by Owen Thomas
Chloe, who was a year older than me, had moved out of the neighborhood six months earlier. I missed Reddy and Bluey more than I missed Chloe. They lived on Chloe’s dresser in an ovular tank with bright blue gravel in the bottom. They darted endlessly over volcanic rocks and through long vines of plastic kelp swaying in the bubble streams that came in intervals from the hull of an old shipwreck littered with bones and a skeleton pirate doing sit-ups on the deck. My favorite thing was to sit on the floor in Chloe’s room with the lights off, flashlight in one hand, baloney sandwich in the other, watching those fish.
My father had promised to buy me my own fish, a concession to relentless begging and promises that I would rake the entire backyard and set the table every night for a month. My mother had been against the idea, sensing that the fish would either be dead within a week or that they would become her responsibility to maintain. But my father, whose reputation with my mother and brother was that he was powerless to resist my will, always seemed to find something endearing in my tenacity. In spite of my mother’s objection, and perhaps because of it, he made me a promise, circling in red on the refrigerator calendar, Saturday the 17th of September.
On Friday, the 16th of September, I broke out of my fourth grade prison and cut my way through the deluge for home as the pin oaks lining the streets shouldered the leafy remains of summer in all of its glorious, gasping color.
My plan had been to prepare my room to receive its new aquatic tenants and to then intercept my father in the driveway when he returned from work and to set about convincing him that as long as he was in the car, he may as well take me to the pet store and unburden his Saturday. I reasoned that the plan stood some reasonable chance for success, primarily because my mother, who had left that morning for a wedding in Springfield, would not be there to break the spell of reason.
Had I gone in through the garage door, I would have seen his car.
It all would have been different.
I would have expected him.
The house was still and quiet beneath the rain. All the way up the stairs I thought I was alone. But in the upstairs hallway, on the way to my room, I heard something move. Or I thought I did. I froze in my tracks, dripping onto the carpet, trying to peel back the sound of the rain on the roof with my attention so that I could hear.
I moved forward, past my room to the end of the hall, listening between each step. Still hearing nothing, I touched the doorknob to my parents’ room. A rivulet slid down my wrist and over the back of my hand.
It was the last I remember of youth.
The man was naked. And monstrous. He did not see the crack opening in the door. He couldn’t have. His back was to me, undulating and streaked with sweat, towering above my parents’ ornately patterned bedspread. The veins in his neck were blue and thick, like the strings of a bass stretching up off the wood to feel the rub of the bow. His huge arms were thrown wide, full of straining bicep. In each hand he clutched a thin, white ankle attached to a dainty white foot that shook like a pale, frosted leaf in the wind. His legs were massive roots growing out of the floor, joining at the trunk of his waist, which crashed violently forward and back, like it was thrashing to be free of some restraint. He pushed his hands farther and farther apart in sharp, ugly thrusts, like he was prying open the bars to a cage of animals, grunting and growling their guttural threats. Letting them all loose. Then his head began to turn.
I ran. If I closed the door, I do not remember it. I took the stairs two at a time all the way to the basement, moving on instinct and thoughtless adrenaline, trying to get to ground. Trying to dive as deep into the earth as possible. I opened the door to the junk room and the dark, dank smell of history, leaving the light off, and squeezed myself into the thin corner seam of space between the big iron boiler and the concrete wall.
My body dripped with water, collecting into an invisible puddle in the dark beneath where I crouched in silence, listening. Trying not to breathe. Trying to stop the images in my head. I was too wet to feel the urine at first. But I could smell it.
Old Greta stood fast beside me as I waited and listened. She was my confidant. My friend. She understood what others did not understand; listened when others would not listen; hid me when I did not want to be found. She was my protector.
But Greta could not protect me. I heard the front door close and then footsteps on the stairs. Light from the hallway sliced into the junk room like a sharpened blade.
There was a moment, frozen in time now for nearly eighty years, in which my father’s eyes had not found me there, huddled in the corner. They were candid in their searching terror. So much so that I allowed myself to believe that he too was running from the man upstairs and was looking for a place to hide. Had I not been paralyzed in my own fear, I might have called out. I might have scooted over to make room. His hair was tousled strangely, as if he had brushed it the wrong direction, against the grain. He was fully clothed, albeit rumpled, but missing his socks.
When his eyes landed on me at last, the shock at having confirmed my presence was like something solid had rammed him in the center of his chest. Still gripping the doorknob, he took a step back into the hall. Neither of us blinked until he finally found the presence of mind to turn on the light.
The sudden illumination startled his fear into anger, the subject of which was what I was doing home from school and what if someone had abducted me on the walk home or had hit me with their car in the rain. My own fear spun headlong into guilt and shame for having done such a terrible thing; for breaking the rules and sneaking out of class and for having been so ready to lie; for making my father so upset. I broke into wailing, throwing out incomprehensible stories about teachers vomiting, and sobbing uncontrollably as he grabbed me by one arm and dragged me out into the middle of the room, shouting at me in an alien voice, Why, Tilly?! Why did you come home?!
Between gulps and sobs I came clean about wanting to go get the fish. The fact that I had, to the bitter end, tried to lie my way out of it, only enraged him further. He turned and sat on the concrete podium at Greta’s crooked iron feet and yanked me over his knees so that my head hung inverted only a foot above the floor.
My mother always marveled at the perfection of my father’s feet. Wide and white and smooth as a baby’s bottom. They were a swimmer’s feet. Like human fins. I remember wanting to touch them, wanting to stroke the tops of them in a soothing way, just to tell him how sorry I was for disappointing him. For being a liar and a sneak and seeing what I was never supposed to see.
You!… Will!… Never!… Come!… Home!… Like!… That!… Again! Do you understand me? You… Will… Never… Come… Home…
It is a hard thing to reconstruct the past. It takes long arms and good vision, as if putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the bed of an ocean while floating up on the surface. I believe my father struggled to climb up to a better perspective. I believe he tried.
The next week he offered to take me to the pet store to pick out some fish. I refused. Suddenly pet fish were stupid and I hated them and wanted nothing to do with them. He tried to pull me up into his lap with his powerful one-armed scoop and tickle me and nuzzle my neck and I tried to like it the way I always had. He kept up the Daddy’s-best-girl routine as long as he could. And he was not just covering. It was not manipulation to keep me from confiding the secret to my mother who, to her grave, remained oblivious of my father’s transgression and my own. I think part of him would have welcomed that disclosure and the rest of him knew, strangely, inexplicably, that I would never betray him.
No, he was sincere. And so was I. But we were both irrevocably changed after that day. Whenever my father looked into my eyes, he saw accusation, and he could not help but act defensively, pushing me away, finding fault, looking for points of invalidation. He was allergic to his own reflection in my eyes. And when I experienced that allergic reaction first hand, I could not help but read it as rejection and festering disappointment. That is who we became for each other. A
nd to ourselves.
A year later, my brother underestimated his own strength and threw his friend’s football, autographed by Dan Marino, through the basement window of my parents’ neighbors and good friends, Henrich and Inga Van Susteren. I remember them as kind and likeable people, who spoke in subdued Austrian accents that were fun to imitate. I liked Heinrich even though he was a drinker and, according to my mother, went on binges for days at a time. They had no children of their own and sometimes seemed to tease and dote on me and David as surrogates. Inga used to sit with us on occasion when my parents went out for dinner on their anniversary or to one of my father’s Christmas parties at the bank. She liked to lay with me on the floor and read comic books while David watched his westerns on television.
She was petite, with soft, honey-blonde hair. And dainty little ankles.
We knew the Van Susterens were not at home because David had rung the bell and waited an eternity for someone to answer. Even if they had been home, they were notorious for keeping the various footballs that ended up in their yard. It took a lot of begging to get them back. Between me, David, and his friend Peter Wilson, owner of the Marino football, I was the only one willing to climb the fence and go in after it. I was over the cedar planks and out of sight before either of them could stop me.
The football was in the middle of the basement floor, surrounded by glinting shards of thin, single-paned glass. I squatted and peered into the broken window. Behind and above the football, along the back wall of the basement, shimmering in watery-blue light, were two, long rectangular fish tanks. One appeared empty except for water and alien trees of eerily lit pink coral. The other tank was teeming.
David called to me from the other side of the fence. His voice came as if from under water. I didn’t answer. I kicked the rest of the glass out of the window and climbed inside, knowing precisely what kind of person would do what I was about to do and knowing precisely how disappointed my father would be in me if he ever found out. I pulled and swung and kicked with every ounce of fury that had been accumulating in my little ten-year old body.
When it was done, I was wet and stunk of fish scum and was bleeding from a cut on my forehead. I felt no less angry. But I felt a little better for having lived down to my father’s expectations, or what, day in and day out, I was coming to perceive of them.
My father took the whole episode out of David’s hide. He made a grand show of it, raking him over the coals for his grand lapse of responsibility; berating him for leading his poor blameless ten-year old sister into trouble. I tried to intervene, yelling and screaming at my father from the staircase that it was my idea and that David was the one who was blameless, but he would not be deterred. It didn’t matter if, as the story went, I had tripped on the way in through the window. It didn’t matter if it was an accident. David should have known better. There were consequences.
I know that partly my father was still exorcising his humiliation and anger at David for having been tossed out of a private school that my family could not afford anyway. It was another opportunity for an action-and-consequences lesson. Another opportunity to remind David of what he had done.
But there was more to it than that.
My father was a very smart man. He knew exactly what had happened in Inga Van Susteren’s basement. And he put it all on David anyway. He let me off the hook entirely. I know now that this had been his clumsy, indirect stab at forgiveness. It was his unconscious code for telling me that he understood my anger. That he was sorry. So sorry that, at the considerable cost of his own self-loathing, he would unjustly accuse his first-born son of allowing me to go in after that football.
David resisted at first, but he was no match for my father. He finally just hung his head and took it. As my mother, then seven months pregnant with Ben, swooped up the staircase that looked down over our dining room and pried my fingers one-by-one off the stiles, I decided then that I hated my father.
And for embracing that dark, unconscionable epiphany, I hated myself.
A delighted shrieking brought me back. I looked up, wiping my face. A woman pushing a stroller with one hand was, with the other hand, pulling against a leash that was supposed to restrain her toddling, towheaded daughter.
The girl shrieked again and slapped at the water slipping over the smooth basin of the fountain. I stood up and walked slowly back to where I had left my father.
He was not at the picnic table. Guilt started to flood in through the interior windows of my chest. I cursed and headed briskly back towards the parking lot.
I found him leaning up against the passenger door of the Miata. Arms crossed, looking contemplatively up at a small cumulus armada foolish enough to challenge the Southern California sun.
“I’m taking you to the airport,” I said. “I don’t want you here. You can book a flight, stay at the Howard Johnson’s or something. I just… it’s not a good time.”
He did not protest. We both climbed in and closed the doors and I was moving before he had his seatbelt on. It was a long drive. Neither of us spoke until the freeway signs started counting down the mileage for the exit.
“I’m sorry for all of that,” I said, still feeling sick, but a little more composed. “Back there, I mean. At the park. There’s just some things, Dad… I can’t… I can’t…”
The words hung there and blew out the window, unattached. He nodded. The miles passed.
“You know,” he said, “When I was young… just barely out of high school… I had a friend named Dillon Knotty. I ever tell you about Dillon?”
I shook my head, not looking at him.
“Everyone called him Naughty Dillon. We were best friends for a while there. I’ve got some good stories about Dillon. All of them too long to tell, I guess.”
I waited, but he fell silent, leaving me to wonder whether he was struggling to find some inoffensive story to cement over the painful awkwardness between us or to at least dilute it. Another quarter mile of freeway passed beneath us before he continued.
“Dillon fell in love with a girl named Minnie Watson. This was up in Cleveland. A beautiful, beautiful girl. And when Dillon first introduced me to Minnie, I loved her too. Instantly. Partly I think I just really admired Dillon. He was cool and good looking and fearless. And what Dillon loved, I loved. I didn’t have a great sense of myself back then. I was insecure and a little timid.
“But it wasn’t just Dillon. I also loved Minnie. As she stood there on that doorstep shaking my hand, I was smitten. Instantly. Like some sort of lightning strike. There was lots going on at the time. People were coming in and out of the house, and her mom was in the kitchen telling people what to do. But I didn’t notice any of them. All I saw was Minnie Watson, and all I could think about was how much I envied my best friend. And from that day I did everything I could to get close to Minnie and to win her affection.”
He turned his head, looking out the window, and continued speaking as if he were talking to the woman driving the minivan in the next lane. She sped up and I pulled behind her, maneuvering my way towards the exit.
“Minnie was so sweet to everybody. So affectionate. It was just the way she was. It was easy to read into her manner with me whatever I wanted to. I imagined the world as I wanted it to be. As we all do. So I decided, simply because I wanted it to be true, that Minnie loved me rather than Naughty Dillon. It was the little things. They way she laughed at my jokes and touched me on the arm when she spoke. She confided in me about some things. Just little stuff. But that was enough. I believed it was love and that it was going to be up to me to show her the way.
“So one day, after a long hot day on the streets of Cleveland, we were sitting together on her back porch drinking a soda and laughing about something or conspiring about something. Dillon was someplace else, I forget where. And it hit me that this was the time. This was the time.
“So I took a breath and told her that I loved her. Wham. There it was. Right out in the open. I told her I wanted to be with her. I
didn’t propose, exactly. I wasn’t quite that brave or sure enough of my own feelings. I told her I wanted to be with her.
“And her face changed. It kind of melted from sweetness to sorrow to a kind of disgust at what I was trying to do and I knew then that I had been completely wrong about her. Before either of us could say anything, her mother, Grace Watson, a woman who was tough as nails and who knew a bad situation when she saw it, was leaning on the kitchen window sill, sticking her head out onto the porch. She had a broken arm and it was still in a cast. I had no idea she was even home. She looked at me with those horn-rimmed glasses and those intense eyes and I was stricken. ‘You got to go, Baby,’ she said. ‘And I mean right this instant.’”
I looked over at my father, who was still watching the traffic. He kept his thoughts to himself until the purlieus of LAX were upon us.
“Dad.”
“Hmm?”
“So what happened?”
“I went back to Columbus,” he said, as if no time had lapsed. “I was never friends with Dillon after that and I never spoke with Minnie again. Saw them coincidentally a couple of times. But it was awkward and we never spoke. I was too mortified to speak anyway. I wanted to crawl down into a hole and die.
“And then one day I ran into Dillon’s father at a Buckeyes game. Darius Knotty. Real big guy. Law enforcement type. Always scared the bejeezus out of me. We didn’t know each other much, but he recognized me and knocked me on the shoulder and asked how I was. We made some small talk and drank beer and rooted for the Buckeyes.
“Darius and Dillon were estranged. Dillon had left home and he and Darius had completely stopped communicating. Darius was such a tough guy he never would have told me that he missed Dillon. But I knew he did. I knew he was lonely. He was a widower. I knew the only reason he was talking to me was that he wanted any scrap of information about his son that I could give him.”
