John says I’m still just scared by how the baby almost died when he was born. That I’ll stop worrying after a while, when enough time has passed that I know deep down he’s okay. This is what Doctor Rengell says, too.
Baby John doesn’t sleep as good as his father. Most times when I pick him up he cries and waves his arms around, opening and closing his little fingers until they find my nightgown and take hold of that. Sometimes he sucks on it, the nightgown. If he does this usually he goes right back to sleep. If he’s mad about being woken up and doesn’t want the fabric to suck on, he’ll fuss and I’ll walk around the bedroom slowly, bouncing him a bit with my arm under his bottom. I stroke his head with its soft baby hair like cotton candy. And my hands will be shaking still.
Sometimes the baby’s fussing will wake Rodney. He’ll come walking into the bedroom, rubbing at his eyes.
Go back to bed, I say to him.
I’m hungry, he says.
It’s not time for breakfast yet, I say. Go back to bed.
I can’t sleep with that baby crying.
Rodney, I won’t tell you again, I say.
Usually at this point he’ll realize I’m not kidding and go back to his bed, though he always drags his feet and gives me a dirty look.
I don’t know what the dream is trying to tell me about Baby John. He’s not actually in it. How could he be? In the dream I’m just a little girl, the same as when it happened in real life. I don’t think of the baby while I’m asleep. It’s only when I wake up choking. Then my first thought—even before I try to breathe—is about him. He’s in trouble, I think. Something’s wrong. It’s that deep-gut certainty you get. Like the feeling I have sometimes while I’m standing over a pot on the stove, or else just watching All in the Family and out of nowhere my heart takes one big beat and suddenly it’s racing and I’m trying to catch my breath even though I’m just standing there. It doesn’t make any sense. But you’re so certain some terrible thing has happened or is about to happen. You’re so certain there’s something to be afraid of.
I pay attention to these moments. Because I think this is God’s way of trying to tell us things we can’t otherwise know. So when I wake up afraid for Baby John, there’s a reason. I’ve got to be careful. And I’ve got to pay attention.
This is how the dream goes: When I was a girl of about six my father took us all to the river. It was sunny, summer, you’d think it was the weekend because my father wasn’t working but the truth is most of the time he didn’t have a job so it could have been a Tuesday. Not counting my father there were nine of us, all nine kids. My mother stayed at home this time, which she must have had a good reason because normally she didn’t trust my father with any of the kids except Rodney, my brother Rodney who my son Rodney is named for. At thirteen my brother Rodney was just like Dad and spent most school days shining shoes at the bars in town and could take care of himself. But my mother didn’t trust my dad with me or the other younger kids, not Patti, who was probably only four or so at the time, or Drew, who was just a baby. But there we all were, walking in a line down the path to the river with Dad at the front. Behind him was Rodney, carrying the baby, and behind Rodney were Matt and Louie, carrying a big cooler. Inside the cooler was a jar of mustard and a loaf of bread but mostly it was full of Narragansett beer.
At the bottom of the path there was a grassy area along the water with enough room for the ten of us to spread out. There was a dock there, too, where people put in canoes and paddleboats. The dock was old and tilted to one side. Some of the wooden boards were cracked, and one was missing, leaving this gap in the middle of the dock like a missing tooth. The river was wide and black and ran hard toward the Scott paper mill, and past that the falls.
This is the part in the dream when I start to get scared—seeing that dirty water go past. How black it is even though the sun is big and bright in the sky. The water bugs riding on the current. I get scared. Watching my father pull open one pop-top after another, I want to get up and run. But I can’t, because even though I’m me, I’m also just watching myself. And this is another way that the dream and the memory are the same—I can’t change either one. I’ve got no control.
So I have to watch myself sit there in the grass, as far back from the water as I can get without being in the trees. I’ve got my back to the river because I don’t want to look at it. The sun is hot in my hair and I’m playing with my Little Miss No Name doll, although playing is really the wrong word, what I’m really doing is sort of caring for Little Miss No Name and at the same time trying to make myself as small and quiet as I can while my father drinks beer and gets red around the straps of his tank top and hollers at the boys to stop throwing rocks and quit fucking around with that dead squirrel. Little Miss No Name has a pale, dirty face and a big gray tear falling from one eye, and she’s wearing a burlap dress with an orange patch near the hem. The only thing that’s pretty about Little Miss No Name is her hair, so blond it’s almost white, and I try out different hairstyles, first putting it in pigtails, then a braid, then parting it straight down the middle.
Little Miss No Name is my one gift from the Christmas before. Since it’s the only thing I have that’s mine I’m selfish with it. Patti wants to play, wants to take Little Miss No Name’s dress off and put it back on, and she grabs at the burlap shoulder. Patti doesn’t have a toy of her own. Back around Easter she stuck her Zip the Monkey in the flame of the range top to see what would happen, and that was that. I’m sitting Indian-style and I tell Patti no and shift my weight back and forth on my butt until I’m facing away from her, my back blocking her from the doll. She gives up and starts digging in the dirt between her legs.
Time goes by, I don’t know how much. Rodney and Matt and Louie and Freddie search through the rocks in the shallows for crawfish. They find a few. One finds Freddie first and pinches his finger. He runs to my father, who’s lying with the baby in the shade beneath a tree, and my father takes a look at the cut and tells Freddie to walk it off. Freddie goes to walk it off and my father cuffs him on the back of the head, but this is one of those times he’s just playing.
I’ve decided that Little Miss No Name has misbehaved somehow and so I’m punishing her. Not punishing her, but what’s the word? Scolding her. I scold Little Miss No Name and that big tear keeps rolling out of her eye.
Then Dad tells Rodney, who is his right-hand man, to get the bread and mustard out and make some sandwiches. Everyone but me gathers around the cooler. They use their fingers to spread the mustard, then press the two pieces of Wonder together and eat. Their hands and mouths are covered in yellow. I am hungry but I don’t join in. My father, still lying with his back against the tree and a can of Narragansett between his legs, notices I’m sitting by myself in the grass.
Debbie, he says. Eat.
I turn and look at him. I’m not hungry, I lie.
What did I say. It is not a question.
I get up and join the other kids. My knees ache from sitting Indian-style for so long. The back of my neck, the part that my hair doesn’t cover, feels tight from the sun. I know it will sting later. My brothers and sisters crowd around the cooler. They push each other and laugh but when my father clears his throat they settle down and just eat.
I take one slice of Wonder and put a little mustard on it with my pointer finger and fold it over. I take small bites and it seems like I’ll never be finished but every time I look up I see my father is watching me and so I eat it all. It’s been a few hours and he’s had enough to drink that he’s got that look now. When I’ve put the last bit of crust in my mouth he looks away finally, across the river, and I sneak back to my spot in the grass.
When everyone’s finished eating my father sits up with the baby and says to us get in the water. The baby is crying, his face all scrunched up under the bonnet, and my father bounces him on his knee but it’s not helping because he’s being too rough and the baby’s head is jerking all over. Go on, you kids, my father says, get in the river and
cool off. And this is when the fear that’s been growing inside me explodes suddenly. The other kids do what they’re told and get in the water and start splashing and shoving each other. I hunch over, using my fingers to comb Little Miss No Name’s hair. I slow my breathing to almost nothing and keep my head down.
This is always what I do. Be quiet and still and try to sort of fade away. Sometimes it works when the others are around. Because the boys, and Freddie especially, are loud and always getting into some sort of trouble and so they attract a lot of my father’s attention and make it easy for me to disappear.
But this time there’s no way to hide. I’m the only one who isn’t in the water, besides the baby of course.
Debbie, my father says. Get in the river, there.
I don’t look up.
Girl, he says. This is his warning voice, and it scares me, but not as much as that black water. I just keep combing Little Miss No Name’s hair. This is me with my head in the sand. I know it won’t work, but there’s nothing else I can do.
Finally he gets angry and puts the baby in the grass and stands up. The baby cries and reaches up his chubby hands as my father comes to where I’m sitting and stands over me. I’m shaking, hunched over the doll, pretending I don’t notice his shadow.
Debbie, he says. I told you to do something.
I don’t like the water. I can’t swim.
Chrissakes everyone can swim, he says. All you do is flap your arms and legs around. Now get in there and cool off.
Except for the shaking, I don’t move.
And then he’s done talking and he lifts me by one arm and is carrying me that way, his hand squeezing my upper arm hard. I start to scream. The other kids stop playing and watch as my father carries me onto the dock. My feet drag along, making a sound like a drum as they thump in the spaces between the boards. My father steps over the hole where the one board is missing. When he gets to the end of the dock he turns and throws me off into the deep water, way past where the other kids are, out to where the current can grab you.
I go under, into the cold and dark. The world disappears. And I wake up and think: Baby John.
I remember to breathe, alone there in my bed, with the light coming in from the streetlamp and bits of dirt in the sheets. With my heart pounding I go to Baby John and lift him from the crib and hold him too tight against me. And pray to God to show me how to protect him, and from what.
In real life, past where the dream ends, I almost drowned. I went under and stayed under until my father realized what he’d done and came in after me. When he pulled me from the water I was half out of it but I remember a couple of the other kids crying. And I remember being on my back in the mud, my father pushing on my chest and saying Breathe, goddammit even though as far as I could tell I was breathing already. His voice was still angry but when I looked up at his face, behind the glaze of the beer buzz I could see fear in his eyes. Whether he was afraid more that I would die, or that he would be responsible if I did, I don’t know. Either way it meant he cared, and that was good enough for me.
Years went by and he went from mean to just crazy, but I remembered the day he was afraid for me, and I still loved him. When he turned his hunting knife over in the light of the TV as I went up the stairs to bed and smiled at me and said Maybe tonight, I still loved him. When I got married at sixteen just to escape, I still loved him. When he died alone in his trailer two years ago, I fell down and cried for three days, because I still loved him.
This is the way, now, that I love my baby.
Father
Here is what you need to know about Father:
Father is a ghost, a specter, mostly absent, then appearing suddenly, in glimpses, as a huge shape under the bedcovers at twilight, a bowed silent head over newspaper and steaming coffee cup. Father is a mustache; once he shaves it and you do not recognize him and for three weeks you scream and writhe every time he appears, until it grows back. Father is nearly mute. Father was not exactly loquacious by nature, and then he went away and killed people and was almost killed himself, and when he came back a year later he decided his mouth had only three functions, and speaking was not one of them. For a while he thought his mouth’s primary function was to take in liquor, and so he did that, working two jobs all the while, seeing your mother through her first pregnancy, and though he did not throw glassware or punches, did not spend money allocated for food or the electric bill on booze, did not ever wake up in a crumpled car or in jail, he nonetheless decided, after two years of drinking hard, after ballooning to 295 bloated pounds, that his mouth now had only two functions—the drinking of coffee and the smoking of cigarettes.
And though at one year old you don’t yet know much about your father, you should be aware that he is the type of person who does not change his mind once he’s made it up. On the one hand, this is good, since he’s not likely to backslide on the drinking. He is steady, calm, a man of unremarkable but ironclad habits, who while at war learned the value of sleep, and now does not allow anything—noise, crisis, lack of time—to keep him from it. And while it is never a bad thing to have a reliable and sober man for a father, his unshakable composure can make him seem apathetic, even cold. And just as his decision not to drink is almost certainly permanent, so too is his decision to hardly speak. Know this, assimilate and accept it, so that you don’t waste energy, in later years, trying in vain to elicit words like “love” and “proud” from him.
Unlike your mother, your father smokes in the house.
When he comes home from the bakery in the afternoons your father likes to lift you from the crib and hold you, but casually; he hoists you to his shoulder like a sack of rocks, holds you in place with one great forearm under your backside, and goes about his few household activities—stirring sugar into coffee, shaving his cheeks and trimming his mustache—as though you aren’t even there, as though he’s always had just one arm. Sometimes he forgets he is carrying you, and retires to the bedroom for an hour or two of sleep with you still clinging to him like a remora on a shark. You’ve learned that if you fuss a bit (but quietly, quietly, he doesn’t respond well to loud noises, especially right next to his ear, and though he has never become demonstrably angry, there is, just beneath the surface of his calm, the implication of a rage so dark and violent it frightens even him, a rage he takes great care to keep under control, pausing when annoyed to breathe and flex his hands) he will remember you are there and be sure not to crush you as he settles his bulk into bed.
Because you most often cannot bear to look directly at him, you know more about how your father smells than anything else. He is a delicious combination of baker’s yeast and Aqua Velva, lemon frosting and tobacco smoke, Taster’s Choice crystals and warehouse dust. Some of these scents change in intensity with the time of day; in the morning the aftershave and dust are prominent; in the afternoons, the yeast and frosting. The coffee and smoke are constants, omnipresent.
Learn to pretend to sleep. Or else learn to wake without crying. This way, you can lie in your crib, listening to the night sounds in your parents’ bedroom, and discover that your father is not entirely mute after all, only mute with everyone except your mother. Wait for him to return, just before dawn, from loading and unloading boxes at the warehouse. Keep your eyes closed, or else the sight of his hulking silhouette will cause you to cry, and your mother will rise and come to you and he will remain silent. Be still, and listen. Do you hear, beneath the rush and fade of the occasional car passing on the street outside, beneath the rustle of cotton sheets and the groan of mattress springs, a sound too deep and calm to be your mother? Listen carefully; it will continue for only a minute or two; he is much too tired to talk longer than that before dropping into a profound if brief sleep. This, then, is the sound of your father’s voice, the sound of absolute safety and control.
Having learned that your father does speak, and having heard his voice for yourself, you now want one thing more than you’ve desired anything else in your short li
fe—to know what he’s saying. Every morning, after he comes in and before he goes to sleep, when he believes no one else is listening, you hear him speak to your mother, but you can never make out the words. Sometimes she answers, a falsetto accompaniment to his baritone, and sometimes she rolls over wordlessly to greet him, to be enveloped by the comforting girth of his arms and chest. Either way, he always has words for her, words whose meaning dangles in the air above you like a mobile hung just out of reach.
Everything Matters! Page 2