Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  “Extra folds of cheek.”

  “A wonder, really.” We knew plenty of statistics. “He should be emaciated, malnourished.”

  “Mother keeps feeding him, meat and potatoes.”

  “What’s she supposed to do? Let him starve?”

  “Maybe,” said Burr. “I mean, think of his liver.”

  We giggled dangerously, as if Father were in the next room. And then found ourselves doubled over.

  Burr stood up, held onto her chair, addressed an unknown audience. “If you wonder why we laugh,” she said, “if you’d spent the first fifteen years of your life edging away from tears, you’d laugh, too.”

  She sat down. We stopped laughing, but continued to wipe our eyes. We were in a place we hadn’t allowed ourselves for years. But the place still had no outlet, no escape.

  “Enablers,” I said. “That’s what we’re called now.”

  “The people who made up the word never had to look Father in the eye.”

  “Did wet”

  Father has become tricky. We know this, but we never say it. It’s something about his eyes, the red horizontal streaks through the whites, the narrowing of focus, the pulling of the look into himself, fast, so we get just a flash, a quick hint of what he might do next. This is our cue to move sideways, exit, make a swift getaway. Sometimes I wonder if, from above, we look like a family of crabs, picking our way sideways to get around one another.

  By now, he has bought a car, a second-hand Pontiac with a stick shift behind the wheel. The car is two shades of green and breaks down a lot, but Father manages to keep it going and no longer relies on the factory truck to travel back and forth to work.

  During summer evenings and weekends, before the bar is officially open, he teaches me to drive on the dirt road. Burr and I are fifteen. Burr refuses to learn. I see it as a means of escape. She sees what’s coming next.

  And what’s coming next is this: Father, on Friday nights after work, drives home and drops off the Pontiac before he heads now farther afield to do his drinking. He’s picked up by the men he calls his drinking partners, but tells us he’s too smart to drive home with them. “They’re all pie-eyed by nine o’clock,” he says. “They can’t hold their liquor worth a damn.” But he, he wouldn’t get behind the wheel after three drinks. To ensure that he gets home safely, he’s decided that I will pick him up when he’s ready to come home.

  “Don’t do it,” says Burr, upstairs in our room. “I wouldn’t. You’ll only be helping him drink as much as he wants.”

  This is decades before the words emotional blackmail begin to appear in the articles we seek out and read.

  Friday nights, Saturday nights, I don’t know how long it goes on, Father phones when he is drunk and ready to come home, and I climb into the Pontiac and edge my way close to the shoulder of dirt roads and back highways, and collect him. I am always to wait in the car and this I do, watching for his swaying figure in doorways of hotels, houses, bars. A greenish sort of light shines across these openings; music blurts into the air with a suddenness that surprises; voices erupt and subside as if severed by the closing doors.

  My father reaches out to steady himself against the passenger side. He slumps rather than slides in, and as soon as the door is shut he raises his head and begins a conversation as if it’s normal for us to converse. Truth is, at home we hardly ever speak. The two of us face forward in the close, whisky-breath space of the front seat. I can escape him no more than he can escape me. His slurred questions are barely understandable; they don’t seem connected to my life or his. One night, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of coins, which he says are for me. When we get home, he scatters them over the front seat. I wait until he goes to bed, and then I go out and scoop up the coins, wondering if he’ll remember and take them back the next day.

  Each time I get him home, I believe I have saved his life. It never occurs to me that if he is at the wheel, he might kill someone else. I concentrate only on him and me: if he drives, he might die; if I drive, I keep him alive.

  He is my father.

  The summer we finish high school, a Saturday, Burr runs away. Father, who descends to the rat cellar and comes up bearing a bottle, opens the bar early because it’s the weekend. After two drinks and some prowling around, he comes upon Burr’s diary and reads portions of it aloud, making fun. Burr is furious. She will never forgive him, she says, never.

  I know where she’s gone, of course. Not far. There’s only one place to go.

  Father walks out to the road a couple of times, glass in hand, looks both ways, comes back to the yard and leans into the Pontiac.

  “Where’s your sister?” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “How should I know?”

  He rolls his eyes, and when he does this I’m reminded of the New Year’s Day he surfaced to open the framed photograph of us, his children, his twins. By their fruits ye shall know them. I’m possessed of a rage I didn’t know I contained, a rage I could not have let fly even moments before.

  “It’s your fault she ran away! It’s your bloody fault!”

  Me. Shouting at Father.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  His rage is greater than mine. His stance threatening. It stops me. Right there. The closest I’ve ever come to naming it, naming him. I have a momentary insight into how Mother must feel. The reasons she leaves him alone. The incident closes over the way water closes over a mudhole.

  I sneak a chunk of ham and two apples out of the fridge and take them to the base of the waterfall. Burr comes out of hiding and I tell her that I’ve shouted at Father. I’ve come close to calling him—a drunk.

  “But you didn’t,” she says, and her voice is flat. “Did you.”

  At the first sign of shadows in the fields, we walk home and go up to our room, unchallenged. Leggings over psoriasis: like every other encounter with Father, this one is never mentioned. After we leave home, we say to each other. After we leave home if he so much as touches a drink in our presence, we’ll tell him.

  But after we leave home, nothing changes. Except that Burr and I move away. Mother stays; they go on living together as if there’s no escape.

  “He’s coming here,” I tell Burr. “They’re both coming for a visit. Only one night, and they’ll be staying at a hotel.”

  “So he can drink without censorship,” she says, on the phone.

  “Do you realize that this is the first trip they’ve taken away from home?”

  Burr and I have distanced ourselves, put a hundred and thirty miles between us and our childhood home. We can visit, but we can also get back to the city quickly. I think of the old dirt road, dust rolling in over the fields and settling on the long grass. Greenly has stretched out to the country now. It has surrounded and encompassed the waterfall—now a picnic site—and our parents’ home, which is part of the town. I think of the cheese factory, shut down years ago. I think of Father’s stash underground. Is it still there? Who buys the whisky? We know, of course, that Father doesn’t drink the way he used to. Can’t. Indirectly, Mother has let us know this as his health has become worse and worse. She does all the driving now. The bus service has stopped; the roads are paved. And she, too, has retired.

  Because Burr’s apartment is small and located on the outskirts of the city, we decide that it will be easier to have the family meal at my home. Burr’s family will stay overnight. “I’m not serving liquor,” I say. “One bottle of wine for the adults, and that will have to be shared. He can’t get drunk on that.”

  Father brings his own. A large bottle of cheap red wine, which he sets at his feet under the table. Before dinner, he pulls two miniature whisky bottles from his shirt pocket, and drinks the contents of those.

  Burr and I are mute. The children chat with their grandmother and, after dinner, go out to play. Our husbands have heard our stories over and over again, but they’re not entangled the wa
y we are, in our past. No one interferes with Father, who stays aloof and sinks into silence at his end of the table.

  Until the momentary flush of rowdiness when he tries to raise a singsong after dinner, slapping his legs against the rug. Mother has already slipped quietly away, and has driven herself back to the hotel. She kisses Burr and me at the door. “He’ll come by taxi, later,” she says. “We’ll stop by for a few minutes on our way home in the morning. We can say goodbye then.” And when Father leaves, not more than a half hour later, he falls flat on his face on my front lawn.

  Burr and I lean against the door and curse and laugh in outrage and relief after the taxi pulls away. I swear to her that I’ll say something the next day. Not when he’s drunk, when he’s sober. I’ll let him know—no shouting or screaming—that it matters to us, that we’re all in this together, that we, they—I don’t know what I’m going to say.

  In the morning, Burr and I stand on the step to greet our parents. Strength in numbers, we say. My heart is fluttering wildly. “Steady,” says Burr, “steady.” If I don’t speak, will she?

  Father slides out of the passenger seat and shuts the car door, but just as he begins to walk towards us, the children swoop around from the backyard, having heard the car. He looks down at his grandchildren, scoops up the youngest and swings him to his shoulders. There’s an outcry from the others; they all want a ride. Father will not be looked at, face to face. He could be anyone’s grandfather, some pleasant old gentleman romping with his grandchildren before he sets off on his journey home. Has he erased himself so thoroughly? Or have we done it for him?

  Maybe he really doesn’t remember.

  One last scene. After Father’s death, I have a dream, and I phone Burr to tell her.

  A group of people has gathered at our childhood home. Family, friends, workmates of Mother, even drinking partners of our father. We are there to celebrate, though what we’re celebrating, I don’t know.

  When Burr and I walk through the door, we don’t see Father. We begin to look for him, upstairs and down. “I’ll bet he’s in the rat cellar,” says Burr, and we go out and walk around to the side of the house. We have to push back the bushes because spiraea has grown over the double trapdoors. We raise the slats and descend the ladder; look at each other and prepare to hold our breath. But here, something happens. The earth cellar opens into an amazing network of underground rooms. We understand now that this is where Father lives. He’s been bringing down odds and ends, bits and pieces, for years. He’s constructed extra rooms, three of them, and these have ceiling tiles and are lined with wood. Old linoleum has been spread across the floor. There is a chair in one corner, even a secondhand fridge. I think of the hanging socket and wonder if the fridge has been plugged in.

  And now, we see Father. He is standing in the middle of the first room, an overflowing bottle in one hand. Champagne, something we’ve never seen him buy or drink. From above, there are noises of celebration—people shouting, congratulating, many voices. Shall we stay down here to celebrate? There is a moment when we must decide.

  I marvel at how much work Father has done to the place. The shelves are neat; the ceilings tight. I move into one of the bedrooms and reach out a hand to smooth the spread, an old one, made of ribbed chenille. I give it a shake to show Burr that, look, Father has even carried a mattress down here. But there is no mattress. As I lift the spread, I see the decay, the disintegration of all that lies beneath. In that single moment when I lift the spread to give it a shake, it becomes clear that everything has been eaten by insects, is in shreds, or has rotted away.

  But his face. I see Father’s face. He has turned towards us while champagne flows over his hand and runs down his arm. He’s looking at Burr and me, and he’s about to celebrate, and we clearly see the expression in his streaked and watery eyes.

  Sarajevo

  During takeoff, Marta called up her angels. Morav, she said to herself. She closed her eyes. Daddy. Aunt Elspeth. Uncle Harry. Jill, who died before me and was too young. She forgot Grandmother O’Hare, and was reminded later the same night. Grandmother O’Hare walked into her dream and stood with a pinched face, severe, silent because she’d been left off the list.

  There was a windstorm in Frankfurt, but flights had not been cancelled. Marta felt the wing outside her window tip to the left, as if she’d caught the plane in the act of tumbling over. Tumble. Drop. She’d gone through this so many times in her mind, for so many years, she knew the sequence.

  It had been bad enough getting herself across the Atlantic. An act of faith she did not believe she could raise each time she flew across an ocean. Acts of innocence and faith to believe, as the plane drifted away from one continent and entered the abyss over cold bottomless Atlantic, that it could and would reach the opposite shore. Always night flights. Flying out over darkness. Hard cold ocean with creatures great and small, lurking below. Never, when she set foot on a plane, did she have a single expectation of arriving at destination. If it happened, it was a gift, a blessing, a miracle.

  Between Frankfurt and Zagreb, the Croatian attendant presented a meal heavy with meat, a layer of cold grease visible. Marta rejected the food, turned away, wondering how, why, she had entered this new set of risks and possibilities. War. Warriors. She was married to a man who’d been away from home for almost a year. That was why she had left Frankfurt in a windstorm, and was headed for Zagreb.

  She phoned her friend Marion before leaving.

  “Marion? I’ve got my ticket.”

  “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “Want has nothing to do with it. I have to do this. He’s out of Bosnia now. He’s living in Croatia. But he goes back just about every week. The last time I talked to him, a Serb had held a gun to his head.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He said to the Serb’s companion—another Serb—’Ask him if it’s because he has such poor aim that he has to stand this close to shoot me.’ ”

  “Was Geoff armed?”

  “No. He hates wearing a gun. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he’s not afraid. He believes that right not might will have its way. He truly believes that. Despite what his eyes are seeing.”

  “He doesn’t think about death the way we do,” said Marion.

  “How is that?”

  “I don’t know. Fear, I guess.”

  “He doesn’t think about it at all. He says if he were to think about death in the middle of a war, he’d already be dead.”

  “He’s probably right,” said Marion.

  A week earlier, a UN soldier’s face had been carved with a knife, at gunpoint. And snipers, there were always snipers. They picked off whomever they could—their own civilian population, UN peacekeepers, aid workers. In downtown Sarajevo, old women out for firewood or water were shot at for target practice. Cowards. Cowardly men hiding behind guns, shooting at their own elderly, their own children. She hated, detested Geoff being there. Last year, his arm had been broken when a Croat had tried to kidnap him. Geoff had not been shot, nor had he been kidnapped. But he’d walked away from a cocked machine gun. He believed in his work. He didn’t see Muslims, Croats, Serbs. He saw humans needing help. Children—many children. Orphans. Women. Some men. The old. He knew individuals. Friends. Teenagers. Victims. All of them victims of their own war. There were days, nights, when she regretted loving him.

  Days and nights were all alike in the hotel. They lived in the countryside, outside Zagreb, a rural stretch of four-lane dusty highway. The hotel had been taken over by the United Nations; from the outside, it was baby blue, a long flat building, concrete and glass. She felt like Rapunzel, alone all day on the second floor. Croatian police guarded her from outside. They swaggered into the bar in the morning where she, the only customer, sipped bitter coffee and kept watch over knives and guns strapped to their waists. The waiters wore blousy shirts and in halting English spoke with her about gut Geld in Toronto and Frankfurt. Every one of them had a brother, an uncle o
r a daughter in Canada or Germany. No one, it seemed, wanted to stay in Croatia.

  In the evening, the warriors came back from headquarters, lining up their white vehicles like cardboard jeeps in the parking lot below. They were from many nations, European and African. Geoff was the first to leave in the morning and last to return at night. He flew in and out of Bosnia by helicopter, by small jet, continuing his journeys in open jeeps or armoured personnel carriers for the final leg. One morning, a bullet ripped through the cockpit of the plane as the pilot landed. Geoff was sitting behind the navigator. The bullet exited inches from his ear. In their hotel room, he painted his blood group on the back of his blue helmet—large permanent felt tip letters, so there’d be no mistake.

  Some part of him, she knew, had been drawn to the danger. He talked with resignation and inevitability about the violence. He told her of thugs who’d emerged from the deepest crevices of the earth when war began. Territories had been drawn; the slime-balls, as he called them, would stop at nothing to keep their guns, their endless supply of liquor, women, money, drugs. Their power. War would not end, not with signed agreements in Geneva, London, Sarajevo. No, it was already far beyond three political parties lining up continual complaints to make one another look bad.

  She could not speak to him of home, of their children. She watched, waited, trying to learn what he was dealing with. Sometimes he stayed in Bosnia several days at a time. He left his gun locked in a trunk in their room. His friends were in Sarajevo. He’d left them behind. He could get out. He was alive. Word of the killings always reached him. Another soldier, another interpreter, horrible, intentional murders. He shook his head, talked to her as if the dead were still alive. Some, a few, had got out. He’d helped. He received letters at the hotel, passed through many hands, filled with tears, with kisses, with love. When he returned each time from Bosnia, his back was soaked through under the armour he wore. The equipment too heavy to carry. He removed it piece by piece in their room, stacked it in a corner, the blue helmet placed on top with his blood group showing, reminding them of what was necessary, of what might be.