I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence. She noted the way our mother applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man, whom she addressed by first name and often invited to use our bathroom. Our father referred to the bank tellers as “doll” or “sweetheart,” and their responses suggested that he had taken advantage of them one time too many. The Greek Orthodox church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly collie, Duchess: they were all in on it, according to Gretchen, who took to piling furniture against her bedroom door before going to sleep each night.
The book wound up in the hands of our ten-year-old sister, Amy, who used it as a textbook in the make-believe class she held after school each day. Dressed in a wig and high heels, she passed her late afternoons standing before a blackboard and imitating her teachers. “I’m very sorry, Candice, but I’m going to have to fail you,” she’d say, addressing one of the empty folding chairs arranged before her. “The problem is not that you don’t try. The problem is that you’re stupid. Very, very stupid. Isn’t Candice stupid, class? She’s ugly, too, am I wrong? Very well, Candice, you can sit back down now and, for God’s sake, stop crying. All right, class, now I’m going to read to you from this week’s new book. It’s a story about a California family and it’s called Next of Kin.
If Amy had read the book, then surely it had been seen by eight-year-old Tiffany, who shared her bedroom, and possibly by our brother, Paul, who at the age of two might have sucked on the binding, which was even more dangerous than reading it. Clearly this had to stop before it got out of hand. The phrase “Tight willin’ gasshole” was growing more popular by the day, and even our ancient Greek grandmother was arriving at the breakfast table with suspicious-looking circles beneath her eyes.
Gretchen took the book and hid it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper, Lena, who eventually handed it over to our mother.
“I’ll make sure this is properly disposed of,” my mother said, hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom. “Fecking,” she laughed, reading aloud from a randomly selected page. “Oh, this ought to be good.”
Weeks later Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress and box spring of my parents’ bed, the pages stained with coffee rings and cigarette ash. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen’s suspicions. “They’ll be coming for us any day now,” she warned. “Be prepared, my friend, because this time they’ll be playing for keeps.”
She was undoubtedly referring to the episode in chapter eight where Mr. and Mrs. Rivers offer their children to a band of crusty gold miners with foul breath and rough, callused hands. The Rivers children seemed to enjoy it, but then again, they’d been raised that way.
We waited. I’d always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl. She was hemming a pair of my pants one afternoon when, standing before her on a kitchen chair, I felt her hand graze my butt.
“I just want to be friends,” I stammered. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing, “Damn, and here you’ve been leading me on all this time.”
I read the book once more, trying to recapture my earlier pleasure, but it was too late now. I couldn’t read the phrase “He paunched his daughter’s rock-hard nopples” without thinking of Gretchen barricading herself in her room.
I thought I might throw the book away or maybe even burn it, but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater, it seemed a shame to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get some use out of it. With this in mind, I carried the book to the grocery-store parking lot and tossed it into the bed of a shining new pickup truck. Whistling out of apprehension and nervous relief, I took up my post beside the store’s outdoor vending machine, waiting until the truck’s owner returned pushing a cart full of groceries. He was a wiry man with fashionable mutton-chop sideburns and a half cast on his arm. As he placed his bags in the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up and leafed through the first few pages before raising his head to search the parking lot, combing the area as if he might spot either a surveillance camera or, preferably, a vanload of naked swingers pressing their bare breasts against the windows and inviting him to join the fun. He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it against the roof of the truck before lighting it. Then he slipped the book into his back pocket and drove away.
cyclops
When he was young my father shot out his best friend’s eye with a BB gun. That is what he told us. “One foolish moment and, Jesus, if I could take it back, I would.” He winced, shaking his fist as if it held a rattle. “It eats me alive,” he said. “I mean to tell you that it absolutely tears me apart.”
On one of our summer visits to his hometown, my father took us to meet this guy, a shoe salesman whose milky pupil hugged the corner of his mangled socket. I watched the two men shake hands and turned away, sickened and ashamed by what my father had done.
Our next-door neighbor received a BB gun for his twelfth birthday and accepted it as a personal challenge to stalk and maim any living creature: sunbathing cats, sparrows, slugs, and squirrels — if it moved, he shot it. I thought this was an excellent idea, but every time I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw my father’s half-blind friend stumbling forth with an armload of Capezios. What would it be like to live with that sort of guilt? How could my father look himself in the mirror without throwing up?
While watching television one afternoon my sister Tiffany stabbed me in the eye with a freshly sharpened pencil. The blood was copious, and I rode to the hospital knowing that if I was blinded, my sister would be my slave for the rest of her life. Never for one moment would I let her forget what she’d done to me. There would be no swinging cocktail parties in her future, no poolside barbeques or episodes of carefree laughter, not one moment of joy — I would make sure of that. I’d planned my vengeance so thoroughly that I was almost disappointed when the doctor announced that this was nothing but a minor puncture wound, located not on but beneath the eye.
“Take a look at your brother’s face,” my father said, pointing to my Band-Aid. “You could have blinded him for life! Your own brother, a Cyclops, is that what you want?” Tiffany’s suffering eased my pain for an hour or two, but then I began to feel sorry for her. “Every time you reach for a pencil, I want you to think about what you’ve done to your brother,” my father said. “I want you to get on your knees and beg him to forgive you.”
There are only so many times a person can apologize before it becomes annoying. I lost interest long before the bandage was removed, but not my father. By the time he was finished, Tiffany couldn’t lift a dull crayon without breaking into tears. Her pretty, suntanned face assumed the characteristics of a wrinkled, grease-stained bag. Six years old and the girl was broken.
Danger was everywhere and it was our father’s lifelong duty to warn us. Attending the country club’s Fourth of July celebration, we were told how one of his Navy buddies had been disfigured for life when a cherry bomb exploded in his lap. “Blew his balls right off the map,” he said. “Take a second and imagine what that must have felt like!” Racing to the farthest edge of the golf course, I watched the remainder of the display with my hands between my legs.
Fireworks were hazardous, but thunderstorms were even worse. “I had a friend, used to be a very bright, good-looking guy. He was on top of the world until the day he got struck by lightning. It caught him right between the eyes while he was trout fishing and cooked his brain just like you’d roast a chicken. Now he’s got a metal plate in his forehead and can’t even chew his own food; everything has to be put in a blender and taken through a straw.”
If the lightning was going to get me, it would have to penetrate walls. At the first hint of a storm I ran to the basement, crouching beneath a ta
ble and covering my head with a blanket. Those who watched from their front porches were fools. “The lightning can be attracted by a wedding ring or even the fillings in your teeth,” my father said. “The moment you let down your guard is guaranteed to be the day it strikes.”
In junior high I signed up for shop class, and our first assignment was to build a napkin holder. “You’re not going to be using a table saw, are you?” my father asked. “I knew a guy, a kid about your size, who was using a table saw when the blade came loose, flew out of the machine, and sliced his face right in half.” Using his index finger, my father drew an imaginary line from his forehead to his chin. “The guy survived, but nobody wanted anything to do with him. He turned into an alcoholic and wound up marrying a Chinese woman he’d ordered through a catalog. Think about it.” I did.
My napkin holder was made from found boards and, once finished, weighed in at close to seven pounds. My book-shelves were even worse. “The problem with a hammer,” I was told, “is that the head can fly off at any moment and, boy, let me tell you, you’ve never imagined pain like that.”
After a while we began to wonder if my father had any friends who could still tie their own shoes or breathe without the aid of a respirator. With the exception of the shoe salesman, we’d never seen any of these people, only heard about them whenever one of us attempted to deep-fry chicken or operate the garbage disposal. “I’ve got a friend who buys a set of gloves and throws one of them away. He lost his right hand doing the exact same thing you’re doing. He had his arm down the drain when the cat rubbed against the switch to the garbage disposal. Now he’s wearing clip-on ties and having the restaurant waiters cut up his steak. Is that the kind of life you want for yourself?”
He allowed me to mow the lawn only because he was too cheap to pay a landscaper and didn’t want to do it himself. “What happened,” he said, “is that the guy slipped, probably on a pile of crap, and his leg got caught up in the blade. He found his foot, carried it to the hospital, but it was too late to sew it back on. Can you imagine that? The guy drove fifteen, twenty miles with his foot in his lap.”
Regardless of the heat, I mowed the lawn wearing long pants, knee-high boots, a football helmet, and a pair of goggles. Before starting, I scouted the lawn for rocks and dog feces, slowly combing the area as if it were mined. Even then I pushed the mower haltingly, aways fearing that this next step might be my last.
Nothing bad ever happened, and within a few years I was mowing in shorts and sneakers, thinking of the supposed friend my father had used to illustrate his warning. I imagined this man jumping into his car and pressing on the accelerator with his bloody stump, a warm foot settled in his lap like a sleeping puppy. Why hadn’t he just called an ambulance to come pick him up? How, in his shock, had he thought to search the weeds for his missing foot? It didn’t add up.
I waited until my junior year of high school to sign up for driver’s education. Before taking to the road, we sat in the darkened classroom, watching films that might have been written and directed by my father. Don’t do it, I thought, watching the prom couple attempt to pass a lumbering dump truck. Every excursion ended with the young driver wrapped around a telephone pole or burned beyond recognition, the camera focusing in on a bloody corsage littering the side of the highway.
I drove a car no faster than I pushed the lawn mower, and the instructor soon lost patience.
“That license is going to be your death warrant,” my father said on the day I received my learner’s permit. “You’re going to get out there and kill someone, and the guilt is going to tear your heart out.”
The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
My mother had picked me up from a play rehearsal one rainy night when, cresting a hill, the car ran over something it shouldn’t have. This was not a brick or a misplaced boot but some living creature that cried out when caught beneath the tire. “Shit,” my mother whispered, tapping her forehead against the steering wheel. “Shit, shit shit.” We covered our heads against the rain and searched the darkened street until we found an orange cat coughing up blood into the gutter.
“You killed me,” the cat said, pointing at my mother with its flattened paw. “Here I had so much to live for, but now it’s over, my whole life wiped out just like that.” The cat wheezed rhythmically before closing its eyes and dying.
“Shit,” my mother repeated. We walked door to door until finding the cat’s owner, a kind and understanding woman whose young daughter shared none of her qualities. “You killed my cat,” she screamed, sobbing into her mother’s skirt. “You’re mean and you’re ugly and you killed my cat.”
“She’s at that age,” the woman said, stroking the child’s hair.
My mother felt bad enough without the lecture that awaited her at home. “That could have been a child!” my father shouted. “Think about that the next time you’re tearing down the street searching for kicks.” He made it sound as if my mother ran down cats for sport. “You think this is funny,” he said, “but we’ll see who’s laughing when you’re behind bars awaiting trial for manslaughter.” I received a variation on the same speech after sideswiping a mailbox. Despite my mother’s encouragement, I surrendered my permit and never drove again. My nerves just couldn’t take it. It seemed much safer to hitchhike.
My father objected when I moved to Chicago, and waged a full-fledged campaign of terror when I announced I would be moving to New York. “New York! Are you out of your mind? You might as well take a razor to your throat because, let me tell you something, those New Yorkers are going to eat you alive.” He spoke of friends who had been robbed and bludgeoned by packs of roving gangs and sent me newspaper clippings detailing the tragic slayings of joggers and vacationing tourists. “This could be you!” he wrote in the margins.
I’d lived in New York for several years when, traveling up-state to attend a wedding, I stopped in my father’s hometown. We hadn’t visited since our grandmother moved in with us, and I felt my way around with a creepy familiarity. I found my father’s old apartment, but his friend’s shoe store had been converted into a pool hall. When I called to tell him about it, my father said, “What shoe store? What are you talking about?”
“The place where your friend worked,” I said. “You remember, the guy whose eye you shot out.”
“Frank?” he said. “I didn’t shoot his eye out; the guy was born that way.”
My father visits me now in New York. We’ll walk through Washington Square, where he’ll yell, “Get a look at the ugly mug on that one!” referring to a three-hundred-pound biker with grinning skulls tattooed like a choker around his neck. A young man in Central Park is photographing his girl-friend, and my father races to throw himself into the picture. “All right, sweetheart,” he says, placing his arm around the startled victim, “it’s time to get comfortable.” I cower as he marches into posh grocery stores, demanding to speak to the manager. “Back home I can get this exact same cantaloupe for less than half this price,” he says. The managers invariably suggest that he do just that. He screams at waiters and cuts in line at tony restaurants. “I have a friend,” I tell him, “who lost his right arm snapping his fingers at a waiter.”
“Oh, you kids,” he says. “Not a one of you has got so much as a teaspoon of gumption. I don’t know where you got it from, but in the end, it’s going to kill you.”
the women’s open
My sister Lisa became a woman on the fourteenth hole of the Pinehurst golf course. That’s what she was told by the stranger who led her to the women’s lounge. “Relax, sugar, you’re a woman now.”
We had gone unwittingly, shanghaied by our father, who had offered to take Lisa and me for a ride in the secondhand Porsche he’d recently bought. His sherbet-colored pants should have tipped us off, but seeing as there were no clubs in the backseat, we thought we were safe.
“Just a short little jaunt,” my father s
aid. He folded back the car’s canvas roof and crouched into the driver’s seat. “Hell, maybe we’ll just tool up to the fairground and back, drive by the correctional center and watch the guys in the exercise yard — you both seem to enjoy that. Maybe we’ll go out to the highway and get ourselves some soft ice cream, who knows! Live a little, why don’t you? You’re not going to experience a thing sitting in the house with your nose pressed up against the TV. It’s a beautiful day, let’s smell the goddamned flowers.”
We shot past the prison so fast, I could barely make out the guards in their gun towers. Both the fairground and the ice cream stand faded in the distance as my father regarded his watch and nervously tapped his fingers against the leather-jacketed steering wheel. He knew exactly where we were headed and had it timed so that we’d arrive just in time for the tee off. “Well, what do you know,” he said, pulling off the road and into the crowded golf-course parking lot. “I wonder if there’s some kind of a tournament taking place? What do you say we take a quick peek? Gosh, this is a beautiful place. Wait’ll you get a look at these fairways.
Lisa and I groaned, cursing our stupidity. Once again we’d been duped. There was nothing worse than spending an afternoon on a golf course. We knew what was in store for us and understood that the next few hours would pass like days or maybe even weeks. Our watches would yawn, the minute and hour hands joining each other in a series of periodic naps. First, our father would push us to the front of a large, gaily dressed crowd. Robbed of their choice spots, these spectators would huff and grumble, whispering insults we would pretend not to hear.