My Father’s Keeper
Julie Gregory

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

The Children of Happiness

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Children of Happiness

They are to be cherished and protected,

Even at the risk of your life.

They know sadness but will overcome it.

They know alienation

For they see past and through this reality.

They will Endure where others cannot. They will Survive where others cannot. They know love even when it is not shown to them. They spend their lives trying to communicate the love they know.

Chapter One

I was born on the day of Liberace, May 16th to be exact, The Day of Outrageous Flair. In the Big Blue Birthday book, Outrageous Flair is appropriately illustrated by a snapshot of Liberace himself soaking in a marbled bath as bottomless as deep dish apple pie, the round of the tub one white solid bubble. The showman and pianist was in his golden age, as plump and gaudy as Elvis in those final days of Vegas. Marinating in bubbles, his stout fingers spread by thick, jewelled rings, he flashes that champagne smile, beaming squarely at the camera from between two gilded swan neck faucets.

At the time that picture was snapped, I was a stick figure tweeny living in a trailer out in southern Ohio, on the back woods edge of a dead end country road that held as many secrets as it lacked street lights. My tub was shallow and rectangular and moulded of the same gold plastic as the trailer’s doorknobs. The bentnecked swans my mother had gold leafed were also plastic and hung slightly ajar on the bathroom’s wood panelling. The constant burning of bacon in the kitchen had infused our trailer’s hermetically sealed air with a sort of permanent tack that coated the curved backs of the swans and caught whatever floated through the bathroom, making a sort of three-dimensional dust. It gave the swans a hairy appearance—not unlike the very chest of Liberace himself.

My father’s baby blue polyester suit hung in the closet and his white Vegas-style loafers lounged beneath, their tight backs ready to snap around his heels and rub blisters. I can still see him wince as he hobbled along after only an hour in them. My mother’s cubic zirconia rings sat in an Avon dish on the back of the toilet, next to the Stick Up.

There was no cameraman and certainly no smiling.

As a young girl, I was taller than I was wide. Long, cool and lanky, I took my strides with the measured gait of an Arabian filly. It wasn’t something I tried for, it just happened. And when I walked the halls as a new Jr. High student, the senior boys called me highwater for the long legs that seemed destined to greatness. I should have been a ballerina, or a model, or at least a prima donna. But sometimes the stork drops you in the wrong place.

Because for all the feel and longing inside me to be a noble child of royal descent, even of the Liberace kind, there was no way around the blaring, honking reality of my daily life: I was shackled to a family of losers.

There was my dad with his Mork from Ork suspenders worn long after it was cool and his battery-operated bull horn that he snuck into football games. And Mom with her outdated fringed western gear making me couple skate with her to Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited” at the Make-A-Date Roller Skating Rink in Amanda, Ohio.

Thank God it was the next town over.

And I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if my dad wasn’t ooga-ing his horn every time a junior in tight Jordache jeans walked in front of the bleachers. And the girls, with their sixth sense, would slow in their tracks for instinctual preening, pulling Goody combs from back pockets to feather long layers back along the sides of their heads, all the while tilting gently parted mouths in just such a way as to showcase their teeth. Then they’d dart glances up into the bleachers trying to catch the eye of their suitor.

I could have died.

And so could they when they spotted my dad; large, hairy, menacing, looking a cross between Jerry Garcia and Charles Manson in rainbow suspenders, wiggling his fat fingers, “Yoooo-hoooo,” at them like he would to a baby. They bolted and my dad would raise his megaphone and blitz the button for the Dukes of Hazzard’s car horn, blaring the confederate tune into the crisp fall night, adding his own “Charge!” at the end and springing to his feet. I wedged my body down into the foot bleachers and unfolded my turtleneck in triplicate up over my nose, hoping this alone would shield my identity.

And when I wasn’t saddled with him on game Fridays, I was stuck with Mom on the Saturdays, dragging me out under the swooning lights of the rink just so she wouldn’t have to couple skate alone. She was upping her chances to catch a wink from the married owner by getting out on the floor when it was least populated.

I held her sweaty hand and we coasted with locked knees around pitted wooden corners, while dancing polka dot lights spun me dizzy on the dark floor.

Reunited And It Feeels So Goood.

Trust me. No kid wants their 40-year-old mother asking them if her butt looks okay in the skating rink bathroom.

I was desperate. Desperate to get out of the hollow where I lived with the big trucks with gun racks in the back and bumper stickers that read “Boobs, Booze, and Country Music”, where at least one hand-lettered yard sign on the way to town scolded with a twang:

This is God’s CountryDon’ drive through it like Hell

I wanted far away from the kids my dad cornered at the football game’s concession stand, demanding they tell him how cool he was—the same ones that went on to pelt the back of my head with crabapples the rest of the year on the school bus. Like it or not, by the very virtue of association, I was a loser too; as long as I was under my father’s roof, every fledgling step in the teenage social hierarchy was eclipsed by a trademark faux pas of my father—a public squelch, raucous belch or exaggerated, lingering crotch adjustment.

The fall of eighth grade saw me herded into choir with the rest of the class, and despite complaining along with the other kids over the injustice and uncoolness of it all, I was secretly thrilled to be looped into the pomp and circumstance of school performance, a world I’d never have gained entry to if it was not mandatory for the class. My parents, in all their trailer-minded glory, placed zero importance on the intellectual advancement of anything as meaningless as music or art. School was seen as a sort of extended daycare to keep me out of the house until I got off the bus and could be handed a list of chores that wouldn’t cease until bedtime. To say that school—and all the bells and whistles of extracurricular activities—meant nothing to them was an understatement.

Choir was the first indulgence of any kind I’d had, the music room a luxurious epicentre of civilized culture that offset the glare of my trailer tarnish.

Our first performance of the year was marked by flat grey skies pregnant with the fall of winter’s virgin snow. The sky hung small and low over the miles of brittle brown corn fields that surrounded Mcdowell middle school but it wasn’t the gloom of winter that knitted my forehead as my father drove us there.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Promise you won’t embarrass me?”

“Embarrass you?” he snorted. “What, you don’t think your old man’s cool? I know what cool is. I’m so cool I had tattoos on my diapers.”

“Just promise,” I pleaded as I stared out of the window, watching the bitter wind kick corn husks up into swirling funnel clouds.

We stood at the mouth of the auditorium, my father and I, his sideburns thick as mutton chops and with that trademark chipmunk smile, the top teeth forced over the bottom giving his grin, however manly he may be, a forever permanence of being twelve. He wore polyester and I wore corduroy and puttycoloured panty hose, a fresh snag running up my leg. In our first formal event together, my father pretended to wait for someone, craning his neck up and over the families that bustled around us and took their seats in the auditorium once they embraced each other. So confident of his cool in the car, he had started to sweat. A few beads of perspiration popped up on his forehead; one let loose and trickled down into his sideburn like a checker dropped from his hairline.

I knew I would have to stay. Who knows what might happen if I left his side?

The wind instruments began their warm up. My choir teacher swept past on her way to the stage and stopped to collect me, placing her delicate conductor’s hand softly on my back. I can still feel the exact outline of it singed on my back.

My father thrust his arm out to her, erupting in a boyish grin and my choir teacher, never the wiser, stretched her long tapered fingers to his, slipping a dainty palm into his calloused one.

I caught the twinkle in his eye but it was too late.

In the split second it takes for the little squeeze that accompanies a handshake, my father cocked his left leg and farted in the empty hall.

Dad roared maniacally. My choir teacher recoiled her hand in horror as my father held it steadfast. And I, the delicate child, stood alone between them. This was life with my dad.

As humiliating as it was to be out in public with my father, I needed him too. He pointed out kids who made fun of me and without him, I felt exposed and uncertain of how to interpret the world around me. Luckily, our public outings were rare. My father wanted little more than to be parked in his La-Z-Boy recliner in the small cavern of our trailer’s living room, cocooned by the soft glow of six to eight hours of television a night. Dad was perfectly content to recline in a flat, predictable world, experienced in manageable half-hour increments, with nothing more complex than a riveting episode of Sanford and Son.

There was me, Danny, my little brother, Mom and Dad, all living in a mobile home that started out no bigger than the trailer of a semi truck. But each of us was living in our own fantasy.

At night I lay in bed burning; burning in a vision of running away. I would get on The Price Is Right, “Julie Gregory, C’mon down! You’re the next contestant on the Price Is Right,” I would spring five perfect back flips down the aisle—boom—straight onto contestant’s row. I’d lean into the mike and know the actual retail price of the His-n-Hers matching hi-ball glasses, the numbers rolling out my mouth like Pentecostal tongue. I’d play the Mountain Climber game with the grace and ease of a cut-throat watcher. And the way I span the wheel, you’d think I had one set up at home in the wood-panelled basement.

After winning both prizes in the Showcase Showdown, my carefully studied bid falling within buckshot of a hundred dollars of my own well-chosen showcase, I’d step out from behind my podium; pry the mike from Bob’s cold, tan fingers and croon, “This is Julie Gregory for Bob Barker, reminding you to help control the pet population! Have your pet spayed or neutered!”

Bob would fall silent, pursing that thin smile as he clamoured for control. But I could tell he was impressed.

Showgirls would fan out around me to fill in for the lack of family rushing the stage and I’d whisper that I’d be donating at least one of the cars to the Humane Society. One showgirl would cup her hand to Bob’s ear and he, in turn, would tell the audience. The crowd went wild.

“Who is this amazing teenage girl?” hissed down the aisles like brushfire.

I lay in bed at night, the vision searing behind my eyes; my fingers clasped upon my soft-breathing belly, eyes wide open, boring into the dark.

And while I was running away to Burbank, California, Mom was living in a closet of gold lamé tracksuits, each holding in its folds the golden promise of an imaginary cruise drifting on the horizon of a fading sunset. The ensembles jammed to swelling on her closet rod, each with its respective price tag dangling anxiously in case the cheque bounced.

And while Mom spent her nights trying on outfits for the ritzy vacation that never came, my little brother Danny lived in a fortress constructed of hundreds and hundreds of Matchbox cars, to which he was ruler of their domain, and future race car driver of all. For those that were his favourites, he had a special carry bag in which he stacked them double decker and carried like an attaché case at all times. In the space between our fantasy bubbles, the air of the trailer was charged electric, ready to crack with velocity the minute one of these worlds tilted toward reality. But the truth was that even as my father lay dormant in a homogenized state, rich in his lazy life, even as he rooted at football games in his ridiculous suspenders and insisted he was the King of Cool, in the front pocket of his trousers sat a spring-loaded gun. It stayed put in my father’s pocket twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t even take it out at night, just dropped his pants and stepped out of two perfect trouser tunnels—leaving his .25 like a sleeping watchdog on the floor by the bedside.

And if he couldn’t get to it, there was always the gun kept beneath his pillow and the other two tucked under my mother’s wigs in the bathroom cupboard. Failing those, three sat atop the refrigerator—one at the front, one in the middle closest to the stove and the third at the very back in case the one or both of the other two were stolen.

And those were just the guns inside.

Hidden beneath a stack of Taco Bell napkins in the glove compartment of the car was yet another—with an extra gun tucked under the springs of the driver’s seat, just in case.

But the one constant was my father’s .25. It was always with him, in the La-Z-Boy, at church and even as the eighth grade choir warbled through Englasis On High. And each day, without really knowing it, I was holding my breath, right up to my fifteenth birthday when my father took his gun to the rooftop of the Sherex Chemical Company to jump.

By then, my father had come to spook easy. And it was my job to ease him out of it. In this way, I was his watchdog too. Tension strung in trap wires around him and anything could pluck the strings: a door slammed by the breeze, the backfire of a muffler, a hunter’s random gunshot that pierced the silence of our woods and my father’s corresponding jolt, duck, a violent swing of his head, the injection of panic into the air from his electrified body sending a ripple effect through me. When he jumped, I jumped. So having Dad in the La-Z-Boy meant a break from the worry. My father was like his gun; the safety latch might be on, but it could go off anytime.

It wasn’t until I had a life of my own, free from my own jolts and ducks and wide eyes that swung around wildly, that I could lay claim to the feeling, to understand that what lay just under the surface of my father’s happy-go-lucky appearance, and resonated out into our family through the conduit of myself, was something so big, so incomprehensible that it could never be touched or opened by any words or healed by the passage of time. And to a kid, that was far larger than anything spoken at all.

There was so much craziness that went down back then, so much Technicolor madness that defied anyone in the Tri-County area from ever believing it, that I’m surprised we even made it out as a family. And by family I don’t just mean the initial clan of us, the four of us who were at best odd-shaped puzzle pieces from entirely different boxes, but the extended cache of strangers that were folded into our drama along the way. Because honestly, without the punctuation of their presence and the adrenaline that swirled around it, I don’t think I could have stood another day with the suspenders or the bullhorn, the skates or the fringed western wear without grabbing at least one of the guns off the top of the fridge and blowing my brains out.

Chapter Two

Even though my father came of age in the Sixties, he was cut of a different cloth than the era. My dad never went to Woodstock. He didn’t protest the war. He did not wear leather vests or fringy things. Never in his life did he don sandals or moccasins, smoke pot or down a fifth of whiskey. And I don’t think my dad even knew what the term “tie-dye” meant. He was a lanky sprout of a kid with Alfred E. Newman ears that sprung out from the side of his head and a smirk that turned him into a west side slurpee the second he flashed it.

He dropped out of school at the age of seventeen to register for Vietnam because he thought the uniform would get him girls. And when the officer that brought him on pitched an extra week of leave for every friend he signed up with him, he volunteered the names of his three best buddies, walked out of the recruiter’s office and promptly blew off boot camp to take his three promised weeks off. He was AWOL before he even began.

My own mother had scarcely made it through the ninth grade when she was married off by her mother, my Grandma Madge, to a carny—what those who worked in the carnivals called themselves—in his fifties named Smokey. At the same time Dad was doing his two months overseas, Mom was travelling with the Grand Ole Opry, trick riding horses and being one half of a side-winding whip act, all in fringed leather. The original white showman’s jacket she wore before I was born hung in my trailer closet as a teenager, radiating the smell of decaying leather and mothballs.

Mom and father, both from the west side of Columbus, existed thousands of miles apart until the trajectory of their lives careened them into one another with a violent crash. Within the span of a few months, my dad was flown back to the States from Vietnam and checked into his first government-issue psychiatric ward and Mom was a widow after walking in to find a cold, stiff Smokey propped up in bed. It was only later I’d hear the whispers that she’d been questioned about his death.

When my dad came out of the mental hospital at age 20, he took the first job he could get at the gas station at Grant and Sullivan. Mom pulled in and less than a month shy of Smokey being cold in the ground had a real boyfriend lined up. Their first official date was on Valentine’s Day; they married in March. Six months later a baby was on the way. That baby was me.

I guess looking back there were signs all along, ominous forewarnings that we would all end piled up at the bottom of that dead-end dirt road desperate and feral as a trapped cat. And the lynchpin of them all orbited around my father and the first singular memory I have of him just shy of turning four.

I remember we lived on Cedarleaf Road in Ohio.

I remember the picnic table in the backyard was a giant wooden spool for electrical wire which Dad had rolled home from the base where he worked.

I remember getting parked on top of the refrigerator when Planet of the Apes came on, my father’s reason being I’d sit still straight through to the commercials if I was afraid of tipping off.

And I remember looking out the living room window from behind heavy mustard-coloured curtains to see my father on his hands and knees in the gravel drive.

He had come home early after being fired.

He pushed a jack under the sedan, hiked his pants up by the loops and plastered a shock of greasy hair across his forehead. I watched his skinny arm pump as the car began to rise.

When it was high enough to teeter, he got down in the gravel and shimmied up flat under the car, his fingers inching out to grasp the rusty frame. In slow motion, he began to rock; back and forth, back and forth, until his body slid out from under the chaises with each hoist of his arms; like a low, heavy chin-up.

I was standing at the storm door by now, watching through the glass when Mom sauntered up behind me. Her arms grazed my hair as they folded into lockdown over her chest, the heat of bristle rolling off her. And it was then that I first felt the gulf between the rest of the world and my father, a chasm so dark and bottomless that even then I sensed it could swallow him whole.

But in that moment I also knew that I would reach across and save him. I would be his bridge back. And in reaching for my father, I would not let him fall.

The car swayed lightly, his face wedged under the tyre and with every rock my body winched forward, until it pressed solid against the pane wet with cold. I touched my fingertips to the glass and bore my eyes steady into the front end of the car. I would not let it fall.

“Jesus,” Mom hissed, “He can’t even do that right.”

I stared harder, willing the car to stay.

On my father rocked.

And it was only me that stood between them.

That’s where my father remains forever etched in my being: just out of reach, on the other side of the glass. From that day forward, carved in my heart was a hole which no other love but his could fill. With a fragile liability that led him out to the drive to wedge himself under the car and a three-year-old omnipotent enough to feel she alone could save him, we were crippled from the start. But this was the template from which my love was stamped and I could no sooner change it than a duckling could undo its imprinting at birth.

Like the Quakers, the Gregory family lineage had always managed to linger slightly on the brink of extinction. My mother’s dad put a gun in his mouth when she was still a girl, my dad’s mother died young of a stroke, his own father only hovered above death, living in a perpetual alcoholic stupor behind cases of Bud Light stacked to the ceiling to keep out the light of day. And, with the eventual death of the last withered-up great-grandparent, the first portrait of our remaining family clan is snapped.

It is a blustery, winter afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, on a piss-grey day, lined up next to a cement wall cascading the carcass of a bush that used to be alive in the months of green.

There is something to be said for the fashion of the Seventies; something haunting, almost surreal in what people actually wore out into the world. In this photo, it’s all of us and we amount to only five—six if you count the dog my grandmother’s holding.

There’s Lee, my mother’s mentally slow brother, standing on the one end, pelvis tilted forward, shoulders slack, arms stiff at his sides. Grandma Madge, my mother’s mother, is next to him, oozing eternal Christian goodness out her every pore. She has a pulsating cluster of fabric orchids fingering out over her lapel and there is something almost sinister to them, like an accessory The Joker might wear. Mom is next to Grandma Madge in a long blond and black peppered wig that kind of makes her look like an early cone head, from where the seam sewn at the top points into a little ^ that runs down her scalp. She wears a purple mini with one panty-hosed knee cocked like a model’s.

Then there’s Dad on the end. Standing cockeyed, throwing the camera his pissed-off, I-could-just-kill-you glare, having hoisted me up to his chest with one mighty palm and pointing his leg out away from the rest of us, like he was about to get off the exit ramp of this family any minute now. His clip-on tie hangs limp and is tucked into a wrinkled suit coat with a buckling waist button, too small to span his protruding belly, even though his pant legs hang ghostly empty.

As Dad points away from the other three, looking disgusted, Lee, on the other end, bears down into the heels of his shoes, looking constipated. I sit on the shelf of my father’s arm and beam brightness in my funeral dress, lacy bonnet and white ribbed leggings. And it is after this funeral that we do what most thinning, dysfunctional families do: move cross country to be closer to one another.

I have no other photo of my father and me until the age of nine and by then my brother Danny will have joined us, amping our total extended family count up to six. But until then, there are seven delicious years of just me and my dad.

It is 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am four years old. I have a Fisher-Price Castle and Weebles “wobble but they don’t fall down”. The plastic horses are thick and smooth and their legs move at the joints, and the castle has a dungeon where the innocent await rescue. They just don’t make toys like that anymore.

On the first day after our arrival, my father and I are dropped off in a public park while our mother drives around to scout for a place to live. Six years his senior, her 31 to his green 25 entitled her to make every choice that affected us, from where we lived to when we moved. Dad lounged in the lush grass, not a care in the world and peeled off a mound of marshmallow snowball from its wrapper to hand over to me. It was the most delicious thing I had eaten in all of my four years and we lazed in the grass, licking coconut marshmallow off our fingers; every moment stolen with my father one of pure contentment knowing he was safe with me.

In our rented crackerjack house, my days are spent parked in front of the television set in a sunken den of the Seventies, covered in wall-to-wall wine-coloured shag. Dad looks for work and Mom slumps at the dinette in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and pushing the cuticles back on her nails.

“Look, Julie, you’re father’s an ass, alright?” she’d startle when I’d catch her talking to herself. “So what if he does find work?” She blew smoke over my head from one of the emergency fags she kept stashed in the silverware drawer, “He couldn’t keep a job if his ass was on fire.”

It was a bad disposition and sheer idiocy, Mom insisted, that caused Dad to get fired. And the more he shied from her verbal assaults, the more I spread my wings to shelter him. If I could temper his mood and happiness, it seemed a small price to pay to have my father by my side. The details were never quite clear but, if there is one thing I can attest to with consistency about my father, it is that whatever misfortune happened along the way, it was never, ever his fault. Bound to see him through his own eyes, it would take me twenty odd years to trace the wreckage back to its source.

My father has the deepest dimples: craters carved into the sides of his face that when activated, all joy sprang forth and radiated outward. My father might not smile for the camera, but he lights up when he sees me. He bounds through the door at the end of the day and scoops me up and I wrap my arms around his neck, squeezing tight. He flips me upside down and swings me by my ankles, my long blond hair tumbling down. He draws my back to his chest with one arm, with me still upside down and pretends to stumble like a blind man into the living room, jutting his other hand out to feel the way. I giggle wildly as he steadies a faux fall down to the carpet, digging his fingers into my armpits until I laugh so hard I nearly wet my pants.

“Ah, baby, I love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” I say breathless.

He kisses my forehead. I fold his arms around me and brush the soft warm of his palms down over my eyes. I love these moments with my father more than anything.

“Sit on my feet so I can do my sit-ups, baby.”

My father calls me baby, a dizzying siren song to my ears. He lay down on his back, bends his knees. I plunk upon my father’s toes, leveraging my hands on his ankles. He curls into a sit-up and raises his feet too, lifting me like a see-saw.

“Daddddddd!” I cling to his shins for balance while he tries to buck me off.

“C’mon Baby,” he says, as he shakes me from his legs like a lemon from the tree, “You got to hold daddy’s feet down!”

I am all gums and teeth with laughter. I bear my weight on the tops of his feet, he crosses his arms on his chest and groans his first sit-up. One, two, three…four…fivvvve…sixsss…he falls back to the floor, winded.

“Six is enough for today, baby.” He wheezes and curses under his breath, “Fuckin’ Agent Orange.”

My mother slices through the corner of the living room, carrying stacks of sorted laundry. My father lies on the carpet, clutching his chest—still burning from a faraway place called ‘Nam.

“Dan, would you brush your daughter’s hair? God, it’s a rat’s nest. The brush is in my purse.”

My father blinks his Little Orphan Annie eyes and crawls over to dig through her bag. I stand between his folded knees and he brushes me from the top, pulling the bristles through my long, fine hair until it snaps in tiny knots at the end. I yelp.

“Jesus Dan, brush her from the bottom, not the top you idiot.” She grabs the brush from my father and pulls it hard through my hair, “Like this,” then slaps the handle back in his hand.

And my father blinks empty, starts over, follows orders, tries to please.

I didn’t meet another child until I was five years old and Mom finally ventured out of the house to find the neighbours. Marty is the Mexican boy from next door who is a year younger and bangs on our door at the crack of dawn; Jill is the girl across the street who is a year older and cheats openly at Hungry Hippos.

At my house we drape the blankets from the bed over the dining room table to make a fort beneath. Mom sits in the kitchen, filing her nails.

And that’s when Marty takes me into the bedroom and Jill makes me lay on my bedspread face down.

“We’re going to play doctor now,” she says in her bossy voice, “I’m the nurse and you need a shot.” She pulls my shorts down and my Tuesday underwear to the tops of my legs and Marty makes his papery fingernails into a C and pinches them closed on the skin of my bottom.

A dizzying electric current shoots down my legs and out the top of my head from the single vortex of one pinch. I lay there breathing into the pillow.

“That’s it.” Jill play-slaps my butt. “You were a good patient.”

In afternoons of deathly quiet, Mom draws the curtains to shut out the blazing Arizona sun and I play the game of Matching Pairs. I slap the cards down on the carpet and I’m good. I only have to turn them over a couple times before I remember where the exact match is. Apple to apple, orange to orange, flower to flower, I stack the matched sets one on top of the other until everything is paired. Then I shuffle them fancy like I see Mom do at solitaire and do it all over again.

An endless stream of unemployed days comes to an end and my father rushes in to grab me, cupping his big hands over my face and leading me out the door into the drive.

“Lookie, baby, lookie what Daddy got! I saw it and said ‘I have got to get that for my baby.’”

In the drive sits a tiny car, a 1972 Datsun painted green, the precise colour of split pea soup.

My father has landed a job as a plumber at the local Air Force base—a position he is almost guaranteed never to lose. Military bases are full of sinks and toilets and drains. In his excitement on the way home, he saw the car and bought it with the money we had left.

“It looks like a peanut, Daddy.”

Dad claps his hands, “That’s it! That’s what we’ll call it, my baby’s peanut mobile.”

My mother simmers at the door as Dad snaps me into the bucket seat. We take off around the block, my hand clinging to the armrest, my head barely high enough to see out the window. My father smiles down to me and I scrunch my shoulders and smile back. The car zips down the road like a Tylenol capsule on wheels, bounding inches above the pavement; racing along with all the punch of a rip cord toy car.

I’m curled in my father’s lap for Saturday morning cartoons when he gives me the signal to follow. He silently trips the latch on the screen and pushes me out the door.

“Sandy,” he leans back over the threshold, “Me and Julie’s going out in the peanut mobile.”

I can hear her No! from the kitchen but we’re already gone; my father exaggerating a tiptoe in fast motion across the pavement while I plaster my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling out loud. He squeals out the drive.

“Just like the Keystone Cops!” he shouts.

“Yeah!”

There is a feeling of exhilaration to be with my father, to escape from the house and have it be just us. Forever bonded; me and my dad. We don’t even have to talk. We drive out of our middle class suburb and through tidy neighborhood streets with Monopoly houses and green lawns, the jitter of sprinklers rapid firing across wet grass. We drive into foreign streets with dirt lots by the buildings, where neon signs light Martini glasses with a bikini-clad girl dipping over the side in an illusion of bright lights. Tall, lithe dogs shoot across the road without looking; their big, boney skulls slung low on the prowl.

Dad is taking me for the first time to his favourite Chinese restaurant.

The parking lot is empty. He opens the front door and a brilliant slice of light cuts into the dark. The carpet is sticky under the soles of my white sandals. There are no other people and not even tables set. He lifts me to the black high back of a barstool that is one in a row lining a long bar.

“Be right back, Daddy’s gotta go potty.”

My father slips through a set of swinging red shutters that hinge in a naked doorway at the end of the bar. Hushed whispers float from behind the shutters and I see a pair of woman’s legs rise from sitting under the frame. Minutes tick by with only the occasional rustle—the clamour of a falling pan, a single thud against a wall, another wave of frenzied whispers—that lets me know my father is still back there.

A long mirror runs behind the bar. If I kneel on the stool, my head crests into reflection and my face emerges in the dim light. Over the door behind me, I can see in the mirror a red exit marquee, and to the left a barely lit bathroom sign emitting the low sick buzz of electricity.

The bell on the door tinkles, a wedge of light slashes across the carpet.

Where is my dad?

A man stands just inside the door, adjusting to the dark.

I watch him in the glass, frozen in place.

He squints his eyes and slowly makes out my face in the mirror. He bolts to the men’s room just as my father swings the red lacquered doors open.

“Daddy!”

A woman follows, dressed in pink satin.

“Hi, Baby. Can you say, Sawatdee Cup? That means ‘Hello, how are you’ in Taiwanese.”

The girl smiles and slips behind the bar. Her long black hair runs cool down her back. My dad gives the doorknob of my knee a honk honk. He orders us wonton soup and egg rolls with duck sauce.

Behind the bar, our waitress turns to give us our drinks. I glare at her.

She smiles.

My father winks.

He is jovial, relaxed, blowing on my wonton soup to cool it, giving me feathery tickles under my chin, making up for leaving his baby in a way only a dad can do. And in the flicker of a moment, the space between us closes and it’s once again a Saturday with just me and my dad.

That first summer in Phoenix was so hot you couldn’t touch your bare feet to the sidewalk past morning light. Our reasons for moving close to Grandma Madge were fading as Mom bickered with her over everything from whether a red bell pepper was called a “mango” to the boxes of floor-length dresses Grandma Madge kept in a big box marked “Church Bizarre”. She dragged them out from the spare bedroom and held them up against me. Floor-length frocks made of heavy velvet and scratchy gold lamé; high collars, dowdy sleeves, zippered backs. These were not the dresses on their way to the church bazaar, they were in fact rejects coming from it.

“Thanks Madge, that’s great, why don’t you just keep them for Julie until she’s big enough?”

“What a good idea, how old do you think she’ll need to be?”

“Twenty, Madge. Twenty.”

And Grandma Madge counts on her fingers, pondering aloud where she will store them for fifteen years.

In the beginning my grandmother would take me for day trips to fish at the lake but every car ride home ended in a fender bender with her behind the wheel. Privileges were reeled in to the local Encino Park where she could pedal me around the lake in the Swan boats. But even then Grandma Madge never missed a chance for ministry on the fly and she’d sweep right past the water in one of her to-the-ankle long-sleeved dresses looking for a gang of homeless youths, me in tow.

When she spotted a kid high as a kite with a bloody nose, she made a bee-line for him. The kid looked around, trapped. With nothing else to lose, he closed his eyes as Grandma Madge fished a Bible from her purse. Caught in the rapture of spirit, she began to weep; one woman in prayer, her bony hand bound to the wrist of the bleeding boy. And the Swan boats floated by as the kid sneezed and splattered blood on me from his broken nose while Grandma Madge tried to convert him to Christianity. It was soon decided that only my mother’s presence could assure my safety.

I have only one photo from these rare outings with Mom as chaperone. The three of us are leaving the mall, my grandmother with a purse as big as a bowling ball bag looped over the crook of her arm. We have walked out into the parking lot’s bright sun and Mom has whacked me on the head with her fist. As I stand heaving in a pastel jumper with knobbly knees and long blond hair, she roots through her purse for the camera and passes it to Grandma Madge. And there we are, a snapshot captured in time, me wiping away a tear and my mother’s arm around my shoulder, veneered smile sealed upon her face.

To her credit, I always remember Mom having a soft spot for animals and back then she’d take me to the slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Phoenix, where we’d buy up the little colts whose mothers had already had their throats slit. The babies would skit around the corral with wide-eyed fright, snorting through their nostrils, afraid to even let their hooves touch the ground. The feeling that hung in the air was sheer terror. I understood that instinctively, despite being so young, and the smell of death seeped through the car windows as we drove in the dusty lane leading back to the slaughter pens. Mom said that most horses here were stolen from farms and given to slaughter because of the foreigner’s love of horse meat, and that was the first time that I knew that we were different. Because my God, Mom would say, who could ever eat a horse’s meat?

My father pants like a puppy, hangs his tongue out. The bike wobbles and spits down the sidewalk, my training wheels freshly shucked. He runs alongside, hanging onto the back of the bike seat.

“You’re doing it baby, Go, Go, pump the pedals.”

His shout at my side fades as I take flight from the push of his palm, pedalling furiously down the sidewalk. Like my father, my tongue hangs out, my face frozen in studied concentration. My arms are bent with a death grip on the handlebars, I’m riding my bike! And I have left my father behind. The ends of my long hair blow off my back, the squares of concrete rush beneath me. But I want my father here, running alongside. I turn to find him and see him back at the house, a block away. I tap my toes to the sidewalk to stop and the bike shimmies. My foot catches in the frame and I topple over, skinning my knee, my hair tangling in the chain. I look to my father and scream but it’s not the pain that brings hot tears. It’s my dad talking to the neighbour, only stopping long enough to wave wildly for me to walk back to him.

That night, Dad pads down the hallway to the bathroom where I soak my knee in the tub. He rummages through the medicine cabinet for a hairgrip.

He sticks the curved end deep into his ear and scrapes, sinking his eyes closed.

“Honey, don’t ever let me see you do this.”

He jiggles the grip and looks at it, then presses it to the leg of his shorts, popping a crescent moon of burnt orange ear wax onto his leg.

“If you ever want to clean your ears, honey.” He sticks the bobby pin back in the cabinet. “You come get either me or mommy. You never want to run a bobby pin in your ear without one of us there to supervise.”

It was just after the first Christmas in Phoenix that the call came in from the base. Dad had tangled himself up while clearing out industrial drains and been spit out again, with both elbows snapped.

My father sits at the dinette in the kitchen, his casted arms folded to his chest like a mummy, anchored by double slings that criss-cross over him and tie around his neck. His fingers rest under his shoulders and look like garden grubs, curled black and blue.

Our mother forks three poached eggs from pan to plate, “Here, feed your father,” she says and drops the plate on the table, walking out.

I butter his toast and spoon a bite of egg onto the corner. I stand at his knee and lift it to his mouth.

My father leans forward, armless. He bares his teeth and bites. A bit of yolk dribbles down his chin and I dab it with a napkin. The bottom rim of his eye wells, one giving way to a quiver.

“You’re so good to me, baby.” A tear splashes down his cheek.

I stand before my father, lift my small hands to his face. His drops his head into the cradle of my palms and I bear the weight of my father’s heavy head.

“You’re so good to your Daddy,” he sobs.

“It’s okay, Daddy.”

“Will you take care of me, baby?”

“I’ll take care of you, Daddy.”

“I got nobody else but you.”

He lifts his forehead from my hands.

“I love you so much, baby.”

A tear drops from his chin to my face.

“I love you, too.”

It trickles down and we are bonded; his tear in my eye, sealing me as my father’s keeper.

With Dad at home in his slings, Mom tries another approach with Grandma Madge. We pick her up at her own crack jack house a mile away and drive to a pool party of one of the neighbours.

“Whatever you do Madge,” Mom warns in the car, “for God’s sake don’t embarrass me.”

I spotted her first when she stepped out of the changing cabana. My grandmother ran a band of long black hair from her belly button to her thighs and there it was in all its glory. When she spotted me and Mom across the patio at the bowl of chips, she waved over the heads of a pool of people, “Sannndy, Jeweeelly, over here!”

Mom walked straight in the front door that night and said, “Dan, I could have died.”

When Dad’s casts came off he returned to the base, only to find he no longer had a job. In the time he’d worked as a plumber, he’d racked up almost more time off with pay than he’d spent working.

And that’s how we ended up leaving Phoenix, and back in Ohio, moving through a series of apartments and mobile homes in a never ending quest to be settled. I went to four different kindergartens alone; just making a new friend before being yanked out again. We finally spent six months in a rented trailer, long enough for Dad to till a garden and mound rows of dirt to plant cantaloupes. On Saturdays, he’d load great baskets of ripe melons into the back of the car and drive us over to the new base where he worked, parking at the edge of the gates to wait for the military men coming and going on shift. I sat on the tailgate of the family station wagon, swinging my legs, happy as a clam to be with my father. Dad was a master melon grower and the men of the base always pulled over to share a joke or a story with my dad and walk away with an armful of juicy cantaloupes. I watched them as the sun set and laughed with them, even though I didn’t know what they talked about. But it was just the warmth of the people who sought out my father that I liked so much; men who smiled and laughed and didn’t carry the weight and anger of my mother. And Dad was never like this when they were together. I experienced my parents separately—and it was my father who stole my heart.

And who knew that it would be in the hollow of Burns Road where we’d finally settle or that I’d come of age on the same track of isolation in which my life began? But we were driven to the ends of the earth by the 22 different jobs Dad had over the years and his increasing need for shelter, each loss a slit in the fabric of my father’s well-being and an obvious indication that the world was conspiring against him. After all, the proof was all around us. Grandma Madge was crazy. Former bosses were crazy. The people who got him fired were crazy. The only one who was not mad, my father insisted and I wholeheartedly agreed, was him.

Chapter Three

I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.

We weave our little fingers together;

Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.

When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.

“Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.

Ooooga-ooooooooga.

The other car would honk back and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.

Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.

Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.

Danny was too small to remember the cool car so he didn’t know what he was missing. But Dad lived so vicariously through my little brother’s Matchbox car collection, expounding big plans for the day he would build us our own classic car, that Danny became as obsessed with the idea of us getting one as I was nostalgic over the loss of the one we’d had.

The outside of our used trailer was dingy white and had interior features Mom referred to as “top of the line.” Doorknobs and bathroom fixtures were cast in gold plastic, some with a marble swirl and little crankout handles jutted from windows far too narrow to let the light of day in, let alone the tang out.

Our mother’s rampant decorating saw us pasting up orange velvet wallpaper and painting accents with gold leaf on everything from the drain stopper to the little plastic clips that held the mirror to the bathroom wall. When the sink faucet she’d spraypainted silver began to fleck, we’d dab at it from a luminescent jar of my brother’s model car paint. Bark art from the Circleville Pumpkin Show displayed a riveting image of Tecumseh’s Last Stand, which was shellacked onto a slab of stained and charred wood and fitted with a toothy mount on the back, suitable for display. Needless to say, the trailer, and all that was in it, was rightfully Mom’s domain. Tan press board was eventually sided up over the aluminium of the exterior and the shutters were drenched in chocolate brown paint.

My mother, wanting to give our trailer some European flair, ordered a plastic cuckoo clock from the back of The Swiss Colony catalogue and hung it next to the hutch that held my father’s blue felt coin collecting books, to which the best years of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters were pressed after being panned from a large clear plastic pretzel barrel that sat wedged in between the couch and the wall. The cuckoo clock chimed on the hour and two plastic birds, one blue, the other yellow, popped out a miniature barn door and circled on a track. The clock’s long chains cascaded down the wall and moulded plastic pine cones dangled at the ends of them, inches above the carpet.

Just like Arizona, time was spent with either Mom or Dad, but rarely both. Even at Christmas, when my father parked in the living room to watch us open presents, Mom scurried through the trailer tending to forgotten tasks. It was as if a hotplate existed just underfoot and began to heat up whenever they landed in the same room together.

Only one photo exists of my father on Burns Road in his boyish state, taken just after we’d moved in. It is a picture of me, Danny, Dad and his two best buddies from the base where he worked. Rolly Polanka and Tommy Templeton were happy, good-natured men, just like my father. Always happy to see us and a joy to be around, they cracked jokes with Dad about gas and crap and never tired once of the same ones. Danny and I laughed just because they did. Excited in their company, we snuck up on the couch and jumped on their heads, rough housing with them for attention.

Life with my father is resurrected as much in memory of our place on Burns Road as it is in the pain found at the end of it. Our one-acre yard was a sea of brilliant lush grass that surrounded the trailer like a moat and I remember riding on a tractor mower in a lime green bikini, leaning into curves around weeping willow saplings, planted to give an air of permanence against the transience of our home. Yellow insulators hung on an electric fence and billowy seeds of milkweed drifted lazily in the summer breeze. A faded canvas halter tied up with baling twine hung just inside the tack shed, next to thick braided reins draped over rusty nails. The call of a lone bobwhite haunted the early summer dusk when I’d pad out in my bare feet and lock the shed doors to keep the raccoons out. A rusty horseshoe dug from the loose earth was haphazardly balanced over the mouth of my father’s garage, a treacherous structure at the edge of the driveway he had cobbled together with twelve-foot-long pieces of rusted sheet metal nail gunned over rough frame.

The garage itself was a dark maze of car parts, milk crates overflowing with a jumble of tools, hand saws and claw hammers dangling from hooks overhead. And back in the dimmest, eeriest corner, in a place no child or budding teenage girl would ever willingly wander, lurked my father’s long metal workbench. The solo fluorescent light that lit his cave buzzed like a fly zapper from where it hung by a dog chain from the low ceiling to shine a five-foot radius on the concrete floor. But even on the brightest of summer days, there were parts of this creepy edifice that remained pitch black.

Our hollow held the kind of raw beauty a band of wild hill children might—shy and innocent, but you could never quite trust them. You weren’t scared of the woods down on Burns Road; you were scared of who might be in there with you.

With the passing of each season, memories of civilization faded and life dwindled to a crawl. Where once I hummed songs from the Sunday schools we used to go to, the lines and eventually the chorus were washed over by the jingles of toy commercials that rang through the trailer on any given Sunday’s worth of television: Mon-chi-chi-Mon-chi-chi, oh so soft and cuddly my pretty po-nee, she gives me so much love Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. Danny and I strung them back to back, changing key and pitch to mimic the TV as Dad clicked through the three country channels again and again and again, waiting for a new rerun to start.

By the time I was twelve, my father had grown to be one with his chair, plopping down in it from the time he came home from work until well after the late evening news. And, although I knew where he was physically, I couldn’t for the life of me find the dad I once felt so close to. He was still happy to see me when he walked through the door but, once he sat in his chair, efforts to reach him were futile. When I could, I’d sit on the couch for hours just to be there should he wish to talk to me. But he didn’t. I would rack my brain, think, think, trying to come up with something that might turn his attention from the television set. But the parting of my mouth, sensed out of the corner of his eye, would elicit a shush or be met by the swish of a forefinger in the air as he winced, leaning forward to piece together what he might have missed. As a last resort, I watched with him, anchored to whatever time we could have together. But even though I didn’t have the right things to say, I believed with all my heart that if I could find the secret words or right way to be, I could unlock the mystery and win back my father. We were so close when he broke his arms, surely I could find a way to resurrect our bond.

“Who’s the King?”

“You are, Dad!”

“Who’s the King in this house?”

“Dad is!” Danny and I ring in unison.

“That’s right. I’m King and you better obey.”

My father cackles with good nature while my brother and I disperse from the end of the couch to carry out orders. Dad’s throne was his La-Z-Boy chair and the food that piled up around it—corn nuts, pork rinds, almost empty boxes of popcorn, bags of corn chips—was the gold on his altar. The empties surrounded him like gilded gifts to be fingered when he needed reminding of his total reign. His was the authority to yell from the seat of his throne and have anything within a five-hundred foot radius delivered to him, without complaint and with total servitude by us kids.

“Fix me some toast Sissy, would you? I want the good jelly, not any of that marmalade shit your mother gets.”

And I would drop whatever I was doing and trot off to make the toast, trying extra hard to get it right.

Our mother, with her ears like a bat, never missed a chance to pot shot him.

“That’s right, Dannnn,” her voice spat from somewhere beyond the thin wall of the living room. “Turn the kids into your niggers. Make them wait on you hand and foot.”

“You just go back to whatever you were doing, Dingbat,” my father would shout, then turn his head to snigger at us, his face scrunched up like a little boy and we’d snigger back, because we knew no better.

If our mother was at least two rooms away, Dad called her the names of the wives and hated mother-in-laws he picked up from television sit-coms—Dingy, Dingbat, Dummy—all gauged by how thin her voice was as it hammered through the panelling. Otherwise, if she yelled from the open kitchen behind his chair, he squirmed from the embarrassment of being caught and fiddled with the remote.

I didn’t mind running for Dad. The errands were usually quick and painless and he responded with exaggerated thrill to receive the fetched item—often making it into a game.

“Let’s see how fast you can run out to the car, Sissy, and get me the bag of gumdrops on the seat. If they ain’t there, check the floor. Okay…ready, set, go!”

“Whoa, you did that in 60 seconds?” he’d shout when I returned breathless with the bag. “Way to go, Sis!”

It was only on the rarest of occasions when we were lucky enough to be left at home with our father and without Mom around, that a bit of the veil would lift, lightness would blow in the skinny windows and trailer life didn’t seem so bad.

My father bellows out the kitchen patio door. Danny and I hold hands and jump from the deck into the gem green water of the pool, flourescent from the double cups of chlorine we dump in at random to clean it.

“Don’t you guys go pee-pee in there.”

“Dad!” I shout, “That’s gross!” But I can see my little brother, soaking to his neck in the water like a little snow monkey. “Danny!”

Home alone with our father, we are just kids. When Mom goes to town on a shopping trip, she claims our time with a list of chores to do before she gets home. We follow her to the car, faces drawn. But as soon as she rounds the first bend, Danny and I run in the trailer and shriek down the hall to change into our bathing suits.

My father slaps his hands together in jubilation, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!”

He loads up a ham sandwich with sweet pickles in the kitchen and, as we run past, we beg him to watch us dive off the deck into the pool.

“Dad, Dad, Look!” I dunk my brother, who lurks just under the surface ready to spring up on my shoulders and push me under.

Dad stands on the porch in his stocking feet and cut-off jean shorts and waves to us with a mouth full of food. He trumpets his nose on the hem of his shirt then pins one nostril with his finger, blowing the rest out. It bolts like a slash against the side skirt of the trailer, painted tan to coordinate with the plastic brown shutters. I can see it from the edge of the pool, where I hook my elbows over the side to watch my father.

“You kids have fun, I’ll be in the garage if you need me.”

“Dad, Dad, can we listen to some of your records?”

“Yeah, Sissy, put on Sergeant Pepper!”

I was eight, and the trailer was still in my future, when I first discovered the coolness of my father’s extensive record collection. I lay on the floor after school, bobbing my feet above me, panning through the long stack of albums leaned up against the wall, relegated to the one room in the house that Mom let him keep his things. At first I pulled out all the albums with the cool covers but there was only one I listened to all the way through: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles were my father’s favourite band and John Lennon was his hero. If we were lucky enough in the car to catch Hey Jude on the radio, my father would stretch his arm back over the seat and wiggle his fingers for me to hold his hand. He sang through the verses, growing ever more melancholy. As the song neared its end, I would catch my father looking at me in the rear view mirror, his eyes glassy with tears.

“Sing it with me, baby. Na, na, na, nananana, nananana, Hey Jude.”

I leaned forward to sing along with my father and saw in the mirror that a tear had run down his face. He squeezed my hand as his cheeks grew shiny, his voice cracking in song. A lump rose in my throat and I could feel my own tears falling down my face. I held my father’s hand as tight as I could and laid my wet face against it, showing alliance. I did not know why I cried or even what the song was about, but such was the power of my father’s tears.

Now that we’re stuffed into a trailer with no extra room, Dad’s record collection has been delegated to the last tiny corner left. The only time a record of Dad’s gets on the turntable is when Mom is gone; otherwise she says it’s the devil’s music.

I run in the house dripping wet and lug one of the big stereo speakers all the way out the patio door to the edge of the deck. I dry my hands and carefully place the record on the turntable, making sure to only hold the album between thumb and forefinger, and lower the needle ever so delicately as Dad has shown me. Then I crank up the volume. The crazy calliope guitar of the first song on the Sergeant Pepper album hits the still air and we know it can’t be heard for a country mile.

The sun beats down on my tan shoulders and I bask in a plastic tube chaise longue in the yard, painting my toenails, bobbing my head to the beat. Danny mock sings on the deck of the pool, using an inflatable duck ring as a microphone. He jumps off sideways and a great tsunami wave careens over the side. Life is good. But even better than the rock and roll booming through the yard on a country summer Saturday, is knowing that Dad is listening right along with me all the way in the garage.

At the first sign of fall, my stomach drops. Pressed Wranglers lie stiff on my bed, paired with back-to-school tops from K-Mart. The impending first day of school brings with it a flurry of anxiety as spiral notebooks and ring binders are picked out with painstaking care, knowing that one false move could destroy your entire year. If you pick the Hang in There, Kitty and everybody else has the pack of galloping horses, you might as well forget it.

“Kids are cruel, honey,” my father pep talks me as I cry in frustration. “And if you opened your eyes, you’d see that half of the school is making fun of you behind your back. You don’t need those kids. Stick with Daddy, I’ll be your friend.”

And for a moment things don’t seem so bad.

Mom takes her fork and perforates another slice of pumpkin pie. The pan is dotted with black lava-like bubbles of carbonized pie juice after being baked at a scorching heat.

She unbuttons her trousers, the pink skin of her belly rushing down her zipper like a flashflood. Mom throws down her fork in a huff. “Dan, you shouldn’t have let me eat so much. God, I’m stuffed.”

I sit on the couch in the living room while my father tips back ninety degrees in his chair. He looks over and rolls his eyes. He flicks a chunk of black crust off his own piece of pie and whispers in conspiracy, “I don’t know why your mother has to fucking cook everything on high.”

Early in life we had to develop a taste for our mother’s tendency to scorch food, and to eat of its ruin without flinching—crispy spaghetti, seared chilli and rubbery hot dogs permanently watermarked from being boiled on high for an hour.

“Jesus, Julie, look what you made me do, talking to me when I’m trying to cook, taste this—is it scorched?” and she’d shove a spoonful of charred chilli to my lips.

“No, it’s good, Mom, you can’t taste the scorch at all.”

It’s best to lie to my mother, with her quick hands that strike like lightning. A brutal woman, with nothing gentle, romantic or mysterious about her, she would backhand me in the grocery store and bloody my nose, then walk off with the cart leaving me to feel embarrassed like it was my fault. So we ate our crisp salmon patties moulded out of a can of fish and an egg without gripe or complaint, quietly pressing the soft cylinder bones to the roofs of our mouths until they burst.

At school, I bummed quarters from the kids in my class to buy potato chips and snack cakes but on the weekend I was left to fend for myself inside the dank avocado-coloured refrigerator, overstocked with a mixture of stale meat soaking in its own blood, expired dairy products and vegetables left in there so long they had turned to algae in their respective produce bags. Any hunk of cheese I discovered came with its own layer of green mould.

“Just cut it off,” Dad would yell from his chair when I’d protest. “Hell, that’s all cheese is anyway, good mould.”

I’d rummage through to find the only item safe enough to eat: single-sliced, individually wrapped, processed American cheese. Even if there was some kind of dripping or weird indistinguishable smear on the plastic, it still meant this cheese was sealed for my protection. I’d peel the sticky wrapper off and voila, the perfect food.

My brother and I lay our torn-off pieces of cheese on stale tortilla chips and microwaved on high. We cracked the molten shape of cheesy chips off the paper plate and broke it into equal shares and were left to scrap for bits of petrified cheese sunken into the grooves of the paper plate. It did not matter if there was a bit of paper melded in; this was still a breakfast of champions.

Besides, Mom’s cooking was worse than faring for ourselves in the refrigerator or navigating the greasy orange interior of the microwave. A staple at her dinner table was chipped beef on toast made from packets of lunch meat. Stirred with lumpy gravy, our mother cooked it on high until it was scorched to a brown paste, then scooped it out onto toast we had to decarbonize by scraping the black off with the edge of a butter knife.

Breakfast was even worse. Mom would whip up an industrial-sized box of powdered milk, pour it into empty plastic milk jugs—still with a milk ring curdled sour around the rim—and stick them out in the 40-cubic-foot freezer in the garage.

When we ran out of milk, we would have to lug out one of these frozen ice blocks from the freezer depths and let it thaw on the counter. With the half-thawed milk floating in the jug like an iceberg, Mom would pour the thin liquid over breakfast. Our Saturday morning bowls of exciting cereals—the Sugar Smacks and Fruity Pebbles we’d begged for so laboriously in the supermarket aisles—now sat lifeless in their watery tombs. We spooned them to our lips with trepidation, the magic of the commercials long gone.

But when Dad snapped his chair upright and said, “Get me the mitts,” excitement filled the air.

“Dad’s cooking!” Danny barrelled down the hall, shouting at the top of his lungs. I’d run back down with him, equally overjoyed and we’d stand attentive as Dad gussied up in preparation to turn the stove burner on.

Dad was the best cook—even if it was like prodding a large slothful animal with an electric zapper to prize him out of his chair long enough to get him to the kitchen. But when we did, it was magic. Suddenly, in my father’s hands, food became edible and delicious. There was not a film, rind or fleck of black carbon you had to remove from your dish before you could put it in your mouth. There was not a cluster of strands from our mother’s hairpiece to pick off your tongue. You just forked up the food, thought nothing of it and ate.

Granted, we had to stay in the kitchen with our father and do nearly everything except stand at the pan. But it was worth it. We’d beg him to make his special spaghetti recipe and he’d sprinkle sugar in the sauce. We’d beg him to make bacon-and-egg sandwiches, and he’d sprinkle sugar on the bacon as it sizzled in the skillet.

Everything my father touched turned golden and delicious. When we ate we did so with rapture, urgency, as if we could not remember the last time we did so and did not know when food like this would ever come again. There were never leftovers. When my father cooked, I squirrelled away every last thing he made. It was the only material proof of him I could take with me.

My father sits in a cloud of his own gas. Mom stands at the kitchen counter, rolling pin in one hand, the other cocked and loaded, a dusting of flour on her hip.

“For God’s sake, Dan, would you get up off your lazy ass and give me a hand in here?”

A tuft of my father’s hair pokes from over the top of the La-Z-Boy, his back to the open kitchen. A commercial is on.

“I told you, Sandy, when a commercial comes on.”

My father sneezes cataclysmically; everything exists for him large.

My brother does a proper table setting, circling round and round the table, setting our cheap flattened silverware on picnic napkins as carefully as if they were damask.

We all sit down to say grace. Dad scratches his head with the prongs of an up-flipped fork.

“Dear heavenly Father,” he starts.

Mom flicks my wrist with her finger, “Stop smacking your lips or I’m gonna smack them for you.” Her eyes still closed in prayer.

Dad continues, “We thank you for this delicious food. Amen.”

“I want to know, Dann,” Mom starts, “when you’re going to get the addition built on? I’ve been hounding you for what, I don’t know, eight months now? We’re running out of room for my stuff.”

“Sandy, you don’t need to be buying any more clothes.” And it was true. Mom had so many shoes she had bought a horse trailer, parked it in the yard and begun throwing in black bin bags of shoes until they were piled to the top.

“It’s not just my stuff, it’s the kids’ shit and your shit too.”

“If you stopped buying it, we wouldn’t need more room to put it.”

Mom follows Dad from the kitchen as he plops in his chair, Danny and I clear the table, clanking dishes into the sink. Mom positions herself across from the TV.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d just be tickled pink, you know? I mean, I wouldn’t know how to act, if you would just for one fucking second talk to me. Communicate.”

My father hiccup-belches. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything!”

“Can we do it later? I’m letting my food digest.”

I pinch off a lug of cheese in the fridge and soften it in my fingers, roll it into a ball.

“Later never comes, Dannnn. We have got to talk now, pronto. If we’re going to stay married, you have got to talk to me like man and wife.”

My father shifts in his chair.

“Are you listening to me?”

He tucks his hands between his legs.

“Godammit, Dan, I’m talking to you!”

He laughs at a commercial.

“You motherfucking rotten son of a bitch,” Mom screams, “How dare you ignore me to watch the same commercial you’ve seen a million times.”

“Sandy, leave me alone, will ya? We don’t need to talk about anything.”

“Oh, we don’t, huh? We don’t have to talk about what a loser you are? Or how you can’t keep a job? Or that your kids don’t respect you? Or how you sit there night after night like a lump on a log? Yeah, right,” Mom snorts, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

My father grips the side handle. “I don’t have to take this shit,” he shouts, and jettisons from the chair. But Mom tries to block him and they scuffle at the door. He knocks her against the hutch and crashes out of the house.

“Dad!” I yell from after him, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to hell, Julie.” He storms off the deck. “Straight to hell.”

“Julie, you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand.” Mom holds up a few fingers, demonstrating. “I do and do and do for people and here I am, 39, and what do I got to show for it? Nothing!”

Mom hyperventilates into a brown paper bag. In between breaths she takes a silver table spoon from the freezer and presses its curved back to the swollen puffs of her eyelids.

The fights that started in the trailer and ended when Dad stormed out often saw Mom chasing down the road after him in the spare car. She’d return alone later that night, her red face red streaked with tears.

“Julie, let me tell you something,” she says. “The one you love at 20 is not the one you love at 30.”

The kind of crying Mom did lasted hours and by morning her eyelids were nearly swollen shut. She’d splash water on her face, compress a cold washcloth to her eyes or scrub on kohl eye liner but it just made her look like a raccoon. The only thing that reduced the swelling was a tablespoon from the silverware drawer run under the cold tap and stuck in the freezer until it froze into a thin, rounded ice cube. She would corner me in the kitchen and stand by the counter with the cold curve of the spoon pressed into the hollow of her eye socket. I leaned against the refrigerator, my hands tucked behind me, sliding them up and down the smooth wood-grain sticker she’d applied to the silver handle.

“Does it look better now?” she’d ask as she lifted the spoon from her eye. It didn’t.

“Uh, a little bit.”

“How about now?” she’d say, raising it again, her eyeball popping up.

“Maybe a few more minutes.”

I vacillated wildly between first feeling sorry for my father and then Mom. I hated how she cornered him but I would show alliance to her even as she called him vicious names. I shared an understanding with Dad but hearing Mom sob through the night and seeing her face the morning after, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. What Mom feared most was Dad walking out and no longer being the breadwinner. She painted a bleak picture of life without his pay cheque; no more shopping, no horses, no nice knick-knacks ordered from the catalogues to set around the trailer—all things our mother wanted that didn’t really matter to me. But I was scared when she said she’d have to pull us out of school to live in a shelter for homeless women and if that didn’t work, give us up to foster care. Mom would turn on her best behaviour to win Dad back, but once the threat was over, she unleashed a vengeance for her dependency that cast darkness over our family for weeks. And when Dad lost another job, the cycle of regular fights accelerated to almost daily shouting matches over money.

“Dan, what are we going to do? I can’t pay the mortgage.”

“Let them take the fucking place, I’ll go live in the garage.”

“And what about us?” Mom seethed. “You expect your kids to live in that filthy rat trap with you?”

“They can if they want to,” Dad reasoned.

In the weeks that followed my father’s last pay cheque, Mom was supposed to budget to stretch out the money but instead went on rampant shopping sprees, buying up the outfits she had her eye on. The cheques bounced at the bank and piled up with fees and penalties and Mom, in a dramatic display of righteous indignation, would stand at the window of a teller and bang her fist on the counter trying to get the charges reversed until they escorted her out.

As for Dad, he never saw a dime from his pay cheques anyway. The only thing he had that was of any importance was his record collection.

But without the money to fuel Mom’s fantasy, her world tipped on its axis and rolled straight down to crash into my father’s.

Mom’s hair is a wild windstorm of stray hairs that stick out from the jet-black hairpiece she has wound up into a cone on top of her head. She stomps through the kitchen, slamming plates down on gold-flecked Formica.

“You go tell that good for nothing, son of a bitchin, no good motherfucking father of yours, Dannnn, that his dinner is ready.”

“Hey, Dad,” I sing-song, approaching the dark lair of the garage, “Mom says she’s fixed up your favorite dinner. She’d love for you to come in and eat with us.” I hold my breath, staring into the black abyss of the garage. I can just make out my father’s shadow, stooped on a milk crate sorting through the junk under his workbench.

“Please, Daddy.”

“Well, you go tell your mother that she can just kiss my rosy fucking ass, will you?” he shouts. “It’s going to take more from that lunatic than her slop to get me to step back inside that hell-hole.”

“Okay.” And I crunch back down the gravel walkway.

“Dad said he’ll be in in a few minutes, he’s gotta finish what he’s doing and clean up. He said to tell you that he loves you, Mommy.”

Back and forth, lobbing my own lies, rinsing the filth from theirs, until five to six trips later Dad reluctantly opens the aluminium screen door and tromps back down the hall to soap his hands with a goop of orange hand cleaner.

He looms like a giant at the yellow plastic vanity, with its dainty shell soap dishes scalloped right into the sink. He shakes his hands off on the fake marble of the counter, peppering the mirror. Dirty froth and water streak down the bowl and pool on the counter. Dad stomps out, turning down the hall and I slip in, wiping the basin clean with the guest towel and rinsing the dirt down the drain. I toss the towel into the long cabinet behind my mother’s wigs and pads and the secret stash of Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues she orders them from. I mean, who’s going to use a guest towel in our house?

The threat of divorce hung in the air thick as burning bacon and was a constant force being prepared for in various forms of execution. Mom made a big production of having us load clothes into a paper sack and keep it in the back of our closets for anytime she thought we may need to flee under cover of night. That she announced it loudly while pacing in front of Dad and the TV seemed to defy the intended secrecy of it all, but we followed orders.

And after dinner when she railed on him as he lay beached in the chair, my brother and I sat crosslegged on the floor in the back of the trailer as we once did playing church. But this time we were perfectly still, straining our ears for the recliner footrest to snap shut. If it did, we’d have to bolt to the living room and get between them in their physical fight. Every shout or stomp ricocheted though the trailer and vibrated the glass panels of the hutch, so just as Dad read Mom’s proximity to him by the strength of her voice through the walls, we read the levity of their arguments by the needle on our own internal Richter scale. There was no way to stop them and just as you’d think Dad’s attention might make Mom back off, it only fuelled a desire to make him pay.

“What do you want me do to Sandy?” my father would plead, “I’ll do anything just to get you to stop. Stop, Sandy, I’m begging you to stop.”

My father stands trapped in the vortex of the trailer where the living room, hallway and kitchen all meet. He keeps his eye on the front door but Mom blocks the exit, her arm strung out, gripping the edge of the hutch.

“Dan, you are going to stand here, face me like a man and deal with this.”

My father sighs.

Mom cuts, “Stop acting like a little boy, Dannn. I want to be married to a man.”

Danny and I sneak down the hall to stand guard.

Mom and Dad wedge into the tiny archway opening, my father’s face dropped in defeat. Mom reads our presence as allies and edges in.

“C’mon, Dannn,” she taunts, “What are you going to do? Huhhhh?”

“I’m begging you, Sandy,” my father says quietly, “Please leave me alone.”

“What!” Mom mocks, “I can’t hear you little boy, going to stand there and cry?”

Mom points to us crouched in the hallway. “The kids aren’t going to help you, are you kids? They’re here because they know how crazy you are.”

“Please Sandy, please let me go.” My father looks up from his hand, exasperated. Mom leers with a smirk, “You’re going have to talk louder if you want me to hear you.”

“Mom,” I whisper. “Please.”

He can beg, we can beg but she will not stop.

Her smile fades, “You son of a bitch.” And she gains steam, “You rotten, good for nothing son of a fucking bitch! I do and do and do and do for you and what do I get? You got nothing here, you destroyed this home. I hate you, these kids hate you.”

Danny squeaks, “We don’t hate you, Dad.”

“We love you both,” I plead.

We emerge from the shadows; Danny latches onto the seam running down my father’s jean leg, I slip in against my mother’s hip, placing myself between them. Mom sneers like a heckler in his face, Dad holds his head in his hands inches from her spitting mouth. Pressed against Mom, I can feel my father’s rage building. With a sudden flare his head jerks upright. His fists shoot out of nowhere and he rushes, tangling his hands in her hair, smacking her gutted mouth. He catches her jaw in the crook of his palm, gripping her cheeks. She folds her chin to her chest like a child being tickled.

My father squeezes.

“Helllp! Heeelp me Juwelly, Denny.” Mom’s eyes are as wide as golf balls, pleading over the top of my father’s hand.

“Let her go!” I screech.

“Call her off, Julie,” Dad screams, “Make her leave me alone!”

“I will, Dad, I promise, I’ll make her stop!”

Dad shoves her from his grip; she crashes into the crevice of the couch, separating it from the wall. The pretzel barrel tips and coins spill like a jackpot over my father’s feet. He heaves his foot out of the pile to haul back and kick her and I desperately tug the belt loops of my mother’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, trying to pull her from the slit of the sofa. Dad’s drawn boot hits the wall, tangling in the chains of the clock, a pine cone whips around his ankle. He catches himself against the hutch as heirloom mail-order plates crash from their plastic holders. The clock flies off the wall, crashing at my mother’s feet. My brother rips from his death grip on the seam of my father’s pants and crumples to the floor, crying. We break in the swirling vortex of the trailer, catching our breath. The jostled hands strike the hour and the little birds pop out the door of the clock, lying on its side, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!, they circle on the track.

School was full of kids whose parents were divorced and returned to class with stories of fun-filled weekends spent with either their mom or dad. I envied them. The only reason my parents fought was because they were together. Instead of getting the best of them like the kids of divorced parents, we got the worst of both. We could handle being with one or the other so the only thing stopping the harmony was the fact that they would not split. But while together, Danny and I lived each day with antennas tuned to the brewing of fights that ran in cycles day by day. And they always ended by the same formula; Dad taking off in the car with Mom in hot pursuit, or Dad pummelling Mom until she finally grew silent.

Despite us begging and pleading, cornering them separately or tag teaming them together, the sweet relief of divorce never came. My brother and I sat in one bedroom or the other, secretly plotting how happy our lives would be if only for the love of God they would just separate. Danny cries bitter tears, his lip buckling under the weight. He cannot stand the fighting, the shuffling back and forth between Mom and Dad to smooth them out, the way they pit us against each other and force us to take sides. We focus instead on the future and talk with excitement about the good times to be had once we are with just one of them. Mom or Dad, but never them both. Please, God, we pray together in our pyjamas on the floor in the dark, please never them both.

The only good thing that came of the fighting was the sporadic new beginnings Dad insisted would lead to a happy home life. Convinced all would be forgiven if we just attended church, Dad donned his blistermaking shoes and Mom had a legitimate reason to try on half her outfits. We headed out early Sunday morning for one of the small country tabernacles that dotted the dirt roads throughout the county, the car ride heavy with tension.

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