Eileen (7 page)

At home I gulped water from the tap and swallowed a handful of laxatives which I kept below the kitchen sink. Then I sat down and drank a beer. My father raised his hand, saluting me gravely, mocking my mood.

“Cops brought whiskey,” he said, pointing to a bottle of Glenfiddich with a bow tied around its neck. It sat by the door to the cellar stairs. “How was the movie?”

He seemed calm, in a better mood. Gone was the cutting fury of earlier. He seemed to want to talk.

“It was dumb,” I answered honestly. “Should I open it?” I went and picked up the whiskey.

“By any means necessary,” my father said. I didn't always hate him. Like all villains, he had his good side, too. Most days he didn't mind that the house was a mess. He hated the neighbors, as I did, and he would rather have been shot in the head than admit defeat. He made me laugh now and then, like when he'd attempt to read the papers, bristling with contempt at any headline he managed to decipher, one eye shut tight, finger shaking at the words, drunk as he was. He still ranted about the Reds. He loved Goldwater and despised the Kennedys, though
he made me swear I'd keep that a secret. He was a hard-liner about certain duties. He had a stern attachment to things like paying the bills on time, for example. He'd sober up once a month for that task and I'd sit next to him, opening the envelopes, licking the stamps, making out the checks for him to sign. “That's terrible, Eileen,” he'd say. “Start again. No bank would accept a check written like that, like a little girl made it out.” Even on his dry days he could barely hold a pen.

That night I poured us each a few fingers of whiskey and pulled my chair up next to his, stuck my frozen hands toward the burning oven.

“Doris Day's a fat hack,” I said.

“Waste of time going to the movies if you ask me,” he mumbled. “Anything good on the tube?”

“Some nice static, if you're in the mood,” I said. The television had been broken a long time.

“Ought to have someone come take a look at it. Bulb's broken. Must be the bulb.” We'd had the same exchange once a week for years.

“Everything's a waste of time,” I said, collapsing a bit in my chair.

“Have a drink,” my father grumbled, sipping his. “Cops brought me good whiskey,” he said again. “That Dalton boy looks like some kind of weasel.” The Daltons lived across the street. He stopped, paused. “You hear that?” He put his hand out, perked his ears. “Hoodlums are rowdy tonight. What day is it?”

“Saturday,” I said.

“That's why. Hungry as rats.” He finished his whiskey, absentmindedly fumbled through the folds of the blanket spread across his lap, pulled up a half-empty bottle of gin. “How was the movie? How's my Joanie?” He was like that. His mind was not quite right.

“She's fine, Dad.”

“Little Joanie,” he said wistfully, somberly. He rubbed his chin, raised his eyebrows. “The kids grow up,” he said. We stared into the hot oven like it was a crackling fireplace. I warmed my thawing fingers, poured myself more whiskey, pictured the moon and stars swirling as they would through the windshield if I'd sped off the side of that cliff and down onto the rocks earlier that evening, the glittering of broken glass over the frozen snow, the black ocean.

“Joanie,” my father repeated, reverently. Despite her whorish ways, my father adored my sister, pined for her, it seemed—“my dear, sweet Joanie”—spoke of her with such admiration and decency. “My good little girl.” Those last years in X-ville, I'd stay up in the attic most times she came to visit. I couldn't stand to watch how he'd give her money, eyes filling with tears of pride and honor, and how they loved each other—if love was what that was—in a way I could never understand. She could do no wrong. Although she was older than me, Joanie was his baby, his angel, his heart.

As for me, no matter what I did, he was certain it was the wrong thing to do, and told me so. If I came down the stairs holding a book or a magazine, he said, “Why do you waste your time reading? Go for a walk outside. You're pale as my ass.”
And if I bought a stick of butter, he would hold it between his fingers and say, “I can't eat a stick of butter for dinner, Eileen. Be reasonable. Be smart for once.” When I walked through the front door, his response was always, “You're late,” or “You're home early,” or “You've got to go out again, we're in short supply.” Although I wished him dead, I did not want him to die. I wanted him to change, be good to me, apologize for the half decade of grief he'd given me. And also, it pained me to imagine the inevitable pomp and sentimentality of his funeral. The trembling chins and folded flag, all that nonsense.

Joanie and I were never really close growing up. She was always much more personable and happier than I was, and being around her made me feel stiff and awkward and ugly. At her birthday party one year, she teased me for being too shy to dance, forced me to stand and grabbed my hips in her hands, then squatted down by my nether regions and rotated my body side to side as though I were a puppet, a rag doll. Her friends laughed and danced and I sat back down. “You're ugly when you pout, Eileen,” my dad had said, snapping a picture. Things like that happened all the time. She left home at seventeen and abandoned me for a better life with that boyfriend of hers.

I'm reminded of one Fourth of July when I must have been twelve, since Joanie is four years older and she'd just gotten her license to drive. We'd come home from an afternoon at the beach to find our parents hosting a barbecue in our backyard for the entire X-ville police department, a rare social event for the Dunlops. A rookie, whom I recognized from around town—his little sister had some sort of disability, I recall—was made to
sit next to me at the picnic table, a situation that afforded my father a chance to joke to the boy that Joanie and I were “jailbait.” The meaning of this term eluded me until years later, but I never forgot him saying it, and I'm still resentful. I remember it irritated my thighs to sit on the raw pine board set up on two pails filled with rocks that served as a bench at this barbecue, and when I went inside to change out of my swimsuit, the boy followed me into the kitchen and tried to kiss me. I refused his advance by steering my head back and away from his, but he took me by the shoulders and spun me around, gripping my wrists behind my back. “You're under arrest,” he joked, and reached his hand up my shorts and pinched me. I ran to the attic, where I stayed for the rest of the night. Nobody missed me. I know other young women have suffered far worse than this, and I myself went on to suffer plenty, but this experience in particular was utterly humiliating. A psychoanalyst may term it something like a formative trauma, but I know little about psychology and reject the science entirely. People in that profession, I'd say, should be watched very closely. If we were living several hundred years ago, my guess is they'd all be burned as witches.

Back then, on that Saturday night in X-ville, the whiskey dwindled fast. My father was asleep and I was on my way down to the basement toilet, burping up the liquor churning in my stomach and about to explode out the other end from the laxatives. I was drunk, tripped and would have killed myself on the steps had I not been gripping the splintery banister like it was the handrail of a sinking ship. I'd tripped and fallen down those
stairs once before, when I was a child running from my mother who was chasing me with a wooden spoon and screaming, “Clean your room!” or something like that. I split my lip and bumped my head on the way down, scraped my hands and knees when I hit the hard dirt floor. I recall looking up at the yellow rectangle of light in the kitchen from the foot of the stairs, my mother's silhouette appearing like a paper cutout. She said nothing to me. She simply shut the door. How many hours did I spend down there, hurt and terrified? It was dark and full of dust and cobwebs and a dank, moist smell, gray steel tools, the boiler, an old-fashioned toilet with a yank hanging from the ceiling that smelled of old urine. Mice. I got over my childhood fear of the dark that day, I suppose. Nothing came at me—no angry spirits attacked me, no restless ghosts tried to suck out my soul. They left me alone down there, which was just as painful.

By midnight I was back on that cold cellar floor, panting with the effort that my body had exerted in emptying my innards, thanks to the laxatives. The toilet tank ran hard. Part of me, I remember, wished one of my father's dark angels would materialize from the musty shadows and yank me down into its underworld. Alas, no one came. The darkness spun and spun and then it stopped, and so I floated up the cellar stairs and through the cold kitchen and up to my attic and fell asleep, exhausted, pacified, and utterly miserable.

T
hat Sunday morning I woke up hungover on my cot in the attic, my father calling up to me to help him get ready for morning Mass. That meant buttoning his shirt, and holding the bottle to his lips because his hands were too shaky. I wasn't very well myself, of course, vision still blurred from the whiskey, my body a limp rag wrung hard by the laxatives the night before.

“I'm cold,” my father said, shivering. He tugged at his unshaved jaw and winced, looked at me as if to say, “Get the razor.” And I did. I lathered up the cream and shaved him right there in the kitchen, standing over the sink full of dirty dishes, a salad bowl full of cigar ash, moldy bits of bread green as pennies here and there. It may not sound all that bad to you, but it was pretty grim living there. My father's moods and explosions were exhausting. He was so often upset. And I was always afraid of displeasing him by accident, or else I was so angry that I would try to displease him deliberately. We played games like
an old married couple, and he was always winning. “You smell like hell,” he said to me that morning as I curved the razor around his jaw.

So of course I felt like killing him sometimes. I could have slit his throat that morning. But I said nothing: I didn't want him to know how much he displeased me. It was important to me that he not know he had the power to make me miserable. It was also important not to let on just how much I wanted to get away from him. The more I thought about leaving him, the more I worried he might chase after me. I figured he could rustle up his friends in the police department, call a statewide search for the car, plaster my face in “Wanted” posters up and down the eastern seaboard. But that was all just fantasy, really. I knew he'd forget all about me when I was gone. And it seems he did. Back then I reasoned that if I were to leave, someone would step up to take care of him. His sister could hire help. Joanie could make an effort for once. Not everything was my responsibility, I told myself. He'd be fine without me. What was the worst that could happen?

When my aunt arrived to pick him up that day, she beeped and we bustled out. Her name was Ruth. She was my father's only sibling. My father waited on the porch—oh, for one of those icicles to break off and lodge in his brain—while I walked around to the driveway, unlocked the trunk of the car and pulled out a pair of his shoes.

“Not those,” he hollered. “Those have a hole.”

I pulled out another and held them up.

“OK,” he said. My aunt barely looked up at me, pinched face
squinting from the glare on the snow. I waved as I passed her car. She did not wave back. On the porch I tied my father's laces and sent him on his way.

What a good girl I was, in hindsight, buttoning my father's shirt and tying his shoes and all. I knew in my heart that I was good, I suppose. Here was the crux of my dilemma: I felt like killing my father, but I didn't want him to die. I think he understood. I'd probably told him as much the night before, despite my instinct toward secrecy. We'd stay up and drink together often, just my father and I. I have a vague memory from that Saturday night of laying my face down on the kitchen table and yawning, looking up at him with the bottle of whiskey in his one hand, gin in the other. “Not very nice, Eileen,” he'd said, referring, I think, to my splayed legs, lipstick all smeared. This wasn't unusual for us. We weren't friendly, but we did talk sometimes. We argued. I'd wave my hands around. I'd say too much. I did the same thing later on in life, when I drank with other men, mostly stupid men. I expected them to find everything about me interesting. I expected them to see my drunken wordiness as a kind of coy gesture, as though I were saying, “I'm just a child, innocent to my own foolishness. Aren't I cute? Love me and I'll turn a blind eye to your faults.” With those other men, this tactic earned me brief sessions of affection until I became soured and saw that I had defiled myself by appealing to them in the first place. I failed and failed with my father to win his affection in this way, blabbering on about my ideas, regurgitating barely read synopses from the backs of books at the kitchen table, talking about how I felt about myself, life, the
times in which we lived. I could get very dramatic after just a few drinks. “People act like everything's OK all the time. But it isn't. Nothing is OK at all. People die. Children starve. Poor people are freezing to death out there. It's not fair. It isn't right. Nobody seems to care. La-dee-dah, they say. Dad. Dad!” I'd slap the table to make sure he was listening. “We're in hell, aren't we? This is hell, isn't it?” He'd just roll his eyes. It drove me mad.

Once he'd gone off to church that morning, I cooked myself scrambled eggs with ketchup and heated a beer on the stove, my hangover cure of choice. That doesn't work, of course. Don't bother trying it. But it did feel good to eat after having emptied my guts into the basement toilet the night before. I felt I had a blank slate, a clean beginning, though I don't think I showered that morning. I hated showering, especially in winter since the hot water was spotty. I liked to languish in my own filth as long as I could tolerate it. Why I did this, I can't say for sure. It certainly seems like a rather lame way to rebel, and furthermore it filled me with constant anxiety that others were sniffing my body and judging me by its odor: disgusting. My father said it himself: I smelled like hell. I dressed myself in my mother's old Sunday clothes—gray trousers, black sweater, hooded woolen parka. I put on my snow boots and drove to the library. I'd just finished looking through a brief history of Suriname and a book on how to tell the future from looking at the stars. The former had great pictures of nearly naked men and old topless women. I recall one photograph of a monkey suckling a woman's nipple, but perhaps I'm inventing. I liked twisted things like that. My
curiosity for the stars is obvious: I wanted something to tell me my future was bright. I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library—something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.

I can't say I've ever really understood what it means to be Catholic. When Joanie and I were little, our mother would send us to church with our father every Sunday. Joanie never seemed to protest, but she'd just sit there during the liturgy reading Nancy Drew, chewing gum. She refused to kneel and stand along with the rest of us and said, “Blah blah blah” instead of the “Our Father,” twirled her hair. She was pretty enough, aloof enough already at nine or ten for our father to overlook any flawed manners. But at five, I was still plump, pale, eyes small and squinty—I didn't find out I needed glasses until I was thirty—and I suppose my aura carried enough doubt and anxiety to fill my dad with shame. “Don't embarrass me,” he'd mutter on our way up the church steps. He'd be greeted left and right by cheerful, brownnosing members of the congregation, X-villers who must have thought it advantageous to be in the good graces of a man in blue. Dad wore his uniform to church, of course. Or maybe they were all scared of him. He certainly scared me. I remember he'd leave his gun in the glove box while we were at Mass, perhaps the only time he spent without it those days. “Good morning, Officer Dunlop,” someone would say. Dad would shake hands, put an arm around Joanie, a hand on my head, and stop to chat. If I was ever asked a question or received any attention at all, my father would leer down at me
as though to say, “Be normal, look happy, act right.” Inevitably I would disappoint him. I'd go mute or mess up my words, grimace and tear up when some friend of his tried to pinch my cheek. I hated church.

“Where is Mrs. Dunlop this morning?” someone always asked. The excuses my father would give were that she wasn't feeling well, that she was visiting her mother, but she sends her very best. My mother never once came to Mass. The only time I remember her setting foot in that church was for my grandfather's funeral. When we got home Sunday afternoons—Joanie and I sat through endless hours of Bible study taught by an elderly nun, none of whose teachings penetrated into my consciousness one bit—the house would be only slightly less disheveled, and our mother would be lying on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine, a bottle of vermouth stuck between her thighs, cigarette smoke floating above her head in the stuffy afternoon sunlight like a brooding storm cloud.

“Promise you'll visit me in hell, Eileen?” she'd ask.

“Go to your room,” said my father.

My mother rolled her eyes at my father's superstitions, how he'd cross himself before eating, look up at the ceiling whenever he was hopeful or mad. “God is for dummies,” she told us. “People are scared of dying, that's all. Listen to me, girls.” I remember when she said this, pulling us aside one day after our aunt Ruth had come over and scolded us for being lazy, for being spoiled brats, or something like that. She and our mother didn't get along. “God is a made-up story,” our mother told us, “like Santa Claus. There is nobody watching you when you're
alone. You decide for yourself what's right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don't be a fool.” I don't think she was ever so caring as when she delivered this terrifying pronouncement: “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

I remember sitting for hours on my bed after that, picturing all of eternity laid out before me. God was, in my mind, a white-haired old man in a robe—not unlike the man my father would later turn into—presiding over the world, marking papers with red pencil. And then there was my sad, mortal body. It seemed impossible that such a God could care what I did with my little life, but perhaps I was special, I thought. Perhaps He was saving me for good things. I pricked my finger with a safety pin and sucked the blood out. I decided I would only pretend to believe in God since that seemed just as good as real faith, which I didn't have. “Pray like you mean it!” my father would shout when it was my turn to say grace. I'm not as angry at my father for his idiotic moralism as I am for the way he treated me. He had no loyalty to me. He was never proud of me. He never praised me. He simply didn't like me. His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts. “Devil's spawn,” he'd say, waving his gun around.

When I pulled up to the X-ville library that Sunday, I parked and slogged through the slush, but the big red door was locked. It was a small library in the town's old meeting house, and the one librarian—Mrs. Buell, I still remember her name—kept hours according to her personal schedule. I visited often enough to know all the books there by the look of their spines, the order
they appeared on the shelves. In some books I'd even memorized the stains on their pages—spaghetti sauce spilt here, ant squashed there, booger smeared over here. I remember sensing something hopeful in the breeze that morning. I detected a hint of spring in it, although it was late December. My favorite part of drinking too much was the enthusiasm and vigor I felt at certain points of my hangover the day afterward. It sometimes carried a kind of blind excitement—mania, it's called now. The good feeling always petered out into gloom by noon, but in that bright light of Sunday morning, I pushed the books through the return slot for Mrs. Buell and decided to take a drive to Boston.

If I'd had any idea that this would be the last Sunday I'd ever spend in X-ville, I might have spent it packing a suitcase surreptitiously up in my attic, or darkly meditating on the house I'd never see again. I could have taken the time and space to weep at the kitchen table, mourn my entire youth while my father was at church. I could have kicked the walls, torn at the peeling paint and wallpaper, spat on every floor. But I got on the highway. I didn't know I'd soon be gone.

Roads were slick with melting ice, I remember. I rolled the windows down so as not to be poisoned by the exhaust fumes. I pulled on the knit hat I'd found a few nights previous, let the icy cold air freeze my face a little. Several times that winter with the car windows up I'd nearly fallen asleep at the wheel. One night on my way home from Randy's, I think, I veered off the road and into a snowbank. Luckily my foot had fallen off the pedal, so there was no great impact. On that Sunday drive out
of X-ville, I thought about stopping at my old college on the way to Boston, but I couldn't summon the courage. I'd lived in that small college town barely over a year, in a dorm with other girls. I went to class, ate in the cafeteria, et cetera. It felt good to have a coffee percolator, a set of sheets of my own, and to be away, albeit not far, from home. Then I was pulled out of school halfway through my sophomore year and forced back to X-ville to care for my mother, though “care for” is not quite the right way to say it. I was terrified of my mother. She was a mystery to me, and by then I didn't “care for” her in the least. Since she was sick, I tended to her as a nurse would, but there was nothing warm or caring about what I did.

I was secretly glad that I had to leave school. I hadn't received very good grades in college, and the prospect of failing my classes, classes my father was paying for me to pass, had kept me up at night. I'd been in some trouble with the dean already since I'd chosen to “fall ill” and stay in bed instead of taking my quarterly exams. Of course, back home I blamed my parents for my misery, wished I was in school again learning to use a typewriter, studying the history of art, Latin, Shakespeare, whatever nonsense lay in store.

Even with that hat I wore, the whipping cold air was so severe that I had to roll the windows up. You can't imagine how cold it was driving down that frozen highway. I played the radio and drove fast for a while, but there was some traffic approaching the city—an accident up ahead, I think—and as I sat there waiting for the cars to move, the wooziness suddenly hit me. My eyelids began to droop and my head felt heavy. I was dead tired.
My brain ached. Those fumes get into the brain tissue. I believe I have permanent damage to this day. Still, I loved that car. I lay my head on the steering wheel for what couldn't have been more than a minute, and when I woke up, cars were streaming past me, honking their horns. So I drove, and I must have swerved out of my lane as I struggled to stay alert because then there was a police car behind me, a face in my rearview mirror, a black gloved hand motioning for me to pull over. In my confusion, I assumed it was my father's face in the mirror, that he'd somehow followed me out of town. I still had that picture of him as a cop in my head, in his uniform, laughing, ruddy cheeks and hands, an ominous glimmer in his eye. The man had never worn a coat as long as he was on the force. “You can't cover up your uniform with a coat,” he said. And so he'd always been sick, his nose always dripping, his body tense, shoulders high up by his ears, shifting his weight from side to side. You can picture him. Of course, my father was sitting in Mass at this time, and he hadn't worn a uniform in years. But I always thought I saw him everywhere. Years after I left X-ville and still today I sometimes think I see him, swinging a baton at the park, coming out of a bar or coffee shop, slumped over at the top of the stairs.