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 (12 page)

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
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I’d never in my life heard my father use the expression “a wild-goose chase.” He was—the only word that came to mind—
bubbly
.

He was so pleasant and outgoing that for an instant, I imagined something had changed in him. Even his face itself seemed somehow different. It was hard to exactly put it into words, but as I watched him while the clerk rung up our items, I was amazed at the transformation, at how perfectly nice and warm and normal my father appeared. I took advantage of what I saw as a remarkably good mood and, as we loaded the groceries into the back of the car, suggested we go across the street to Friendly’s for ice cream.

My father said, “Ice cream hurts my teeth.” And I saw that his face had changed, once again. Gone was the kind, open expression; now his face was a mirror again. His features were completely blank, his eyes absolutely dead.

I thought of the few times we’d gone to the university together and how he’d taken me around and introduced me to his colleagues. He’d seemed like such a 
dad
 that I’d wondered what was wrong with me to always feel so suspicious of him. I remembered thinking how, in the light of day out in the world, my father was just like anybody’s father. But as soon as I was alone with him again, 
Dad
 was gone and 
dead
 was there in his place.

Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men—one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw.

In my bedroom late that night I thought I heard him laughing downstairs in the basement. It was a soft laugh, more of a throaty chuckle. And then he stopped and I heard nothing. I didn’t investigate. I knew he wasn’t laughing because something was funny. It was basement laughter. And there was something crazy about it.

BLOOD STAINED THE seat of his threadbare pajama bottoms and when I asked him if he was all right he replied, “My skin has been acting up, that’s all.” And when he took his jacket off after work, there were bloodstains on his white shirt.

One night, instead of grading papers, he sharpened every knife in the house. He sat at the kitchen table in the near darkness and drew the blade across the gray sharpening stone. I could hear the steel singing from my bedroom.

I was very nervous and my stomach hurt. A few times, when I wiped myself there was blood on the toilet paper. I slept with the hot water bottle and wished for my mother, wished I were thirty.

And when I woke up in the middle of the night and heard my father in the kitchen speaking a language that couldn’t be real, gibberish, moon-talk, when I held my breath and closed my eyes and listened to him speaking in tongues to himself alone in the kitchen, what I wished for was to be dead.

 

NINE

AND THEN THE men came. It was like the rains had arrived to quench the earth at last.

The men came with their machines and within the desert of my motherless month, I feasted on their most extraordinary arrival. We were to have a new septic system.

At first I was wary, afraid of the equipment. The bulldozer was like a giant poisonous yellow spider tearing apart the land to lay its eggs. Dump truck, bucket loader, an arm with a toothy head attached that mindlessly clawed at the land—the appalling noise these things created made me believe they were breaking up more than just the yard; they had the power to destroy the family.

But I was spellbound. I felt that if I could make friends with these men, I might be able to talk them into digging a small swimming pool for me.

Standing on the front steps, I stood up real straight and tall, hoping to double my age by doing so. I was so shy and especially afraid of strangers and men. But I was also completely fascinated and wanted to watch every move they made. So even though it took all the courage I had in my body, probably even the extra emergency backup courage a person stores in reserve within those bumps along the spine, I managed to remain on the front steps and not run inside and peek at them from behind a curtain.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi
. And gradually, I began to calm down. My heart crawled out of my skull and went back down into my chest. And when the beasts turned to look at me, I didn’t even blink.

I began to appreciate the beauty of these steel machines that were under strict control. I studied them and saw that as a knob-topped lever was pulled forward within the cab, the bucket of the loader was raised up in the air. When another lever was pushed away, the corresponding blade of the bulldozer would lower and scrape. I wanted to clap my hands.

With the likelihood of attack all but removed, I was quite happy to sit and watch. After a while, I saw that this pack of men had a leader. Large in all directions, he would have cut a terrifying figure were he not enclosed within the glass-walled cab atop his machine. Even his voice was giant, as now and then his head would pop out of the window and he would shout at the others, “To the left, to the left!” or “Back it up!” The pack obeyed immediately, thoroughly.

The men took occasional breaks for smoking, mashing sandwiches into their mouths, and stretching exactly like dogs, with their backs arched, tossing their heads from side to side, sweat flying. During one of these breaks, the leader stepped out of his machine and I got a good look at him. His hair was the exact color of the dirt he scooped from the earth. It appeared he had tougher skin than normal, more like a hide. He had a thick, bristly mustache, woolly eyebrows, and green eyes that glittered like faceted stones in a tarnished setting. He was mesmerizing and I could not look away. I hadn’t even realized he was staring right at me until it was too late to look away.

“Hey,” he called, “you wanna sit up here?” He slapped the seat of the bucket loader.

Suddenly realizing that he’d caught me watching him, I panicked. I couldn’t think of what to do, so I scurried inside and stayed away from them for the rest of the day. But I watched from my bedroom window, making sure to keep only the top of my head and my eyes exposed above the windowsill. I saw him glance around a couple of times looking for me.

I was just not accustomed to large, grown people asking me if I wanted to share in what they were doing. The moment had been thrilling, too thrilling. I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl. Fleeing had been an act of self-preservation, not shyness in this case.

The next day, though, I returned to my perch at the top of the stairs. It didn’t take long before he invited me up into the seat again. “C’mon, kid, it won’t bite.”

This time, I nodded and stepped forward with confidence. I wasn’t afraid anymore, not in the slightest.

After the men had left the previous evening, I’d crawled all over their machines. I sat in the bucket loader seat and put my hands on all the knobs. I bounced from bulldozer to dump truck and wished we could keep them. I even petted the bucket loader’s bucket and rubbed the dirt from its teeth.

As I placed my foot on the first step, the man ruffled my hair, then pushed me up with a surprising grip—so firm and powerful that I knew he could pull trees out of the earth with just his arms. I was tempted to let go and experience the sensation of falling, then being caught by him.

I managed to climb inside the cab and sit on the seat, bouncing once or twice. “It’s neat,” I said.

“Yeah?” he asked. “You like it up there?”

I did. I nodded.

“Good, then maybe someday you’ll grow up and drive one.”

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn’t say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

I swung out of the cab, stood on the top step, and decided to jump. I landed harder than I expected and stumbled, clutching my ankle. “Thanks,” I said, probably blushing from my clumsiness. I headed back toward the house but paused, turning around once again. I smiled. Then ran up the stairs and back into the house, which seemed dark now that I’d been outside in the bright sun. I quickly walked back to my bedroom and went to my window to watch. After a while, I returned to the front porch.

The man noticed I’d returned and he smiled at me, hitched his jeans higher up on his hips.

I waved at him, but the small, friendly wave disguised my complete fascination with him, my confusion, the sad longing I felt when I was near him. I would have felt better being away from him, but I could not leave him, not while he was there for only a few days.

In just the two days he’d been at our house, the man had given me more attention than my father had, maybe for my entire life. There’d never been anyone to compare my father with, and suddenly here was this dirty, smiling man. And his constant glances in my direction, the easy way he ran his fingers across the top of my head, the way he invited me up into his monster, these small things hit me with tremendous force.

That night, I thought about him. I lay awake for hours, imagining myself walking down the street with him, sitting beside him in a car. I imagined him tucking me into bed at night and could almost feel his mustache tickle my forehead as he leaned in to kiss me.

The next day, I was already waiting for them on my steps when they arrived. Prior to this, I had come outside only after I heard their engines start.

Seeing me, he walked over. “Hey kid, you know what? I don’t even know your name. What do I call you?”

I looked down at his shoes, and said, “Augusten.”

He laughed, as though what I’d said had been funny, a joke. “Augusten? But that’s a 
boy’s
name,” he said.

Furious and humiliated I admitted, “Yeah, that’s what I am.”

It was terrible to see the complete shock somersault behind his eyes. He stammered, “You’re a boy?”

My face flushed bright red, I just knew it, and I was so mad I wanted to bite his finger off.

He walked away.

He did not glance at me again.

I’d been mistaken for a girl before. With my long, curly blond hair and fair skin, I didn’t have the rugged look people are accustomed to in a boy. I was quiet, shy, and reserved; qualities one associates with a girl. But this had been more humiliating than one of my mother’s dippy poetry friends thinking I was my mother’s daughter.

Though I continued to sit on the steps, determined to be brave and not hide, he never again invited me up on his bulldozer, he didn’t pet my head good-bye. I had disappointed him, disgusted him. He wanted nothing to do with me.

I could think only of revenge. I wished I had a dress and entertained the idea of putting on one of my mother’s. Then I would sit on the steps dressed like a girl and I would call out to him, 
I love you! Come give me another kiss!
 And his friends would all think I was the cutest, prettiest little thing, and they would tease him for having a new little girlfriend. 
Go on, give her a kiss. Don’t be so nasty, she’s got a little crush on you,
 they’d say. And then he’d have to come over to me. He’d probably whisper through his teeth, 
Knock it off, kid
. But I’d jump up into his arms and kiss his cheeks. I’d scream, 
When I grow up, I’m going to marry somebody just like you
. It would serve him right. Oh, I wanted to play this trick. Or, even better, I could put my hair in pigtails and knot my shirt above my belly button like the girls at school. And I could shout to him, 
Hey, Mr. Sir? Show me your thingie again, like before
. Then, the other guys would look at him in a whole different way.

Just like that, I was no longer upset. I sat there on the steps, thinking up ways to get him back for calling me an icky girl.

I WAS STARTLED awake in the night by my dog Brutus standing on the bed over my body so that I looked up at his belly. He was facing the door and growling into the dark. A deep, threatening rumble was coming from him that I had never heard before. He sounded almost like an engine, like one of the machines that ripped the yard apart. I could feel him trembling, all his muscles were tensed. As though he would not be able to hold himself back from lunging for much longer.

That’s when I saw him. My father, standing in my room at the foot of the bed. “Dead?” I whispered.

He said nothing, just watched.

Deeply asleep, then abruptly awake, beneath the growling dog, my father standing in eerie silence—it was all so confusing that I wanted to put my head back down and close my eyes.

“Dead?” I said again.

He turned and walked out of my room.

Gradually, Brutus sank back down to the bed, his tense, powerful muscles relaxing. But now, he was awake, on guard. He faced my bedroom door. I could not see his face clearly in the dark, but I could see his eyes clear and wet, wide open.

I’d been dreaming of fish hooks. And my father had been in my dream. I didn’t remember what happened. But I knew I’d had the dream before. It seemed to me, maybe, I had the dream every night.

When will my mother be home?
 I wondered.

MY FATHER WAS chopping wood out back, getting ready for winter. After he had a big pile of split logs, he stacked the wood under the deck and covered them with plastic. All the ice had melted in the glass of iced tea next to him on the stump. He held the ax above his head and he winked at me and smiled, but it was his other smile.

The one he only used at night when he caught me alone. The one nobody else ever saw, except maybe my mother. Perhaps this was the smile he gave her when he proposed.

I’d never seen it before in the daylight and I didn’t like it.

He brought the ax down hard and the log divided, flew in two directions at once. I could read his lips: “Very much I love you.” The phrase we spoke at night to each other before I went to bed. By speaking it like this, with that smile, he was distorting it, redefining it in a way that had nothing to do with 
love
.

I stood still, looking at him.

He was exhilarated. But why?

That word, again, came into my head: 
wrong
. Something tightly wound within me uncoiled. It was knowledge. It was the knowledge that my father was actively missing an essential human part.

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
5.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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