The television was on in the next room, so I went in there and sat down on the sofa, glad to be alone. Eileen always kept the room dark—because it was so ugly, she said—the only light emanating from the television screen. In this relative privacy I slipped a hand into my trousers to check myself out. The year before, a boy in my class who had been picking his nose on third base had taken a line drive in the crotch and he had swelled up sufficiently to require special underwear. I hadn’t actually seen him in this swollen condition, but I’d heard the matter discussed in the locker room before gym and a boy had lifted his own member to remind us of the size of a normal testicle, this compared to the big fist he put next to it. Going strictly on feel, mine still seemed about their usual size, but I couldn’t be sure.
By cracking the blinds, I could watch Drew from the sofa, though it had grown dark outside. He too seemed to have lost the edge of his anger. He had shoveled all around the bike, leaving it a shiny island. He was now engaged in carving out some of the snow beneath the cycle so that he could plant his feet and gain some purchase. After a few minutes the bike was mostly free, though still magically reared up, frozen in place. Tossing the shovel aside, he stood before it, blowing on his hands, seemingly lost in thought.
I’d spotted for him enough when he benched in the garage to know what he was doing. He was collecting himself, preparing. Breathing. Swelling his muscles, as if in a mirror. Studying his own steamy breath, feeling the power surging in his body until he was certain it was equal to the weight of the bike. I watched with genuine anticipation when he finally bent to the task, knowing that he intended more than simply dislodging the bike and rolling it forward into the garage. My father’s taunts were eating at him, and I didn’t need to see his broad forehead to know that the blue vein was pulsing there. I could visualize his expression, too, his contempt for whatever he was up against. He put one red hand under the seat, the other in the crotch beneath the frame and above the wheel, holding his squat position perfectly for a second before throwing himself back and up, his knees and arms straightening without quite locking. The bike stayed stuck for a second, then gave with an audible crack.
He nearly lost his balance then, but somehow righted himself, still refusing to set the bike down. For a moment I thought he actually intended to clean and jerk it, but instead he turned with it, still held chest-high, 180 degrees and stepped with it over the snowbank. The rear wheel of the cycle caught the antenna of my father’s car and snapped it like a twig.
A moment later he emerged from the dark garage and came toward the house. On the way he stopped and picked up the busted antenna, used the palm of his hand to reduce its length, then his thumb and forefinger to stretch it full again, whereupon he cocked his arm and whistled the antenna out over the top of the garage, deep into the black trees.
In relating what follows I must confess to a certain chronological vagueness. The events themselves I can see in sharp focus, and I want to think they happened that same evening, and there are good reasons to suppose they did. In a narrative sense they present a nice neat package, effect dutifully tripping along at the heels of cause. Perhaps it is the attraction of such simplicity that makes me suspicious; that along with the conviction that real life seldom works this way.
The events which follow may have been the culmination of many meals eaten in the Littler kitchen, the four of us cramped into the nook where their dinette was stationed, walled in on three sides. Eileen herself always insisted on the seat at the free end so she could get up and grab the coffee pot or pour drinks. Drew, my father, and I would all be penned in once the meal began, unable to push our chairs back more than an inch or two. I think I was the only one who felt the terrible restriction, since Drew had no intention of getting up as long as he had his mother to fetch for him. My father seemed to enjoy tight places, always spurning the empty end of the counter at the Mohawk Grill in favor of the end jammed with people and stacks of dirty dishes.
Once we were seated around Eileen’s table it was impossible to stand up without pushing the table forward and pinioning whoever was opposite against the wall, and I think Eileen took solace from the fact that if she could just get my father and her son seated they could rise in anger only with supreme difficulty. Nobody needed worry about me rising in anger, but I couldn’t have, regardless. Being the smallest by several degrees I got the narrowest seat, opposite Eileen herself, hemmed in by a wall behind, my father and Drew on either side, the table in front. I always relieved myself before dinner began.
The little dinette itself was always crowded beyond belief. Condiments that did not require refrigeration were always left in the center of the table and these were joined, half an hour before mealtime, by cold jars of every description. Drew devoured pickles—sweet, dill, bread and butter, kosher—while my father ate olives—green ones, bulbous purples, shriveled blacks. Their tall, slender jars he would probe thoughtfully with his black forefinger, extracting the fruit expertly, even from the bottom of the tallest jars without the aid of a utensil. To this day, I cannot contemplate an olive, even when attractively displayed, say, on a silver relish dish, without seeing my father’s finger worming around the jar in search of the last elusive marble afloat in its own murky juices. Drew was equally disgusting in his personal search for pickles, which I too was inordinately fond of. But unless I could spear the first slice out of a fresh jar, before the contents became polluted, I abstained.
I freely confess that my fastidiousness about the condiment jars was unwarranted. I was myself a grubby boy who had to be reminded about washing my hands before coming to the table, and it was my father who reminded me. I had been far cleaner when I had lived with my mother and eaten at the long table of the old Monsignor, but since coming to live with my father I had backslid badly in the area of personal hygiene. Since I ate alone much of the time, or with people it was pretty hard to offend at the Mohawk Grill, I had become a social liability. In our apartment I had indulged many bad habits that my mother would have blanched at. I drank milk from the carton, ate pepperoni in bed and fell asleep sticky. My father never objected to these practices at home, but if he happened to notice anything particularly foul about me in public, he would hold it up to considerable humor and ridicule, blaming my condition on lax maternal training. More than once the clients of the Mohawk Grill were invited to inspect my caked fingernails. And while comparisons to most of Harry’s regulars weren’t necessarily invidious, my father was right. I was frequently revolting.
Which makes my squeamishness about his finger in the olive jar that much more absurd, my father being himself a brutal hand scrubber. He bought coarse, gravelly Lava soap for the apartment and required Eileen to have a bar on hand for him at her house as well, though I don’t believe he advocated it for her personal use. Sometimes, in addition to sandpapering his own knuckles and palms, he’d do mine as well so I’d “know what it felt like to be clean, for once.” By “clean” he apparently meant “raw.” No doubt the Lava got his hands clean, but it made no difference in the appearance of his thumb and forefinger, and try as I might, I couldn’t shake the idea that once his black digit invaded an olive jar, the juices therein were tinged a subtle shade darker.
By the time Eileen began to bring hot food to the table it seemed to me that breakage was inevitable. The jars of pickles and olives were never cleared away, seldom even consolidated sensibly. To the center of the tiny table were added each night, first, a huge bowl of mashed potatoes and an oblong platter of meat, then, at the outer edges of the table a bowl of vegetables and basket of rolls, a dish of fruit or applesauce. By the time Eileen was finished bringing food, it was possible for me to knock something off her end of the table by nudging something at my end by slender centimeters. To make matters worse, we passed things, setting off chain reactions. Lifting the platter of roast pork would upset the bowl of green beans, which someone would try to save, his elbow sending the big bottle of Thousand Island dressing to the floor. In this way, the person w
ho appeared to have made the mess seldom actually caused it, but was rather trying to prevent another calamity altogether, the threat of which he alone perceived. My father and I ate dinner with the Littlers at least once a week, and I can remember no single meal free of casualties, though what got shattered varied from an old, nearly empty bottle of maraschino cherries (what could it have been doing there amid the roast pork, mashed potatoes, canned asparagus, and Parker House rolls?) to a valued fancy casserole dish said to have come down to Eileen all the way from the venerable Myrtle Littler herself.
Though I was just a kid, it was obvious to me that our attempts to wedge ourselves into Eileen’s little house were not working and that, to borrow my father’s phrase, some fucking thing had to give, but I was the only one who saw it that way. I remember Eileen as a better than average cook, and I’m confident when I say I was the only one unable to enjoy a single morsel at that table.
So. What follows may have happened that same evening when Drew lifted his cycle out of the snowbank and whistled my father’s broken antenna out into the woods. Or it may have been a month later, with several such meals as the one depicted above intervening. Since neither Drew nor my father ever forgot a single grievance, it probably doesn’t matter. What my father had done and what Drew had done would have been as fresh to them a month later as if it had happened moments before. In any case, the episode begins in my memory with Drew spearing a roast with his mother’s silver serving fork.
God help me, I had to watch him.
I didn’t want to, because that’s what my father was doing. I tried to appear occupied by taking some mashed potatoes, arranging them in one corner of the plate, flattening them out with the back of my fork, depressing a cavity in the center for gravy, then spooning some green beans next to them. All of this to mark time while Drew, who was first, as usual, at the meat platter, built a huge mound, one slice at a time while the rest of us waited for him to finish.
At the time I thought he must be oblivious to us, or at least to my father, who was watching him with an air of quiet homicidal menace, but I’ve since changed my mind. The opposite hypothesis makes far more sense—that Drew Littler was perfectly aware of my father and of himself. With such a large fork, he could easily have removed half the meat from the platter with one forceful thrust. Instead, he made a point of his hoggishness, taking each slice singly so there could be no mistaking his intent, by arranging each slice artfully, by not surrendering the silver fork until he was good and ready. When he finally did surrender it, he turned his attention to the gravy boat, which he emptied over the mound of gray beef.
“Mind your own business,” Eileen said to my father, who looked ready to spontaneously combust. “There’s plenty more.”
She pushed back her chair and took the empty gravy boat with her. I could tell that she too was miffed with her son’s behavior, but she never publicly took my father’s side in matters of conflict.
My father helped Eileen to some of what little remained of the roast, then me, then himself, leaving one thin slice in the center of the big platter. For a vigorous man, my father hadn’t a large appetite, and the portion he took for himself was comically small, a pointed contrast to Drew’s heaped plate.
Eileen returned with the gravy boat and we ate. My stomach had shrunk to pellet size and I’d have given a lot to be able to return to the platter some of the roast my father had given me, because I could see where we were headed with that one remaining slice of beef. Each mouthful was a struggle.
Drew had no such difficulty. With his steak knife he sliced through several layers of meat at a time and raised them, dripping gravy, to his mouth. He never changed hands with his fork or set his knife down. He seemed almost not to chew. His Adam’s apple bobbed once and the food was gone. We all watched, my father openly, Eileen and I surreptitiously, engaging each other in small talk, trying in vain to draw my father into it, to disturb his focus, but all the while adopting that focus ourselves. There was no point in trying to draw Drew into any conversation while there was food around, and in the end the talk died.
Drew ate.
In steady, workmanlike fashion he devoured what was before him without looking up from his plate, exhibiting the same concentration he used under the weighted bar in the garage. My father ate much more slowly and I knew why. It was a matter of timing. He did not want to be finished before the boy. He was working it so the two of them would swallow that last bite of roast at exactly the same time, with just the one remaining slice of meat between them in the center of the table. I doubt Eileen saw the strategy of it or she’d have either taken the slice of meat herself or gone to carve more, but I’m quite sure Drew knew where they were headed, knew it without having to look up, just as he knew my father was trying to shame him.
He must have understood all this, because Drew Littler couldn’t have wanted that last slice of beef. He just had to have it. I was sure of that as I watched the blue vein in his forehead work over that last mouthful of food. And when he reached, I saw that my father was holding his own fork like an ice-pick, tines down. At first, I thought he intended to stab the back of the boy’s hand. Instead the fork pierced the meat, pinning it to the platter so that Drew’s came away clean. Then, suddenly, it was on my father’s plate.
I thought for a second I would wet my pants.
“There,” Eileen said. “Are you happy now, you two children?”
My father kneed me under the table. “You gonna let her call you names?”
“Sure,” I said.
“That’s where you’re smart, unlike some people,” my father said.
“Some people are smarter than you think,” Drew said.
“I doubt it,” my father said. He relit a cigarette he’d extinguished at the start of the meal. Then, after a thoughtful drag, he put it out again in the center of the still untouched slice of beef.
“You think it’s smart to waste good food,” Eileen said, getting up to clear away the dishes. “That’s your idea of smart?”
My father ignored her. “You enjoy your dinner?” he asked me.
I said I did.
“How about you?” he asked Drew.
“It was all right,” the boy said.
“Just all right.”
“The potatoes were lumpy,” he said.
“Just all right,” my father repeated. “I thought it was a very good dinner, myself. Of course, that’s just me. But it was the best meal I’ve had in a long time. Maybe if you had to work for a meal, you’d appreciate it more.”
“Potatoes either got lumps or they don’t.”
“Stop it, the two of you,” Eileen warned, and she looked to me like she meant business.
“I tell you what,” my father said. “Just to be nice to your mother and show a little appreciation, you and I will do the dishes. Your mother can go in and watch TV. Relax.”
“Get him to help,” Drew said, indicating me.
“He can help too.”
“I’ll help,” I agreed. I would have stood up and started right in if I could.
“I got someplace to go,” Drew said.
“I tell you what. Go later,” my father said. “People won’t mind if you’re late. Trust me.”
“I’ll tell you what,” the boy said. Then he cleared a place in the center of the dinette large enough to plant his big elbow. “Loser washes.”
“Enough,” Eileen said. “In a minute everything’s going to be broken, and guess who’ll get to clean up the mess.”
My father put his elbow next to Drew’s, but they didn’t lock hands immediately. “You better move those bottles,” my father said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Where I was sitting, I figured to get the worst of it. Drew had an arm like a leg, and when he slammed my father’s into the table, I’d get the gravy boat and the dregs of the green beans for sure. It took me a split second to prepare for this and even less for my father to slam the back of Drew Littler’s hand onto his mother’s plate, flippi
ng it into the air like a Tiddly-Wink. The boy let out a sharp howl as the chair went out from under him and he disappeared onto his back beneath the table. He never hit the floor though, because my father never let go of his hand, which stayed pinned right where it had been slammed. Drew looked to me liked he’d have given a good deal to just fall, but he couldn’t. Like a big, excited bug, he tried desperately to right himself. His feet had become entangled in the capsized chair and his free hand frantically climbed the smooth wall in search of something to grab on to. With all that weight on his pinned forearm, it was a miracle it didn’t snap, especially the way the boy continued to thrash, kicking the fallen chair violently, but ineffectually, since with every blow it rebounded off the wall and back on top of his feet to be kicked again.
“You let go, Sammy, you fucker!” Drew bellowed, the blue vein in his forehead wriggling frantically. “So help me, I’ll break it!”
It took me a moment to realize the unusual nature of this threat—that it was his own arm he was threatening to break. And while its obvious sincerity scared the hell out of me, its comic aspect did not escape my father, who looked willing to risk it. I think it was the knowledge that if the arm broke he’d eaten his last dinner at Eileen’s that finally caused him to let her son drop. And from the frozen expression on her face, I’d have sworn his decision came too late.
Drew no sooner hit the floor than he was back on his feet again, and I thought there would be blood now for sure, but here again I was mistaken. Drew looked like he was going to attack, but my father did not get to his feet, and something about the way he just sat there so calmly prevented the boy, and when he saw my father lean back against the wall it was suddenly all over. He grabbed the arm my father had pinned to the table top and sank to his knees. “I wasn’t ready, Sammy, you cheating son of a bitch, you cocksucker,” he wailed.
“No,” my father admitted, “and twenty years from now you still won’t be. That’s your problem.”