Read A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father Online

Authors: Augusten Burroughs

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (11 page)

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
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It was never fixed.

He stood there now at the top of the stairs, dread on his face.

My mother and I stared at him. She explained what we were talking about, my curious pronunciation. “I don’t hear it,” he said. “It sounds perfectly normal to me.” And was he maybe a little angry at the mere suggestion? He seemed to glare at my mother as if to say, 
Why do you always have to . . .

He walked into the kitchen, grimacing with each step. Now that he was upstairs, he might as well pour himself some tea. He pulled a glass from the cabinet and filled it with ice.

My mother walked into the living room and sat on the edge of the sofa, loss in her eyes.

I joined my father in the kitchen and asked, happily, “Do you think I have a southern accent?”

My father sighed. “I don’t know, son, I just don’t know.”

I said, “When you were my age? Did you ever think about having a southern accent?”

He poured tea from his old brown plastic pitcher, discolored now, never washed only refilled. “I don’t remember, son. I don’t know, I just don’t know.” His voice was heavy with burden.

And I felt sad. “I didn’t mean to make you come upstairs. I forgot what I even wanted.”

He smiled but it was an effort to do so, as if it caused him pain, physical pain that he had endured for years. He said nothing. Then he turned and walked back downstairs with his tea.

I went into the living room and looked at my mother. She seemed in a trance, standing in the center of the room and staring at a point beyond the far wall.

She said nothing and I wondered if she realized I was standing there. Finally, she said, without blinking, “Did I ever tell you how I met your father?”

I said nothing.

“We met when we were both freshmen at the University of Georgia. It was English class and we sat alphabetically, according to our last names. He was Robison and I was Richter. Our seats were right next to each other.”

“You told me the other day, when you were painting. Don’t you remember?” I felt as though insects were crawling up my arms and legs. Something was wrong with her. 
Wrong
. The word settled over me, a weight. My mouth tasted of dread.

But she didn’t seem to hear me. “When he proposed he said he’d kill himself if I turned him down and I believed him. I believed he was serious, so what could I do? Mother wanted me to marry him, there was so much pressure. And if I didn’t, he would shoot himself in the head. So I did. I married him.”

“Mom? You already told me all of this. Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she answered, her eyes glazed and fixed.

“Here, why don’t you come sit down,” and I led her to the sofa. She followed like a small child and sat obediently.

“Do you want some tea?”

“No, I don’t want anything.” Still, she wouldn’t look at me.

I left her then, sitting by herself in the living room. I went to my bedroom and closed the door, glancing at the spot where Ernie’s aquarium used to be, the void occupying more space than the actual aquarium ever had.

Maybe I should be careful. Maybe I shouldn’t call him
 dead. 
It might stimulate something dormant inside him.

I PRAYED. 
DEAR God, please protect my mother. Please make her stay healthy in her mind and please make her stay home.
 I caught myself just in time, because I could be punished for asking a favor of God. I could be granted what I asked for, not knowing that what I asked for was the wrong thing to want. Only God knew what should happen, so I revised my prayer. 
Please, God, protect my mother and whatever you think should happen, make that happen, but please make the best thing turn out.

The shift in direction of my prayer gave me a tiny comfort, made me feel I had prayed correctly, smartly.

And then I thought to pray for one thing more. 
And God? If you would, please keep an eye on my father
.

•    •    •

I DIDN’T HAVE any real friends at school. I was teased some for being “weird,” but mostly I was left alone. I did, however, enjoy writing plays. Every month or so when I wrote one, the teachers let me put it on in the school library. Even kids who were normally hateful to me would slide up and ask if I had a role for them. I didn’t write plays about farm animals with magical powers or garden vegetables that could sing and dance. I wrote plays about mothers and fathers who fought, children caught in the middle. In one of my plays a ten-year-old girl was given up by her parents for adoption. “There’s just something sour in you, little girl—always been that way. Best as I can figure it, you got combined with a seed from a lemon inside my belly when I was pregnant with you.” I was thrilled when this play made so many of the girls cry and ask me if it was true that a little girl could be combined with a lemon seed during pregnancy. “Not only is it true, but I know a set of twins and one of them has a stalk of corn growing clear out of the center of her head, just exactly like a horn. Sometimes, it doesn’t show until you’re older.”

My teachers sat me down and told me not to write plays that upset the other children, but secretly, I thought they liked this one the best.

I was bad at math and didn’t seem to have an ear for languages. But I loved writing plays and skits, and this was my focus, until Damian came along.

Most of us kids had been together all our lives. It was rare to have a new kid join the school. And when little Damian showed up for class one day, the class rejected him the way the body rejects a skin graft. Damian was small for his age but really, he was small for any age. He was a tiny, thread-thin boy and he had a sweetness about him that made him an instant target. That first day, some of the older kids pretended to buddy up to him, then they led him out beyond the soccer field and pulled his pants down. I watched from a distance as they shrieked, egging each other on. “Get him! Get him!” They took branches and whipped him across his naked legs and then kicked him in the stomach.

Even though these kids were bigger, and even though I wasn’t brave, I ran as fast as I could and when I reached them I said, “Leave him alone.” I took Damian’s hand in mine and pulled him up. I led him away, carrying his pants in my other hand.

It was a mystery to me why they let me rescue Damian. Easily, they could have ganged up on me, whipped me with sticks, too. But I knew that if they tried, I would take my own stick and I would poke their eyes out. And maybe they knew this, could smell my intent the way a dog smells fear.

I helped Damian get dressed over by the jungle gym and from that moment on, I was his hero.

I’d never been a hero before and the feeling was empty. Damian was nice enough but he wasn’t bright and we could never really be friends. But I was fond of him and when anybody picked on him, I put an end to it.

My one true friend didn’t go to my school because he was a couple of years younger than me. Greg Fanslow lived two doors down and with his blond hair and fair skin, we could have been brothers. As a matter of fact, as far as we were concerned, we were brothers, joined at the finger by the blade of a knife and a drop of blood.

Greg was younger, but he was smarter. He knew the name of just about every bug, plant, and flower and he always had ideas.

Most days after school, we hung around together in the woods. We went exploring, following old hunting trails or trying to find bear prints in the soil. We made forts from branches and piles of stones. We rode our bikes the seven miles to South Amherst to get cold sodas from the tiny old store near the railroad tracks and, sometimes, we slept outside in a tent in his backyard.

Greg never came inside my house. Although he wouldn’t admit it, I knew it was because his mother told him not to. His mother warned him that there was something wrong with my parents. He didn’t have to admit this to me, I could see the truth in his eyes.

Behind our houses was a path and then a stream and then more woods and there was no reason to keep walking back there, deeper into the woods, because all you’d see was more trees.

Except once, Greg and I did just exactly this. We walked straight back, crossing the stream and then beyond. And suddenly, we came across a perfect and perfectly real little house. A shack, really. But with a door and windows and a peaked roof. It even had a chimney made out of silver pipe. The door was padlocked but when we fiddled with it, we discovered that the lock was not engaged.

We entered the tiny house and saw a platform where a person could unfurl a sleeping bag and sleep very well. There were a couple of cabinets, a window in the rear that opened and closed and locked. There were curtains.

It felt like a miracle. We didn’t know what to do so we sat down on the floor in the center of the room, which was the whole house, and we thought about what to do. Should we tell somebody? Should we tell our parents?

We decided we didn’t have to do anything. It was enough to know that it was there. And it was okay for us to keep our knowledge of the cabin a secret.

After this, the cabin became a regular part of our lives. We didn’t spend much time inside of it, but we visited it frequently, I think, to make sure it was still there. To make sure we hadn’t imagined it. We never could quite believe it was real.

Privately, I liked knowing the cabin was there. I liked knowing that if I had to, I could run deep into the woods, far from home, and not be at the mercy of nature and all the creatures in it.

 

EIGHT

MY MOTHER WAS in the hospital.

My father said she was there because she was “nervous” and needed “some time to herself.” Two weeks had passed and I wanted my mother. Already I’d begun to worry because I could not conjure her face. What would happen if I forgot what she looked like entirely?

I spent hours in her office in the rear of the house. I was a stowaway inside her closet where boxes of her papers, her knitted cape, and belongings she’d had since childhood were stored. It was where I felt her essence was most concentrated.

My brother was on a camping trip that seemed to last for months.

It was the first time I’d ever been alone with my father. The day he brought her to the hospital, he came home and slipped into my room as silently as a snake. I looked up and saw his face in my mirror and I flinched. “Well, son, it’s just the two of us now,” he’d said, “I hope we’ll be okay.” Then he forced a smile and turned around and left. I wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that “I hope we’ll be okay” remark. There were a couple of ways you could think about it and I didn’t like either one. I made a decision right then and there: I wouldn’t think about Ernie and I wouldn’t think bad thoughts. The days passed slowly, silently. And despite myself I had a terrible thought: if she died, I would have to run away from home.

WITHOUT MY MOTHER there, the house was dark. My father insisted on turning off every light to save electricity. Only the dim bulb above the stove illuminated the entire front of the house. Being November, it was dark by five o’clock.

My father roamed silently at night, checking the locks on the doors, pouring himself another drink. Or he would sequester himself in the bedroom downstairs for the entire day watching football.

In the morning, my father woke me for school by knocking on my door and calling my name in a peculiar, singsongy voice that didn’t even sound like him. “Wake 
up,
 Augus
ten
.”

But I was always already awake and dressed, sitting on my bed. “Okay, thanks!” I called out. I stayed in my room until the last possible minute, then ran outside and down the driveway to catch the bus.

When I returned home, he was never waiting for me at the door with a kiss, like my mother. He was downstairs in the bedroom or at the kitchen table grading papers, not to be disturbed.

Some evenings he didn’t come upstairs to make dinner. I wouldn’t see him at all and when I looked down the stairway, it was fully dark. On these nights, I opened a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and ate it unheated, straight from the can.

We said almost nothing to each other. Occasionally, he stood in the hall and dabbed at his bleeding psoriasis-covered hands with the thin, worn handkerchief he always kept in his back pocket. He smiled at me when he saw me. The whites of his unknowable eyes were yellow. I looked away.

One Saturday we went grocery shopping together at the Stop & Shop. My father carried a Bic pen and a small pad with him everywhere he went. On this pad he’d written a list and ticked the items as we put them into the cart. We shopped in silence, my father occasionally pausing at a shelf and tapping the keys of his Texas Instruments calculator to determine which product was the better value. When I tossed a package of cookies into the cart, my father halted and stared at the package, the muscles of his jaw clenching. “Do not, I repeat,
do not
 add things to the cart which are not on the list.”

I quickly put the cookies back on the shelf. “Okay, sorry,” I said, eager to have the incident behind us.

But he continued to stare at the space in the cart the cookies had briefly occupied. And without looking up he continued, “First, it will be the cookies. Next it will be crackers or some such thing. And before you know it, we’ll have a cart filled with all these foods we can’t possibly eat and they’ll all spoil and need to be thrown away.”

I nodded my head in agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t want them anyway, I’m sorry.”

And now, he looked at me. It was a hard, intense stare. “Maybe next time you should wait in the car or just stay home. I don’t want every shopping trip to turn into some out-of-control nightmare with you throwing all sorts of things into the cart and me having to then go all through the store putting everything back.”

I didn’t say anything, I just nodded once and set my eyes on the floor.

But at the checkout my father was suddenly very light and sociable to the clerk, smiling and making small talk about the price of corn, how it was “a terrific value” to get so many ears for a dollar. He even told her he’d started to buy gas out in Sunderland because it was almost four cents cheaper. He offered to write the name of the station on a page of his little notebook for her. She laughed and said she didn’t want him to go to any trouble and my father said, “Why, it’s no trouble at all. See? I always carry my pad with me.” He pulled the pad out of his shirt pocket and held it up to her as proof. He licked his finger and turned the page to a fresh sheet. Carefully, he drew a brief map to the Sunoco station on Route 5. He tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to her. “There you are. Now, I hope they haven’t raised the prices. I’d hate to send you all the way out there on a wild-goose chase.”

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
12.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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