The Schwa Was Here

We all knew the Big One was a clear and present danger. For years we hoped the pressure could be released through smaller tremors, and for years it had worked. I was beginning to think maybe the Big One wouldn’t come at all.

“If it wasn’t for me, you’d all starve!” Mom yelled.

“At least we’d be out of our misery!” Dad shouted back.

The Big One was all about food. Mom was no slouch when it came to cooking—but, like I said, Dad stood in a league by himself. No parent I know—mother or father—could whip up dishes the way my dad did, but he didn’t often get the chance, because the kitchen was Mom’s. Dad might have been the Vice-Vice-President of Product Development for Pisher Plastics, but Mom was the Empress of Bonano Food Productions, and I pity the fool who challenges her reign.

Dad was that fool. It was his destiny.

Well, if the Big One was tonight, they picked the wrong day to have it. I had just walked fourteen dogs, been dumped by a blind girl, been dumped on by her grandfather, and right now I wanted a cold soda.

“Antsy, don’t go in there,” Frankie warned. “We ain’t got any body bags.”

I figured I could slip in and out unnoticed. The Antsy Effect was nowhere near as potent as the Schwa Effect, but in my own family, it worked just as well.

I pushed my way past Christina, who was scribbling her life away in the diary, logging her impressions of the battle for fu­ture generations.

The scene was weirdly dramatic. Like something out of Shakespeare. Dad waved a spatula in the air as he spoke, mak­ing him look like a swordsman, and Mom spoke with her hands so much, it looked like karate.

“I’m tired of eating your family’s lousy, tasteless recipes,” Dad said.

“Tasteless recipes? My grandmother’s rolling in her grave!”

“It’s from indigestion.”

She threw an artichoke at him, and he batted it away with the spatula.

I went to the refrigerator, took out a Coke, and then some­thing very strange happened. I flashed to Howie and Ira play­ing “Three Fisted Fury,” ignoring the Schwa. Anger began to boil up inside me. Yeah, I could get in and out of that kitchen unnoticed, but suddenly I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to ever again. I had a right to be noticed.

“Excuse me,” I said, loudly. “If you two are just going to argue all night, I’ll cook dinner; otherwise we’ll all be rolling in our graves from parental starvation.”

“Don’t you open up a mout like that!” Mom said.

“Go back to the living room,” Dad said. “This isn’t your problem.”

“Bullpucky!” I said, which isn’t actually the word I used, but I’m in a much better mood now than I was then.

When she heard that, Mom drew in a breath kind of like the way the ocean sucks back before a tidal wave. “What did you say?!”

“I said it’s time to eat. If you wanna fight, why don’t you lose a few teeth and go on a daytime talk show?”

Mom glared at me, and crossed her arms. “Do you hear this?” she says to Dad. “Where do you learn this disrespect, huh?”

“You don’t learn disrespect,” I told her. “You’re born with it.”

“Just keep digging that hole deeper, Antsy,” Dad said. So now all their anger had turned away from each other and was aimed at me. There was awesome power in being the center of fury.

“You want to earn your dinner, smart mout?” Mom says. “You tell us—who makes a better fra diavolo sauce. Me or your father?”

It was a stupid question, because who really cared, and yet I knew the answer was critical. The old Antsy would have found some way to distract them from the argument and, failing that, would have said something to keep the peace, like “Mom’s is better with pasta, Dad’s is better with meat” or “Dad’s is spicier, but Mom’s is heartier.” An answer would have held everything together and would have eventually gotten things back to normal.

Then it occurred to me exactly what my place in this family was, and had always been. In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-neck ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unno­ticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, but I’d be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.

“You gonna answer us or not?”

“You want the truth?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, then. Dad makes the best fra diavolo sauce.”

Stunned silence from the both of them. They hadn’t wanted the truth. We all knew it. Suddenly I wasn’t playing by the rules. “And come to think of it, his alfredo sauce rocks, too. What else do you want to know?”

Dad put his hand to his head like he had a headache. “That’s enough, Anthony.”

Mom nodded and pursed her lips into a thin red line. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, that settles it, then.” I didn’t like the calmness of her voice. She walked over to the range, took the big pot of sauce she had made, and in one smooth motion dumped it down the drain. A cloud of steam rose and curled like a hydrogen bomb had gone off in the sink.

“You make dinner, Joe.” She stormed out of the house, leav­ing us all in nuclear winter. Once she was gone, Frankie pulled me aside and glared at me. “You see what you did?”

*** 

Dad did cook us dinner that night. He had to go to the grocery store to get his ingredients, so dinner wasn’t ready until nine. He made us veal rollatini, better than you’d get in the best Ital­ian restaurants. We all ate and said nothing to one another. Not a thing, not even “pass the salt,” because it didn’t need salt. It was, at the same time, the best and the worst meal I had ever sat down to.

When it was done, we all did our own dishes and left the kitchen spotless. Dad made a plate of leftovers and put it in the fridge. I knew it was for Mom, but he wouldn’t say it.

Frankie and Christina went to their rooms, but I hung around in the kitchen a bit more while Dad cleaned the pots.

The clip is gone, I thought. The pages are flying like confetti. What a moron I am.

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Antsy.”

The fact that he didn’t know scared me more than anything else that night. Was our family so fragile that this could tear the foundations loose?

“It seems like such a little thing,” I said.

“The biggest things always seem like small things,” he told me.

I stayed up as long as I could that night, waiting to hear the front door open and Mom walk in, but I fell asleep before I heard it. In the morning, I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before. Mom wasn’t in the bedroom, and Dad had al­ready left for work. I went downstairs slowly, afraid she might not be there. What would I do if she wasn’t? What would that mean?

I don’t know, Antsy.

Parents were supposed to know the answers, and even if they didn’t, they could usually fake it really well. I wanted to hate my dad for not knowing, but I couldn’t hate him. That made me want to hate him even more.

I came downstairs, and Mom was in the kitchen. I had to hold on to the wall, as if the Big One was having an aftershock. I took a deep breath and went in. She was drinking coffee by herself, like they do on those commercials for fancy flavored coffee.

“Are you having breakfast before you go to school?”

“What is there?”

“Cornflakes, Raisin Bran. There may be some Froot Loops left, if Christina didn’t make a pig of herself.”

Most of the time Mom would get the bowl, or the box or the milk. She would always do something to be a part of the meal. Today I did the whole thing myself. It just didn’t feel right.