How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

by David Stuart MacLean

  I got home and panted and drank two glasses of water in a second, keeping my hand on the tap while I drank the first one down.

  “You’re home?” my dad asked.

  I nodded, continuing to pant. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and filled my glass again. “I ran the whole way, Dad. It was like five miles. Maybe tomorrow we can go out in the car and track it with the odometer.” I wanted to tell my dad how fast I was, how my legs were miracles grafted onto me, ask him if he knew any coaches at the college who might be interested in me.

  “You were at the Singh’s. It’s not five miles to the Singh’s.” My dad peeled his glasses off, his voice deepened into the punishment octaves. “And where’s your bike?”

  “I left it at the Singh’s.” Why was my dad giving a shit about these specifics? I had developed a new power. We should be celebrating.

  “Where have you been?”

  “There was a party. But Dad, I think I’m a really good runner.”

  The phone rang. My dad walked to get it off the wall. He stumbled a little and I noticed he had been carrying a glass of scotch with him. It wasn’t a short glass either, but one of the water glasses.

  “Yeah,” he said into the receiver. “He’s here, Gary.” Dad squared his eyes at me and made sure I was watching him talk. “No, you can’t speak with him. Because he’s grounded.” Dad took a swig of his scotch, the ice cubes somersaulting on the way back down. “No, I don’t. Your dad was here earlier, but I don’t know where he went. I can’t keep track of my own son. I can’t keep track of anyone.”

  Pause. Swig.

  “I’m not going to tell your dad. Unless he asks. I keep secrets but I won’t lie. Not for you anyway.”

  Pause. Swig. The glass was empty! Dad held it up to the light like something suspicious had happened. He squinted at it. Where had all that scotch gone? he seemed to be asking himself.

  “Whatever. You still can’t talk to him. Wait for school, Gary. Bye-bye.”

  Dad missed the cradle hanging the phone up. It was wall-mounted and had a smooth dolphin curve. Dad hung it up upside down and laughed like he’d done something no one had thought of before. He turned to me, shook his empty glass by his ear, and said, “I am celebrating.”

  “Mr. Singh was here?”

  Dad walked to the fridge and opened the cabinet above it. He pulled out the handle of Cutty Sark and filled his glass. “What are you celebrating, Dad?” he said in a falsetto. He opened the fridge and twisted ice cubes free from the plastic tray.

  “Mr. Singh was a total dick to you. Now you’re buddies?”

  “Well, son. Since you asked. I am celebrating many things. Three things, really. Number one is that I got a job.”

  “The college hired you? Full time?”

  My dad shook his head. “Get a glass for yourself.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Get a glass and have a drink with me. You can’t go off to secret parties and then come home and refuse to drink with your dad.”

  He burped. He was cartoonishly drunk. Like Andy Capp–drunk. I expected him to start saying “hic, hic, hic” anytime now. I got a glass. A short one. He slopped it half full.

  “Want ice? You’re not supposed to drink scotch with ice. It makes the taste buds contract.” He tapped his head three times. “I’ve got a PhD; I know things.” He capped the bottle and tossed two ice cubes in my glass. “But when you’re drinking shitty scotch it doesn’t matter.” Dad and I clinked glasses. He stared me in the eyes. His eyes were glacier blue. They were haunting, just enough pigment in them to make them a color. They seemed even paler tonight, like something inside him was calving. He took a large gulp from his glass. I took a swallow and immediately regretted it.

  Dad patted me on my back as I coughed and spat into the sink. “It’s a burn, right? That burn is life. Alcohol, it’s poison. Your body is smart to reject poison.” He took another gulp from his glass. “It gets easier though once you get a taste for it.” He walked into the living room. I followed. I brought my glass of scotch with me. In our living room there was a couch and a recliner. Dad collapsed on the couch.

  “Doc,” he said. “I have to tell you about my dreams.” He laughed at his own joke. He looked up at me.

  “Dad, you got hired by the college?”

  “Doc, these dreams—they’ve been torturing me for a long time, y’know.” Dad had adopted a hick accent that gleamed with sincerity. When I didn’t laugh, Dad grimaced. I was letting him down by not finding him hilarious. He sighed. “No, boy. I did not get hired by the college. I am pursuing a new career.”

  “But your book?”

  “Why write about something nobody cares about so no one can buy it? Everyone else in the world, it’s like making money is this talent, this ability that I never learned. There’s so much money, I want some of it.”

  “We’re fine. Mom’s salary, I thought . . .” Dad gave me a look that stopped that sentence.

  “I’m starting at Bettle Brothers on Monday,” he said.

  “But your classes.”

  “Fuck ’em,” he said and laughed. “Fuck ’em. Like they give a damn about me.”

  “You’re going to quit midterm? Won’t that like blacklist you or something?”

  The fan spun at full speed above us. I noticed it was freezing in the room. Dad had opened all of the windows. The sweat from my run was sending a chill I felt in my spine all the way down to my butt. How had I not noticed it was freezing? I took a sip of my scotch. It was awful but it did make me feel warmer.

  “So the first thing we’re celebrating is my new job.” Dad hoisted his glass in the air, clinking glasses with the wall art. “The second thing we’re celebrating is your dad giving up.” He turned to me. “People will tell you, Barry, that you should pursue your passion, that you should do what you love, that it’ll be hard but if you commit yourself, really commit yourself to what you love, then the world will open up, blossom for you.” Dad drank. Dad coughed. Dad winced. “It’s bullshit. Today we’re celebrating the death of the dream, the death of your dad’s delusions. Those people who tell you about following your dream are always sitting on a pile of money. I want my pile of money.” Dad laughed and drank again. He coughed again. A minute went by and he was snoring.

  Consider the drunk father, passed out on the couch, his legs akimbo, his arms—one on his crotch, his hand intermittently scratching his balls, as if the hand worked independently of the rest of the father system, a little butler who tidied up while the master was asleep, scratching the balls like whisking ashes into a dustpan, the other arm off the couch, trailing in the nap of the shag carpet, like a fisherman letting his fingers dangle in the lake as the boat steered itself, as the line’s bobbin bobbed in the water, waiting and wanting/not wanting a fish to take the bait. His stomach was showing. He’d gained more weight than I had thought. His big mottled hairy belly was a new tenant with its own demands. Our house had recently never lacked for ice cream or cheese.

  What’s your favorite white cheese? Maybe she was attractive. Maybe when you can’t stop thinking about someone that’s when they’re attractive. Maybe it wasn’t about attractiveness at all. Maybe it was just about who you couldn’t stop thinking about.

  I met a girl. I ran what had to be five miles. And I came home to my dad drunk enough that he passed out while telling me he’d quit being a professor. I didn’t think it was legal to quit in the middle of a semester. I grabbed my two glasses and my dad’s glass. I ditched the scotch glasses in the sink and refilled my water glass. My legs were still a little trembly from the run.

  The kitchen smelled like scotch and farts. It was a celebration! I almost cleaned up because I knew Dad would feel awful in the morning but then I decided against it for that same reason. He’d feel so bad, it’d probably be good for him to have some chores to do. He’d made himself some microwave grilled cheeses and the residue inside the open microwave was a charry bubbly slag of burnt bagged shredded cheese. I picked at it and it ca
me off in a single greasy shingle. I put the cheese on top of his scotch glass in the sink. It was a celebration!

  Dad had quit his job. Dad had gotten a new one at the place Mr. Singh worked. But he said there were three things he was celebrating. Had he told me what the third one was and I missed it? I grabbed the bread and bagged cheese and made to put them away when I noticed the index card taped to the fridge.

  Delta 431: 8:35 pm was written in sharpie. With three exclamation points after it.

  I knew the third thing now.

  Mom was coming home.

  CHAPTER 20

  Mom got out of college and worked for IBM. She was a sales something or other. Mostly what she told about those days was getting to travel and having to wear white gloves all the time. She grew up in Wisconsin, the second daughter of a truck farmer who had a son and a daughter after her. I never met the man but there were enough equivocations and euphemisms to describe him (“He was a good man, tough but good”; “Alcohol certainly didn’t enhance his parenting”; “He came from the old school of raising kids”; “He believed in discipline”; “Very Old Testament”) that it was perfectly clear he’d beaten the kids growing up. Mom was close to her mom. When Mom was in college, she found out her mom died and my mom went in to take a math test. She can do that. Compartmentalize, I mean. Her insides can be at high tide but she always has a placid look. The joke we make is that she’s half Norwegian and half Vulcan.

  She met Dad in Cleveland. He was finishing his PhD on a student deferment. It was at a bar. He invited her to a party at his apartment the next week. My mom agreed. And she brought a date to that party. My dad figured either she was clueless or she was cruel and drank himself sad that night.

  He called her the next morning and told her he really liked her and it was rude to bring that guy and he was sorry that he was making such a big deal of it. This is important. My dad called to harangue her and ended up apologizing—this is my dad. I’ve never been grounded without him lifting it a day later. He’s a sucker, a mark, a sap. But maybe that’s what she liked about him. They had lunch. They got married. And here’s my equivocation: they came from a different time, so even though Mom kept her maiden name, she quit IBM to follow Dad’s academic career. Dad taught in Omaha, then in Bismarck, Flagstaff, Denton, then in Wheeling, then he got the position here. He was feted when he first arrived. Gave a public reading; a faculty cocktail party in his honor; designed his own upperclassman classes; was given course relief so he could write his book on translating Hegel; health insurance; 401k; dinner at the president’s house every semester; a profile in the local paper and an interview with the Columbus Dispatch. The appointment was for three years and was meant to give junior faculty a place to launch their careers. But after that third year, my dad stayed. You know how you can dress up as Batman on Halloween and everyone plays along but if you are still wearing the costume November 1, you’re a lunatic? Dad had been dressing up as professor for fourteen years.

  I was born in Wheeling, so his course relief was spent running after me, not publishing, writing, or looking for another job. He was politely demoted to visiting professor and then to adjunct faculty. They took his office from him, they gave the classes he designed to senior faculty, and only gave him Intro classes. Another young professor came in for the three-year appointment—that guy they hired after two years. That guy frequently asked my dad for advice in the beginning and now condescended to him: “Tough job market out there. We didn’t become philosophers to get rich.” Ha ha ha ha.

  Dickhead.

  But Dad kept having him over for drinks every couple of weeks. He was probably the closest thing Dad had to a friend.

  Once I got into school, Mom got bored. She took classes at OSU. She got her MBA. She got a degree in Hotel Restaurant Management. She got hired by Marriott. Now her normal business trip takes her out of the house for three weeks at a time. This time she’s been gone for seven.

  We waited at her gate. Dad brought flowers; I talked him out of a box of candy. Dad was more nervous than I’d seen him in a while. And it was in his pacing, his bumming of a cigarette off of a stranger, his botched attempts at lighting up, that I realized he didn’t talk to Mom before quitting the college.

  The ride home was going to suck.

  Mom came out of the gangway with her sleep mask around her neck and three bags clustered around her. She had a purple blouse on and a black pleated skirt. She always dressed up for flights, even overnight ones. “You never know when they’re going to bump you to first class,” was one of her adages. Her hair was a mess but she had freshly applied makeup and she stank of mouthwash. Dad messed up their hug by trying to hug her first when Mom went for the flowers. It looked like she was disarming an attacker. They laughed. Mom snatched the flowers from him and hugged him. And then she hugged me. The spectacular ergonomics of a mom’s hug. I suddenly wanted to tell her about Ottilie and my special running power and my new friend Gary and drinking scotch with Dad and being infamous but not popular and how there was a difference between the two. My throat got that tight feeling and my thoughts were going like a broken carousel, spinning and spinning—the brake snapped, the gears loosening, all of it fit to fly away.

  The way she smelled made me want to tell her everything. The mouthwash, old perfume, slept-in-clothes smell. This was Mom smell.

  And every time I smelled it I was reminded that I was an unrepentant pansy-assed mama’s boy. I loved her like a lemming loves another lemming’s rear end. Maybe it was her hair, chestnut brown to her shoulders in something called a demi-wave, or the fact that she liked to eat popcorn while she did the crossword or because she had never once tried to explain Kierkegaard to me. I grabbed two of her carry-ons and started to hustle ahead of them. She never checked luggage. She hated airports that much. She would rather wear the same thing over and over than stay the twenty extra minutes waiting for the baggage to be unloaded. They were walking slowly, so I hustled back, making a joke of running circles around them. Let’s get to the car, let’s get on the highway, let’s get home. I wanted to wake up and have Mom smell in the house.

  “You’re smoking now,” she said to dad.

  Dad looked at the cigarette in his hand like a pickpocket had placed it there. He tossed it on the airport floor and stepped on it. “I quit teaching,” he said.

  He couldn’t have waited for the car? He could have told her when we were driving home and then we’d still be in motion. Instead, he did it like he was swimming in a cold pond. Jumped right in. Maybe he figured hitting mom with it when she was jet-lagged would be strategic. She stopped walking and dropped my dad’s hand. Everyone was in movement around us. People hoisting children. Skycaps pushing wheelchairs. Business people checking their watches. College kids carrying guitars. Even the shoe-polishing guy was in motion, his brush going whisk whisk whisk whisk.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she asked. When someone says that line, you expect them—no, you want them—to scream it. My mom said it like Clint Eastwood. Quiet and steely.

  “They were never going to hire me on full time. There was no market incentive for them to do it. Why pay me more when I was clearly willing to work for nothing? I’m done with the dream. I’m awake now and I’m going to do real work and make real money and I’ll provide enough so you don’t have to be gone all of the time and we can be a family.”

  “We are a family,” my mom said. Her coldness was freaking me out. It was freaking Dad out. He started talking faster and faster.

  “I’ve already got a new job. I didn’t quit the old one before getting another one. I’m not stupid. I just had had enough of being funded by my wife, by my silly dream, my unprofitable profession, making you work and travel so much. I miss you. Barry misses you. I thought this could get you off the road as much.”

  “You want me to quit my job?” If she were a porcupine, her quills would be jammed so far into Dad that every major organ would be pierced. “You decided to quit your job, burning who knows how m
any bridges in the process, and you also decided that I would quit mine too? Were you going to talk to me about this? Maybe ask how I felt about this?”

  I dropped the bags by the wall and sat next to them. People swerved around them. Happy people. Busy people. Soldiers in uniform holding hands with pregnant women.

  My dad continued to talk faster and faster, he was sweeping against the wind but he couldn’t stop himself. “I was tired of everyone sacrificing for me. For this stupid dream I had of being a professor, of teaching these theories about life to Econ majors who want nothing more than for me to tell them how any of this is going to profit them. They want education to be a tool and I can’t do that. I’m bad at that. I teach useless things and for a long time I took pride in it, felt like I was doing soul work, forging young characters, making the world a better place one reading of The Republic at a time. But I can’t do it anymore. It’s a different world. No one wants to be smart. Everyone wants to be rich. They’re sending a schoolteacher into space, but you know who’s going to be next. The wealthy. They will own and experience everything. I can’t fight that anymore. I’m not going to put my family in jeopardy and send my wife away for months at a time so I can just play out this dumb dream I had of being important, of being a wise man, of chasing out the knowledge hidden in plain sight, teaching others to do it.”

  A man driving a golf cart was yelling, “Coming through. Coming through. Move to the side. Coming through.” Dad grabbed Mom by her shoulders and pulled her out of the way.

  “It wasn’t just your dream,” she said.

  She didn’t say another word until we got home. She was putting back together a grenade that had gone off inside of her. Collecting the shrapnel, withdrawing it from where it had lodged.

  After I’d run upstairs to floss and brush and change into my pj’s, she came into my bedroom. “You should’ve told me about this, Baruch,” she said.