A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (3 page)

Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.

•    •    •

IN TIME, I began to feel I had no father. When I made friends with a girl my own age, it was our mutual fatherless status that bonded us. Tina’s father lived in China, which was so far away I could not conceive of it, as incomprehensible as if he lived in the year 1600. For her birthday, Tina’s mother baked a red velvet cake and although I declined a slice, feeling too anxious to eat in front of strangers, I would think about that cake for years. I’d never seen red cake before. What was wrong with me that I would decline it? All the other kids had accepted a slice. Why hadn’t I? Why had my stomach been wrenched into an impossible knot? Why was I filled with dread at the prospect of being seen consuming it? When I thought about this some more, I realized it was not the cake that upset me, but the community surrounding the cake. It was the other kids. I knew they’d end up teasing me and I didn’t want to have a mouth full of cake when one of them finally reached out and punched me in the stomach, which I was sure would happen. Better to refuse the cake and be allowed to sit alone, apart from the table. Better, always, to be self-contained.

Shortly after this party my mother announced that we were moving back home to live with my father. There was no transition, because the house was packed and the boxes were moved while I was at school. One day, we were simply home again.

My father greeted us without any fanfare. He patted me on the head three times and stiffly hugged my mother but she pulled away. Then he sat in the living room and watched TV. He didn’t even notice that I was taller and bigger on the inside. And it was as if none of it had happened: the violin and that strange school where I never fit in, my friend with a father in China, the red velvet cake.

Back home, I rode my new bike down the driveway but tumbled off and scraped my knee. My father bolted the training wheels back onto the bike, which made my face turn deep red with shame. “You just weren’t ready,” he explained.

Except I had been ready. I’d been riding for weeks without training wheels, and if only he’d seen me he would know this. “I don’t need them, really!” I cried, but he installed them anyway, wrenching the bolts on hopelessly tight.

I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn’t been there, simply didn’t believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing.

THREE

THE COLD WOOD floor in my bedroom was always a bit of a shock in the morning, a spank to the soles of my feet that made me hop onto the square of carpet in the center of my room. There, I sat down and put on my socks, remembering my aunt Curtis had taught me how to get my heel in the right place. She’d flown up from Georgia the winter my mother and I had moved back into the Shutesbury house and even though I was pretty old now, seven, I still saw her showing me how to line up the heel of the sock with my foot. I also remained convinced that she peed through her panty hose, because I’d seen her sit on the toilet and pee and it didn’t look like she pulled down her hose at all. She insisted that she most certainly did and merely hadn’t pulled her hose down 
all the way
, because I was standing right there watching her.

After my socks, I put on my green jeans, which I insisted on wearing because of Mr. Green Jeans, who was Captain Kangaroo’s sidekick. Green jeans, I was almost certain, possessed some sort of rare power. And while I wasn’t yet sure what this power was and what it would enable me to do, I knew I would eventually find out. I suspected I might be able to fly when wearing them, but hadn’t had the opportunity yet to test this theory. I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren’t called turtlenecks, I wouldn’t have worn them.

Skidding into the hallway, I clutched the door frame and looped around to the door right next to mine and opened it. In the dark, I saw a hulking form beneath the covers. And then there was the stench that accompanied it. I didn’t much like him but he was mine so I turned on the light. “Get up, get up, get up.”

Eight years older, John Elder, named for the “Elder” side of the family, was my Big Brother. Big and awful is more like it. Big and stinky, big and greasy, big and dumb. One time he tricked me into looking inside this big hole he’d dug in the yard, and then he knocked me over into it headfirst and started to bury me with only my legs sticking out. My hatred for him nearly caused my skin to steam, and I was constantly plotting revenge for one thing or another.

The other thing was that I’d experienced some confusion about him, because first we went to Mexico without him, and then my mother and I lived in the little Amherst apartment without him. So was he temporary, on loan from some other family? But my mother said, “Of course he’s your big brother. He always has been, he always will be. John Elder used to hold you when you were a baby.”

“He did?” I was horrified that she would let him hold a baby, prone as he was to either dropping or throwing things, if not plugging them into electrical outlets just to see what would happen.

But now we were back in the same house together, I guessed, forever.

“Quit it, varmint,” he hollered. “Turn off the light.”

“But it snowed,” I told him. “Come on, it snowed.”

He liked the snow as much as I did. It created an immediate truce to any and all ongoing wars. He threw off the covers, grabbed his thick glasses and shoved them onto his greasy face, then followed me down the hall to the closet.

We both had snowsuits, blue. We put them on side by side in the front hall near the door. And while he seemed to have no trouble at all, I kept getting caught up in the legs, then I couldn’t work the zippers. By the time I finally managed to get myself inside the thing, I was so hot that I was sweating and only wanted to rip it off. My arms stuck out from my sides and I had to walk stiff-legged. To get down the stairs I had to slide on my stomach feet first, using my hands as brakes.

When we entered the basement my brother said, “Watch that furnace. It eats small children like you.”

“It does not,” I said, believing not one word out of his mouth but keeping my distance from the furnace nonetheless.

We opened the door to the backyard and white light filled the room.

Side by side, we stood wordlessly in the doorway, just looking out at the yard blanketed by so much impossible white. It was wondrous. Snow clung to the limbs, and they sagged under the weight of it. Even the slenderest finger of a branch was piled high with white and I stopped breathing without realizing it, because just my breath might disturb the tenuously balanced snow. For a moment, the world was perfectly still and clean and miraculous.

“You go first,” I said.

He hesitated.

We were both afraid to dent the perfection of the white.

“On the count of three. Ready? One, two . . .” And we leaped, together. “Three!” we shouted, the word expelled from our lungs by the force of our landing. I’d plunged chest-deep into the drift in front of the door and now I couldn’t stop laughing. The temptation to throw my body around the yard and sink into the snow was nearly irresistible. No longer were there any rocks, sticks, or snakes back here. There was just this icy fluff everywhere. Magic protection.

WITH SHOVELS WE dug a network of tunnels deep enough so that we could crawl throughout the yard, invisible. “You still there?” we called out to each other, just our disembodied voices floating over white.

LATER, OUR MOTHER stood on the deck above us. She sipped her black coffee from a mug with the Morton salt girl printed on the side. Her red bathrobe was knotted at the waist, the bow tied with only one loop. “Where are my boys? Where have they gone?” she called, pretending not to see us in our tunnels.

Both of us crawled to our nearest exit, popped our heads up like prairie dogs and looked at each other, thrilled and surprised by the distance we’d made. The tunnels really 
were
 as long and winding as they felt.

And then a few moments later she appeared at the basement door holding our father’s camera. “Here, now,” she said. “Why don’t you boys crawl down into this tunnel right here, then poke your heads out and let me get a picture.” She fiddled with the dials on the silver and black camera, the strap looped around her neck.

Years later, I stared at this photograph, mesmerized, disbelieving. But there it was: proof that my brother and I had grown up together in the same house, evidence that we were brothers, that we had been a pair at one point in time.

I was so happy.

In the picture, you can see it: my snowsuit, the sun behind me, my happiness.

As we expanded our tunnels, connected them, built emergency exits, the driveway was being plowed by Mr. Sheffield, my school bus driver.

Later, our father came outside to shovel the front steps and all the way down to the driveway. My brother joined him and the two of them scraped their shovels to the bare gravel.

I was too small to do any useful shoveling. I watched.

Watching them work together like this, I understood that they had some kind of 
something
together. My brother had been born before me so of course he had been a part of my father’s life for longer. Normally, I never thought about those extra years they had lived together as a family. 
The family
 hadn’t really begun, I assumed, until I was born. But I was wrong and the proof was just before me, two shovels in hand, a bank of snow growing larger.

I LOVED LIVING in the red house in the woods, with its black deck that was surrounded on all sides by those towering pines. There were always birds on the branches, small gray birds with dark little apple-seed eyes. They were skittish things that twitched and moved jerkily. Standing on the deck and looking in any direction, you always sensed movement but couldn’t quite see where it was coming from. It was peaceful. And with the large sliding glass doors to the deck open, an actual wind would blow all through the house, one of my mother’s operas on the record player blending with the breeze so that the dramatic high notes could make your hair blow around.

My parents saw their psychiatrist together in Northampton on Saturdays. Sometimes, they saw him more than just once a week. I felt insulated, protected.

Mexico and that strange, lonely apartment seemed so far away. I had my big brother and I had my mother. I had tuna melts on Roman Meal bread and a fireplace. Best of all we had three dogs. Cream was a smooth-coated, pale tan golden retriever mix. She was clever and would ring the doorbell when she wanted to come inside. Also, she knew she wasn’t allowed on the couch and when we came home, there she’d be, sleeping curled up next to the door. But when you went over to the sofa and put your hand on the indentation of the cushion, it was warm.

Brutus was a black and tan rottweiler, fearless and bold. My uncle Mercer had sent him up from Georgia because he was worried he’d be hit by a car on Mercer’s busy street. He wasn’t as smart as Cream, but he had his charms, acting as my bodyguard when I played my Arriving at the Oscars! game outside, using the blue wheelbarrow as my limousine.

And last, there was Grover, a little black elkhound with a curlicue tail. Grover, unlike the other dogs, wasn’t allowed inside. He was christened our “outdoor” dog by my father and he practically never left the deck where he slept, pressed against the sliding glass doors.

It upset me that one of our dogs wasn’t allowed inside, and for no reason that I could understand. Because his coat was long? Because he was smaller than the other dogs? It didn’t make any sense to me and when I asked my father, “Why can’t Grover come inside?” he always replied, “Because Grover is an outside dog.” Like there was a special breed of dog that might die if exposed to a sofa.

Even on the coldest winter night when Grover was no more than a black, furry mound curled into himself and pressed up against the house, my father wouldn’t let him in.

Sometimes, I let bad thoughts linger. Like, if my father made Grover sleep outside in the cold, what stopped him from locking 
me
 out there, too? He had two sons; what if he decided to make the younger one the “outside” son?

I WAS ALWAYS excited when my mother went shopping for fabric and patterns because I loved the smell of the drawers where the patterns were kept at the stores. It was a sweet, clean smell, unlike anything else and it was the same at every store. She bought patterns for dresses, curtains, tablecloths, vests, and skirts. Then she sat for hours at her black sewing machine, her big toe working the foot pedal, a row of needles between her lips. Every few minutes she would reach up and take one of these needles, insert it into the fabric. I wanted desperately to touch the smooth, warm machine. But she almost never let me touch it, worried the needle would stitch my fingers. It never crossed my mind that the sewing machine was not a pet with feelings, needs, and desires. I could not fathom why she hadn’t given it a name and I suggested many names, often pinching her on the arm so she would finally look at me so that I could say, “Well, what about Penny? That’s a good name.”

Tuna melts, my treasured dogs, my mother’s nameless sewing machine pet—I loved all of these home things. And the thick, tarry scent of the railroad ties that formed the steps leading to the concrete stairs of the house. The deep, shag carpeting in the living room, which would be like a huge forest if you were small enough to walk around inside of it.

Most of all, I loved my father.

He was rare and extraordinary because I seldom saw him. He was always at his university, being a teacher, so when he came home, it was the biggest event of my day—unless I’d been able to find money in the sofa cushions or in the pockets of one of the coats hanging in the closet.

Hours before he was due I would begin asking my mother, “When will he be home? Is he almost here? How much longer?” I patrolled the house, walking from the living room to the dining room, through the kitchen and into the foyer, down the hall. I checked each bedroom before going downstairs, where I searched my parents’ bedroom and the basement, even under the stairs. I had to make sure he hadn’t come home without my notice, that he wasn’t hiding somewhere.