by Robert Riche
“Oh. Sorry. Just wondering how it’s going.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’ll get another scraper, and give you a hand.”
There being no response to this, it robs me of any glow of beneficence.
“You want to turn the volume back up?”
“Oh, sure.”
I’m trapped now into helping him, and without getting any credit for it, either; and with the volume of the stereo blasting in my ears, too.
I descend to the cellar, find another rusty scraper in the mess on my workbench (which I must clean up some day), and come back up and attack the railing of the front porch to the accompaniment of “Let’s Do It in the Middle of the Road.”
About an hour of this is all I can take, so I wander over to the foot of the ladder, and stand there for a minute, wondering how long it will be before he will deign to look down. Since it doesn’t appear that he will, in fact, ever look down, I am obliged to lower the volume again, eliciting another black look as I call up to him, “How about a break for lunch?”
He stops his scraping for a minute, as though annoyed, and then a moment later descends without saying anything.
“A little lunch?” I say, trying to catch his eye.
“Okay,” he says. Hunger forces him to speak, but not to look at me.
Which is my cue to bend over, and snap off the concert, since we will be eating inside.
The girls (okay, women) are off somewhere. I have a sneaking suspicion they are shopping at one of the nearby malls. So my son and I will be lunching together alone.
He goes into the bathroom to clean up, while I locate some hot dogs in the meat compartment of the fridge, which I put on to fry, at the same time heating in a saucepan some chili from a can, and putting some toast in the toaster. Chili dogs, everybody’s favorite.
“You want some chopped onion on yours?” This after he comes out from the john. That will be his job, to chop the onions.
“No, thanks,” he says.
Okay, so I put the dogs on the table, and we sit down to eat in mutual silence.
I am wondering why he hates me. I can’t figure it out. Have I been too tough on him, assigning to him that tedious task of scraping paint off the house? What does he expect after what happened at school? I could have been a lot tougher on him. I haven’t bugged him with a lot of lecturing. We had a pretty good talk, it seemed to me, coming back from his school. Sort of a man to man talk, when he indicated for the first time that he actually has ambitions of his own, a desire to do something in life. Could it have been that he was merely feeding me what he thought I wanted to hear? That thought does cross my mind now. I brush it aside, as unworthy paranoia. Still, he doesn’t trust me. He expects the worst from me. And, I suppose, I don’t trust him. Distrust on both sides. And no resolution. No détente.
So lunch is no fun. We finish, and he gets up from the table, and instead of the gathering closeness that I had hoped to feel I sense within me a resentment rising. A resentment sufficient to rival his own, particularly when he starts out the kitchen slider, without a word of thanks, and even leaving his dirty dishes at his place.
“Dishes,” I say, hating myself.
He stops and looks back at me, as though there is something messy on the floor that has caught his attention. “What?”
“Dishes. We put our own dishes in the dishwasher after we have lunch.”
His eyes go to his place at the table, and without another word he goes over and stacks his glass precariously on his plate with the silverware and goes to the dishwasher.
“Better rinse them first,” I say. It would be difficult to say now who is more angry with the other. “And, if you don’t mind, clear off the rest of the table, too.”
“Dad!” he protests.
“I cooked! I’m asking you to do your part!”
He doesn’t reply, but retrieves the plate from my place, while I am still sitting there. I am not sure, but I feel that the bump against my chair is not wholly unintentional.
“I am getting sick and tired of this!” I suddenly blurt out at him.
“You asked me to clear the table, I’m clearing the table,” he says.
“I’m talking about your attitude! If you don’t feel cheerful, or if you have something against me, I can’t do anything about that. But, dammit, as long as you’re in this house, I expect you to act—civilized.”
“Like, how?” he comes back at me. “You want me to thank you for putting me up on that ladder scraping the house all week?”
“Do you want me to pat you on the back, and tell you what a great guy you are for getting kicked out of school after being there for only three days?!” I roar back at him. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see anybody else’s point of view but your own?”
“You don’t understand anything!” he replies bitterly, and starts toward the door.
“Wait! What don’t I understand? What don’t I understand?”
“Just let me alone, Dad!”
“Wait a minute! I don’t know how to deal with you any more. We can’t talk. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing!” And with that, he turns his back on me, and goes outside.
The emptiness of the room resounds like a gong. How did we get to this point? I am ravaged by a mixture of anger and guilt. And I can’t tolerate for the moment the guilt, so I nourish the anger. Where is he now? Has he gone to his room? What do I do if he refuses to work on the house?
Gratefully, a moment later I hear a resumption of the rock concert, and the sound of his scraper against the wooden siding. I am relieved, at the same time feeling some imprecise guilt and sorrow replacing anger. I go back to the New York Times Book Review, my eyes poring over the columns, but my mind registering nothing.
Annie and Laura have, indeed, been shopping. They arrive back at the house with arms full of boxes and shopping bags, their cheeks flushed with excitement. I am treated to a fashion show, brief glimpses of bright colors held up in a variety of coquettish poses, but all I can think of is what all this must be costing.
“Just a few things we needed,” my wife says, and I am aware of myself nodding at her like a dazed boxer. Who am I to know what they need, and what they don’t need?
“Everything all right?” my wife asks, looking at me tentatively.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Fine.”
Apparently she’s not convinced. “Peter’s working on the house.”
“Yes, yes.”
“We thought we’d go out this afternoon, and get some apples and cider. You want to come?”
“I think I’ll stay, thanks. Keep an eye on the workforce. I’ve got a report I ought to do.”
I retire into my den/office. It is the one place where I can absent myself from the cares of the world. I am not going to do a report, nor even read The New York Times. I am going to sit in my recliner, my feet up, and waste the rest of the day. It would have been better to go for apples with my wife and daughter, but I have no interest in it.
The day passes. At a certain point I bestir myself to go outside and finish up the leaf raking, lugging the last of the lawn debris to the woods behind Chet’s house, fairly sure now that he is on his way to Hawaii or Vegas today and won’t know. (It’s actually good for the forest floor.) At five o’clock I am finished, and Peter, too, knocks off work for the day. Wife and daughter turn into the driveway with a peck of apples and a jug of cider.
We will have baked apples with roast of pork for Sunday dinner tonight, and treat of treats, my wife will bake her annual apple pie. She voluntarily bakes one apple pie every fall, in exchange for which everyone, mostly meaning me, agrees not ever to ask her to bake anything else during the rest of the year. (Sometimes during the Christmas season, by subterfuge means of considerable heavy sighing and pitiable whimpering and rummaging and fumbling through empty canisters in the kitchen I am able to break her down to baking a batch of Daddy’s favorite cookies—Carmelitas and apricot che
ws.)
Dinner is ready at seven o’clock, at the very moment that Mike Wallace is about to interview a Sultan in his palace. The Sultan is believed to have forty-five wives, (Nobody knows the exact number), and I am hoping maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of flesh through the gauze, but my wife instructs my daughter to turn off the TV set.
She is right, of course. This is a family get-together, and to be savored, as there will not be too many more of them as time speeds along and the children move on. So I get up from the table and start pushing buttons on the VCR, hoping to hit the right combination, for a change, so as to record the show on tape. Usually I get it wrong, though, in fact, it won’t matter, as I rarely get around to watching programs previously taped, anyway.
It isn’t exactly a fun-fest at dinner, though everyone is genuinely appreciative of Annie’s cooking, Peter even offering a compliment, nodding his head and mumbling, “Not bad.”
My wife and I carry on a conversation about nothing, and I ask my son how his studying is coming along.
“I can’t concentrate in the house,” he replies. “There’s too much going on.”
“How come? I’m at work during the day. Your sister’s at school. Only Mom is here, and she doesn’t do anything but lie in bed and eat chocolates all day.”
“All right!” my wife says, wagging a finger at me.
“No, really,” I say. “It’s quiet here, isn’t it?”
“Not today, it isn’t.”
“You’ve been scraping all day.”
“Yeah, but you’re going to make me study tonight.”
Ah ha! I should have known there was a point to all this. “If you were at school, they have study hall Sunday night,” I say.
He knows I’ve got him on that one.
My wife, the great compromiser, puts in. “Just work for two hours tonight,” she says. “You can work in your room, if it’s easier for you.” She looks at me for confirmation.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Just make sure you get done what you have to get done. No music.”
“Dad,” my daughter pipes up in Peter’s defense, “music helps to study.”
“It never helped me.”
“Because you were listening to that Guy Lombardo dude,” my son says, forgetting for a moment and almost allowing himself a small grin.
“It wasn’t Guy Lombardo! I never listened to Guy Lombardo.”
“Well, the Beach Boys, then.” And the grin now simply cannot be suppressed. Apparently there is among a certain cadre of youth even more massive contempt for the Beach Boys than for Guy Lombardo. And to think there was a time once when I had thought my liberal appreciation of the Beach Boys was something I would share in common some day with my children.
“No music while you’re studying,” I say. “At least, not while you’re home.”
“When am I going back?” he asks.
“Wednesday. That’s your week.” A pause. “How do you feel about it?”
There is another pause, and for a moment I am fearful he may tell us that he doesn’t want to go back. He has to go back! “Yeah,” he says. “Whatever.”
“Don’t say ‘whatever’!” I say. “Please! I mean, for your own sake. It’s more than ‘whatever.’ You know that. Don’t you? I mean, if you feel, just ‘whatever,’ it means you don’t care. And caring, really, Pete—really—is what it’s all about. Do you see that? We’re trying to help you.”
He nods. But I’m not sure but what he is doing it just so that I won’t go on. We’re all looking at him, as he pushes his chair back. “Guess I’ll get out to my room, and get to work,” he says.
My heart leaps up. Is that his answer? Or is it that he just can’t stand being around us?
“You haven’t had your pie!” my wife says.
“I couldn’t eat any more now,” he says. “Maybe later.” He stands.
I am disappointed. I wanted more from him. “Do you want to be excused?” I say.
“May I be excused?” he says.
“Yes, Peter,” my wife says softly.
“Thanks. It was good,” he says.
Thank you for that, I think. He starts to gather together his dishes to take them to the dishwasher. Is he learning, or is he merely trying to avoid trouble with me? Which is perhaps the same thing.
“You don’t have to do that,” my wife says, as I frown and grimace at her, and waggle my hand to signal that she should not discourage what he is doing.
“’Sokay,” he says, and totes his plate and glass over to the dishwasher. A moment later he is out through the kitchen slider.
“He didn’t eat any pie,” my wife says disappointedly.
“His loss,” my daughter says. “Yum. I’m gonna have some.”
“Me, too,” I say. “The heck with him.”
“Dad,” my daughter puts in, “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Peter, but I need a ride to the movies tonight.”
“Movies? Have you done your homework?”
My daughter merely rolls her eyes while my wife jumps in. “Yes, she has,” my wife says. “And I told her she could go.”
“Who’s going?” I ask, not objecting now, but nevertheless, I still want to know.
“Oh, Missy. And Bonnie. And a couple of others.”
“Boys?”
“No. No boys. What difference does it make?”
“I just like to know, that’s all.”
“Well, now you know,” my daughter says. “Will you give me a ride?”
“Now?”
“No, not now. We’re catching the last show.”
“Which is at what time?”
“9:15, Dad! Gee!”
“Okay, okay. If your mother says okay, it’s okay with me.”
“It’s okay,” my wife says.
“All right,” I say. “But you come right home.”
“I’ll need money,” she says.
All in all, it hasn’t been a bad day. A minimum of craziness, I think we could say, except for the shouting at lunchtime. My son seems to have reconciled himself to the reality of his situation. My daughter and wife are chattering gaily together over something or other that happened during the afternoon. I retire to my den/office with The New York Times Book Review.
Freud is, indeed, in the news again, this time it being established that he was a fraud, an opportunist, and a sexual molester. Hitler, it is averred in a new book published in Bavaria, was impotent. The new brilliant novel this week is by an Australian paraplegic lady who writes holding a pen between her teeth. At nine o’clock I am finished. It occurs to me to check the news to see if we are at war, but feeling replenished from my reading chores, I decide, instead, to nourish the good feeling, and try to win a minor Brownie point by taking out to my son a piece of apple pie with ice cream.
“You’re not having another piece of pie?” my wife exclaims, catching me daubing a fat scoop of ice cream onto a plate next to a pie wedge.
“No, I’m not having another piece of pie,” I reply, mimicking her tone. “I’m taking it out to Peter.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” she says.
We have a spotlight attached to the outside garage/studio, but, of course, the bulb is burned out, since no one other than Daddy ever remembers to turn it off when it’s not needed. I am making my way gingerly in the dark when out of nowhere all of a sudden I stub hard against the ladder my son earlier in the day must have dropped flat there across the driveway. By executing an incredible leap that Baryshnykov wouldn’t have believed possible I am able to save myself from a bad fall. Even more miraculously, while still in the air—and in the dark!—I am able to snag in my left hand the scoop of ice cream that has been propelled forward in a looping trajectory, a fielder’s choice that I am proud of but immediately regret. Standing there in the dark with the freezing lump squished between my fingers, I scrape it off onto the plate next to the pie, and lick my palm and fingers before, finally, wiping the back and front of my hand across my shirtfront.
Enthus
iasm for the mission somewhat dampened, I nevertheless manage to negotiate successfully the remaining terrain over to the stairway leading to my son’s room, and grope my way up, gripping the railing with my free hand, taking care to keep my body away so as not to catch my pants on any nailheads.
When I reach the top landing, as customarily, I immediately start humming loudly, clearing my throat, and stomping my feet, so as to alert my son in case he has temporarily put aside the books in favor of an early evening massage of the upright organ. Light leaks out around the edges of the cardboard stapled across his window and from underneath the door. I don’t hear any rock music, so apparently he has obeyed my stricture against listening to the stereo.
I knock softly, anticipating the growl from within that normally greets any such intrusion. (He’ll feel guilty when he sees me standing there holding a piece of pie and ice cream for him.)
He doesn’t answer. It could be that the delights of Algebra II and the Early History of the American Nation have charmed him to sleep in his chair.
I knock louder. “Peter!” It’s possible, too, that it’s simply taking him a few minutes to tuck his pecker back out of sight before getting up to let me in. Could he be cheating on me, with the blast of the rock concert piped in through earphones?
“Hey, Pete!” I pound on the door. He ought to be able to hear that. “Wake up, buddy!”
Quiet as a tomb. Which isn’t quite right, either, it seems to me. The first fearful intimation that perhaps something is wrong suggests itself. Electrocution by stereo connection, right now the music beating into his dead body through singed ear canals. The slip of a knife while sharpening a pencil to write a school essay! (How would that son of a bitch headmaster like to live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life?) The possibilities proliferate. A depressed state occasioned by rock music deprivation, resulting in a razor slash across the wrist, or a belt around the neck attached to a ceiling spike.
“Pete! Can you hear me?” I’m banging on the door now. If Chet Dowd is home, I’m sure he can hear me, and shortly will be extending his head over the hedge. I try my son’s door now, rattling it uselessly. Naturally, it is locked, and he is the only one who has a key, a circumstance that you can bet will be corrected tomorrow. I am aware for the first time of a burning sensation in the arch of my foot where I banged it into the ladder, and a feeling of cool stickiness about my instep, blood, I think, having run down inside my shoe. Ignoring that for the moment, I put down the plate of pie and ice cream, and move quickly to the window, which I can see is also locked. Adrenalin is pumping now, and my breathing is coming heavy. Kicking off the shoe of the non-injured foot, I hammer the heel against the glass near the latch, and stick my hand through the broken shards to unlock it. I am able to get it open, and rip back the cardboard, throwing a leg over the sill drawing my body in behind.