Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  Over dinner that night our parents’ silence continued in every tense passed plate, and the effort of their restraint seemed to exhaust Dad. His eyes wandered, and finally he said, “The most amazing thing happened at the store today.”

  We turned to him, our forks and knives motionless. He was still working, I thought. Mom dabbed at her lips with a napkin.

  “Mrs. Mitchell came in today,” he continued. “I saw her shoes hadn’t come from my store, and, I don’t know, I couldn’t help myself, I said, ‘Mrs. Mitchell, long time no see.’ She didn’t miss a beat, though, she said, ‘Happy to see you’ and asked after the kids. Anyway, she wanted an ordinary pair of flats, nothing special, and I went to the back room for her size. Now you won’t believe this, but all the boxes on the shelves were kind of twitching, like the shoes inside were kicking to get out, or something.”

  He paused significantly. Molly sat across from me in mid-chew, her mouth open.

  “I had to run back and forth with the ladder to push them all back in place, but they …”

  “Frank!” Mom leaned over and shook his shoulder. Suddenly silent, he gazed at his plate and fiddled with the edge. Mom rose and took his hand and he let her lead him from the table. Molly and I were left alone with the macaroni and cheese. Mom was on the phone that night, whispering to Aunt Cissy—Dad’s sister—but she fell silent whenever she heard me approach. And later, in my darkened bedroom, I created a planet where no one spoke because they were too busy thinking good thoughts.

  *

  Dad started grinding his teeth at night, producing a gnawing worse than any snore. It drove Mom to the living room couch, and it drove me there too. Finally Molly nestled among us, and we all crowded our legs and elbows as best we could. My own teeth ached from the grating that seemed to exude from the walls, and I pushed my face against the couch pillows and rustled my legs together, anything to drown it out.

  “Please, stop it!” Mom whispered. “We don’t need any more noise.” So we clung to her quietly in the dark and fell asleep only from sheer exhaustion, our lullaby the crackling of molars.

  When we awoke the next morning Dad was already up, buttering a piece of toast at the kitchen table. How could he have slept at all, I thought, when he was the closest to the sound of his own grinding? But what seems so strange now is that none of us mentioned our grueling night, as though Dad always gnashed his teeth and the three of us always slept together on the couch. Even Molly was unusually subdued, sipping slowly through her orange juice.

  That week my body ached from sleeping each night in improvised and awkward positions, and I dreaded the sight of the afternoon shadows lengthening into the evening. One night, twisted on the couch, I dreamt that my parents were muttering to each other in a darkened room. I couldn’t hear what they said, but Mom’s voice sounded frightened and angry. “Please, stop it,” I heard her plead. Then I was awake, afraid I had been rustling my legs again. My body was cramped against empty space, for Mom sat at the edge of the couch. Dad was bending down before her, grabbing at her feet. She kept kicking his hands away.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Mom turned her unhappy face to me. “I don’t know,” she whispered, kicking her foot again at Dad’s grasping hands.

  “I promise you,” he said, head bent, “it’s a lovely shoe.”

  “Sammy, help me,” Mom said.

  Dad smiled, and I sat up terrified: he was back at his shoe store, and Mom was a customer. Now, when I think back to that night, I believe that even then I knew Dad had somehow turned himself inside out, so that the lost store he imagined surrounded us.

  He edged toward me. “Welcome in! We have a sale today.” I couldn’t retreat: Molly was curled beside me and I didn’t want to wake her. And then his hands were on my bare feet.

  “Frank,” Mom moaned, but he didn’t listen.

  “Well, sir,” he said, his fingers working at my feet as if he were unlacing shoes, “I see you’re a size five.” I nodded. He looked up at Mom. “Madam, you have a fine boy here,” and he tousled my hair. “Here’s a beautiful new shoe that just came in today. Why don’t we try a pair on?”

  I glanced at Mom. She shook her head.

  “I don’t think so, thanks,” I said.

  He peered at me, confused and earnest. “Excuse me?” he asked.

  I hesitated—I’d long wanted to be a salesman, but now that I was a customer I could finally help him make a sale. “Sure, let’s try them,” I said. Mom’s hand was on my shoulder, and I forced myself not to look at her.

  From an invisible box by his side Dad carefully lifted out an invisible shoe, and just by the way his fingers framed it I knew it would be a perfect fit. His hands slid around my foot. He held them still and I sensed his satisfaction, though this false sale saddened me. When he started to tie up the invisible laces I couldn’t bear to extend the moment.

  “They’re great, I’ll take two pairs,” I said—anything to make him stand up. Mom’s tight grip on my shoulder released, and I believe now that this was the moment when she no longer doubted that she had to protect her children from her husband.

  She pushed him away. “That’s just about enough!” she shouted, and Molly woke up. Dad struggled to his feet, his face pale and bewildered, and I doubt even now that he knew what was happening: why such anger from this oddly familiar customer? She pushed him again and Molly howled. I tugged at Mom’s arm but she kept shoving him away, out the living room and down the hall. At their bedroom doorway Mom pushed him again and he fell inside, his head just missing the edge of the bedframe. We stood there at the threshold, stunned. Mom slammed the door shut.

  Molly whimpered. Then we heard Dad talking in there, a kind of vigorous mumbling. His voice rose. “Steady there, steady,” we could make out. “Quit it, quit that kicking.” He pounded a wall.

  “Don’t listen,” Mom said.

  “Get back in the boxes!” Dad shouted. We heard him fling himself about the room and I begged Mom to open the door. She just stood there, unable to move. But when Molly rushed to the door Mom lunged at her, slapping her hands.

  “Daddy, Daddeee!” Molly shrieked, and she slammed her head against the door. Mom dragged her away and they grappled down the hall in the dark.

  I was alone, listening to Dad. How easy it would be to open the door and help him, I thought, and I extended a hand. Mom called to me from the living room, “Sammy, are you still there? You mustn’t listen to that!”

  I hesitated. What if I opened the door and actually saw those shoes free of their boxes, tramping across the rug with a fierce anger and cornering Dad against a wall?

  “Keep away, keep away!” Dad shouted from inside.

  I rushed to my bedroom, where I tried to calm myself by drawing slowly on a tennis ball, hoping that carefully drawn lines would erase Dad’s frightened bellowing and my vivid images of his store in revolt. A world with three continents appeared, the middle land mass the largest, and in its center was my town, and in my home Mom was opening the bedroom door. It was morning and Dad was rubbing his eyes. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked. They were about to kiss, but as Mom approached she began to blur. Molly ran to them, smiling with some foolish trick that would make them laugh. Yet I couldn’t imagine what it was, Molly’s wailing down the hall distracted me so, and I held the tennis ball in my hand and squeezed it until the tendons in my wrist began to hurt.

  It was a terrible mistake, leaving Dad alone with that invisible rebellion, and it still frightens me to think what he went through. When Mom finally opened the door we found him trembling on the carpet, and he only looked like Dad. Mom knelt down and held him with a tenderness that shocked me, and she called softly, “Frank, Frank.”

  *

  The man who resembled our father almost never spoke and at dinner rarely ate. He grew thinner, seeming even less familiar, and sometimes, looking at no one, his mouth moved but no sound came out. Mom made us walk barefoot, and so we moved with muffled footsteps through
the house. Once Molly made a trail of silverware on the kitchen floor and she walked on it toward Dad, carefully balancing herself, bending the spoons and forks beneath her feet. But no game could make him Dad again, and while Mom scolded Molly into tears he smiled at them as if they were very far away.

  When our Aunt Cissy came to visit she cried all night. Molly and I lay awake. In the sudden, brief silences we could hear Mom’s tense whispering, and then Aunt Cissy started up again. I secretly hoped that if she finally stopped then Dad would be better, but I fell asleep to her sobs. The next morning Aunt Cissy put her shoes back on at the front stoop and walked to her car with a red-eyed, crushed face.

  The Electric Shoe Scraper disappeared from the basement workshop soon after. The empty shoeboxes were cleared out, even the eerie circle of dust was wiped clean, and I didn’t dare question Mom since I wasn’t supposed to know. And then one day Dad wasn’t lying as usual on the couch when Molly and I arrived home from school. Mom bustled about the kitchen, making us a snack, and I forced myself to watch her spread jam on the crackers while Molly called to Dad from room to room.

  Mom stirred chocolate syrup into three tall glasses of milk and I stared at the darkening swirls chasing each other.

  Molly appeared in the kitchen. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” Mom said.

  “I hate you!” Molly screamed. “Where’s Daddy?’

  “We’re here,” Mom said, her back to us, her head resting against the refrigerator, “isn’t that enough?”

  I left them for the worlds waiting under my bed. They lay snugly together in the cardboard box, and all of them had failed me. I took out a tennis ball and threw it against the wall. As it bounced back over my head I wondered which continent I had crushed, which happy family I had snuffed out.

  That night I walked out onto the back porch with my box of tennis balls. At the edge of the lawn I picked out a thick, broken branch, and by the fluorescent light from the kitchen window I smacked one of those balls high in the air over the woods behind our yard. I watched it briefly sail off in an awkward curve before it descended into the trees, landing with a dull thud among the moist leaves on the ground. I picked up another. I slammed them again and again, listening to each one fall through the distant branches. When I was finally done I peered out into the night and realized that I couldn’t let all of them go. I walked into the woods, and the branches seemed to grab at me from nowhere with gnarled and frightening fingers. I bent down to avoid them, skimming my hand across the moist dead leaves, and my hand was wet and cold when it finally gripped a round, yielding thing. This was the one I would keep. The rest could stay hidden. I worked my way back through the thicket of trees, and though the lights of my house served as a beacon, I held my little world as if I would be lost if I let go.

  *

  Our determined mother quickly earned her real estate license, with the hope that selling houses would better serve her children. Neighborhoods were rising up everywhere, transforming empty fields, and this suited Mom well because she always preferred to sell new homes. Even now, when I think of Mom I sometimes imagine her standing before a pristine and empty house, its fresh lawn dotted with the tiny shadows of newly planted saplings.

  All Mom’s wanting, all her fierce desires for us came true. We soon had a color TV, and when we moved to a larger house we had one for the living room and for each of our separate bedrooms. During the rare moments when we were all together in the same room Molly would suddenly clench and crackle the knuckles of her toes, which sounded so much like grinding teeth. This always drove Mom away. Then Molly nestled in her chair as if it were the lap of a parent, embracing one of the upholstered arms, a solid support that would never squirm with anger or impatience. Though I wanted to stay I followed Mom, knowing that she was alert to any sign of desertion.

  I let Mom think I was who she wanted me to be, for I was all she had left. But I discovered there were an alarmingly large number of places inside myself that should be kept from her. My most hidden secret was my belief that if I closed my eyes and just walked I would be able to find Dad, no matter how far away he might be, and I often imagined myself marching down sidewalks like some clairvoyant blind child.

  I actually attempted this once or twice, but with my eyes closed I could only manage a few hesitating steps, afraid that my face was about to hit a wall. How could I endure this disturbing anticipation for miles, even to find my father? And what if I did find him? Sometimes I imagined Dad alone in a little room, sitting on a cot beside a barred window, and when I entered he would look up only to see a small stranger; other times his smile of recognition would envelop me as he carefully, perfectly recounted the peculiar path that had led me to his room. These were the thoughts that fought inside the boy who dutifully made sure for his mother every night that all the doors and windows were locked.

  I remember one evening Molly made a face out of her mashed potatoes, using broccoli as hair. “Daddy,” she whispered.

  “You can leave right now, young lady,” Mom said, “since you can’t eat food like a normal child.”

  Molly pushed away from the table, her face fisted up and tearless. I glanced over at her plate, at that face and the sunken sockets of its eyes. Then I grasped my knife and fork and proceeded to eat my food like a normal child, hoping that meant that I was one.

  After dinner I helped with the dishes. “You’re so careful, Sammy darling, even the edges are dry,” Mom said, as she did every night. When I was done I went upstairs and stood in the hallway. I could see under Molly’s door the television light rampaging in her darkened bedroom. I wanted to join her, but as I listened to the frenetic music and gunshots, her high laughter and the rattling of a whiskbroom, I once again decided to stay a good boy.

  I padded to my bedroom, where I sat among my collection of model airplanes, my television, stereo and records and everything else I could possibly want. And through the long evening I listened to the car squeals and crashes of Molly’s television coming through the walls, competing with the monotonous, canned laughter from the television Mom watched down in the living room. They slowly notched the volume up to drown each other out, and there was only one place I could escape this noise. I took out my last remaining tennis ball, closed my eyes, and imagined I was in Dad’s beloved shoe store. He still worked there, business was good, and the display tables revolved so silently and slowly no one noticed. And then we were all visiting him and he wasn’t shamed before us by an empty store.

  We visit even now. I can’t help myself, it’s something I have to do whenever Mom phones me in the middle of the night, or when I realize Molly isn’t going to answer my latest letter. Once again Molly and I are children, and Mom’s hair is still dark and glistening. Dad’s so busy he shouldn’t be able to pay us any attention, but he does, with a wide grin that Mom actually returns, and their embrace is good enough to end even the longest absence. Molly and I hold on to each other and our parents, a happy knot of reconciliation, and together we stand on the smallest patch of a little world that hurtles in orbit through a clear and welcoming sky.

  Angel

  Bradley already knew by heart the tales of the lonely angels who hovered at busy street corners and watched careless children; of angels whose tears for all the unconfessed sins of the world created the mountain streams that emptied into the oceans; and of angels who lived in upholstered chairs and waited for lapsed believers to settle unsuspectingly into a suddenly renewed faith. Yet as he sat in the front row of the nearly empty catechism class, resisting as always the impulse to stare at the wispy hint of pompadour that dangled from Father Gregory’s forehead, Bradley still listened carefully as the priest said, “Celestial beings have no bodies of their own and need none, for they are clothed in thought. But they love to assume the human form, and this they can do instantly.”

  The Father looked up at the ceiling, away from Bradley and the other remaining student, that young girl named Lisa who always sat in the last row. Only two left, h
e thought. “Some angels,” he half-mumbled, “let their fingers, hands, and limbs fill out slowly, with voluptuous grace, quietly erupting from nothing into a diaphanous shape.”

  Though Bradley knew most of these words, he wished Father Gregory would spell the hard ones so he could look them up. But he was afraid to interrupt the Father, who, regarding his hands as if he were alone, said, “Others spend hours inventing a perfect face for their angelic temperaments.” Then the Father held one hand before his lips as though suppressing a cough and continued, very softly, “There is some dispute as to whether angels invent clothes for themselves.” Bradley suppressed a giggle and glanced back at Lisa. He was shocked to see her indifferent face.

  At the end of all those empty rows of folding chairs, Lisa watched the Father’s bulbous lips move, which she imagined slapped together. She was glad she wasn’t close enough to hear, so she could decide what to make up about today’s class—the last time she had told the truth about Father Gregory’s stories her dad had smacked her for lying. But right now she couldn’t concentrate; instead she wondered why the Father still called out the long class roll even though only two kids were left.

  “It is of course well known that angels can read a person’s thoughts,” Father Gregory said, “but some angels will do this only briefly, for they are too easily lost within that thicket of desires and fears, strange opinions and unspoken urges—so unangel-like!” He looked down at the two students and wondered how long it would take before they too stopped coming to class, so his afternoons would finally be free. “All angels—the seraphim and cherubim—are addicted to us,” he now whispered, “and they hover not so much to protect, but to experience us.” Bradley, straining to hear this, felt uneasily that he had just heard a secret. He didn’t care if he couldn’t always understand; he loved being spoken to as if he were an adult.