Her childhood home, the house itself, had borne the brunt of her brothers. It was a furniture mausoleum, decorated with cracked and glued lamps, smashed chairs reassembled hastily by the perpetrator, usually the oldest, whose addiction to mayhem was a shining example to his younger brothers. They were a Hydra of domestic destruction, and she, the youngest, was Athena observing from shore, usually left to her own devices except when a story had to hold together, and required the collusion of all the siblings, at which time she stepped in to weave her spell of conjunction.
She was no pushover, that girl, this woman. She cut waves like an oil tanker, diverted from her course by neither high seas nor marauders. But when I bled, she got very serious very quickly.
No blood, my father confirmed. Tooth went down the chute, though.
Show me, she said, peering into his mouth, venturing a finger.
Let me see, I said, struggling free from his embrace to gain a better sight line into his gaping maw.
Where? I said.
My mother pointed.
You have yellow teeth, Daddy.
Mawshes ah yehwoh behwee, he garbled around my mother’s finger.
Let me see, I said, pulling at his shirt.
It’s just a saying, my mother said. Daddy’s belly is white as a whale’s.
Hanks, he said.
Oh, lemme see lemme see! I said.
He would do anything to make me laugh. He wanted to give me a happy childhood. Moronic phrase, yet one he was unable to banish from his thoughts. It was a fantasy implanted in his head by guests on Carson who insisted that their childhood homes had been filled with laughter, an invention to put the audience at ease: See here, I’ve been content going way back, don’t you worry about me. And the audience exhales, because it’s nerve-racking, being responsible for the happiness of that guy in the spotlight, which, unless he tells you otherwise, depends entirely on your expressions of love for him. That’s your job, to take care of the performer’s feelings, to cradle him and caress him, to feed him your laughter and attention and make him feel okay.
So my father wanted me to have a happy childhood because it relieved him of the overwhelming desire to care for me? Perhaps.
It was true that I elicited from him a pure, aching compassion. He thought it possible that I was, for him, the origin of that very emotion, its first expression simultaneous to my birth, as though it were a rare tropical fruit he’d plucked from the tree and eaten while sitting on the forest floor, a sweeter, more elaborate flavor than he’d ever tasted from all the oranges and apples he’d mowed through in his life. He wanted me to laugh, perhaps, because he had no other gifts to give. He had darkness and introspection, a tendency to recoil from human contact. He had neuroses, cowardice, the nasty hangover of a past he couldn’t shake. No natural feel for parenting, and at his age, little hope of learning. I was a grown woman by the time he got his arms around the task. He relied on simple rules, little orange flags in the misty landscape, but even as he trekked from one to the next he had no sense of up or down, north or south. No instinct for it, he thought, none at all. In art and argument he valued complexity, but when it came to me, his brain overflowed with monolithic, simplistic ideas: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Look before you leap. Haste makes waste. A happy childhood.
According to him, he was a bad parent, a notion bolstered by the prodigious ease with which my mother nurtured me. It was like playing Claudius opposite Olivier’s Hamlet. He stuck to his lines and tried not to screw up the blocking. Simplicity. Consistency. Stay out of the way.
I had been just a newborn when my father had come to the conclusion that his own instincts were not to be trusted. Rocking me in my dark room one night, humming softly, he was overwhelmed by what could only properly be named a flood of emotion—not a single, identifiable feeling, but everything his heart was capable of throwing at him, a raging muddy river clogged with debris. He’d sobbed and held me as though I were his life buoy. Too much, he’d thought. It’s just too much. Unsortable, uncontrollable. And how would he protect me if he was this weakened by love?
Ah yehwoh behwee, he again said around my mother’s finger. I turned my head to hide my smile—I was not done with my accusatory tears. As I did, a spot of red appeared on my white shirt, above the school crest, at the clavicle. My parents both saw it and my mother ran her hand up my neck, her fingertips lightly touching the skin. I giggled and closed off access by clamping head to shoulder.
Honey, my mother said. She and my father were both looking for blood from the ear, of course, having been tempered to search out that cinematic signal of
