by Kris Bertin
Sad Mom is usually crying in the garage, sitting on the deep-freeze and screaming for me to leave her the hell alone. Me gazing up her dress, at her big, smooth legs and white panties with black pubic hair darkening out the front. Good girls don’t do that, she’d said, which was harmless, and probably the only right thing to say in that situation. But it still hurt, and still made my stomach clench and sink. Still made me cry and hate her and punch and kick when she tried to pick me up and take me to my room.
It’s so easy to hate Dad. So easy because he doesn’t say much, and when he does, it’s something that hurts or wrecks the delicate balance of things. Even easier now that he’s ugly. Simple to point at the women strewn all around him and say BAD. But it isn’t fair. And it doesn’t mean anything when you hold it up to the memory of him in that sailor’s hat, or the feeling of his beard against your neck, or the sound of his voice rattling down your spine saying I love you forever Margie. This is something I try to convey to Michael in the same way he tries to explain things like structural dynamics to me.
At the grocery, Dad doesn’t bother to explain why his latest marriage is over. The way he looks, I know he doesn’t want to talk about it.
I just want to park in the driveway, he says. I don’t need to stay with you.
No, I tell him, and the next thing I know I’m doing what my brothers and husband always accuse me of. Falling all over myself to accommodate him:
You can have our bed, I say. We can sleep on the couch while you’re here. I know how uncomfortable that camper is.
No, he says. I should be in the camper. I just need to hook up to your hose, that’s all.
He tells me he’s going to stay for maybe a week. He’s going East, going on the road for his leave of absence, and that he thought he ought to see me before he disappears.
Disappear, I laugh. What, are you never coming back?
No. But I don’t know where I’m going or how long I’ll be.
He looks off at the parked cars.
Don’t know, he says again. Finishes his sandwich and is nearly out of breath by the end. When his belly rises it gets so big he looks like he’s in his third trimester.
Frank and I added a little algorithm to our infidelity timeline, off to the side. It was for how much weight he puts on per woman, and how much shittier he acts as a result. He’d been a smiling, charismatic person once. Once, he could’ve been a game-show host or a politician or a movie star. His students loved his classes, and Mom’s ex, Marcus, said his courses were always filled earlier than anyone else’s, just because people liked him. He had this smile. All the lines are still there on his face—ready to go—but at some point it just stopped showing up.
When we get home, Michael gets mad at me for insisting that Dad sleep inside the house. For trying to give him our bed.
What’s wrong with his Shaggin’ Wagon?
He can’t decide if he wants to start a fight about it or not, so it’s all just jokes for now. It’s halfway sweet that he feels the need to protect me from my own father. And halfway insulting. I get mad at him for getting mad and pretending he’s not. I do it by pretending I’m not.
But Dad saves face by claiming the couch as his own. He gets his own pillows from the RV. They’re brown and musty and have probably never been washed. Then he pushes his shape and smell into the cushions for a week and a half. He and Michael exchange a maximum of sixty words a day. They are both alike and unalike, and give each other a wide berth, aware of each other and their respective positions. They occupy the same physical space, but at different times. You see this stuff in nature documentaries.
The only good that comes of it is that my dreams stop for a while, though I don’t know if it’s him or the Valium. If it’s him, I don’t understand it at all. It isn’t like I feel any safer or reassured having him around. It isn’t like his presence calms anybody down. But the dreams stop nonetheless, and I feel okay when I wake up. I even have a nice dream for once. Something crazy and silly that I barely remember. A baby elephant thing, running around on the beach. Allan is in it, maybe. I don’t know if it means anything, but at least nobody dies.
One morning I creep downstairs and he’s still asleep—so I watch him. I try to see if his big body is giving off beams or waves or particles that calm you down, but I don’t notice anything. Nothing happens.
Later, Dad’s newest ex, Ronette, shows up.
She comes right up to the door and bangs on it with all of her gold rings, her wrinkled head blurry but unmistakable through the frosted glass. I shoot a look at Michael, and paralyze him in the kitchen like a buck in headlights so I can answer the door first. I can see how he might leverage her presence into an argument about why Dad shouldn’t be here.
And Dad, he sees her through the window and right away drops his National Geographic. His cat runs out of the room and he makes a little sound like he’s got cramps.
I open up the door and she looks past me. Searches my house over my shoulder.
Is Benny in there? Ronette asks in a crazy voice. Tell him I got his note.
Her make-up looks like it was put on in an earthquake, or else washed away in a flood.
No, I tell her. He isn’t here.
Then what’s the camper doing here?!
She screams it—really screams—with her hands curled into claws and everything. It makes it easier to lie to her, and I even come up with something halfway believable.
He dropped it off on his way past. Says he doesn’t need it anymore.
Yes he does, she says, shaking her head, her face working itself towards collapse. Then she half-screams the word camping, like it’s a swearword.
He’s not here, I say.
He’s leaving me, she says, then sort of jolts like she’s in pain and I get the idea that it’s the first time she’s said it out loud. There’s a look on her face like she’s realizing it—really thinking about what it means—and I watch her body react. It moves through her like a chill. What Ben’s mother would have said was a goose on your grave. Then she’s crying and trying to open the screen door, but it’s locked.
You’re having a fucking family reunion, she hisses.
It’s locked, I say.
I just—
It’s locked, I say again. He was here, now he’s gone. I’m not inviting you in.
She tries opening the screen door with one last jerk, so I close the main one instead. Lock that too, and then she’s knocking again, sobbing and moaning on the other side of it.
Is that Grandma? Emma asks from behind me.
I turn around and see that Michael has both hands on her shoulders. They’re standing in the kitchen watching me. No.
I think about how this will look to them when it’s a memory recalled, years later. I turn and speak with my back to them so she only hears the lie, doesn’t see it actually come out of my mouth:
That’s not Grandma.
I don’t want her to look out the window and see that it is the grandma she grew up with. Don’t want her to know that you can go from being somebody to nobody just like that.
Or at least not yet. We can probably make it six years before she learns that.
I end up standing with my back to the door while Ronette pounds away, like I can shield her from it.
It’s a neighbour, I tell her. Mrs. Fry.
But then Dad speaks up and ruins the rest of it. His voice shoots up at us, a booming, commanding noise from some place we can’t locate. I look around until I see that he’s crawled between the couch and the armchair, to a little crack the girls get into. He takes the whole space up with his body, like he’s a new piece of furniture. A blanket is wrapped around his shoulders and he looks like he’s all head. Like some Indian god on a totem pole.
No, he says. Says it extra loud so Ronette can hear through all the wood and glass separating us.
No. That’s not Grandma anymore.
Then he looks up at me, and so do Emma and Michael, because everyone’s waiting to see what I do. But I do nothing. I do the same thing as each of them and try to ignore the woman on our lawn and move forward into the completely ordinary day we’re supposed to be having.
Ronette’s visit is the only time his voice booms through our house. After that it’s just a muffle, just a few things here and there, about how good my cooking is, or tiny little questions and comments for the girls. Teaching them about the different tracks running through the backyard, telling them about how raccoon families work. Crouching beside them while they walk their Barbies around the house, asking them what the story is. That’s one of his little sayings, one that’s worked its way into all of us. What’s the story here? Even my brother Frank says it when I call him a few days into Dad’s visit. Says it when I tell him that I’ve got a visitor.
Well, he says. What’s the story there?
He’s going to disappear, I guess.
Where? Frank asks. He’s excited, always excited to hear news about Dad. He treats all of it like some crazy joke he’s hearing about other people—people who aren’t us. Like a TV show he used to watch, but lost track of.
He’s on some trip across the country.
Oh man, he says. I knew it. You’ll never guess who else is.
Who?
The Boy Wonder, he laughs. He means our little brother, Allan.
Really?
Swear to god. Except he’s going the other way. They’ll probably meet in the middle.
I see it in my mind like one of those dumb road-trip movies, a father and son reconnecting. Arguing, laughing, crying. Maybe around a campfire. The car’s broken down. They drink Jack Daniel’s. Argue about the radio. Born to be Wild playing in the background. Critics call My Old Man the most heart-warming movie since Juno.
Then Frank tells me he’s coming over. Says it fast, like he’s in a hurry, and says he’ll be over by supper. I tell him I don’t need more company here and he says it’ll be fine and hangs up, which means now I’m going to have to make dinner for all of us, and make something good since it’s now officially a family gathering. I tell Michael that my brother’s coming over for dinner and he knows instinctively to come over and give me a big hug and kiss. I’m not done being mad at him and I kind of hate that I need him to do this, but it makes me feel like we’re at least on the same team again.
Hey, he says to the girls. Your Uncle Frank’s coming over.
They’re watching TV, some cartoon with a fuzzy blue thing that keeps rolling around on the ground. The both of them don’t bother to look up.
No, Kelly says in that shitty voice. Says it without looking up.
I tell her she needs to stop saying that, and she rolls her eyes. The other one blows air out her mouth, sticks her tongue out and makes a cuckoo gesture at her temple. Starts laughing until she falls over. Starts rolling around like the thing on the screen.
I tell them to get in the car. We’re going to get groceries.
I can go, Michael says. What do we need?
No, we’re all going, I tell him.
It’s good to get out of the house.
What about Grandpa? Kelly asks.
I look around, and realize I don’t even know where he is. Last I saw him he was in a lawn chair, smoking cigarettes and putting his butts into the birdbath. On an unnatural-looking dip in the ground, the spot I’d been asking Michael about for weeks now, because it looks like it might be a sinkhole.
He stays where he is, I say.
My memories are all tied up to that house we grew up in, the one that Allan still lives in now. I almost think of it as the place where my memories are stored, like you could look in Frank’s room and it’s all movie trivia, and then go down to the basement and see all the stuff I was forced to remember in my MA program packed into the soggy boxes by the water heater. All my ex-boyfriends shirtless and lying underneath the pink insulation of the attic like a duvet.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to live there, but then I can’t imagine what it would be like to be Allan at all. To be trailing behind me and Frank while we laugh at something that really isn’t funny, to have to grow up in our family with no one but Mom on his side. Even though I call him every month and ask all the things I’m supposed to ask, there are a lot of silences, and a lot of long-distance minutes eaten up by his quiet yawns and short mm-hmms. There’s a lot of him saying outrageous things that I don’t know how to take:
I’m going to take up skydiving. I am going to dive in the sky.
I remember the day I told them about what it’s like to go out on the boat—told them that it was our boat, even though it wasn’t—and the look it brought forth on Allan’s face. He couldn’t believe Dad had something so incredible that he wasn’t sharing with everyone. Not even a secret, just something that he had never bothered to include us in. And Frank just laughed, said of course, which I think meant he both did and didn’t believe, or maybe believed it and wished he didn’t. Frank has always possessed the ability to go outside of his own body, even if only to laugh at himself.
I remember that day most because it was the day Frank took the globe out of Dad’s study. He wrenched it out of its stand and opened it up at the seams. It was old—not an antique, but an expensive replica of one—and showed routes for the British Royal Navy. We had spent the entire day picking handfuls and handfuls of those red berries that covered all the trees around the house—puke berries, cause they make you puke—without knowing why, but knowing it would be good. When we turned in our harvest, he told us it was so he could fill the globe with them, and right away Allan began to shout NO over and over, horrified that he was now an accessory to our crime. I told Frank I wouldn’t help him either, but I stood in the doorway of the office watching him stick handful after goopy handful inside. Then, when he couldn’t close the thing back up, he lied and said it didn’t matter. He said to me that his plan was to throw it off the roof anyway.
When he got up there, Allan and I watched him balance on one foot, drop the globe in front of him, and boot it across the street and over the power lines like a kickball.
I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but looking back I realize this kind of thing could only happen when something major was going on. He always timed it out perfectly so that whatever he did lined up with something worse: Mom’s maybe-on-purpose car accident, a (female) student showing up at the house just to say hi, or the time Frank drew on Dad’s picture in the paper, wrote cheating beard right on his face. The day I told them about the speed boat, it was a big one—Dad’s crazy credit card bills for hotel rooms and champagne and room service from his trip to the island that was supposed to be about PEI’s naval history and not about whomever he split all those lobster rolls with.
Frank was the oldest, so he always had the best idea of what was going on, what it all meant, and how to use it for his own personal gain.
And that’s my permanent Frank memory; that’s how he’ll always look to me.
Skinny, with a shaved head, limbs growing out of his t-shirt and shorts faster than they should—holding my father’s outdated planet over his head, getting ready to smash it open, getting ready for crazy reds and purples to shoot out for everyone to see.
It doesn’t matter that now he has a stable, reasonable-looking woman next to him, holding his hand. Doesn’t matter that he says mostly rational things and talks in a slow, steady voice. All I see is him getting ready to laugh, really laugh—laugh so hard his eyes roll back into his head and we all get worried for him.
All I can feel is what it’s like to be in the middle, to be excited and scared that he’ll swing back from being funny to being crazy or mean or cruel.
The next morning I find six empty bottles of wine, not counting the one that exploded on the cement out back. Two are in the kitchen. One i
s in the living room, on the very top of the tall cabinet where the board games are kept. One is in the big rubber tree plant pot, shoved neck-down into the soil. The last two are in the upstairs and downstairs bathroom, in the sink and garbage, respectively. Four of the bottles are commemorative wines from Dad’s third wedding. Him (looking suave and dashing with salt-and-pepper hair and beard) and Seline (with thick, black hair and a tanned face with too much foundation) smiling on the labels marked Benjamin and Seline Chesterfield 2003 in thick cursive.
I’m up before everyone, and even though my head feels like it’s going to cave in, there’s too much that I have to do. Too much to hide from the girls. I have to do the dishes, clear the leftovers, vacuum, mop and sweep and wipe everything down. Change the garbage and take it out.
Answer the door and tell Ronette to leave.
Put away the Pictionary game strewn across the kitchen table, try to remove Frank’s sketch of a hamburger on wheels (fast food) stuck to the table. Get breakfast going for all of us and try to get everyone up.
Crystal is on the couch, Dad’s in the camper, and Frank and Michael are asleep in our bed. I woke up in Emma’s room, sleeping with the gigantic snake we won her at the fair, my arms and legs wrapped around it like a chunk of shipwreck. The girls, at least, are where they’re supposed to be.
There’s an idea in my head that if I make the place look better than it did last night, I can cancel out any long-term damage I may have caused them.
The only person who gets up is the one person I thought to let sleep—Frank’s girlfriend, Crystal, who I probably woke up with any number of the appliances I turned on just feet away from her head. She comes towards me quietly with one of those looks on her face—something between embarrassment and understanding—like we’d shared in something we shouldn’t have.
There had been a few nights like this, but just a few, and none since Emma was born. Nights where I drink enough that it feels like years are sloughing off of me, like water eroding rock. And suddenly I feel more like twenty, or even thirty. A fun number that makes it okay to say or do whatever dumb thing comes into your dumb mind at that dumb moment.
