A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  I tapped my father on the elbow again. “But, if you could show me how to make them? Then I could make them,” I said. “And? I would make one for you, too. The best one, you could have it. To keep.”

  My father did not look away from the television and carefully enunciated his words. “As I told you not three minutes ago, I am very busy and do not have time right now. I would like you to please respect that, son. Now, run along.”

  My father was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drinking his drink and looking at the off TV and I couldn’t see how he was busy because there was nothing to be busy with.

  I missed my mother. She was at the store where you could buy paint brushes and paint in every color that existed in the whole world, even colors between the colors.

  “When will my mother be home?” I asked again. I had asked him the same question all afternoon.

  “I don’t know, son. Now please,” he answered.

  I knew that if my mother were there, she would show me how to make a balloon dog and also tell me stories. Unless she was sad and then she wouldn’t. But when she wasn’t sad, she told me all the stories. Like about her sister who was born with problems and who had arms that were bent and then she died when she was nine. And the undertaker had to break her arms to fit them in the coffin. That was a good story but it was sad because Harriet would have been my aunt and would have sent me presents. And she told me about her big brother who used all his money in the whole world to buy the wedding ring that she gave to my father when they were married. I told my brother and said that he should buy me a ring, too. And he gave me a ring but it was only a trick ring made out of copper wire and it wouldn’t even fit on my finger, that’s how mean he was. Sometimes, he was too mean to even live.

  And she told me there were rattlesnakes in the bamboo patches behind the house where she grew up.

  And she told me about aunts and uncles and cousins I didn’t even know were all mine. I came from people and there were a lot of them and they lived in Georgia and they were my relations. And my mother and father moved to the north and that was why I liked the snow.

  I pressed my lips together and then I asked my father, “What are you busy with?”

  And my father slammed his glass down on the kitchen table so hard the table knocked against the wall and liquid splashed out of his glass and landed on my forehead. “Damn it, son. I have told you again and again that I need to be left alone. Now, why is it that you insist on asking me all these questions? I am tired, I don’t feel good. I have work to do for school.”

  I went away. Clutching my small bag of balloons, I padded down the hallway into my room.

  My father was busy because he worked at the university. He was a teacher, just like Mr. Nester at school, except my father taught big people, grown-ups.

  In my bedroom, I stripped the covers from the bed. I took the blue blanket and placed it over my desk chair. Then I dragged my bedside table across the floor and I placed this near the chair. I draped the remainder of the blanket over this table. Then I crawled inside. I had made a Goonie House.

  Best of all was when I made a Goonie House in the living room and my mother got down on her hands and knees and poked her head inside. “I see you,” she would say. And I would kiss her nose.

  But she wasn’t here now and so her head didn’t appear at the door of my Goonie House. I sat for a moment and shivered because I felt so cozy. But then I decided to visit my father again, because maybe he was no longer busy.

  “Hi,” I said, walking back into the kitchen to stand beside him.

  He stared straight ahead at the television. The muscles in his jaw tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, as though he were chewing something very small, like a seed.

  Because he didn’t answer me I said it again.

  “Hi.”

  My father moved so fast that I flinched. He leaped up out of the chair and lunged forward, gripping my shoulders within his massive hands. He squeezed hard, and I winced. His fingers pressed deep into the flesh beneath my shoulder blades and it hurt so much that I suddenly felt warm and nauseous.

  He shook me back and forth. “Goddamn you,” he spit in my face. “Just this barrage of incessant talking, on and on and on.” He stopped shaking me and spun me around so that my left shoulder was pressed into his stomach. With his right hand he spanked me on the bottom, hard. So hard that my pelvic bone would ache for a week and the bruise would spread to my lower back.

  “Now, you have to learn that you cannot simply dominate a room and the thoughts and attentions of every person in that room simply because you are in it. Goddamn it, Augusten.” He continued spanking me until my knees gave out and I folded onto the floor.

  At last, he took his seat. “Now, you get up and you go on back to your room and you stay there until your mother gets home. Do you hear me?”

  Without looking at him I nodded and tried to stand but I couldn’t. So I crawled out of the kitchen on all fours, like a dog. Like a balloon dog. I made it to my room, where I eased into my Goonie House.

  He’d spanked my bottom but it was my head that hurt, a hammering sharp pain. I tried to sit, but the pain was worse so I curled up on my side. But that hurt, too. So I lay on my stomach. I closed my eyes and was soon asleep.

  My father, seeing the package of balloons on the kitchen floor, picked them up and placed them in the trash can in the kitchen. I would find them there the next day but I would not remove them.

  FIVE

  ON SATURDAY MORNING my parents slept in very late, as though they’d been grave-digging all night. It might be noon, even two or three before I saw them. Awake, alone, I watched TV and ate vanilla cake frosting straight from the can with a spoon. The sugar and the cartoons, speedy and colorful, made me unbearably fidgety. During commercials, I sat on the bare wood floor, raised my knees to my chest, and spun myself around on my tailbone. I gained only enough momentum for a few quick rotations before tipping over on my side, but it was enough to make me dizzy and cause the room to sway and heave, as if it were a ship and not a house on solid ground.

  I should have run as fast as I could down the street, all the way to the reservoir and back, exhausted myself, wore myself out. But instead, I stayed indoors, the volume on the TV all the way up, and spun in place. Or, wearing socks, I slid across the kitchen floor into the living room and around the central carpet beneath the dining room table. I slid until my sock bottoms attracted enough dirt and grit that they started to grip instead of slide.

  When the cartoons began thinning out, replaced by dreary religious shows and worse, sports, and my sugar high had peaked and I found myself on the other side, spiraling down, tumbling, a sense of emptiness and loneliness overtook me. Sunlight drenched the house, streaming in through a series of wide, sliding glass doors and the large geometric windows above them. But when I peered downstairs the steps merged with darkness and I knew that within that darkness, warm and sleeping, I would find my parents.

  Quietly, gently, I padded down the steps. At the bottom, I stood before their closed bedroom door. I pressed my ear to the wood, heard nothing.

  I opened the door and entered the cool, dark room. The dehumidifier hummed; it was never turned off, yet the air had a lingering dampness that never went away. My father emptied the two-gallon reservoir daily, but somehow the air remained moist and swampy. I disliked this machine, which seemed to do nothing except pee all day and require constant attention. Secretly, I referred to it as “Harriet,” after my mother’s brain-damaged baby sister, long dead.

  In the dark I crossed the room and found them in their bed, each lying on their side away from the other, creating a wide empty space in the center between them. For me. Suddenly, I was drowsy, so sleepy I could hardly stand on my feet one more instant. Quietly, I entered the bed and crawled over the covers, careful not to bump their sleeping forms.

  But my mother stirred, made a sound, not quite a mumble. In her sleep, she was aware of me. Her arm unconsciousl
y lifted the covers beside her, welcoming me in, under.

  I crawled beneath the thick soft comforter. My feet, stripped of the filthy socks, were icy against their warm bodies.

  I snuggled against my mother, pressed my face into her neck, inhaled her most familiar smell. It was the aroma of my home, where I belonged, everything safe and wonderful.

  But I was restless and just as soon as I settled in against her, I turned over onto my other side. I bumped my way over until I was pressed against my father.

  He awoke, turned over on his back.

  “Augusten, is that you? Oh, now, now, now,” he said, raising himself up on his elbows. “Son, no. You can’t come down here and mess up our sleep, go on. Go on now.” He lifted the covers and pulled them all the way down, exposing me entirely.

  I clung to him, wrapping my left arm across his chest.

  “Go now, go. You’re too old for this, you’re not a baby anymore. You have your own bed upstairs in your own room.”

  When I didn’t move, he said angrily, “I mean it, now.” He stared at me, his dark eyes furious. “Go. Now.”

  Stricken, too shocked by this expulsion, I didn’t complain. I climbed out of the bed leaving their warmth. I was ashamed. Too old for this.

  My mother had woken up as well. She looked at me with tenderness and something else, something that broke my heart a little bit. She mouthed the words, “I’m so sorry.”

  Once I was out of the bed, my father lay back down and repositioned the covers beneath his chin. His head was on the pillow but his eyes were open to make sure I actually left.

  “And close that door,” he said finally.

  I closed the door.

  • • •

  MONTHS LATER, MY father was sitting in the living room in front of the television in his Shaker rocking chair, watching college football and sipping his drink. Dressed in his familiar khaki slacks and gray woolen shirt, his lap was too inviting, so I tried to climb up his legs.

  I wanted to curl up there and sleep while he watched the game.

  I was still small enough to fit.

  But when I tried, he swatted me away. “Get down,” he said, eyes on the game. “Get down.”

  I withdrew. I sat on the floor, mad, and looked at him. I at least wanted him to glance at me so that he could see my mad face and feel bad. I worked hard not to smile, maintaining my mad stare. But the concentration involved made me finally laugh out loud.

  Without looking at me, he took a sip of his drink, eyes fixed on the screen.

  And this surprised me. I’d done nothing to him, nothing bad and yet he wouldn’t even look at me. I thought about it some more and realized that he never allowed me in his lap. And that was not fair.

  I was very concerned with what was fair and what wasn’t. If my big brother got two scoops of vanilla ice cream, I wanted two scoops. Even if I could only eat the one. My mother said, “But he’s a teenager,” as if that should justify extra privileges. As far as I was concerned, the only thing teenagers deserved more of was punishment. After all, my big, stupid brother couldn’t even aim into the toilet; the rusty radiator beside it was all the proof you needed. Fair is fair and fair is equal.

  I was now aware that my father pushed me away but I wanted to see how often he pushed me away. Surely, he couldn’t push me away forever. So I decided that I would attempt to snuggle with him and count the go aways and the come heres. This would make me happy. Because sometimes, I had learned, things seem to be one way but are another. Like, it seems that light is white but really it’s made up of all the colors. I learned that from my brother who was shocked that I didn’t already know it. All a rainbow is is light that walks behind a raindrop and its colors fall out.

  I was a willful thing and now I had a plan through which to channel my ambition. For three days, I undertook my experiment, going so far as to actually borrow my mother’s clipboard so that I could feel terribly official. It required every fiber of restraint I possessed not to burst out laughing or giggle, I’ve got a secret, I’m a scientist! when my father glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t playing with his cigarette lighter. My plan was to confront him with the data and say, “See? It’s not fair. I should get to sit up on your lap much more than you let me.” I imagined him laughing and scooping me up. “You’re absolutely right!”

  When I saw him sitting in his rocking chair, or watching television, when he was lying downstairs in his bedroom taking a nap and when he came home from work, I called his name in celebration and attempted to climb into his lap.

  I did not need to count the number of checks on the little scorecard I had drawn to see that always, one hundred percent of the time, my father pushed me away. My father would never cuddle with me. I was not allowed in his lap, beside him in bed, or next to him on the sofa with my head on his shoulder. His rebukes were mild but they were consistent. “No, not right now.”

  I decided this had been a terrible experiment in the first place. I returned the clipboard to my mother’s office and then clutched my little scorecard in my hand and carried it to the trash can in the kitchen. I buried it, because the only thing worse than the results of my experiment would be for somebody to see the card and know I had carried it out in the first, pitiful place.

  ONE EVENING WHEN my mother was in her office typing and my father was still at the university, I sneaked into their bedroom and rifled through my father’s side of the dresser.

  I found a pair of slacks I had not seen him wear lately and pulled them from the drawer. In the bathroom closet I pawed through the various shirts, jackets, and dresses on hangers until I found a plaid shirt that he would not miss.

  He had a drawer of belts, coiled like sleeping snakes. I took one and carried the clothing upstairs to my room and laid it all out on the bed: slacks, shirt, belt through the loops.

  I pulled my own top sheet from the tangled mound of blankets and worn clothes on the floor at the foot of my bed and began stuffing the corner deep into the leg of the pants. There was enough sheet for both legs but not enough to plump up the shirt, too.

  I scurried down the hall and into the bathroom where I swiped the two towels hanging from the shower curtain rod. In the hall, on the way back to my room, I looked over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t spotted.

  Next, I stuffed the shirt, pulling as much towel into each arm as possible, then I tucked the shirt into the slacks.

  A headless, footless, modestly stuffed body lay on top of my bed. Outside my window, the crickets maintained their relentless throbbing and the clatter of my mother’s typing seemed to merge with their sound until there was almost a rhythmic chanting urging me forward: go, go, go, go, go. The air in my bedroom had altered, brightened, become charged—like another person was now in here with me. As I looked at what I’d done, I felt a pulsing excitement. As well, I felt as if I had solved something. I’d never been good at math, except the single time my brother sat down with me and helped me think through a word problem. When I arrived at the answer on my own, I was both startled and euphoric. That’s how I felt, standing in my bedroom and looking at what I’d created with my father’s unworn clothing: a swell of pleasure at having arrived at the answer myself.

  Tenderly, being mindful not to dislodge the torso from the legs and spoil the illusion, I crawled into bed beside the body, turned on my side, and curled against it.

  A trace, a mere whiff of my father’s cologne clung to the shirt’s fibers when I pressed my face against its chest. It was an acceptable substitute.

  Drowsiness overtook me like a drug. The father body had an intoxicating effect on me, and if I had spoken, my words would have been slurred.

  Somehow, I understood that I must not fall asleep. That to be caught with my stuffed father would get me into a different kind of trouble. The punishment would have to be as unusual as the crime and this realization rejuvenated me, pulling me from the strange, thick sleepiness.

  I climbed off the bed and severed the torso from the legs, stacked
them together, folded them once. They would be easy to reassemble, and in the meantime they appeared to be just a pile of clothes on the floor of my closet. I pressed the surrounding closet contents—books, stuffed animals, shoes—around it.

  Never again would I attempt to snuggle up with my father.

  Now when I needed him, I would go to my room and assemble the body, place it on the bed, and hug it.

  In time, the sheets and towels were replaced with pillows, “guest pillows” for guests that never came.

  Periodically, I rubbed a little pine-tar lotion into the shirtsleeve or sprinkled the slacks with Old Spice. I smeared just a little Eucerin cream into the collar. These were my father’s scents. And with my head on the stuffed chest of the substitute, I would experience the same sudden, bleary tiredness that had overtaken me the first time. I would sleep, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour. And then I would startle awake, flushed with shame, and quickly disassemble it, stowing it hastily in the closet and promising myself that this was the last time.

  For it had begun to feel somehow wrong, even dangerous. Dangerous to me, and dangerous to other people, though the recognition was dim and I had no idea exactly why. It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

  But at seven, then eight, I was still sleeping with my stuffed father regularly. While not every night, I found I was sleepless without him at least three times a week.

  When I considered how much comfort this arrangement gave me, I was sickened. So I refused to think of it. And my stolen, puzzling naps assumed a reckless quality. I was a slave to my need.

  When at last my stuffed father was deconstructed it was not by my own hands. My mother discovered the clothes stuffed with pillows in my room. She thought nothing of it, or not enough to mention it. She simply returned the clothes to the closet and placed the extra pillows on my bed. Over time, my father’s scents faded from the pillows until there was nothing left of him at all.