But where was my father?
My mother said, “We have to stay here for a while. We can’t see your father right now.”
Fear wafted from her skin like a fragrance.
“But Mom, why not?”
“Because he’s dangerous,” she said.
Her words lingered in the room like a third person standing in the corner watching us.
WHEN MY UNCLE Mercer, her brother, came to visit from Cairo, Georgia, he brought me a cardboard box in the shape of a space rocket. He assembled it for me on the living room floor and I crawled inside. But I didn’t play with the rocket, I only sat inside and stared at him through the porthole. He had been the first person to hold me after I was born.
At night, he walked me outside to the parking lot so that we could look up. I liked to stare at the night sky. I didn’t understand the stars. They looked to me like sparkling lakes, seen from a great distance.
My mother sat on the sofa smoking and whispering urgently to her brother. I didn’t listen to her words. But, like a dog, I heard the anxiety and fear in her voice. I sat on the floor and held Mercer’s large hand, pulled at his fingers, which were stained yellow and smelled of nicotine. But being in the living room with my wide-eyed and whispering mother made me anxious so I filled the tub with warm water and then climbed inside. I bathed with my new brown plastic Noah’s ark, dozens of small animals floating in the water all around me. There were so many new toys that I worried I had traded my father for them. So, except for the Noah’s ark, I didn’t play with them. The price for having the ark, I reasoned, was not seeing my father for a while. But to play with all the other toys would be to drive him away for good.
I saw Peter almost every day because my mother spent many afternoons at Hyacinthe’s home, an L-shaped one-level ranch just outside town. Peter and I played in the backyard among the skunk cabbage plants that grew in the wetlands behind the house. There were so many cabbages we were compelled to pick them and invent games. One of us would be the shopkeeper, the other the customer. A cabbage cost five round flat stones. We had a wealth of something we didn’t want, but the wealth itself was intoxicating and we invented games just so we could experience the sensation of having too much of something.
We watched Sesame Street in his basement and we learned to count. We both shrieked with joy when five was the number of the day. We placed olives on each finger and then ate them off, one by one.
Hyacinthe spoke French with her son and I was so jealous of him for being able to talk to his mother in this exotic secret language.
My mother would sit on the sofa and weep while Hyacinthe tried to soothe her, massaging her neck and shoulders and reassuring her in that beautiful, melodious voice. That my mother needed the comfort so frequently, that she wept so constantly, scared me. I felt like we weren’t walking on solid ground but on a quivering net suspended in the air, and at any moment our feet could plunge through the holes.
I learned to ride a bike in the parking lot of our new apartment house. Now six years old, I was enrolled in Wildwood Elementary School. Because my mother had told me our living situation was “temporary” and that eventually we would be reunited with my father and move back into our red Shutesbury house, I found that I could not concentrate in school. I avoided making friends because I would just have to give them up eventually. But my reluctance was misinterpreted by the other children and I became the object of bullying. The defining moment occurred on the playground one afternoon when my class divided into two groups, the boys and the girls, with each group chanting at the other, “boys are better than girls,” and “girls are better than boys.” I stood between the two groups, trying to remain neutral. “Come on,” one of the boys shouted at me. “Come over here.” But I joined the girls instead, since they seemed less hateful and were certainly much cleaner than the boys. “Girls are better than boys,” I sang out, the only one on my side of the playground without a barrette or a hair band.
From then on I was despised by the girls and the boys. The boys hated me for siding with the girls, for virtually becoming one before their eyes. And the girls plain mistrusted me.
I became the sickly kid. Some mornings I ran a high temperature or displayed a rash of raised, red bumps. Other days my malady was more amorphous; I just didn’t feel good. I saw the doctor more frequently than my mother could afford. She worried about money, standing in front of the phone, biting her lip, knowing she had to call my father to ask for more but unable to do it. I missed a lot of school. Some mornings, just imagining the blue metal doors of the building caused my stomach to clench miserably. I only wanted to stay home in bed; home with my mother, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Fanta orange soda.
My mother drove a brand-new, 1971 red Chevy Vega, which she named Rosie. It had a black interior and a manual transmission, and the small car smelled new inside. Each day when I saw it pull into the parking lot, I nearly wept with relief. Opening the heavy passenger door, I climbed inside and slid onto the vinyl seat.
“How was school?” my mother asked.
“I just want to go home.”
Some days, my mother was bright and hopeful, her hair washed and her spirits high. “Would you like to drive to Northampton and go to the Farm Shop for a Golden Abigail?” The cheeseburger with crinkle-cut french fries, served in a red plastic basket, was a favorite meal.
But other days she arrived disheveled, with creases from the pillow etched into the soft skin along the side of her face, like a tree bare of leaves. Her hair was oily and unkempt and she was despondent, her eyes ringed with red. On these days, she worried out loud, “I’m just afraid that if we go back home to your father that something terrible will happen but I don’t know how much longer we can survive on our own.” Her hands trembled, even as she gripped the steering wheel.
But I missed his presence, the fact of him in the house. And I didn’t understand what had happened. Why, suddenly, was she afraid? Why was he dangerous? Why hadn’t he come with us to Mexico? And why were we living in this strange, small apartment when we had a brand-new home?
So much had happened since I last saw my father that I wasn’t even the same person anymore. At night when I was supposed to be sleeping, I’d lie awake and wonder if he would like the new me. And I was new, wasn’t I? Didn’t every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks? I was part Mexico now, and part new school, and part bicycle with no training wheels.
My mother said he was sick. I asked, “Is he in the hospital?” Standing at the dingy, chipped porcelain sink in the small kitchen and arranging wildflowers in a rinsed-out jelly jar she said, “Not that kind of sick.” She wouldn’t look at me.
I wanted to bring him my hot water bottle. It always made my stomach feel better. I knew I might need it myself, but I would give it up for him, I really would. She kissed the top of my head and said, “We’ll see.”
AT NIGHT MY mother locked the door and checked the windows. She picked up the telephone to check for a dial tone. She made sure we had candles and matches, as if we were preparing for a huge storm, the certain failure of our electricity. Her fear leeched into me, became mine. My father, already a mysterious man I used to see mostly at night when he came home from work, became a larger and more ominous presence in my life. Though I could no longer form an image of his face in my mind, I felt him under my bed, behind the closed door to my closet, lurking in the shadowed corners of our small, temporary home. I started to fear him instead of miss him. If he’d suddenly appeared at the front door, I might have shrieked and run in the opposite direction.
I BEGAN VIOLIN lessons with a private instructor. Once a week, I was taught how to tuck the instrument under my chin, curling my thumb against the underside of the neck. Over and over, I raked the bow across the strings, trying to achieve a sound and not a screech. I learned the names of its various components: the frog, the bridge, the tailpiece, and the pegs. And while I was proud to be able to name the parts of its anatomy, it was the smell of
wood, rosin, and velvet that I loved. The best part of every lesson was opening the violin case and lowering my face to inhale. Also, it seemed almost a miracle to me that this hollow figure eight, as light and elegant as a lady, as my aunt Curtis, was made from wood, from a tree, like the trees out back behind our house in Shutesbury. I just could not see how this was even possible. And that wood—wood—could make a sound so ethereal you were tempted to look over your shoulder and see if somebody transparent were standing right behind you, watching and smiling. It gave me that looking-at-the-night-sky feeling. It made me think of the word God.
I longed for my father to see me holding such a beautiful thing so properly; it seemed impossible that so massive an addition to my life could occur without his knowledge. And then I felt guilty for thinking of him and betraying my mother. By longing for him, it was like I was inviting him back into our lives. And if I was inviting him back when my mother was so afraid of him, I was responsible for scaring her. And her trembling and weeping—it was my fault.
I destroyed the violin by winding the strings so tight the neck snapped.
My mother wasn’t angry with me. She sat me down and told me it was natural to feel upset and angry with my father. I hadn’t known I was angry with him, but because she said I was I began to wonder if it was true.
Soon, I couldn’t remember why I’d ruined the violin and could no longer play it. I’d only wanted to see him without hurting my mother, but she’d said I was angry with him, and I had broken my instrument’s neck, so maybe it was true.
Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.
• • •
IN TIME, I began to feel I had no father. When I made friends with a girl my own age, it was our mutual fatherless status that bonded us. Tina’s father lived in China, which was so far away I could not conceive of it, as incomprehensible as if he lived in the year 1600. For her birthday, Tina’s mother baked a red velvet cake and although I declined a slice, feeling too anxious to eat in front of strangers, I would think about that cake for years. I’d never seen red cake before. What was wrong with me that I would decline it? All the other kids had accepted a slice. Why hadn’t I? Why had my stomach been wrenched into an impossible knot? Why was I filled with dread at the prospect of being seen consuming it? When I thought about this some more, I realized it was not the cake that upset me, but the community surrounding the cake. It was the other kids. I knew they’d end up teasing me and I didn’t want to have a mouth full of cake when one of them finally reached out and punched me in the stomach, which I was sure would happen. Better to refuse the cake and be allowed to sit alone, apart from the table. Better, always, to be self-contained.
Shortly after this party my mother announced that we were moving back home to live with my father. There was no transition, because the house was packed and the boxes were moved while I was at school. One day, we were simply home again.
My father greeted us without any fanfare. He patted me on the head three times and stiffly hugged my mother but she pulled away. Then he sat in the living room and watched TV. He didn’t even notice that I was taller and bigger on the inside. And it was as if none of it had happened: the violin and that strange school where I never fit in, my friend with a father in China, the red velvet cake.
Back home, I rode my new bike down the driveway but tumbled off and scraped my knee. My father bolted the training wheels back onto the bike, which made my face turn deep red with shame. “You just weren’t ready,” he explained.
Except I had been ready. I’d been riding for weeks without training wheels, and if only he’d seen me he would know this. “I don’t need them, really!” I cried, but he installed them anyway, wrenching the bolts on hopelessly tight.
I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn’t been there, simply didn’t believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing.
THREE
THE COLD WOOD floor in my bedroom was always a bit of a shock in the morning, a spank to the soles of my feet that made me hop onto the square of carpet in the center of my room. There, I sat down and put on my socks, remembering my aunt Curtis had taught me how to get my heel in the right place. She’d flown up from Georgia the winter my mother and I had moved back into the Shutesbury house and even though I was pretty old now, seven, I still saw her showing me how to line up the heel of the sock with my foot. I also remained convinced that she peed through her panty hose, because I’d seen her sit on the toilet and pee and it didn’t look like she pulled down her hose at all. She insisted that she most certainly did and merely hadn’t pulled her hose down all the way, because I was standing right there watching her.
After my socks, I put on my green jeans, which I insisted on wearing because of Mr. Green Jeans, who was Captain Kangaroo’s sidekick. Green jeans, I was almost certain, possessed some sort of rare power. And while I wasn’t yet sure what this power was and what it would enable me to do, I knew I would eventually find out. I suspected I might be able to fly when wearing them, but hadn’t had the opportunity yet to test this theory. I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren’t called turtlenecks, I wouldn’t have worn them.
Skidding into the hallway, I clutched the door frame and looped around to the door right next to mine and opened it. In the dark, I saw a hulking form beneath the covers. And then there was the stench that accompanied it. I didn’t much like him but he was mine so I turned on the light. “Get up, get up, get up.”
Eight years older, John Elder, named for the “Elder” side of the family, was my Big Brother. Big and awful is more like it. Big and stinky, big and greasy, big and dumb. One time he tricked me into looking inside this big hole he’d dug in the yard, and then he knocked me over into it headfirst and started to bury me with only my legs sticking out. My hatred for him nearly caused my skin to steam, and I was constantly plotting revenge for one thing or another.
The other thing was that I’d experienced some confusion about him, because first we went to Mexico without him, and then my mother and I lived in the little Amherst apartment without him. So was he temporary, on loan from some other family? But my mother said, “Of course he’s your big brother. He always has been, he always will be. John Elder used to hold you when you were a baby.”
“He did?” I was horrified that she would let him hold a baby, prone as he was to either dropping or throwing things, if not plugging them into electrical outlets just to see what would happen.
But now we were back in the same house together, I guessed, forever.
“Quit it, varmint,” he hollered. “Turn off the light.”
“But it snowed,” I told him. “Come on, it snowed.”
He liked the snow as much as I did. It created an immediate truce to any and all ongoing wars. He threw off the covers, grabbed his thick glasses and shoved them onto his greasy face, then followed me down the hall to the closet.
We both had snowsuits, blue. We put them on side by side in the front hall near the door. And while he seemed to have no trouble at all, I kept getting caught up in the legs, then I couldn’t work the zippers. By the time I finally managed to get myself inside the thing, I was so hot that I was sweating and only wanted to rip it off. My arms stuck out from my sides and I had to walk stiff-legged. To get down the stairs I had to slide on my stomach feet first, using my hands as brakes.
When we entered the basement my brother said, “Watch that furnace. It eats small children like you.”
“It does not,” I said, believing not one word out of his mouth but keeping my distance from the furnace nonetheless.
We opened the door to the backyard and white light filled the room.
Side by side, we stood wordlessly in the doorway, just looking out at the yard blanketed by so much impossible white. It was wondrous. Snow clung to the limbs, and they sagged under the weight of it. Even the slenderest
finger of a branch was piled high with white and I stopped breathing without realizing it, because just my breath might disturb the tenuously balanced snow. For a moment, the world was perfectly still and clean and miraculous.
“You go first,” I said.
He hesitated.
We were both afraid to dent the perfection of the white.
“On the count of three. Ready? One, two . . .” And we leaped, together. “Three!” we shouted, the word expelled from our lungs by the force of our landing. I’d plunged chest-deep into the drift in front of the door and now I couldn’t stop laughing. The temptation to throw my body around the yard and sink into the snow was nearly irresistible. No longer were there any rocks, sticks, or snakes back here. There was just this icy fluff everywhere. Magic protection.
WITH SHOVELS WE dug a network of tunnels deep enough so that we could crawl throughout the yard, invisible. “You still there?” we called out to each other, just our disembodied voices floating over white.
LATER, OUR MOTHER stood on the deck above us. She sipped her black coffee from a mug with the Morton salt girl printed on the side. Her red bathrobe was knotted at the waist, the bow tied with only one loop. “Where are my boys? Where have they gone?” she called, pretending not to see us in our tunnels.