by Aimee Bender
On this night, he was hunched over, reading the Caltech general information pamphlet about campus for probably the twentieth time. He didn’t read the course catalogue but seemed far more interested in the dorms. Mom refilled her glass of wine. She caught me watching her, and winked.
I didn’t talk at the table because I was busy surviving the meal. After the incident in the ER, I no longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There’s a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent—a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.
I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth—always so active, alert—could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I’d use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the foodmaker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California’s was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation. This all kept me very busy. I had little to add to the conversation.
But my mother would talk. Once she sat down, she would take a couple sips of wine to warm up, and the rest of us would lean in as she filled the space. We were grateful, for the distraction of her. We could float in and out of her speeches, her hand light on the curved neck of the wine bottle. She told us everything about the carpentry co-op, which had managed to hold and even extend her interest; her skills had advanced fast in four years, and she talked about cabinetry, and cutting rabbets, and of the various pitfalls and triumphs involved in ripping a board with a table saw. Of the textural differences between cedar and spruce. Of the mortise, the dowel rack, the transom. She told us about all of the other carpenters, and her opinions of each one, and it was in this way, while I was desperately exploring the distant subtleties of the roast beef, trying to figure out if it was from central California or southern Oregon, that I stumbled across the source of her affair.
Bobbie, Mom said, does not do her share of clean-up.
Amber, she muttered, is a fine craftsman but no visionary.
Larry! she said, voice lifting in a curl, put up the new group assignment:
Desks, she murmured, as if she were talking about roses.
I’d been half listening, sawing off a new piece of the roast beef, still warm and savory and swirling with feeling, beef from Oregon, I’d decided, raised by organic farmers, when the curl-up in her voice matched what was in my mouth. Larry, spoke the roast beef. Larry. I chewed and chewed.
Who’s Larry? I asked, taking a sip of water.
Joseph turned a page of his pamphlet. Dad made neat cuts into his potato.
Larry? Mom said, fixing round eyes on me.
Larry, I said. Is he a regular?
He’s co-op president, she said, shifting in her chair, and no one who had any listening skills could’ve mistaken the glimpse of pride in her voice.
Ah, I said. President. I spit a bit of gristle into my napkin.
How’s the beef?
Fine, I said. Oregon?
I think so, she said. Did you see the wrapper?
No, I said.
We all voted for president, she said, pushing a row of bracelets up her arm. She said it the way a young girl with a crush tries to slip details into a conversation, to prolong the topic without too much emphasis or spotlight. No wonder she’d stayed. Joseph drank a long sip of juice. Dad mopped up his plate with the soft interior of a dinner roll. By then, I’d plowed through enough of the meat to get by, so I got up and went to the pantry where I found a half-eaten cylinder of stale Pringles.
May I? I asked, placing a curved wafer on my tongue.
Mom sank back in her chair. Teenagers, she sighed.
After a few minutes, Dad cleared his plate and excused himself. Joseph returned to his room, where he was working on some homework about electromagnetics. Mom ran a sponge over the counters. After I’d bussed the rest of the table, I wrapped up the remaining roast beef in plastic and put it in the refrigerator for some adultery sandwiches the next day.
I just have to run some errands, Mom said, as the dishwasher began its chugging wash cycle. She said it to the air, as a throwaway: Dad and Joseph had long ago left, but I was just done cleaning, standing in the doorway, and the words fell to me. Something small and fragile punctured, inside my throat. Where? I said. Just to get some materials for my desk project, she said, kissing my cheek. Can I come? I asked. Sorry, Rosebud, she said. You have homework. See you in a couple hours! as she sailed out the door.
15 We still got regular packages of household items from Grandma, slowly mailing her life away in Washington State. They came more frequently now, almost every other week, and in the last one she’d sent me a half-used bar of soap. I didn’t want to use it up, so I put it in a drawer.
She’d started good—those two-tone towels, old-fashioned glass paperweights, even a toy bear—but she seemed to grow more bitter over time, and the items deteriorated until we were opening boxes containing a baggie of batteries, the silver backings of a pair of earrings, a half-checked-off laminated grocery list which made my father twitch. The latest box was in the living room, nudged against the red brick fireplace. A couple years back, I’d asked my mother why Grandma didn’t ever visit in person. Mom bent her head, thinking, zipping the scissors along the narrow center line of the brown box tape.
Grandma doesn’t like to travel, she said.
Then why don’t we go see her? I asked, popping open the flaps.
Grandma doesn’t like guests, Mom said.
I made some kind of questioning peep, and Mom ran a finger lightly over the raw end of the scissor blade.
Your grandmother, she sighed, was raised with seven siblings. So, when she moved into her own household, she wanted quiet.
What do you mean? I asked.
She put down the scissors and scooted closer. Picked up my hand. Look at your pretty nails, she said.
Were you quiet? I said.
She laid my hand on top of hers.
I tried to be, she said. She used to call me garbage truck when I asked for too many things.
She put her cheek down to rest on our matched hands and closed her eyes. She was wearing a new eye shadow, pale pink on her brow bone, and she looked like a flower resting there. How much I wanted to protect her, her frail eyelids, streaked with glimmer. I put a hand lightly on her hair.
That’s mean, I said.
Her lids fluttered. After a few seconds, she sat up and folded the box flaps back fully. She didn’t look inside. All yours, baby, she said. I mean Rose, sorry. Take whatever you’d like.
That evening of her errands, I settled down with the new box. In this load, we had a diminished pad of pale-green Post-its, a book on the history of Oregon with a broken binding, and a bag of crackers. I ate a couple. Stale. Kentucky. I filched the Post-its for my room, and put the rest in the garage next to the bulk of Grandma’s other mailings, wedging it all onto a shelf next to a jar of jam coated in mold that my mother did not want to refrigerate.
The brown box was in good shape, so I lugged it over to the hall outside Joseph’s door. New box, I said, rapping on his door. Within minutes, when I walked by again, it had been absorbed into his room.
I still felt upset about the roast beef, so I put in a call to Eliza Greenhouse, my old lunchtime friend with the razor-straight bangs, to ask about the history homework. While it rang, I ripped fringes into the pad of paper by the phone, and when she picked up, someone was screaming in the background. Sorry, she said, laughing. My little sister is having a tickle fight with my dad, she said.
Are you serious? I said.
Stop it! she called past the phone, slapping at someone.
We talked about school for a little while and I tore the fringes into scraps, and after we hung up, my own house felt especially vast. The foundation ticked and settled. All things cleaned and put away. I stood over the trash can and dribbled the torn paper bits out of my fists. That took four minutes. I thought about calling George just to say hi, but I wasn’t sure what a person might say after that, so I left the phone and went into the TV room. My father was sitting on the sofa, reading a newspaper article, his feet wiggling away on the ottoman. He wiggled those feet so often it was like we had a pet in the room.
What are you watching? I asked.
Nothing, he said. He pulled a red leather ledger off a bookshelf, in arm’s reach, and opened it to rows and columns of numbers.
That one soccer-ball drawing spree had been the most eager I had ever seen my father about fatherhood. I’d glimpsed a little me in his eyes then, inhabiting the pupil, sitting next to him in Brazil at the World Cup finals, drinking a beer. But when I’d drawn the faces on the soccer balls, like a TV blinking off, the little me in his eyes had blacked out.
But, Rose, he’d said, holding up the latest eyelashed soccer drawing, why?
Beer is gross, I said, leaving the room.
Still, regardless of his general lack of ability in the paternal realm, my father was a very decent man. He worked for middle-money law so he did not have to screw the little guy, and he studied the books hard because he wanted to do his part correctly and well. He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges—as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.
When we left the restaurant, he would hand the whole package, including plastic knife and fork, to a woman or man wearing an army blanket outside, at a corner on Wilshire, or La Brea. Here, he’d say. Just please don’t bless me. I watched this happen, over and over. He wanted my mother to wear nice dresses and to buy the jewelry she wanted to buy so he could take it off her. He wanted to dress and undress her. The best way I can describe it is just that my father was a fairly focused man, a smart one with a core of simplicity who had ended up with three highly complicated people sharing the household with him: a wife who seemed raw with loneliness, a son whose gaze was so unsettling people had to shove cereal boxes at him to get a break, and a daughter who couldn’t even eat a regular school lunch without having to take a fifteen-minute walk to recover. Who were these people? I felt for my dad, sometimes, when we’d be watching the TV dramas together, and I could see how he might long for the simple life in the commercials, and how he, more than any of us, had had a shot at that life.
The one unexpected side of him—beyond his choice of our mother, who really did not seem like a likely match at all—was his incredible distaste for hospitals. Beyond distaste: he loathed them. When driving through a part of town with a hospital, he would take a longer route, using meandering ineffective side streets to avoid even passing by.
The story went that when Joe and I were born Dad couldn’t even enter the lobby. Mom had struggled out of the car and checked into Cedars-Sinai, a lovely hospital, a hospital with money, about twenty or thirty blocks from our house. After Dad parked he located the maternity ward, called up, found the number of her room, and asked the harried nurse for the exact location of Mom’s window. When the nurse wouldn’t tell him, he called back repeatedly, every minute, until she yelled it into the phone: South Side! Eighth Floor! Third Window From Left! Now Stop Fucking Calling! after which he promptly dialed up a local florist to send the nurse a gorgeous bouquet of tulips and roses, one that arrived long before Joseph did.
The same determination and competence that had led him to conjure up a made-to-order footstool meant he was settled right outside the perfect window for hours, staring up, but the limitations this time were far less appealing. During the hours of labor, Mom pushing and pushing, her best friend, Sharlene, cheering her on, Dad waited outside on the sidewalk. There he stayed, for the eight hours needed for Joe, and the six for me, pacing. He chatted with pedestrians. He did jumping jacks. Apparently, for my birth, he brought a crate, and sat on it for long hours reading a mystery until the parking cop told him to move.
Mom told the story, even though Dad would get embarrassed. She told the story fairly often. For Joseph’s birth, she said, she was in there all day long; when she was done, she shuffled to the window in her torn hospital gown and held the screaming little baby up. Dad was just a small figure on the sidewalk but he saw her right away, and when he glimpsed the blue-blanketed blob, he jumped up and down. He waved and hooted. My son, my son! he called to all the cars driving by. Mom dripped blood onto the floor. Dad lit up a cigar, passed out extras to pedestrians.
16 After I talked to Eliza, after my mother had left to go on her errands, I parked myself on the other side of the sofa, in the TV room. My father held that red leather ledger in his lap, and he was inputting numbers into new columns. The TV muted across the room. For a while, I just sat and watched him.
Yes? he said, after a few minutes. May I help you?
No, I said.
He had a striking forehead, my father: long with a slight slope at the hairline that lent him an air of officiality. His hair—thick, black, streaked with gray—gripped closely to the top of the forehead, making a clear and assured arch. He looked like the head of a corporation.
Just the previous night, George had been over for dinner and had started asking my father questions about his time in high school. That my father had ever been to high school was funny, and that he was willing to talk about it? Shocking. Somehow, with George there, asking, lightly, the tight box of Dadness was open for looking. I was the lead in my high-school play, Dad said, sipping his water. I dropped my fork on the floor. What? Oh sure, Dad said. Everyone did it, he said. A musical? George asked. Of course, Dad said. Even Mom laughed. Dad filled his mouth with yam. What musical? I asked, and we all waited while he went through the process of chewing, and swallowing, and dabbing with his napkin, ending in the new word Brigadoon.
Who was he? That night, the romance in the roast beef had so excluded him, even as he ate it, every last bite of it, and maybe for that reason, he just seemed a little more approachable than usual. I leaned closer, from my end of the couch.
Yes? he said, from his seat. Rose?
Hi, I said.
He put down his pencil.
Don’t you have homework?
Yes.
He raised an eyebrow. And why don’t you go do that?
Can I bring it in here?
He coughed, a little, into his hand. If you’re quiet, he said.
I ran and grabbed my notebook and textbook. While he worked on the details of his schedule and budget, I did California history on my side of the couch, dutifully answering the questions at the back of the chapter before I’d read the chapter. It was so easy to locate the sentence r
eferenced in the question, and I plugged in the appropriate lines like a good little lab rat, looking up occasionally to see the muted actors arguing on-screen, their eyes emphatic. We worked in silence together. With him sitting there, lightly writing those numbers with his slim mechanical pencil, I seemed to get my work done about twice as fast as usual.
Dad? I said, looking up, after writing in the five reasons that the gold rush built up the Californian economy.
Yes?
Where’d Mom go?
On errands.
When will she be back?
Soon, he said. I imagine by ten, at the latest.
Dad? I said.
He raised his eyebrows again. Yes, Rose?
Never mind, I said. Nothing.
He continued his work. I finished up my assignment and went ahead to the next chapter, since our teacher did not believe in homework variety and gave us the identical task for each week. The clock ticked along.
After another while, I looked up again. Across from me, in the red ledger, my father had written many neat new numerical rows. It seemed he was getting more work done too.
Can I ask you a question? I said.
He kept his eyes on the page, deep at the base of the latest column. Then laid down the pencil.
Knock yourself out, he said.
The couch creaked as he resettled himself. It was an open doorway. I could hardly remember the last time I’d sat across from my father without anyone else nearby. I really had no idea what to ask, so I just blurted out the first thing that came into my head.
Did you ever know something? I said.
Excuse me?
I took a breath. Sorry, I said. I mean, did you ever know something you weren’t supposed to know? I asked.
He tilted his head. What do you mean?
