It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (4 page)

Just looking around at the food she made for birthday parties—the platters that would have made a supermarket look under-stocked—it
was clear to everyone how Mom loved through food. “You really outdid yourself, Maryellen,” they’d say as they shuffled out of the party at the end of the night. I didn’t like it when they left. Family, friends, anyone—I wished they wouldn’t leave us alone. Dad seemed especially on edge whenever we had guests over. During many of the parties that Mom threw, he’d be present for an hour at most, and then he’d retreat to the bedroom with a six-pack of beers in hand.

This night was no exception. When everyone had gone home, he came out to the kitchen. His eyes were only three-quarters open. Each blink was long and labored. A whiff of his breath smelled sweet turning sour. He walked through the rooms of our house in a purposeful yet clumsy way. As if he needed to get somewhere and he’d really like to be on his way, if only his feet would cooperate.

Mom turned to see him. She eyed him, but not in the same way she had before the party when he’d come into the kitchen in his underwear. When she realized I’d been watching her, she smiled at me. It reminded me of the smile she gave when she sat me down to tell me that Dad lost his job and that he’d get to spend more time at home with me. That was the kind of smile I didn’t return. If smiles were as varied as the flavors of cupcakes, I’d found one I didn’t like.

When he saw that the kitchen was filled with pots, pans, and dishes, Dad offered to help.

She took the porcelain gravy boat from his hands. “I’ve got it, Rob.” I could tell she was using her polite voice. Ignoring her urges for him to go to bed and that she’d handle it, Dad moved around the kitchen picking up plates, shuffling them from one counter to the next, from the table to a chair, from the sink to the stove. I
watched, puzzled, as he moved the dishes in no order closer to and farther from the sink. For a few minutes, Mom pressed her lips together to prevent impatience from spilling out of her mouth. I wondered if Mom would yell at him the way she yelled at me that time I spread Elmer’s glue and flour on my bedside table playing bakery. “Rob …, please, honey.” She reached for the stack of china that balanced on his forearms before he could take it to the living room.

“I’ll clean up,” he said and tried to move backward, angry at her interference.

Before she could take the plates fully into her own arms, he pulled his arms clean out from under them and the stack shattered beneath them on the tile. It felt as if minutes had passed before all the crashing and clanking stopped. Dad began yelling. “See what you did, Mere?!” When she began yelling back, I could see that her eyes were filling with tears. Instantly, mine filled, too. Those plates had been her favorite.

Dad’s hollering sounded more like rumbling, like the earthquake that split the earth in
The Land Before Time
, when Little-foot’s mother died. His face puffed and reddened. Soon he was standing with his face so close to Mom’s, I wasn’t sure if his yelling would turn into a kiss, but she pushed him backward, and he stumbled toward the stove. “This is fucking bullshit!” he shouted. He tilted sideways to reach for his thick green glass ashtray on the kitchen table, and, before I knew what he needed it for, he cocked his arm back and swung it full force at the wall just to the left of where Mom stood. Mom shrieked, and that shrill sound, coupled with the smash of glass pummeling through plaster, made me yelp. I looked at the floor to find translucent shards of green glass all
around Mom’s feet. I noticed how closely they resembled the green apple Blow Pop I’d dropped on the sidewalk last weekend.

“Jesus, Rob!” Mom screamed, grabbing me and tucking my head into her chest. She held me as tightly as Anthony did when we wrestled. I felt the tears that raced down her cheeks splash onto my forehead, the tip-tops of my ears. Soon her tears were coming so fast, they slipped from her chin straight onto my eyelashes and halfway down my cheeks as if they were my own.

I stared as Dad stumbled backward and onto a chair at the kitchen table. Something had changed in him. The tiny red branches that sprouted in his eyes, the beads of sweat that poured from his temples—they frightened me. He no longer looked like my dad. He no longer looked like anyone’s dad. Seeing him then was like staring at the old mahogany piano we had in our living room. When Mom brought it home from the antiques shop, I’d thought it was perfect, a unique treasure that was ours alone. But now that I’d been looking at it long enough, I could see its flaws: the grooves that ran like fault lines across the surface, how wobbly the whole thing was when it wasn’t supported by the wall it leaned against, the nicks, the dings, the ways it had been damaged in a previous life and in ours.

By the following afternoon, all had returned to normal. Everyone went about living as if it were a typical morning, with no mention of the night before. Mom cleaned and swept the broken bits of ashtray into the trash; Anthony went to a friend’s house to play flag football; Dad resumed his somber daytime routine. It seemed the only one who wasn’t the same was me.

HE STARTED DRINKING MORE
. I hadn’t known it to be anything unusual until that Wednesday, at just about three o’clock in the afternoon, when I heard the glass shatter. If it had been just a smash—the crunch of another heavy green glass ashtray cracking through the wall—perhaps I wouldn’t have flinched so markedly. If I hadn’t heard Dad howl, I’d have assumed it was another routine case of him losing his temper.

At seven years old, I’d become accustomed to seeing ashes and cigarette butts flying through the air like confetti in the kitchen. They argued, usually after Mom pleaded with Dad to stop drinking or to help with some household task that might have made her life less overwhelming. Before she left for work, she’d ask for him to tidy up, and upon her return, she’d be met with a bigger mess. The dishes, in a crusty pile, waited to be bussed, and dirty laundry sat, almost patronizingly, just to the left of the hamper. She resented it. And he resented the nagging. Mostly, she backed down.
“Never mind. It’s fine,” she’d say, relenting. She took all the reasons she couldn’t take it, not even a day longer, and packed them away. She rolled them, refolded them, and rearranged them, tucking them in and under and more tightly, as if she were filling a suitcase. Only patience made more room. She lugged that baggage with her, blistering the middles of her palms, and I could almost see the hunch her back had taken to support the weight. There were moments when she threatened him, said she wouldn’t put up with all of it anymore. Those times, she’d stand straight up, her shoulders squared, with her suitcase at her feet, and I’d witness her body steel as it went from nervousness to self-assurance to hesitation to
just leave already!

What I wonder now, when I think of how unbearably heavy that suitcase had become, how broken she looked every time she stuffed one more sorrow inside, is why she never left.

On the occasions when she chose to fight back, when she began unpacking the suitcase and setting its load upon Dad, his rage ignited. Even if he understood how valid her wants were, the attack made him defensive. He blasted her with her own insecurities over and over. The cursing, the name-calling, the insults—they corroded her confidence. They made her feel small. She ran our house and paid the bills by way of four jobs, and still I watched her weaken her stance and look downward as if to ask herself,
Is he right?
If she fought back, he roared louder. Or he’d throw something she loved across the room.

But those were not the times my chubby body trembled. Those weren’t the times when my spirit split like the walls of our house. No, it was only when Anthony entered the room, when I heard his small voice try desperately to make itself bigger and less boyish,
that the pit of my stomach twisted so violently, I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or about to be sick. I’d see Anthony wedge himself between Mom and Dad, separating them by the width of his thin body. I’d watch him try his best to be brave, to speak through the staccato of his stutter. And at first, Dad would go easy on him. He’d gently tell him that everything was fine and that he should go back to his room. But with one look at Mom, Anthony planted his feet where they were. He stayed and tried to defuse the fight. Soon enough, Dad would begin launching insults at Anthony just as he’d done to Mom. The names he called him, the way he teased his fourteen-year-old son the way he might a man his own age—set the anger inside me over high heat. My insides rolled to a boil. I’d clench my jaw so tightly, I thought my teeth might crack.

I can still remember the last time I’d heard them fighting and Anthony had gotten involved. The three of them stood in the kitchen, and I looked on from the darkness of the dining room. My nails dug deeply into my palms when Dad began with the yelling. He belittled Anthony, taunted him, and then called him a faggot. My eyes darted around the room from Dad’s red-hot face to Anthony’s quivering bottom lip to Mom with one arm wrapped around her son and one arm outstretched toward her husband, keeping him at bay. I walked toward Dad with leaden legs. I bent slightly so that our eyes met—Dad seated in a kitchen chair that creaked under his 350 pounds, and me standing taller and twenty pounds heavier than any girl in my second-grade class. I felt as though my eyes were on fire. I moved my face to within inches from his, our noses nearly touching.

And then I told him that I hated him; that he was a bad, bad man, and I meant it. Mom drew my shoulders back, but I leaned
farther into him as if to press my rage on him. I used words I hoped would cut into him in the same way I’d seen him cut Mom, cut Anthony, for the eight years I’d lived. I wasn’t even sure at the time what my words would mean to him. In fact, I wasn’t sure I even knew what I wished for him to be like, what I wanted out of a father. But then my thoughts rewound to episodes of
Full House
and
Little House on the Prairie
, where I came to know fathers like Danny Tanner and Pa Ingalls who were protectors and providers. And I was reminded briefly that my own was neither of those things.

When I finished hurling every angry thought I held at him, I searched Dad’s eyes for recourse. I waited for him to do to me what he’d done to everyone else. I breathed hard, panting from adrenaline, into his face. I braced myself for whatever would come. He closed his eyes. My teeth gritted once more, as if tightening my face would harden my whole exterior into a shield. He opened his eyes, and the look he gave me wasn’t anything I could have anticipated. What I saw in his eyes made my heart sink, made it deflate, just as it had two weeks earlier when the boys in my class called me fat while the girls looked on, smiling.

That day, my classmates had been running around the school yard at recess, laughing and whispering. I figured it was just boys being goofy about our second-grade teacher. It wasn’t until one girl in my class—the one who had been teased for accidentally farting during gym class—approached me on the swings that I realized any of it had to do with me. She told me, as matter-of-factly as she’d once told me that I’d forgotten to return her pink mechanical pencil, that the boys wanted me to get off the swing set because they thought I was so fat that I’d break it. For a few seconds, I sat
motionless, stunned. My face burned as I realized what she had just told me, and I looked around the playground, racking my brain for a joke, anything to say in return that would belie my embarrassment. And then I saw the group of them, all the boys and a handful of girls, standing on the pavement just under the basketball hoop, laughing at me. Laughing because of me. I turned my head down, tears welling and threatening to spill out and onto the peaches of my cheeks. I couldn’t help but notice the way that the thin black rubber of the swing seat dug into the fleshy sides of my thighs. It reminded me of the way Mom tied up a pork roast, how the meat bulged between the thin white lines of string. I blinked a dozen times, hoping the flutter would fan the tears from my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to look back up. I feared she’d still be standing there, watching my humiliation. Worse, I feared she’d have one more mean thing to say.

The things I’d told Dad—they’d done what I’d intended for them to do. They cut him deeply. And when he turned his face away and picked up his beer can, upturning it into his mouth, I hated myself. I hated him for making me that angry. For teaching me that people listen when you yell louder, that you not only can cut them with your words, but you can pour hatred in their open wound. I hated Mom, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, for letting me see his rage and then unleash my own. For letting me believe, even for a moment, that I had power, that I could be an adult in mind before body. I hated that in trying to stop the fighting, I’d waged a new war. And most of all, I hated that in trying to protect us all from the bully, to knock him down, I’d become one.

Mom said he never drank much before the year I was born. Six years after having my brother and marrying, Mom came home with
a pink swaddled smoosh of wild black hair, full lips, and only a hint of a nose. And on January 25, my birthday, he fell down drunk. She cried, quietly and alone, with her face pressed into the nook of my little neck. She slept in Anthony’s room that night, with me in the bed between them. In the morning, she opened her eyes to find Anthony smoothing my hair back on my head with his palm, whispering into my tiny ear. She smiled. “What are you telling your sister?” she whispered.