A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (17 page)

A pine needle. In his hair.

I backed out of the kitchen, as though I could undo my entrance. But I could not.

After school, I met Greg at our apothecary rock. It was comforting to be with him because I never had to explain anything. He didn’t ask me why I sometimes looked frightened or had dark circles under my eyes. I imagined he knew something was wrong at my house but he also knew it was not something I could ever talk about. With Greg, I could be alone without having to be alone. It was like I was with an extension of myself.

And for a while, for as long as we were in the woods together, that’s all there was. There were no mothers and fathers. It was a whole other world and it was ours alone.

With Greg I was able to escape. And sometimes, more than anything else, that’s what I needed.

THIRTEEN

DOWN THE ROAD from our house, close enough that a human voice could travel there, lay a body of water so entirely still that the pine trees surrounding it were reflected in needle detail. At first glance, there didn’t appear to be any water at all, only forest and a sudden curious chill in the air. A levy sheltered the water from breezes, so on some days the surface never so much as trembled.

White signs posted on the land surrounding the water warned, NO TRESPASSING. PUBLIC WATER SUPPLY, TOWN OF AMHERST. But the signs did not apply to me. The reservoir was mine, as were the pine trees, the path framed by ferns, and the lady slipper orchids that bloomed only in the shade. The law I obeyed was never to pick their blooms—swollen, pink, and veined, the most human thing you could find in the woods.

The town of Amherst didn’t know there was a red tackle box hidden beneath the wooden footbridge. The town didn’t care that the slight peninsula that extended north into the water was overtaken with butterflies in the spring. Or that they would land on you all at once like a sentient blizzard. If you stood with your arms outstretched, you would have hundreds of wings all over your body, all of them beating, pulsing. And you would almost believe that you were about to become airborne.

The reservoir was mine.

“It’s twenty-nine feet deep here in the middle,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Greg asked.

“Because this is one foot,” I said, holding my hands a width apart. “And there’s about twenty-nine of these worth of string.”

I’d come out alone the day before and measured; tied a rock around my string and thrown it over the side of the raft. Really, what I wanted to do was drain the lake and see what was at the bottom. But since I couldn’t, I measured its depth instead.

Greg nodded. “That’s neat. Twenty-nine feet is a lot.”

We ate cucumber sandwiches that my mother had made. Our fingers were wet, which made the bread soggy and fall apart in our hands. Cucumber slices slipped out, landed on the rubber floor of the little boat. “These are good,” Greg said.

“I know.” Cucumber sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise—this was the taste of summer, like biting into the actual day itself.

We tossed the bread crusts overboard for the low-flying birds and saw the flickering shadows of their wings play across the ripples of our lazy wake. We paddled slowly to the shore. It was dark as we walked home and the tall grasses by the side of the road glittered with fireflies.

AT HOME MY father saw me kneeling before my mattress. I seldom knelt when I talked to God. 
Kneeling is for people who aren’t friends with him
, I thought. Kneeling was formal. Kneeling was for guests. You would kneel if you weren’t certain. Kneeling was wanting and showing, not knowing and believing. That’s just what 
I
 thought, at least.

But I was kneeling that night because I needed so much, so desperately. And what if I was wrong? What if kneeling was merely good manners? Like never putting your elbows on the table, the way my grandmother Carolyn taught me.

“Augusten, what are you doing down on your knees like that?” my father asked disdainfully.

I turned around as I stood up. I sat on my bed. “Nothing.”

He parked his fists on his hips and asked incredulously, “Son, were you 
praying
?”

The sheer disappointment on his face made my own cheeks burn. “A little,” I admitted.

“Oh, 
son
,” he said, rolling his eyes and lightly shaking his head from side to side. “Jesus Christ, Augusten. You’re much too old for this praying business, much too old.”

His eyes continued to bore into me as if the full magnitude of my dishonor was only just beginning to be revealed.

He continued. “Praying is something little kids do. Son, it’s like writing a letter to Santa. Now, you wouldn’t sit down there at your desk and write a letter to Santa anymore, would you? Praying is just exactly the same thing. You’re old enough now where you have to understand that if you want something in life, you are responsible for taking care of your needs yourself.”

Boldly, I said, “But you were a priest.”

He didn’t shift position, but I sensed a change, a certain tensing of his body. “Well, no. That’s technically not correct, I wasn’t a 
priest
. I was a preacher.” He waved his hand in the air to dismiss the distinction. “Son, there is nobody in life who is going to do anything 
for
 you. There isn’t a God in any 
traditional
 sense; a man up there in the sky who grants wishes like a magic genie or a wizard.” He laughed softly, even contemptuously. “Is that what you really believe, son? That there’s an all-knowing something or other up there in the sky with a magic wand who’s going to get you a new record player or whatever it is you’re asking for?”

I had been on my knees, moving my lips along with the silent prayer, because what I was asking for was 
that
 important.

God, please take my father away. Please make him leave. I am very afraid that he’s going to do something bad. There’s something wrong with him. And I am very worried that my mother and I won’t make it. She used to say he was dangerous and I didn’t understand. But now I do. If death is the only answer, please take him. If he doesn’t hurt me, I’m afraid I might hurt him. I’ve become quite good with the rifle, you know. I’m sure you’ve seen me. Unless you think I’m the one that’s bad and then you can take me. I won’t be mad at you.

When I spoke to my father my voice came out low and soft, almost a whisper. “I don’t really believe in a God that gives you new ice skates and stuff.” I kept to myself that when I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right beside me like a real best friend, watching and smiling and wishing he had a mouth.

My father stepped forward and slapped me on the shoulder, a rare and shocking instance of physical contact. “Okay, son, all right,” he said and walked out of my room. Without having to watch him, I knew for a fact that as he walked down the hall and into the kitchen, he turned off each light switch as he passed it. He then checked all the burners on the stove, even though nobody had cooked a thing all day—I’d had cold cuts from the package for dinner, pickles from a jar. Next, he would walk into the living room and peer at his thermometer-barometer unit, which was bolted to the wall. He’d repeat the figures in his head until he made it back into the kitchen where he would write them down on the top page of his diary. Next, he would pour himself a glass of vodka and carry it into the living room. He would sit in his rocking chair in the dark.

I didn’t know if it was because of what he said or just that I was getting older, but I soon stopped feeling God standing right beside me everywhere I went. I stopped talking to him when I was alone in the woods or under the bridge looking for diamonds among the river stones. I stopped asking God to protect me.

I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of 
yourself
 that was always 
there
 and always strong, even when you were not.

And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a cop-out? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.

If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me.

THERE WERE THREE of us. It almost felt like the house contained three caves, and each of us sat in the back of our own.

Sometimes I could hear my mother howl from inside hers. Over the sound of her endless typing, I could hear her forlorn, desperate wail. Like a wounded animal crouched in the corner, knowing it would soon run out of life.

When my father came near my cave, I could hear him breathing and grinding his teeth.

People believe in God because they can’t face being alone. It didn’t scare me to think of being alone in the world. It scared me that I wasn’t.

FOURTEEN

MY MOTHER COULD not bear to be in the house. A terrible anxiety consumed her. She swung from darkness to euphoria. “I think I have to kill myself” could become “They want me to read my poems on the radio!” in just an evening.

When she wasn’t in her office typing, she was talking on the phone or at the university meeting with her adviser to discuss her thesis, a book of poetry. Now that she was working toward her degree, she met friends for coffee at eleven at night. She went to movies she had no particular interest in seeing.

“Did you take your medication?” my father asked her every day.

The question infuriated her. The question was a switch that engaged her wrath. Per her psychiatrist’s orders, she took two Mellaril, eight Valium, and three Elavil each day but still she vacillated wildly, like an electric line outside in a storm. “I’m losing my mind. It’s exploding right out of my head,” she’d scream, clutching her skull.

She felt we should take a holiday. “We’ll take a trip to Martha’s Vineyard for four days.” When my father agreed to come it became a 
family
 trip. Minus my brother, of course, but then the four of us had never done anything together. We’d never gone anywhere together, not even to the grocery store. Even when my brother was younger and lived at home, he would hole up in his room.

It was odd. My brother had been part of a family of three, and now I was part of a family of three. We’d never been a family of four, not for long. And even though he and I shared the same parents, they were not the same 
people
 by the time I was born. My brother and I were truly raised in two different families, by two different sets of parents.

When he was born, they were young, smartly dressed, and freshly married. They must have still felt much hope about the future, starting a family, making a life together. A photograph of the three of them shows my father smiling, my brother eating cotton candy from a hollow paper stalk. My mother looked so young I didn’t recognize her, the expression on her face so tentative and fragile.

I was born into their smoking, oily wreckage. Married almost ten years by then, my mother was suicidal and my father, suffering with psoriatic arthritis, was consumed by alcoholism.

He stopped preparing for his classes, and taught them mechanically, dispassionately, from muscle memory. He wondered if he should just shoot himself in the head. He must have wondered, too, if he should take his family with him.

I’d asked my mother, “Was I on purpose or an accident?” And she’d replied, “You were the most wanted baby in the world.” But I knew this wasn’t true.

Every year on my birthday she told me about the silver, blustery October night that I was born. How she’d started to feel contractions and she knew that labor had begun. “You need to drive me to the hospital now,” she’d told my father. But he’d wanted her to make him some spaghetti first.

Excited people can’t eat. For the entire week before Christmas I could barely keep a thing down except candy canes and chocolate Santas. If I’d 
really
 been the most wanted baby in the world, if he had wanted me even a little, he would have been in the car, with the heater running and the radio tuned to a station that played something to take her mind off the pain, oldies like Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw. Instead, he made her boil water in a pot. Fry ground beef in an iron skillet. Heat a jar of sauce. She grated cheese, wiped the counter clean. She left the grater in the sink to deal with later.

More than once my mother told me she’d been overpowered by my drunk father, pinned to the bed, “taken.” It was vile to imagine my parents having sex, especially if my father had forced it to happen. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I believed occured.

My brother remembered when “things were more normal.” He’d told me stories from 
before
. Days when she made tuna casserole and planted flowers.

It was like the nuclear war I dreaded as a little boy had turned the sky from blue to gray. There were no trees and the rivers, streams, and oceans were brown, and the only remaining nourishment was expired food in dented cans that we went ahead and ate anyway. But my brother remembered cows and birds and white snow. My brother remembered the sun. That’s how it felt. I recalled the photograph of him with the cotton candy, and I thought, 
then
.

He got to the table first and ate all the meat and left me a pile of empty bones to pick at, to sustain myself with slivers of fat and gristle.

Still, I was excited about the “family” trip. It had only happened twice before. Once, we went to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, but we drove straight back that same night, getting home at three in the morning. The second trip was to Newport, Rhode Island, to look at the mansions—my idea. And now this rare third outing.

We would leave in a week.

My father bought a map of Massachusetts from AAA. He unfolded it on top of the kitchen table, arranging beside it a pad of paper and a row of four ballpoint pens, their edges flush with the pad. At night, my parents planned the vacation and I stood between them, wiggling with excitement, chattering at them endlessly.

“Will we have lobster?”

“Will we see whales?”

“Will we swim in the ocean?”