My voice rises to meet hers. “It’s not a relationship if you’re playing games and digging into my past behind my back!”
She clenches her fists, her eyes burning with anger. “So now I’m just your whore, is that it? I embarrass you, but I’m good enough for a fuck?”
I am wholly unprepared for her reaction and just stare at her, shocked, unable to form a response. Then her hands go to her waist and she pulls her skirt down, then yanks her shirt over her head. She stands before me in a bra and black panties, furious, an enraged nymph. “Then fuck me, Ethan,” she says, sneering. “Fuck me like the whore you think I am. Right here, on your desk. Do it.”
I stare at her, dumb in the face of her rage. Then I turn away from her and place my hands on the back of a chair and stand there, hands gripping the chair back, head slightly bowed. Part of me wonders if she’ll attack me, snatch the three-hole punch off my desk and bash me in the head. I stand that way, my back to her, for some time, listening. Then I hear my classroom door slam shut. Marisa is gone.
PART II
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Susannah was refusing to eat again. She scowled across her dinner plate at our mother, who twisted her wedding ring. “Honey,” Mom said, “go on and eat your peas.”
“They’re cold,” Susannah said.
Mom glanced at the kitchen doorway. “Please, Susannah,” she said. “Your father wants you to eat your vegetables.” Something about her voice, a pleading tone underneath her usual Irish lilt, stirred my sense of filial duty.
“Use the microwave, Suzie,” I said.
Susannah spat, “Don’t call me that.”
“Just heat up the goddamned peas, Suze.”
“Ethan,” my mother said.
“You heat them up,” Susannah said.
“You’re a big girl now,” I said. “Toilet-trained and everything. You do it.”
It was like arguing with a flat tire. The only way to change Susannah’s mind would be to open up the top of her skull and physically remove her brain. Ever since she had turned nine—just after Dad returned from Iraq—she had refused to do anything she didn’t want to do, but it had become an annoying game lately; she was trying to see how far she could push us. The game threatened to become dangerous whenever she acted this way around our father. Pushing him wasn’t advisable. You never knew which Dad would rise to the surface. Sometimes he would be stern, like the soldier he had been, but otherwise normal. Other times he would just stand there and look lost, a baffled expression on his face. And then there were times when our father could be mean. He had never hit us—not yet, a treasonous voice whispered in my head—but he could shout, and he would glower at me and my sister if we were too loud. Once, when Susannah and I were sniping at each other, Dad had snatched the pepper mill from the table and thrown it across the kitchen, putting a dent in the pantry door. I wasn’t sure which was worse: seeing Dad turn mean, or not knowing which Dad would be coming home that night.
Like my mother—and I cursed myself for having the same weakness, the same fear—I glanced at the kitchen doorway, the pencil-yellow walls highlighting the empty space there.
Susannah saw me do it, like she saw everything.
“The big bad wolf isn’t there, Ethan,” she said. “You’re safe for now.”
“Just shut up,” I said.
“That’s enough,” Mom said in the same voice she used to still a classroom of sixth graders. Usually this would be enough to subdue me, and Susannah would grin triumphantly at me behind Mom’s back. But something was different that day. Maybe I was sick of Susannah provoking me. Maybe I was sick of seeing my mother’s anxiety, of being afraid myself, the fear of my father a bright prison searchlight that stabbed out and pinned us mercilessly to the wall. But I also knew that, somewhere at my core, I was simply angry. I was the older sibling, the only other man in the house. Wasn’t I supposed to take care of my mother and sister if my father couldn’t—or wouldn’t?
So I reached across the table and grabbed Susannah’s plate, pulling it to me. Some of the peas spilled onto the table, rolling across the wood surface.
“Hey!” Susannah said.
I shoved my empty plate toward her and began shoveling her peas into my mouth. They tasted like little cold balls of clay.
“Ethan,” Mom said, but there was no fight in her voice.
Susannah pounded her fist on the table. “What are you doing?” she cried.
“You’re welcome,” I said through a mouthful of peas.
“Those are mine!” She was truly furious.
I was about to make another retort when Mom stiffened in her seat. I looked over my shoulder to see my father standing in the doorway.
“Why are you yelling?” my father said to Susannah in a calm voice that raised goose bumps on the back of my neck. “You know we don’t yell at the dinner table.”
Susannah’s face was bright red. I didn’t look straight at her but continued to eat the peas.
“Don’t provoke your sister,” Dad said, and he sat down heavily in his chair. He was wearing his gray Glen plaid suit with a red paisley tie that was maybe twenty years out of style. Dad sat there at the kitchen table in his unfashionable tie and tired-looking suit, like a stunned commuter who hasn’t quite realized he’s already pulled into his own driveway, and at that moment my own anger and resentment drained away. He just looked so lost, a sense of confusion tinged with awareness that things were no longer the same but without knowing the precise moment when they had changed. I wanted
