My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ