A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

  SIX

  MY FATHER AND I were walking along Market Hill Road in Shutesbury just two houses past our own. My father’s black oxford shoes crunched over the loose gravel on the dirt road while I kicked stones and tried to follow their trajectory. “What’s the straightest thing?” I asked. I tried to imagine what it could be. A ruler? The sharp edge of a piece of paper?

  “What do you mean, son, the straightest thing?”

  “I mean, what’s the straightest thing in the whole world?”

  My father exhaled, weary. “Aw, well, let’s see, what would that be?” he asked himself. And as we walked, my father tilted his head to the sky, which was blocked by the pine trees that lined the road. I continued to kick rocks with the rubber toe of my sneaker, shooting pebbles into the ditch that ran alongside us. “Well,” he finally said, “I would have to guess that the straightest thing would be a ray of light.”

  A ray of light.

  His answer excited and confused me, propelled me forward so that I was steps ahead of him and had to walk backward to face him. The questions spilled out of me. “But how? How can light be straight? Isn’t light just like water and it washes over everything? Light isn’t straight. Light isn’t a thing.”

  “Well, rays of light, yes. Those would be the straightest things, I’m pretty sure. It’s only an illusion that light is, like you say, water, washing over everything.”

  Suddenly, I desperately wanted to look at the sun, I wanted to see in the sky a sun radiating pure, straight yellow lines. Like the drawing on a box of Raisin Bran. But the sun was blocked by the trees, these woods were so thick. Our whole neighborhood was just a street carved out of the wilderness, a few houses dropped down into small clearings. How could the rays of the sun be the straightest thing, straighter than a ruler or a piece of paper? “You mean, if you squint?” I asked, narrowing my eyes, instantly seeing rays of light—indeed—streaming through the dense pines. Yes, they were straight, these lines. But how could they be the straightest things? How could you measure?

  “Son, I’m tired now. We’d best be heading back home.”

  We’d only walked the length of four houses. We weren’t even past the Abramses’ yet, not four hundred feet from our driveway.

  My father’s limp became pronounced, as though his right leg were sinking into the road with each step. His mouth was a fixed grimace, the lines on his forehead were bowed, as though bearing weight. I knew there would be no argument, no Just five more minutes. We would turn around now and walk home.

  But this had been something, our first walk together. I didn’t know then that it would also be our last. That the memory of this day would remain with me always: the single time my father and I took a walk and spoke of light.

  Looking at my father’s face, seeing that half of it was in shadow, the other half nearly glowing, I felt engorged with hope.

  I was his son and light was the straightest thing in the world and I felt amazed, like when my teacher played a record for us, a mournful, weeping song, and told us it wasn’t any instrument at all but the sound of a whale.

  “No.”

  I hadn’t asked him a question, I hadn’t said a thing.

  “No, I just don’t feel good, not at all,” my father said.

  ON MY NINTH birthday my father gave me a baseball glove. It was a beautiful mitt; a Wilson A2100 the color of cooked sugar. Not only had I never had a glove before, I’d never learned to throw a ball and didn’t know the rules of the game. For years, I’d sat and observed my father watching baseball games, cutting in now and then and asking, “How does it work? What are the rules?”

  “It’s difficult to explain,” he said. “Just watch the game and see if you can follow along.” So I sat back, my gaze alternating between the small television and my father’s face, trying to decipher the rules of the game.

  Now, I turned the glove over in my hand, slipped my fingers inside.

  “Be careful with it,” my father said. “You have to break it in. You have to take good care of it. And especially, don’t get it wet.”

  It seemed every moment in my life had led to this one, the first time my father had taken me aside and given me something special. I held the glove in my hand reverentially. “I will,” I said. “I will be so careful.”

  He smiled tightly, slapped me on the back. “Good boy. I’m glad you like your gift.”

  “Can we go outside?” I asked, embarrassed because I knew I was leaking hope the way our dog Cream would sometimes squirt pee on the floor when she was excited.

  He folded himself into the rocking chair in the living room, exhaling loudly as he sat. “Oh, not now. You go play, I’m in a lot of pain.”

  “Just for a minute?” I begged.

  He closed his eyes. “I’m very tired right now. You go on and play with your new glove.”

  I walked away, carrying the mitt by the wrist strap. The trouble was, I didn’t know how to play with it.

  I knew I should be very grateful for this extraordinary present, but I couldn’t help feeling almost sad. Because before I had a glove, I didn’t need a father to throw a ball at me.

  A ball. That’s when it occurred to me, he’d given me a glove but nothing to catch.

  THE BASEBALL GLOVE sat alone on the highest bookshelf in my bedroom, a location of honor, high above the record album sleeves, dirty laundry, general clutter. It sat there for months. But it seemed to taunt me from that height, with its wrinkle-free hide, its pristine condition.

  One afternoon after school, my mother surprised me with a baseball. “Look what I bought at the store today. Would you like to go out to the backyard and play catch?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s okay. I don’t need to.”

  She smiled at me, bit her bottom lip. “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun.” With her big toe, the nail painted bright red, she scratched her calf, then hopped to regain her balance. She was in an unusually perky mood; she’d even set her hair in curlers and then brushed it out. But I knew that one of her good moods was always followed by a very bad one. I figured I better not be the reason.

  “Well, all right,” I finally agreed. “Let me just go get my glove.” And I ran back to my room. I dragged my desk chair over to the bookshelf, stood on the seat, and grabbed the glove.

  I followed my mother outside, around the house to the back. She lit a cigarette from the pack she always kept in the front patch pocket of her dress and said, “Okay, you go stand over there at the edge of the woods,” and pointed to the very rear boundary of the yard.

  I jogged back there, swatting bugs away from my head. I turned around to face her. “Okay,” I shouted. The glove felt funny on my hand, heavy.

  She brought her cigarette to her lips. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” I called back, waiting.

  She tossed the ball to me, underhand. Even though I ran, I missed it because it only landed a few feet in front of her.

  “Sorry,” she called. “I’ll throw it better the next time.” My mother had become expert at speaking around the cigarette in her mouth, squinting her eyes against the smoke.

  I handed her the ball and then ran back to my spot at the edge of the yard. I slammed my fist into the glove, because I’d seen players do this, and shouted, “Okay, I’m ready again.”

  My mother threw the ball again and this time it landed off to the side and rolled into the woods.

  It was no use. She didn’t know how to play baseball any more than I did. My mother could open a book of matches and remove one and light it using only her toes, but she could not throw a ball.

  I picked it up off the ground, wiped away a damp leaf, and then walked back to her. “I don’t want to play catch,” I said. “We don’t have to, it’s okay.”

  “I’m not very good, am I?” she asked, gently tucking a curl out of my face. “Well, maybe your dad can come out after work and play with you for a while.”

  “He won’t do that,” I said, and the anger in my voice surprised me. In a m
ore casual voice I added, “He never wants to do anything with me.”

  I wanted my mother to hug me and say, That’s just not true, but instead she said, “Well, I want to do things with you.”

  She headed back indoors and I left the glove outside on a rock so that the rain could weather it. I wanted it to at least look like the other boys’ gloves, soft and well used. I certainly couldn’t bring such a pristine glove to school; I might as well show up in a dress. So I left it on a rock and after a week, dye had leached onto the stone beneath it.

  The glove had dried stiff. I’d ruined it.

  My mother felt sorry for me. She drove me to the Mountain Farms Mall, where we parked in front of JCPenney. As always, I couldn’t resist staring at the tooth imprints on the dashboard of our drab Dodge Aspen wagon. When my parents had brought the Aspen home for the first time, I’d sat in the passenger seat, admiring the new car. Then, because I could not stop myself, I leaned forward and bit into the soft dashboard. The material flexed beneath my bite and when I pulled away, I saw my tooth marks had remained in the dash. Even at the time I’d wondered what had compelled me to bite the dashboard like that. But now, a year older, I groaned inwardly whenever I saw the bite, which was every time I got in the car. It was like a tattoo of my immaturity. Plus, my father had been furious when he saw the damage, screaming, “Jesus Christ, son, what possessed you? Why would you do such a thing?” He couldn’t think of a punishment appropriate to the crime, so there had been none. My own mortification had been enough.

  “Ready?” my mother said. We climbed out of the car and walked into the mall.

  The pet store was, of course, my favorite. Although I visited it each time we went to the mall, I’d only once been allowed to bring something back from it: hermit crabs. The crabs had been fascinating pets, as I invented a rich inner life for them, naming them Gladys, Marshall, Stuart, Gabrielle, and Charlotte. Despite my best efforts, they all died, leaving me with their shells, which my mother, to my horror, wanted to mix with the bowl of decorative seashells in her office. “When Cream dies, will you hang her hide on your wall?” I asked.

  We were here today for a guinea pig. My parents wouldn’t let me get another dog, but at least my mother understood that another set of crabs just wouldn’t cut it. I needed something warm and fuzzy that I could name and snuggle with.

  The pet store had an entire wall of small, furry mammals: mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils. While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail. My mother understood this at once because when I asked she replied, “No way.”

  But a guinea pig and an aquarium were modest, so she agreed.

  There were so many and they were all cute, and I realized this wouldn’t be just a matter of waltzing into the store and pointing to one. I would have to meet each of the pigs and choose one based on its personality, spirit, and innate good manners. Luckily, the clerk was patient and allowed me to cradle every pig I pointed to. I knew I didn’t want a long-haired model, those were for girls who liked to comb hair and add repulsive little bows. So I narrowed my search to the short-haired variety.

  Still, it was tough. The black ones were sleek and beautiful, but did they look a little like rats, all one color like that?

  I could get a white one, but then, why not just get a bunny? “Could I?” I asked my mother.

  “Absolutely not. You may select a guinea pig and that’s it.”

  I settled on a tricolor, a little of each. He was tan and white with just a smattering of black. When I pressed him to my chest and he wriggled up against my neck and nuzzled my ear, I named him, Ernest. Ernie for short.

  We set up Ernie in his aquarium in the kitchen. The aquarium had a stand, so the top of the tank was well over my head. I had to call my mother or my father to take him out when I wanted to pet him.

  Soon, Ernie possessed an impressive repertoire of tricks. He squealed every time the refrigerator was opened and would stop only if some lettuce was deposited on the cedar-shaving-covered floor of his cage. He emitted a different squeal when he wanted to run around on the floor. If I called, “Here, Ernie!” he would run to the side of his aquarium closest to the door, stand up on his little back feet, and wait to be picked up. “Look at you,” I said to him, “just a little animal, plucked from nature.”

  Ernie was so adorable, even my mother, who at first called him “a loaf of rat,” came to love him. “He is awfully sweet, isn’t he?” she admitted as Ernie crawled across her bosom to nibble on her blue Indian corn necklace.

  My mother took many photographs of me and Ernie together—Ernie in one of the costumes I created for him out of fabric scraps and glue, Ernie sitting in a chair just like a person. Though when I strung one of my mother’s gigantic bras across the back of two kitchen chairs and set Ernie into one of the cups, like a hammock, she didn’t take a picture as I expected but screamed, “Take that horrible thing out of my good bra!” I was insulted that she called Ernie a “horrible thing” and I back-talked her. “He’s cuter than what’s usually in that big old bra.”

  Only my brother was uninterested in Ernie. But my brother, I’d come to understand, wasn’t interested in living things. Not only would he refuse to make eye contact, my brother wouldn’t respond if you spoke to him. You had to walk up to him and scream at the side of his head to get his attention, or jab him really hard with something sharp. That worked.

  One morning, an expression of contempt settled on his face when I told him there was no more cereal because I’d fed the last of it to Ernie. He was now in active competition with the little guinea pig for food.

  That afternoon I said, “Mom? I’m afraid my brother is going to do something bad to Ernie.”

  She stopped typing and looked up at me. “What do you mean by bad?” she asked. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  I told her, “I just . . . my brother doesn’t understand little pets. They aren’t cute to him. What if he fed Ernie a battery? What if he cooked him?” Ernie was, after all, in the kitchen, along with all the other ingredients.

  My mother continued to look into my eyes, then she reached for her pack of cigarettes and lit one. She inhaled, closing her eyes. “Okay,” she said, exhaling in relief. She chewed her thumb nail as she thought about this. Maybe she was remembering the time my brother buried me outside, headfirst. Or perhaps she was recalling when my brother hooked her up to a series of strobe lights when she was sleeping, so that she awakened with a heart-seizing shock to a flashing, confusing light show inches from her face. Even though nobody ever spoke of it, we knew there was just something different, perhaps even defective, about my brother. You could see it in photographs of him when he was small, something about his eyes. He had the oddly impersonal gaze of a mischievous farm animal, a goat maybe, but not a boy.

  My mother moved Ernie’s cage into my bedroom, where he would be safe.

  “IT’S OKAY, ERNIE, it’s okay boy. Don’t worry. This just happens sometimes is all. They’ll stop soon, I promise.” I was whispering these words into Ernie’s ear as I lay in bed with him tucked into the crook of my arm, covers pulled up over us.

  My parents were shouting at each other in the living room.

  I’d never known life without the sound of my parents’ fighting. The shrill, furious screams of my mother, the drunk, bitter reprimands of my father. Though they’d been fighting since I could remember, over the last few years it had escalated. Now I was afraid something might happen.

  I scratched behind Ernie’s little head and he made the softest sound, air rubbing against air, as his whiskers twitched and brushed against the blanket. “Don’t worry,” I said softly, “we’ll be okay.”

  But I wasn’t sure about this, not at all. Sometimes, I’d be able to make out a word: “kill�
� or “hate” or “die.” I didn’t want to hear what they were saying, I didn’t want to understand one thing. I just wanted them to stop.

  As though I had willed it to happen, the house was suddenly silent. I gently ran my index finger down Ernie’s nose. “See? It’s over, it’s all better now.”

  I silently peeled back the blanket, as though by making even one small sound I would reactivate the battle in the living room, and climbed from the bed, Ernie still cradled in my arms. Gently, I stepped onto the chair I’d placed beside his aquarium and lowered him onto a bed of soft, fragrant cedar chips. I saw that his water bottle was full, but I knew by now it wasn’t cold any longer. Normally, I’d run into the bathroom and let the water run until it was icy. Our water came from our own deep well and all other water tasted wrong to me. But that would have to wait. I couldn’t risk leaving the security of my room. One thing I could do, though, was scoop out the few soiled chips that I saw, throw them into the trash can, then add a fresh handful.

  Ernie circled like a miniature dog then snuggled into a ball. I gently lowered my hand into the aquarium and traced the irresistible curve of his precious back. With my finger just barely touching him, I could feel the tiny rise and fall of his body with each breath. Ernie was a happy guinea pig, unlike the one at school that was a small monster, driven mad by the shrieking children, the constant poking and squeezing. The school pig struggled against affection, would nip your finger if you reached for him. Pauline Milkmoore had to see the nurse after it bit her pinkie and drew blood, and I could only hope she would die from rabies. Pauline Milkmoore would run around chasing everybody and shouting, “Smell my finger” after having inserted it into one of her many holes.

  My mother opened my door with such force, a gust of wind passed through my room and the curtains swayed. “We’re leaving,” she said directly. “Pack your bag with underpants, clean socks, a pair of jeans, a sweater, two or three shirts. I need you to hurry, Augusten. Do this right now. You’ll need your toothbrush.” She turned to leave but I called out, “Wait!” and she froze.