My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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