by Kyp Harness
On our way home and later at my house my dad didn’t look at me or speak to me, but when I went to bed my mom came into my room and said she knew Paul Roughton was being a smart aleck because she’d gone to school with his father and he was a smart aleck too, and as a matter of fact all the Roughtons were smart alecks, and they were tough, hard people, and she thought it was mean of him to try to embarrass me in front of her and my dad, but maybe I didn’t have to do that diddling thing when I was at school in class, and then she turned out the light and left the room and I lay there waiting for sleep, thinking of Mrs. Robbins raising her fingers to her eyes and asking my parents if they were aware I did this, which was bad but still not as bad as it would’ve been if she’d told them I showed Mary Hiemstra my penis in the cubby beneath her desk. Then shadows clouded around the image of my teacher and I fell asleep.
Dad still had to work hard on the house. It needed a lot of repairing, and so one weekend Mom and my brother and I took a train to visit some friends of Mom and Dad’s who lived in a city a couple of hours away, so Dad could get a lot of work done while we were gone. Don Regnier was an old friend of Dad’s and his wife was a friend of Mom’s and they had four kids that my brother and I played with. Don and his wife had a waterbed that I would secretly go and lay down on, but we weren’t allowed to sleep there, and I slept with my brother in a spare room down the hall and in the night, in my sleep, I saw myself and my brother and my father in our kitchen back home, and I was fighting with my brother, and I bit him on the arm, and my brother cried to my dad, and Dad came over to me angrily and his mouth opened, and it kept on opening as the blackness within it engulfed me entirely, and I felt the massive jaws closing around my head as if to say, “You bit him and so I’ll bite your head off,” and in an instant I was awake in a foreign bed as if blasted by an electrical shock to find I was already crying, howling and screaming in the strange room till Don Regnier came through the darkness from the waterbed in the next room and said with sleepy-eyed alarm, “Hey, hey, hey, what’s the matter?” and I was sobbing too hard to speak, yet even when I could speak I couldn’t tell him because he was Dad’s friend and I didn’t want to tell him I’d dreamed of Dad biting my head off, and he kept saying, “Jeepers creepers, what’s the matter? You’re gonna wake the whole house up,” and he hugged me to try and get me to quiet down and after a while I did.
The next day Dad was coming to pick us all up and drive us back home, but we were all surprised when he came not in our usual car but in a small sports car he only used occasionally because it didn’t have any back seats but only a space for me and my brother to crouch, and also because it was a Triumph Sprite and was always breaking down and needing parts that were hard to get. When we asked him where our other car was, he said he’d been driving late at night across a bridge and all of a sudden a deer came into his path, so he was forced to steer the car off the bridge and it sank into a creek.
As we rode home, my brother and I wedged in and crouched behind the bucket seats, and he told the story again and I imagined the deer suddenly appearing in the silvery ray of the headlights out of the blackness of the night. I imagined the slivery ray suddenly swerving into further darkness, the low guardrail providing no barrier to the car as it tilted into the creek, but as much as I could see this, I couldn’t help but imagine there was never a deer at all, that something else had happened to our car, or that yes, maybe it had gone off the road and over the guardrail and into the water, but a deer had nothing to do with it, and the thought seemed inescapable, though each time I entertained it the guiltier I felt, at doubting my father, and also diverging from the story that everyone agreed was true. Something down deep in me knew that my suspicion wasn’t just a nasty reinterpretation of events, but was itself reality—and what claimed to be reality was a play-acting performance by the rest of the family to make themselves and each other feel happy or simply okay.
Yet my dad did get a lot of work done on the house, and in the work that he did he seemed to take more pleasure and pride than in the hair-cutting during the day, though it took him a long time because he wanted it perfect, and we had two bathrooms and one of them would inevitably be out of service most of the time, and I was allowed to decorate the unfinished wall of the kitchen with a long parade of Disney characters I drew on a roll of paper Mom got at her work. He also liked to cook, using the Mondays he took off work to make elaborate dinners for the family when we got home, and sometimes apple and rhubarb pies, and when he called you out to the kitchen and got you to taste something he was cooking, he’d watch you intently as you ate it, and when you gave the reaction he wanted he’d respond with a high-pitched, hooting laugh and I noticed the fingers at the ends of his arms when he laughed, and they’d wriggle excitedly as his body shook with laughter, as they sometimes did when he laughed after telling jokes in his barbershop, and I’d think maybe he was feeling some of the same excitement I felt when I diddled, and maybe that’s why he got mad when I diddled, because he was scared of his own diddling, which only came out sometimes.
Those times he cooked, Mom would say he cooked so good that he should open up a restaurant, and I would get excited about the idea, imagining my dad working in the kitchen, people sitting at the tables we’d set up in the living room and dining room, and my brother and I bringing the meals out to them from the kitchen, their cars parked out in the laneway and on the lawn. As much as I enjoyed the idea of our house being transformed into a restaurant, I enjoyed even more the idea of my father doing something he loved and got pleasure from, picturing him proudly bringing out some of the pies he made for his favoured customers, because it seemed to me the reason he was not coming home nights and staying out, or not coming home at all, so that I got up and went to check and see if my dad was beside my mom in their bed in the mornings, the more often he would stay out longer on Sundays, golfing and coming home angry with his right eye squinted up to have a fight with Mom, was because he didn’t like his job, because he always came home from it depressed, to drink a couple of beers and go to sleep in front of the TV.
I wished somehow a sudden gust of inspiration would lift and compel my parents to turn our living room into a restaurant, though I knew it would never happen, still the thought was so appealing I couldn’t help but hold out the tiniest hope they would choose to leave their uninspired lives behind to start a dream where the man who watched you tasting his food—looking with anticipation to see the expected response of delight—was my father, not the man who lay defeated on the couch. But I knew that it would never, could never happen, that the sun-dappled living room restaurant was only a dream.
Dad was coming home later on the Sundays, as he did on the day he promised to take us to the Point Edward Ex-Servicemen’s Club Picnic that was put on by the club he went to drink cheap beer most Saturday nights. This event was the one time these old, chunky, ruddy-faced gentlemen emerged from their mottle-floored clubhouse to commune with their respective family members at a gathering in Canatara Park and set up their picnic tables to serve their traditional delicacy of turkey burgers, taking turns to man the immense vats of shredded turkey on the gas burners, plopping the hot turkey on hamburger buns for the kids and the wives, as a little old man dressed as Popeye wandered the grounds handing out candies and suckers “for the kids.”
Yet as the day wore on it seemed Dad wouldn’t get home in time to take us to the Ex-Servicemen’s Picnic, and about mid-afternoon Mom said, “Well, it looks like he’s not gonna get home in time to take ya,” which was too bad because our cousin Chris was with us, Chris who still lived out of town on a farm and with whom we shared many weeks of our summers, us going out to his place for a week, sleeping in the rooms at the top of the old farmhouse which still had a hole going through the ceilings and floors for the pipe of the now-absent old stove, then us running through each day in games of war in the hay mow where we built forts with the bales and swung out on a rope from the high window over the cow pen.
But now Chris was staying at our
place and we’d told him about the picnic and the turkey burgers, and we sat in the desolate hum of the waning afternoon till suddenly our new car came edging up the driveway and we jumped up and shouted, but Mom said, “Don’t get too excited, he’ll be in no shape to take you,” and the sight of my dad getting out of his car with his slow, disgusted gait and his looking around with his right eye squinted up like a mean and merciless stranger made me realize she was right, and he came in the door and Mom said, “You promised these boys,” and he said huskily, hoarsely, “Well, alright… Let’s go!” Jason and Chris and I got up excitedly even though I saw Dad wasn’t in the best type of mood to take us, but I so much wanted to go to the picnic, riding on the enthusiasm of the two other boys, that I ignored the warning signs as maybe they did, though they seemed to have nothing but excitement as he scoffed to my mom, “We’re still gonna go—come on, let’s go!”
We ran to the door and she cried, “You’re in no shape to take them!” but out the door and down the short sidewalk we went to the driveway where we all got into the front seat and my dad got in behind the wheel and for a moment he just sat there with his hands on the wheel, staring down, and then he got up out of the car, walked swiftly back into the house and after a moment emerged with a beer in his hand. As he walked to the car my mom appeared at the door calling, “Oh, yes! Don’t forget to take your beer! Always got to have your beer!” and Dad gunned the engine, pulling out around our curved driveway, making the gravel jump and click as we zoomed out onto the road at a speed that made Chris and Jason and me tumble into the footwell at the bottom of our seat as we cruised into the city, my brother laughing and my dad looking at him with a wicked, ecstatic face as the speed made a hopeless wind sweep through the heart, at which point I tried to laugh too even as I felt compelled to clutch at the mats on the footwell of the car in search of solidity and stability as we whisked past all the other cars and trucks on the avenue, their roofs and hoods passing unnaturally fast at a cockeyed angle from where we huddled on the car’s floor, and then we eased for a while into a normal speed, only to have my dad hit the gas again, so we lurched suddenly into a higher speed and my brother who had been laughing suddenly began crying with no apparent transition as my dad, whose face was against the side window and its whizzing landscape, looked at us with both eyes squinted up, the corners of his mouth lifted in a smiling laugh that wasn’t sinister so much as beyond all concept of sinister and innocence, and in fact seemed to have no human feeling in it whatsoever as he laughed at us clutching each other and huddling together on the car’s floor.
We got to the park where the picnic was just as the turkey burgers were shutting down for the day and Dad made sure we got the last ones. We also got to see Popeye, who seemed in a less than energetic mood, passing out his candies and suckers with exhausted sullenness. After we ate the turkey burgers in the fading sun as Dad sat on a picnic table and smoked a cigarette, we got back into the car and he seemed to fall into a different, quieter mood, driving us down unfamiliar streets without gunning the engine. We asked him where we were going but he didn’t answer, and we pulled up to a neat little house that I recognized but my brother and of course my cousin didn’t, and Dad led the three of us up to the door of his brother’s house, where we never went, even though we lived in the same town, and only in the dimmest memory could I remember us being there before, and the handful of words my uncle ever spoke to me.
I remembered my uncle’s wife only as a nervous person who worried about my brother and I touching things in her house, or dirtying them or breaking them, with big fat cats that she didn’t want us to bother. This time she came out the side door with the green garden hose reeled on the wall beside the door and we were led down into the basement rec room where my dad’s brother sat watching TV from his easy chair, and my dad sat down on a couch with us three boys sitting down beside him, and he asked pointedly for a beer, and his brother went and got one, and my dad sat there silently drinking his beer and smoking a cigarette on the couch as everyone looked at the sports on TV, and every so often my dad would look over at me or one of the other boys and make a face mocking his brother and his brother’s wife, and the whole situation, and he’d blow out a gust of smoke disdainfully as if to say, “Well, isn’t all of this pathetic and stupid, isn’t this proof positive of what a miserable farce this whole thing is?” and after a silence I could feel as a tightening vice in my chest, we got up to leave, following my father after—and only after—he’d entirely finished his beer with a satisfying smack of his lips from the bottle as he sucked out its final drops then laid it on the coffee table and made his way up the stairs of the shadowed rec room to the evening still illuminated by the sun as we got back in the car, leaving as wordlessly as we’d arrived.
But just as it wasn’t every Saturday night he would go straight from work to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club without calling, leaving my mom worrying and waiting for supper, on Sunday he didn’t always go golfing and curling and drinking away most of the day. Sometimes he would just get up and laze around the house, or on one Sunday we all went to Green Valley Trailer Park, for that’s where Kim Hoswell lived, and we’d found that Kim Hoswell’s dad and my dad were old friends, and though I worried my dad would find out from Kim Hoswell’s dad that I had showed my penis to her and Mary Hiemstra, I wasn’t entirely worried, since for Kim Hoswell to tell her dad she’d have to admit that she got into trouble and had to go down to the office too. We had gone over to Green Valley Trailer Park to use their pool, and my dad leapt in from the diving board so it made the water jump up over the sides, then he shot across the pool with slashing strokes from one end to the other—because he’d grown up by the water, by the river and the lake, and spent his whole summers in a bathing suit, he said, and made money from jumping into the lake and retrieving coins flung from travellers on the old SS Hamonic cruise ship.
And when he came out of the pool after his swift swim—for adults didn’t stay playing in the pool all afternoon like kids did—he sat with the other adults in their lawn chairs with their beers and they joked about me and Kim, about us kissing and holding hands at school, and at one point Dad said, “Yeah, Tim does pretty good at school, but he’s got this habit—you ever see him doing this, Kim? He lifts up his hands and starts flappin’ them around in front of his face…” He paused to demonstrate the action. “Looks like he’s got a mental problem or somethin’—you ever see anything like that?”
Shame mixed with a surprising blast of anger shot through me and grasped my stomach. “What’re you doing?” Mom asked him. “Why do you say that in front of all these people here like that? You’re embarrassing him,” she said as my face was growing hot and Kim and all other kids of the trailer park were looking at me and the beer-drinking adults were gazing at me with impersonal curiosity.
“Maybe he should be embarrassed,” my dad said. “Nothing else works to get him to stop—maybe he won’t do it anymore if he’s embarrassed to do it.” Later in the afternoon he went in the pool again, and Jason leapt in with him, and they were swimming around the deep end and my dad called out to me to get in, but I didn’t want to, and he called me in a more stern, commanding voice, swimming to the edge of the pool and glaring at me, so I walked to the edge of the pool, and he treaded water in the deep end, holding out his arms to me and said, “Come on! Jump in!” and I stood there, and even though my little brother was in with him and smiling up at me, and though I knew my dad could swim as good as anyone I knew, and had even saved my life in a pool once, I couldn’t make my body jump into his open arms over the pool’s glistening surface, for there beneath it, and beneath him, were the darkening untold depths of the water which had no safeguard or escape clause. There were my father’s arms and his increasingly angry face, and his increasingly harsh voice beckoning, demanding that I jump.
I froze on the pool’s edge and tears began gathering in my eyes, the same kind that gathered when I tried to tie my shoes and couldn’t, or tried to solve a math probl
em and couldn’t, or tried to do some commonplace task that everyone else could do but couldn’t, and he would stand there sighing, the frustration coming off him in waves as he looked down at my fingers fumbling, failing and trying again, my panic dooming my efforts once again. And now shivering with my arms folded around me on the side of the pool, I felt the same again with the tears starting in my eyes and my dad hissing through his teeth “Don’t cry… DON’T cry...” and all the people of the trailer park, Kim Hoswell and all the other kids, and Kim Hoswell’s father and Dad’s other friends, all looking as Dad treaded water with his arms stretched out saying, “Come on! Jump in!” his face and head and shoulders welcoming me above the water’s surface, his legs pedalling down below, and the more he demanded and needed his son to jump into his arms in the pool in front of the other adults, the more impossible it became for me to entertain the idea of doing so, and finally he gave up, shaking his head and floating away with the same expression he had when he talked about me never using the ball mitt Fred Scott gave him for me when I was born. He whooshed away in the pool as though departing some small, undignified, ignominious death.
I put on my shirt and joined Kim Hoswell and the other kids who were now playing outside the pool enclosure around a picnic table. Before long, Kim began telling the story of how I pulled down my pants and showed my penis to her and Mary Hiemstra at school. I wasn’t worried or embarrassed, though, because the adults were far away and the other kids seemed to think it was really funny, so afterwards I was encouraged to provide a repeat performance, and there on the top of the picnic table it was easy enough to pull down my bathing suit and show my privates, and do a little dance to make them bounce around, and it was then that my dad came around the corner with a towel around his shoulders and saw me and the smile disappeared from my lips and all the light drained out of his eyes as he strode towards me, lifted me from the top of the picnic table with one sweep of his arm, plucking me from the centre of the kids and transporting me with calm swiftness into our car, and we departed from the Green Valley Trailer Park immediately.
