A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (20 page)

I heard my mother gagging. And then she was coughing, spitting.

“You fucking bitch,” my father said. Hateful, ugly. It was shocking to hear. Like putting your ear to a shell to hear the ocean and instead receiving a bite.

My mother wept. “John, please. Please let me 
be
.”

Suddenly, my father was shouting. “You wanted the dog dead, I had him killed. Goddamn you, why won’t you ever show me a little fucking gratitude.”

The sound of my mother’s crying warbled, she moaned miserably. “John, 
please
,” she begged.

I heard the springs of their bed creak, then a frantic, rhythmic squealing from the mattress as though it were screaming. My mother’s muffled cries. My father’s low, guttural curses: 
Bitch. Whore. Cunt
.

I crept back up the stairs, the sounds of their lovemaking sickening me. My father had done what she asked with the dog and now he wanted sex and she wouldn’t give it to him. I was pretty sure this was what was going on. I couldn’t help but entertain the sickening notion that I was overhearing the night of my conception all over again.

On my way to my bedroom, I passed by the kitchen and saw the dog collar, still there on the table.

What was happening to us?

SIXTEEN

THE MOHAWK TRAIL was originally a footpath used by Native Americans to walk from what is now Boston to Upstate New York. Today it’s paved and carries buses packed with tourists, peering out the windows at the fall leaves. The highway winds through the mountains and is peppered with motels, fruit stands, and maple syrup houses, thick smoke pumping endlessly from their chimneys. There are tacky gift shops all along the trail, and one of them has a giant fiberglass Indian standing guard in front. He must have been twenty feet tall. And not once had we driven past him when I did not whine for my parents to stop.

On this day, though, my mother couldn’t stop because she was in a hurry. “We just don’t have time. After we pick up my cards in Greenfield, we have to head straight home because I’m meeting Gayle at five.”

My mother had sketched an image of a boy in a corduroy coat standing in front of a maple tree, lifting the lid on a bucket attached to the tree and peering at the sap inside. The boy was me and she’d found a local printer to turn the pen-and-ink illustration into note cards. She would pack twelve cards with envelopes into plastic sandwich bags and affix a round white sticker on which she wrote in pencil, “$3.99.” Already, the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop had told her they would carry the cards—her Emily Dickinson series had sold nicely.

Greenfield was about forty minutes from our house. There was something depressing about the town, with so many of its Main Street stores empty, for rent signs taped crookedly in the windows. But I liked Greenfield because its bones were grand. Main Street was wide and elegant. Homes in the town had rolling grass lawns, neoclassical columns, and old fruit trees in front. Greenfield reminded me of a beautiful grandmother that nobody ever visited, but she kept squares of lace on the arms of her sofa anyway.

There was not one interesting thing about the printing shop. A receptionist took my mother’s receipt, told us she’d be only a few minutes, and stepped into the back. Restaurant menus, violation notices, and annual reports were hung on the wall and there was a row of hard plastic seats beneath them. There 
was
 a gumball machine, but it was that handicapped gum, with a picture of a child in crutches attached to the glass ball. It was only a penny and I was pretty sure you’d get more than one piece, but I also figured it would be stale and I’d end up spitting the squares of crackle-coated gum into the trash can, so I just sat down and watched the wall.

After ten torturous minutes, the receptionist reappeared carrying a long blue box with one of my mother’s cards taped to the front.

“This looks wonderful, oh I’m just delighted,” my mother said, examining the card. “What do you think?” she asked me.

I loved the card. She’d drawn me from a photograph and her drawing looked just like the picture. It was neat to think that all these people, strangers, would buy me and send me to their friends. “I like it,” I told her.

She paid by check and we left. As we were driving out of town, a storefront caught my eye. “Quick, stop!” I shouted.

“What! What is it?” she cried, jerking the car over to the curb and slamming on the brakes. She looked left, then right to make sure she hadn’t hit a dog, a bicyclist.

I pointed to a small bookshop, the window filled with crosses, plastic statues of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A religious bookstore. My mother was puzzled. “Augusten, why on earth did you make me stop for this store?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Had the glint of a gold cross caught my eye? Had my eye been drawn to the deep, royal blue of the sky in a painting of Jesus? “All of a sudden, it just seemed like we had to stop,” I told her honestly.

My mother had pulled blindly over, but the car had landed at a meter. There was parallel parking all along the street and almost no other cars. “Well, we can run in for a second,” she said, checking her watch. “If you really want to.”

I didn’t really want to now that I saw what it was, but since I’d made her stop I said, “Okay, let’s go inside.”

She didn’t bother putting anything in the meter. It wasn’t like there was any competition for the space.

A bell attached to the door jangled when we opened it and the tinkling made me happy because it made the store seem quaint.

I scanned the little shop, but there was nothing there for me. Just counters filled with small statues, rows of Bibles, framed prints of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Parting of the Red Sea.

But in the back was a glass display case and I walked directly there. The case was filled with jewelry: rings and bracelets, necklaces and pins.

My eye had already landed on a small silver cross. There was a slight flair at the base of the cross, and the silver had a grain, as if somebody had pressed the cross against a grass mat. It hung from a dainty silver chain.

“Mom, I have to have this,” I said as she approached me. “I really need it. I’ll buy it myself, if you give me an advance on my allowance.”

My mother leaned forward. “What do you need? That little cross right there? Augusten, why do you need that?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. And I didn’t. Why was I so drawn to it? Yes, I liked jewelry. Digital watches with black faces, mood rings. But this cross wasn’t even shiny and it wasn’t gold and it didn’t have an embedded gemstone. “I just know I need it.”

My mother studied my face for a moment, then she looked back at the cross. A white paper tag dangled from its chain. Nine dollars. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll get you the cross if you really need it.”

The saleswoman was in her late sixties, bony with no extra flesh to spare. Her smile was tight, withholding, and her eyes darted between me and my mother. It must have made her suspicious to see a young man pestering his mother for a little girl’s catechism cross. Still, she opened the glass cabinet and hooked the silver chain over her nail, lifting it out. “This is what you’d like to see?” she asked.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “We’ll take it. You can just wrap it up please.”

She smiled her tight smile and said, “Very well.” She laid it on a sheet of white tissue paper, folded, and folded again. Then she taped the edges and handed me the package.

My mother paid and we left. This time, I didn’t even hear the bell I was so strangely excited.

Once inside the car, I tore the tissue paper open, shook the cross out in my hand. I opened the clasp and placed the chain around my neck. I borrowed the rearview mirror to see that the cross dangled just below the hollow of my neck. It was tiny, a first piece of jewelry for a little Catholic girl. I didn’t care.

Being given a dollhouse a few years back had fortified me against such trivial mortifications.

THE NEXT MORNING I folded the backseat of the wagon flat and helped my father load the car with green trash bags for a trip to the dump. My mother had mentioned that she might come, too, so I kept the front seat clear of bags so the three of us could squeeze in together.

Once the car was packed, my father climbed in behind the wheel and pulled the car forward to the middle of the driveway. I ran up alongside and when he stopped I opened the passenger-side door. “Wait,” I said, “I think my mother’s coming.” Then I climbed in and slid to the center of the bench seat, leaving the door open for her.

We waited. I craned my neck to look back at the house, waiting for her to appear. Finally, the screen door opened and my mother stood in the doorway.

I would have grinned at her. I would have scooted over to the edge of the seat, leaned out and waved. I would have called to her, “Hurry!” But I did none of these things because in an instant, my father suddenly exploded.

His hands clamped down on the steering wheel.

His knuckles, bone-white against the raw, scaling, furious red of his gripping fingers.

I saw his face in profile, the blood-filled purple color of internal organs; a spleen, the interior of a stomach. His teeth were a cage, two rows of a grimace, cracking together. 
Klack, klack
. No tongue.

His head swiveled on the stalk of his neck, cords in his throat tightened like cables beneath the skin. The whites of his eyes were more yellow than white, webbed with red veins finer than hairs. The eyes bore into me and from the pit of his body he growled.

He threw the car into drive and I hit the back of the seat as his foot crushed the gas.

The door bounced and slammed shut. I turned in my seat and saw my mother standing on the front steps, the telephone receiver stretched all the way from the kitchen, falling from her hands, her mouth in a horrified 
O
.

Gravel exploded against the underside of the car. When we hit the end of the driveway, he didn’t stop; he turned left and stomped on the gas like he was trying to stomp a rat. I screamed for him to stop. “Stop!”

But he snarled or barked—an ugly noise that human people never make—and the car roared forward, rear wheels fishtailing, the engine making a horrendous whine.

Crouched against the door, away, as far away from him as I could get, I looked at his face but his gaze was fixed. I followed his sight line out the window and saw the pond and just beyond it: a telephone pole.

He was steering for the pole.

Now, I turned my body in the opposite direction and hooked my fingers under the door handle. I pulled and the door opened.

I leaped out of the car.

I landed hard on the packed dirt, rolled, rolled again, sticks cracked beneath my back and I bounced against the embankment. Stillness. And then 
up
. I had to get up.

Not hurt, fast, I ran. I ran home.

My lungs were too small, too hot, it felt like they were melting in my chest. At the bottom of our driveway, I saw home. My mother, she was there, she was running, she was calling my name, “Augusten, 
Augusten
.” And hearing my name, hearing 
her voice
 call my name made me know I was alive but it terrified me, too, because it turned what just happened into something true that I could never wipe away. Hearing her call my name, seeing her run for me, was the same as light striking film.

I was in her arms. She was strong, wrapped around me. And then we were running up the driveway. Together.

Inside the house we separated. There was no speaking, we just knew. She ran downstairs to her bedroom; I ran to mine. I gathered what I could carry and ran back out of the house. She had done the same thing. She opened the hatchback and we threw it all in together.

I climbed into her red Vega, reached for the door to slam it shut.

“No,” she ordered, “you get in the back.” No fear in her voice. Nothing vague.

I hopped back out, folded the seat forward, and climbed in. For a moment we sat parked in a cut-out perpendicular to the driveway. After just a moment, through the windshield I saw my father as he walked toward the driveway from the road. What had happened? Had he crashed the car?

“Lie down,” my mother said.

“I don’t want—”

“Down!”
 she screamed and I obeyed.

She stepped on the gas and I rose. I sat up and looked. I had to.

My father was frozen in place, car versus man. My mother rolled down her window and leaned her head out. 
“Get out of the way.”

My father remained standing exactly where he was.

My mother stepped on the gas.

I knew only this: My mother would not stop the car and she would not swerve around him. I let the sudden forward momentum throw me to the floor. I didn’t want to see.

At the last instant, my father stepped out of the way because suddenly we were on the road. We were driving.

I was shaking uncontrollably. I was saying, “He wouldn’t stop. He was so mad, and he was going so fast and I knew he was going to crash us into something.”

“I saw,” she said simply. “I screamed for you and then I ran after you.”

“What happens now?” I asked.

“We’re never going back,” she said.

And then she said it again. “It’s okay. We’re never going back.”

I touched the silver cross that hung from my neck.

WE CHECKED INTO a Howard Johnson’s motor lodge. My mother paid in cash and used an alias, Louisa Ledford. She locked the door, then put on the chain. We dragged the heavy, vinyl-backed drapes closed. We didn’t turn on any lamps. The only light in the room came from the television, which I watched muted.

After this, we stayed a few nights with one of my mother’s friends and her family. Even though my mother and I were together, I’d never felt so distant from her. It was as if 
she
 was on the run and I had just come along, like her pocketbook. Except she never let her pocketbook out of her sight. I knew, somehow, that I was losing her, that she was already gone. Her eyes frightened me, there was too much white. Her breath was all wrong. She was too 
animal
. Something was wrong with her mind.

The construction of my world was failing.