Our father always started the song, and my brother and I were expected to sing as loudly as we could.
Our mother never sang, as she despised this song more than any song, and she would beg us to stop singing it, saying we were absolutely killing her ears.
But the more she complained about our singing, and the harder she pressed against her ears, the louder we sang, our father always singing the loudest.
Our father had told us many times that he was a great singer, that he’d sung with a group in college, and he would say, Harmonize, to me and my brother, and though we never knew how, our father would try, would go higher, go lower, and always go louder, so we would go louder too.
But even in our most enthusiastic moments, moments in which our mother threatened, to our delight, to open the door and throw herself from the car, we never got even close to the end of the song.
Because even in these very best moments, we had to stop, always, when our mother would pull on her hair and scream, I’ve had enough, Enough already, I despise you all.
And though our father was always the one to start singing, and though he loved more than anything to anger our mother, to bring her as close as he could to the brink of explosion, he, too, would say, Enough you kids, I said enough.
The rest of the ride was our father silent, staring at the road.
It was our mother pretending to sleep.
It was us in the back, all wound up, still wanting to sing.
I tried, I admit, alone in my room, to get all the way to the end of the song, but could not.
It wasn’t because I was lacking in skill, but, rather, because it wasn’t a good song to sing alone.
There was something about singing the song alone that suggested drinking alone in a crowded bar, and a desperation I recognized even then.
And I recognized the desperation as a certain messy desperation I’d seen on faces outside bars I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near.
And I recognized the desperation as an adult desperation, one I wouldn’t have to face for years, though I would face it, I knew it, even then, we all faced it.
My brother and our father would go on these walks by the water, that were our father’s idea, that were guys-only walks.
Our father used these walks to teach my brother about things that were guys-only things, like for instance girls and ways to manage girls.
Our father would teach my brother that the most effective way to manage girls was just to wear them down.
And though my brother already resented our father, and though I knew in my gut there would come a day on which my brother would convey this resentment, they always came back from their walks laughing, often laughing at me.
I would say, in response to their laughing, What, and they would laugh even harder, and I would say, Stop, and they would just go on and on.
What I felt those days is hard to explain, though I’ve felt it many times since.
It just takes a certain kind of guy and a certain other kind of guy.
It takes a joke going on and on, and you, the girl, at the center.
When we got to the house with the object on its lawn, there were people drinking outside it.
So we kept on driving around.
There was the moon that we said nothing about, and there were trees that we said nothing about.
And I should tell you about the object on the lawn.
I should tell you it was just an anchor, the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen.
Because it wasn’t an actual anchor, but a replica, made of who knows what, of an anchor.
And my brother had clung to the anchor, that one night, all fucked up, refused to let go, refused to go back to the boathouse unless the anchor went as well.
But the anchor was larger than you think, and it was stuck deep in the dirt.
On one of our trips to the shore, our father ran over a dog.
It was a large dog, and in our father’s defense, the dog had been lying already in the road.
It turned out, so we learned from its owner, a woman, that the dog just liked to sleep there.
And had we lived on this road, we would have known this.
Had we lived there, we would have slowed our speed like the people who lived on this road must always have done.
But we didn’t live on this road, and we would never have lived on this road.
And on the side where we lived, our dogs slept not in roads but on sprawling lawns.
When my brother stopped the car that night, he didn’t, at first, remind me of our father.
He didn’t remind me of our father because my brother wasn’t stopping the car out of anger.
He wasn’t stopping the car to punish us, so I wasn’t reminded of our father.
He was stopping the car to be dramatic, to give me one of the wild looks we gave each other in the back of our father’s car.
The point of these looks, back then, was just to make each other laugh.
Because the one who laughed first was the one toward whom our father’s anger was directed.
Because enough meant enough, when our father said it, and it meant enough with the singing and enough with the talking and enough, it turned out, with any noise at all.
So when one of us laughed at the other’s looks, our father just about went mad.
I can see, looking back, that our father thought we were laughing at him.
So I can see this, now, as somewhat cruel, this literal laughing behind our father’s back.
But I also can see this cruelty as a cruelty we were forced to inherit from our father.
Like so many things we didn’t want but got and still, to this day, have.
But I wasn’t reminded of our father as my brother looked at me all wild, stopped there in the road.
I wasn’t reminded of our father, but of a younger version of my brother and a younger version of myself.
And I saw these younger versions of ourselves as two people on the same team or in the same camp or whatever metaphor you want.
And it wasn’t until my brother started singing our father’s version of the song that I was reminded of our father.
And it wasn’t until I said, No, and, Stop, and nearly covered my ears that I was reminded of our mother.
But I wasn’t our mother, and I would never be our mother.
I was one kind of weak, but I would never be that other kind of weak.
So I sang with my brother, loudly as I could, that fucking song we never liked.
It was a party, that one night, on the other side.
My brother was too fucked up.
I left him lying on the lawn.
I couldn’t find my brother’s friends.
Inside the house was a smell of mold.
There was a smell of smoke, a smell of beer.
There were plastic tables and plastic chairs.
There were ring-shaped stains on the rug.
A filthy guy was staring at me.
He said, Sit, but I wouldn’t sit.
There were pizza boxes on the chairs.
The freezer door was tied shut with a string.
The guy said, You should sit.
I went outside to look for my brother’s friends.
They were now on the lawn, throwing my brother’s shoe over my brother’s head.
When the shoe landed on the roof, his friends said, Let’s get his other shoe.
It was then my brother ran to the anchor on the lawn and clung to it how he did.
It’s hard to explain his position.
The awkward way his legs were bent.
How tightly he was holding on.
His friends were laughing harder than I’d seen them laugh.
And it was funny at first, but then I said, Just pick him up.
Then I said, Just carry him.
It took a long time, but eventually his friends dragged him away.
And the anchor became another dumb joke they would keep alive forever.
; Moments before our father ran over the dog, our mother had cracked.
She was everywhere in that moment, just on everyone in that moment.
She was screaming and she was screaming words she shouldn’t have said.
She was pulling her hair and her eyes looked wild.
Because our father was being too much our father.
He was singing too hard that awful song.
He was singing too loudly, and our mother, I swear, opened that door to throw herself from the car.
And were we secretly hoping.
I can only speak for myself.
Now our father was driving way too fast.
Our mother eventually closed the door.
Some kids on the side of the road were waving at our car.
I saw the kids, but our father, I have to believe, did not.
And before I could scream, and I did scream, Stop, and grabbed our father’s arm from behind, there was this thump.
At first, I thought our father would keep on driving.
But he stopped the car right there and got out.
The kids were crying and covering their faces.
Their mother ran out of their shitty house, covering her face.
My brother and I got out of the car, and our father said, Get back in the fucking car.
And we did get back in the car.
But first, I saw this hit dog lying in the road and its eye that something was wrong with.
There were still people standing on the lawn, so we kept on driving and we kept on singing louder and harder than we’d ever sung this song.
Sometimes we sang in accents.
Sometimes we fake harmonized.
My brother’s face was wild and I’m sure mine was wild as well.
And had you heard us singing, you might have thought we’d gone completely mad.
Or you might have sung along.
You might have better understood us.
But I’m not trying to make this night more special than it was.
I’m not saying we achieved some great thing by singing the song to its final line.
I’m actually saying there was nothing we achieved.
Because we didn’t sing to the final word.
Because in the version we sang, our father’s version, there was no way to get to the final word.
Because the final line, we realized that day, as we tried to sing it, was flawed.
I mean grammatically and I mean metrically, so we stumbled through it, so we stumbled again, and I was like fuck this song and stopped.
Perhaps needless to say, the final line in our preferred version, the one now going through my head, wasn’t flawed.
And had we chosen to sing our preferred version, we would have gotten to the final word.
But here we were, and the details of the line don’t matter.
The words themselves, don’t think about those.
Just think about what it was to get there, after all those years, and realize.
My brother would start college in the fall.
He would go to the college our father went to.
He would major in the same thing our father did.
He would try to find the singing group our father was in.
But there would be no singing group.
This would be no surprise to me.
To my brother, though, this would be a disappointment.
And there would be many more disappointments.
And, eventually, my brother would go after our father.
No, I was the one who would.
It would start, for me, as a seed, for lack of a better word, moving into my gut.
On that day, there would be too many seeds, and they would bloom at roughly the same awful time.
On that day, I would go after our father with both hands.
It wouldn’t be the first time I did.
The first time was at the shore.
And I lost that time.
I wasn’t ready that time.
But the next time, I would be.
It would be a scene like you can’t believe.
Imagine things that shouldn’t fly flying.
But that’s another story.
And I’ll tell that story another time.
Our father told us get back in the car, and we did.
We watched the rest of the scene through the window.
The mother crying, her kids crying.
Our father saying something to the mother.
Our father wearing the mother down.
Because it was her fault, he would say to her, that the dog was sleeping in the road.
And what kind of person, he would say to her, would let a dog just sleep there like that.
We watched the woman’s body wilt, her face wilt, the kids’ faces almost too sad to look at.
And their poor sad house behind them.
The whole world sad around it.
That evening, our father and my brother took one of their walks.
Our mother locked herself in a room, and I lay on our sprawling lawn.
I was thinking how we owned that lawn.
I was thinking how there was room on that lawn for a thousand dogs and room for a thousand kids.
I could see the sun through my eyelids.
I could feel our orbit of the sun.
There was almost quiet then.
I even dreamed for a second.
It was a dream about water.
Then my brother was making shadows on my face.
Our father, too, was looming above.
They were laughing at me, and I wasn’t in the mood.
I wasn’t going to play my part.
So I stood and walked across the lawn.
And I didn’t come back.
So I’m not a good sport.
So I ruin a joke.
I ruin their lives.
No, I only ruin my brother’s.
Because he wants to keep on singing.
He wants to get to the final word.
But I’m looking out the window now.
I’m pushing through the window.
There are trees out here.
The moon right there.
There’s no one now on the lawn.
So it’s time to stop the car, brother.
It’s time to run like wild, brother.
Time to pull that fucking anchor from the dirt.
Killers
There once was a madman who lived beneath my bed. This was when I was younger. This was when things were different. Then I would call out for my father, wait for him to snap on the light, kneel by the bed, assure me there was no one hiding beneath it.
The first time I called out for my father, my father said, Madman. He said, Where did you get that word. But I didn’t know, then, where I got the word. It just came to my mind that night in the dark and made me call out for my father.
My mind, I’d been told, was unlike the minds of others. I’d been told since birth I was greater than most. I couldn’t remember being told this at birth. I, of course, couldn’t remember birth. A gift, I thought, that one couldn’t remember the mess.
It was only my father I called for, nights. My mother was too sound a sleeper ever to wake. She’s uncivilized, said my father, mornings, when my mother was still asleep. He would sit at the table, waiting to be fed, and called it, too, uncivilized, this waiting.
The coast is clear, my father would say. Those words made me think of sun-scorched men in stiff green pants. Of a quiet beach before a thousand wretched deaths. But I would keep this image to myself. I would lie there, silent, as my father stood, as the light went out, as I watched my father’s sleeve shrink in the thinning strip of hallway light as he closed the bedroom door.
But there was no reason now to think a madman was hiding beneath my bed. I was older now, and a madman simply could enter the room, straddle my thighs, stare down at me until I wake. A madman could breathe into my face an awful smell through yellowed teeth.
He could whisper softly into my mouth, You’re dead.
So perhaps this is why, one night, on a bed, hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, hearing doors open, hearing them slam, I thought a madman was coming to get me. So I said to the guy I was with, Get up. I said, Go, and pushed him out of the bed and toward the terrace door.
I didn’t think then to go with him. How the rest of the night could have been. Both of us climbing down to the lawn. Running across the grass. I only thought to stay where I was. To lie there, looking up. And when the door opened, I closed my eyes. Then I felt the weight. Then felt the heat. The bedsprings pushing into my back.
The night began on the boardwalk. Me and the girl standing at the rides. Pills dissolved in our sodas. We stood there after the rides had closed. Then the ground was pulling like gravity pulling too hard. Like a black hole pulling, and then I was down. Then a summer cop was coming. Then the guy from the haunted house was coming. I could see them in the distance. Fucking saviors coming to fix it all.
My mind, I’d been told, wasn’t unlike my father’s mind. It wasn’t his mind, exactly. Meaning not at the level of his mind. But it wasn’t, in several ways, unlike it.
My father said my first word was star. That I pointed to the sky, opened my mouth, and out came star, of all the words to begin with. He saw it as a sign of some great thing. That I was destined, he said, to be that. But my mother said my first word wasn’t star, but stop. She said my father must have misheard me. My father, she said, was pulling my hair. And one can see, she said, how what I said, which was stop, pointing not to the sky, but to my head, might have sounded like star.
I told my mother my father’s woman had gone completely mad. She was after me, I told my mother, and my mother said she was not. Because my mother didn’t know everything yet. I mean she didn’t officially know. And I was prone, said my mother, to imagining things. That woman is just a rich bitch, she said. Another rich bitch, she said, at the shore. The daughter, she said, of yet another rich bitch.
The cop helped me up from the ground. By then, the girl was gone. Even she called the cops pigs. Even she ran when a cop was coming. He bent me into sitting on a bench. He told me to look straight ahead. I don’t remember everything. I do remember I said, Fuck you. This wasn’t our first situation, mine and the cop’s. And the guy from the haunted house. He was kneeling, now, in front of my legs.
Machine Page 7