by Jacki Lyden
"There's your mother on the box," said Mabel, Kate and I looking for the little thimble doll that looked like her on the television set. And there she was in Pasadena, 1961, stamping along with the Doctor and the rest of the band in the Tournament of Roses Parade. That was before they were together. The Doctor entered our lives a couple of years later with what he took away, which was our mother and her carelessness. Our moments with our mother before the mirror now had an urgency lacking all enchantment. I did not wish her well as she walked out the door, arm in arm with someone large and glacial. I was seven now. I wrote purposeful short stories in which large men died suddenly, the victims of mysterious accidents. Rocks fell. Motorboats hit buried sandbars and sank. One of my characters was fatally bitten by a rabid raccoon. Medicine only prolonged his agony. None fell off roofs and then hung around, wordlessly dissolving into the fate of his own impotence and the loss of his senses.
In the brief time between my father's leaving and the Doctor's coming, we were happy enough. Mabel sat in the kitchen when we arrived home from school, buttering Wonder bread, a special treat. Mabel was there because for a year or so after my father left, my mother worked, and loved it. Mabel drove us to meet the Milwaukee Road train each day as it brought Dolores home from her old job as a legal secretary. My mother was dazzlingly happy to see us. The air around her thrummed and sparked as she skipped off the train to run to us. She showed us the packages she'd bought on her lunch hour, told us we would do the same someday when we were grown up. I thought we could stay like this forever, watching her descend from the Milwaukee Road on its way to St. Paul, reading the boxcars emblazoned with the words Soo Line and Blue Earth Minnesota. Blue Earth Minnesota. I had never heard of anyplace so beautiful. My mother laughed and my grandmother planted her feet beside the railroad. The wind from the approaching train blew back the tops of the brown-eyed Susans, wrinkling like sea anemones at the train's shadow passage as it hissed and spat to a flaring stop. The beast disgorged our mother. Gathering up her girls in her arms, she cried, "It's Punky and her Pals!" citing my favorite television show. "Punky!"
"What would you have done?" my mother says and sighs quietly decades later. She is sitting on her bed and I can see the gray roots where the henna has not touched her hair. The curve of her back has for two decades borne her waitress trays like hods. A manicure is a luxury now. She is sitting in Mabel's bungalow, looking out at Puckawasay's water lilies. Mabel is long dead. What would you have done, my mother asks, and I can't answer her. For years I used to think I knew what I would have done in my mother's straits, but to my astonishment I have never raised even one child, much less a brood. I know only that I myself have been drawn to men with despotic natures. The way they give orders, the way they justify their majestically cruel behavior, smoke pouring out of their beautiful nostrils like ancient dragons. I once loved a man who held my hand in a flame, another who twisted my flesh with pliers, a third who raped and beat me. A desperado helps one live dangerously, and perhaps that is how we know we are alive. Perhaps that's what my mother needed. Maybe that's what I thought I needed, centuries ago, when love was fueled by hardnesses and the desperate sensation of powerlessness balanced against power, as in war.
Mabel was on the Doctor's side as well. Didn't I want something better for my mother? my grandmother chided. Didn't I? Maracas shifted in the mirror, a dancer danced in Japan, an animal crashed free in a thicket of brambles, bounded into the dusk. Yes, of course. Yes indeed I wanted something better. I wanted to come too, wherever she was going. Even if it meant we were going to live in the Doctor's house, I'd go.
In the summer while my mother worked, Mabel sat on the back stoop, facing the farm and the cows. She liked the farmer; he gave her fresh-killed chickens. Mabel sat with one now, its head hanging over her knee, dangling like a wet nylon stocking. Her hands flew through the scalded feathers, plucking each one until a gray snow pile drifted at her feet and began to swirl in the breeze. Mabel singed the skin with matches, sulphur rising from each filament, an acrid incense. She dragged on a Lucky.
"You dassn't go saying bad things about the Doctor." My grandmother's cigarette bobbed at me, its orange ember glowing like a hazard light. She had picked up her new husband's idioms, and he spoke English savagely with a Slavic accent. Even then I thought my grandmother's English was as old as she was, which was ancient. She singed another quill follicle. "He's good to your mother, and I'll betcha he'll be good for you. You girls are jes' wild Injuns. What you need is a big stick with a nail in it. You have a mouth on you that runs overtime. And besides," she said, knees splayed, the floppy chicken getting the worst of it, "what other chance does your momma have?"
I laid my head on her shoulder and watched while she shook the chicken like a tassel. My grandmother talked roughly, coarsely, but never touched a hair on our heads unless she was smoothing it down and tying a bow in it. Her fingers were so stiff with arthritis that she couldn't tie bows very nicely, but at chicken-flicking she was better, her fingers working somehow deftly. After plucking the carcass bare, she took it to the kitchen sink to cut off its feet and scoop the unformed eggs from its intestines. Mabel then pulled out the whole aubergine mass and stuck the chicken's feet in a pot, boiled them until they were yellow, and dropped in the liquid eggs with a spoon. She pointed out correctly that they tasted twice the egg of anything we got at the store. Mabel's cooking was like voodoo, primal and full of things that grew in the yard or came back from Louie's traplines. Things that looked odd and were tossed together as Mabel muttered. And that's what our lives were like—disparate contradictory things patched with voodoo spells, stirring and bubbling. You could hardly tell what you had started with because it had all stewed together. I sat in the kitchen and felt sure that the Doctor would make a fatal mistake, that the adults would see him as I did. I had on Superman X-ray glasses, I could see where he had holes.
"Hey, chum," he'd gloat. "I gotcha!" They'll see, I thought. They'll know.
We hardly ever called each other by name, the Doctor and I. Sometimes he addressed me as "little girl," but because he also used this name for my mother I hated it. In all the years we lived with him I don't recall that he said my first name a dozen times. It was as if by ignoring our given names we could cancel each other out. I felt the earth spinning faster and faster. The Doctor swung me by the ankles, pretending he was going to drop me. Faster, here comes the grass, tickling my head just where it brushes the ground. There's the swing set and the sandbox, smack where the clouds should be. I could feel the Doctor thinking about how small I was. A smile appeared on his mouth, never in his eyes. Yet sometimes when the Doctor visited us, he whistled. It was the only beautiful sound he made, and it was gorgeous, a fluttering three-part whistle, a primordial note. Floating and haunting, a tripartite chord that could have been the sound of rose petals coming off the stem, it was that lovely. I try to remember that he did at least have the ability to make a lovely sound. An ability my father had lost.
Sundays were the days my father came back, everyone knew that. He collected us after church, heading outdoors and pulling us over the fields on a toboggan or, if it was raining, to the bowling alley or the movies. We saw dozens of films— Prince Valiant and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Your Cheatin'Heart, about Hank Williams, starring George Hamilton. That was the best, where they got married by putting washers on their fingers. My father had plenty of things to sort out besides us. Work, fluid locomotion, flash cards, mouth sounds, rewed-up rhymes like Peter Piper. He was re-inventing his world; he still had a place in the universe. He had moved back home with his parents. From time to time, his older sister, a seriously unhappy woman, took it upon herself to ask me who I liked better, my mother's boyfriend or my father. "Both the same," said Kate and I, lying through our teeth, feeling that any other answer betrayed either our mother or our father. But Sarah, who was four by then, disagreed. "Our Sunday father is our real father," said Sarah quietly. "He just comes on Sundays, but he's the real one.
" Even then, Sarah always cut to the chase.
One Sunday evening before Christmas when the dark and ice seemed both lock and key, my father brought us home and stood beside the Doctor's Cadillac, parked in our driveway. It was an affront, that Cadillac. It had overstayed its allotted hours at my mother's house, hours that until now had ended long before our return. My father looked over the glossy car, taking its measure as he shuffled in the snow. He put his hand on the hood, as if to verify the car's presence. My father had been building us a toy kitchen in the attic as a not-so-secret Christmas present. He was great with his hands. The miniature kitchen was an absolutely wonderful testimonial, but it would never be in league with what the Cadillac represented. That automobile might as well have been a ballroom that my father would never be allowed to enter. My father stood for a moment, and then on impulse led us to the front door and yanked it open. My mother stood there cradled in the Doctor's arms, as if she'd been caught falling down. The Doctor had on his hat and coat. He'd been about to leave. Everyone stopped breathing. Electric Christmas chimes on the mantel bleated repetitively in the stillness like Morse code, their lights clicking on and off the startled faces before us. My mother and the Doctor, a fleshly fact.
Far above me, my father's pink head roared in its own silence, a Roman candle firing in a vast empty night, one thought streaking to its destiny like an asteroid. "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat are youah doing in mah hawse?" my father screamed, knowing the answer. "Do youah know whoah built this hawse? Awe built this hawse, goddamit. Get your handddds offa mah whofe!" The Doctor and my mother recoiled but did not step back. Then we were all inside. The Doctor, a foot taller than my father, put his hands on my father's shoulders, restraining him. We girls bobbled at my fathers knees, suspended, unwilling, too dazed to let go of one another. Words were frothing around the room somewhere near the ceiling.
"Fathead," the Doctor said, a revolting word. "Idiot. Get out." I looked up and saw my father's face scrunched, trying to lip-read, his skin as slick and shining as an old burn, and then his fist hammered out and struck the Doctor in the chest. Whatever else he knew, or didn't know, he was being thrown out of the house that he considered his by the interloper himself. He gave the Doctor a big push. "Stupid jerk," said the Doctor, flailing backward but not too far. He reeled forward and shoved my father reciprocally, and my father staggered. Everybody had gone crazy; everyone was flying. My mother hauled Kate and Sarah up in her arms, and I slipped behind the mesh curtains by the picture window, watching the two men grope through a room that was crowded with things I was beginning to understand.
The Doctor's face hardened but did not fundamentally change. A lock of his waxy brown hair looped over his forehead, his finger skewed into my father's chest. If he punched my father in the head I knew he would kill him. Presumably the Doctor knew it too because he held my father by the collar, like a child, shaking him up and down. There was too much flesh in the room, and too much movement. No one could stand or walk straight. My mother cried, "Pat, Pat," but of course he couldn't hear her, and his own voice was crazed, monotonal from syllable to syllable, just like the bing-bang, bing-bang of the Christmas chimes. My father seemed to focus all his energy and rushed at the Doctor, shouting, "Wah, uh, you, ah!" in an incomprehensible gaggle. He was a goose man. His glasses had fallen off his nose, and he was dumb-reeling blind.
For a few minutes, the Doctor pushed him back rhythmically like a punch toy. Between pushes he removed his camel hair coat and elegant fedora and scribbled little notes on his prescription pad, furiously muttering, "Fathead," "Loser," "Pipsqueak." The Doctor jammed the notes into my father's shirt pocket. My father tried to read a few of them but couldn't see for the sweat and the steam over his eyeglasses. Patrick wadded the papers up and flung them into the Doctor's face. The Doctor pushed my father backward, hard, really hard, and launched him into the Christmas tree.
Airborne, confused, Patrick Lyden flew into the tree, soared through his silent world of color and light. The tree crashed explosively against the window, pulverizing the uniformly blue Christmas balls, upending the spotlight that made them shine like small blue planets. Crushed beneath my father were the antique Christmas peacocks that had been clipped to the branches, and the train set that he had given us the previous year, which ran around the tree's base. He lay with arms and legs tangled like a big Raggedy Andy dropped through the ceiling. The fine white powder flocking floated from the tree and transformed us all into figures in an overturned paperweight. Daddy was a big starfish, hardly human at all. I stayed where I was, behind the curtains, watching. Maybe my father would float away without ever getting up again. And in a way he did.
The brilliantine helmet peered into my cave. The Doctor eyed me. "Are you OK, little girl?" I yanked back the curtains, my barrier, smelling the chemicals of the dry-cleaning fluid, the stale sunlight and dust motes, the world that had lived and died in the summer in our picture window. A cancer had started in my stomach. The clarity of my hatred for the Doctor, my shame and humiliation for my father, welled up in me as nausea, like the cloud of flocking powder. I closed my eyes and was far, far away, alone over the rainbow in a land of children who engaged in fierce battles with one another and lived in snow forts, amid snow furniture. All the world was snow and falling snow. We were at war in the snow, and we would live there together and I would be their tribal leader.
When I opened my eyes, I felt older and could see that my mother was now bending over my father with a washcloth, but that he was getting up, that he was Patrick again. I became dimly aware that Kate, Sarah, and my mother were all crying, but the girls sounded and looked so very far away, clutching each other somewhere out in the land beyond the hallway. As my father sat up, white flocking mashed to the back of his wet shirt and speckled his rump and stuck to his bald head. The snowman. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but speech was a knack misremembered and he was mute now as well. My mother's arms were pulling at something invisible, like a lever yanking up and down, trying to crank the axis of the world back to a sane angle, and she was saying over and over, "Let's all have some Christmas cookies. Let's all have some Christmas cookies." And the Doctor grew there, planted into the room like a sequoia, grim with his hands on his padded hips. Finally he bent and made a gesture as if to examine my father, who pushed him away, much more feebly this time. It didn't matter how long my father sat there. Our home was the Doctor's domain now, and everyone under that roof knew it.
Before he lost his hearing, my father had taken me to see a northern lights show when a new gas station had opened nearby. I knew that these were not the real northern lights, of course, but a spectacular imitation, a force of nature under our control. The lights bolted from tipped barrels, shooting great spouts of illumination that painted the night sky. My father in an eager voice explained that searchlights like these had combed the sky for him when he was learning to be a paratrooper, and that he had floated down between the crossed hatches in the darkness as part of the American "Victory over Japan." I could see him in my mind's eye, a small figure hurtling through the inky sky, bravely swerving to avoid the searchlights, and then his parachute opening, like a crocus bloom. I imagined him in Japan touching quietly to the ground, listening keenly for the slightest sound of the enemy. I looked at him beside me, standing tall, gazing rapt as the barrels tipped out their light show. My father was looking up, seemingly taking the measure of the bands of light, and gave the sky his full attention.
That Valentine's Day when I came home from school, my mother showed me the diamond solitaire on her hand from the Doctor. She held it up to the light in our picture window, and said, "I want you to call him Daddy." But I couldn't call him Daddy. I couldn't without choking, feeling the lie in my throat like a fish bone. "I already have one daddy," I said to her. "And no one I know has two. And anyway, he's not my daddy." She said I would have to learn to address the Doctor that way eventually, but she was dead wrong.
The Doctor married my mother late t
he next October, just after I had turned seven, on a night that held a thousand kinds of cold. The stars were cold and so was the moonlight patterned like a ziggurat on the church steps. The camera flashbulbs and the teeth of the adults were all cold stars. We three girls were dressed identically in tiny white stoles of mock fur like rabbit pelts and matching cummerbunds of pale rose. Maybe it looked like we were all getting married, the whole family. The cummerbund felt as tight as a tourniquet cinching my waist. I had learned that cummerbunds were for formal occasions. I also learned some other things. I had new instincts about the absolute fragility of love, of its tendency to be friable and powdery when what is required is a bulwark. My mother had a platinum ring from my father that said forever, but forever turned out to be finite. Betrayals looped through betrayals in the shape of a love knot. I was looped inside that knot. I swallowed the whole idea, the platinum circle without end, the inscription that vainly called on eternity. And Sarah and Kate and I held hands, lacing our fingers together and steeling ourselves as if for an earthquake. We looked toward the altar, at the tableau that seemed as if it couldn't be.