of his throat. Now, even when I p
oured hot water over Grover’s dry food and let it soak until it was soft, he wouldn’t eat. The tumor was just too large.

  I sat with my parents in the living room looking at our oldest dog, Cream, an indoor dog. “See the way she turns her nose up in the air like that?” my mother said resentfully. “She looks just like Mother.”

  My father hated Cream because my mother constantly compared the dog to her own difficult mother. Once when I was small, he kicked her to get her out of the way. I’d cried and kicked him in return. I was sure he’d kick me back, but he only walked away.

  “Even the way she wags her tail. If Mother had a tail, she would wag it just exactly like that. There’s something superior in the way she does that. She’s so much like Mother it almost makes me feel ill.”

  I SAT IN front of the dollhouse and peered into its tiny empty rooms. I could almost feel the presence of two girls lurking over my shoulder. Thick-boned Swedish girls with long blond hair and pale, soft wrists. Their gleaming blue eyes would know every inch of this house. While I didn’t know any flesh-and-bone girls like this, they felt so real. I could almost see them reaching into the dollhouse and moving a chair just a fraction of an inch, so it’s perfect. And I began to wonder about the girls who had this dollhouse before me, if perhaps some part of them lingered within it.

  Once, these little rooms had been lovingly decorated with tiny beds, pillows the size of earlobes, skillets made of iron and smaller than a dime. What games did the girls play? Did the doll parents scream at each other? Did the doll family have a dog and did it have to sleep outside? And did the doll children have a dollhouse of their own? Was this dollhouse a mirror held up to a mirror, reflecting itself back forever?

  THE GROWTH IN Grover’s mouth began to bleed. Rivulets of blood clung to the whiskers beneath his chin, as though he’d recently consumed a bit of prey. Grover had always patrolled the deck like a small officer. He alerted us to cars, dogs, people out for a walk.