by Terri Cheney
It was a dinner that I wouldn’t soon forget. I kept waiting for someone to say something, anything, about what had happened. When my brother asked, a bit more politely than usual, “Please pass the mashed potatoes,” I wanted to grab the whole bowl and chuck it at him. I wasn’t really mad at Zach; for a change, I wasn’t even mad at my mother, and certainly not at my father, who looked so tired he could barely chew. Nausea swam in my stomach. I was sick to death of the sight of them. Sick to death of swallowing when what I really wanted to do was shout, “What the hell is going on?”
Surely this was not how other people did things at their houses. I thought of my friend Maria and her gabbling, squabbling family. You could barely get a word in edgewise there. Everybody knew everything about everyone else and never stopped talking about it for a minute. Why couldn’t we be more like them? I looked down at my dinner plate. The gravy was threatening to run off my potatoes and invade the sanctity of my roast beef. I quickly put up a barrier of peas between them. There, that felt better. Everything in its place. Nothing touching anything else.
I took a careful bite of the beef. It needed salt, but the shaker was way over past Zach, and I was afraid to open my mouth to ask for it, afraid of what might come tumbling out. The words were nearly choking me, but I gulped them down, along with the tasteless meat. Fine. I could live without salt. What I couldn’t live without was answers. But the man I’d always turned to for answers was now a cipher himself.
Not for the first time in my young life, I thought of Sherlock Holmes. What would he do? He was always faced with mysteries, and he always figured them out. I knew his methods: “Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I would deduce from the evidence before me where my father had spent the night.
I snuck a glance at him. His hair was neatly combed now, the stubble gone, but he looked glum and tired. My mother was always accusing him of having affairs with everyone he came into contact with: the waitress, the bank teller, the girl at the supermarket checkout, and of course, the mysterious Rebecca. There wasn’t a woman alive she wasn’t suspicious of, including but not limited to my own friend Janie, who had developed a little earlier than the rest of us girls. But surely if Daddy was having an affair, he would look more satisfied; or at least he would make a greater pretense of being solicitous to my mother, to cover up his tracks. As it was, I hadn’t heard them exchange a single word since he had come back home.
I snuck another glance, this time at my mother. She didn’t have the old familiar “He’s-cheating-on-me” scowl on her face. Instead there was a smug “I-told-you-so” look in her eyes. What had she been accusing him of lately, besides the usual infidelity? It had to be money. And then it came flooding back to me: their argument last Saturday night. I’d come in early from my ballet class to find them in the thick of it—my mother furious, waving her arms at my father, who sat stone-faced and silent in his brown leather chair. “That’s what you get when you deal with people like that,” she said. Then she saw me and clammed up. I thought it was rather strange at the time, because normally she would have just kept on arguing. I’d meant to ask Zach about it, but I forgot.
Was it possible that my father was dealing with bad people? Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable . . . Not only was it possible, it was highly likely, given his willingness to trust in anyone, anytime, even the most obvious snake oil salesman. No doubt the bad guys had told him their stuff was “the best.”
I felt sick again. Bad people meant trouble, maybe even jail. And sure enough, there was a livid bruise along the side of my father’s wrist, where handcuffs might have hurt him. Sherlock Holmes would undoubtedly have been proud of me, but I took no comfort from my cleverness. How was I ever to know for sure? The sheer weight of all the unconfirmed suspicions I carried around with me was like molten lead in my veins.
Suddenly I was exhausted. My hand felt so heavy, I couldn’t lift the fork. I wasn’t even hungry anymore. I just wanted to go to bed and stay there for days, because bed was the only safe corner in the house—the only one that didn’t pose unanswerable questions. I dared to raise my eyes from my plate and look at the silent faces around me. What were they thinking? Were they all aching for answers too? If I opened my mouth and spoke the unspeakable, what was the very worst that could happen?
No, no, never. I’d been through an earthquake before, and I knew: something fragile would be shattered.
So I kept my mouth shut and continued to pick at my food, because that’s how secrets were treated in our house: with exquisite inattention. It must have been the right prescription, because they flourished like the scarlet bougainvillea that ran along the back fence. We each had our own special variety. Mine, of course, was my struggle with the Black Beast, my knowledge that I was so different inside from the way I looked, I was practically two separate people. Zach’s life was shrouded in mystery too: just what did he do in his room all day, and why would he not come out to play?
My mother’s secret was even murkier. Something bad must have happened to her, sometime, somewhere, to make her so afraid of life. I’d asked her about it often enough, not in a nice way but with the nastiness of a thirteen-year-old exasperated by her every move: “Mom, what’s the matter with you?” But she was not one for introspection. The most I ever got out of her was the stone story.
Apparently, when she was a little girl, she was a dead ringer for the young Shirley Temple. Her mother dressed her up and curled her hair to accentuate the resemblance. Although she lived in a small farming village just outside the quiet backwaters of Windsor, she attracted a lot of notice.
Her friends didn’t like it. One day when she was stumbling home from school through the snow, a gang of girls stepped out from behind a tree and began taunting her, pulling her ringlets, tearing her dress. She started to run, but they followed her, pelting her from behind with stones and debris. The only blemish on my mother’s body—a small, triangular scar on the back of her calf—came from that attack.
When she finally made it home to the farm, sobbing and terrified, she ran to find her father. He was sitting in his rocking chair, packing a pipe. This is the only strong visual memory I have of my grandfather: a lean, almost gaunt figure, sitting in his rocking chair, silhouetted against a dark, wintry window. Picture Whistler’s mother as a man, and you’ve got him. My mother always called him a saint, but to me he was a forbidding presence—a man of few words, each one carefully chosen.
After my mother finished telling him what had happened, my grandfather brushed the dirt off her Red Riding Hood cloak (just like the one Shirley Temple used to wear) and looked at her through a wreath of smoke. “You asked for attention. You got it,” he said. Out of this, my mother concocted a moral: “Don’t ever be too pretty,” she used to tell me, stroking the hair back out of my eyes. “People will throw stones at you.”
I’m sure there were many more stories like this, but my mother never told them to me. For the most part, she flat-out refused to talk about her childhood.
“Why do you want to know that?” she’d ask.
“I’m curious,” I’d say.
“You’re nosy,” she’d counter. “It’s nobody’s business but my own.”
The vigilance with which she guarded her past made me all the more certain that there were dark, brutal incidents lurking back there that had made her who she was. In rare moments of compassion, I wondered if maybe she even had her own Black Beast to contend with. It would certainly explain her mercurial moods, the sudden, volatile flare-ups of temper that whipped through the house like a devil wind, leaving us all breathless and shaken.
But up until the night he didn’t come home, I was sure that my father had no secrets from me. I felt like I knew his hometown of McCracken, Kansas, as well as if I’d grown up there myself. It helped that it was the town in which the movie Paper Moon was filmed. When I was thirteen, Daddy and I sat through that picture three times in a row. “Th
ere, that’s the front stoop where I used to drink pop,” he said. “There’s the silo, there’s the Methodist Church, and just around the corner is where we lived.” McCracken was such a sparse, dusty town, its one main drag barely as long as a sneeze, I felt sure there were no secrets there. Where could they hide them?
In the end, that’s why I never asked my father to explain his whereabouts that awful night. It was partly respect but mostly self-indulgence: I didn’t want to know his shame. Shame would have been a smudge on the page. For all my love of great literature, with its tragic heroes and complex plots, I preferred my gods pristine.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I was in my thirties, that my mother finally let it slip: “Remember the night your father spent in jail?” she said. I tried to grill her—I was a lawyer by then, and pretty good at grilling—but she refused to give. The only thing I could ferret out was that several of the contractors my father had hired were alleged to be in league with the Mafia. That’s all she knew, or all she’d tell me.
I assume that because there was no trial, and I never heard anything further about it, my father was eventually acquitted of all charges. But the allegations took their toll: whatever had actually happened that night, it was the end of Wonderland Hill. Then began the lean times, the bad times, the times I’d rather not write about: the reign of Brew 102.
My father couldn’t get a job. No doubt because of the cloud hanging over his reputation, no one in the construction industry would hire him. He tried retail for a while, selling mobile homes out of a tiny trailer, chain-smoking his way through the empty days. But the economy wouldn’t cooperate, and his heart truly wasn’t in it. He had a dream—“a vision,” he called it—of yet another project. I remember the night he told us about it. The Wonderful World of Disney was on TV, and it was just at that moment when Tinker Bell flies in to light up the screen.
“I’ve had an inspiration,” he announced. “By this time five years from now—maybe three, if I’m lucky—we’re all going to be millionaires.”
My mother rolled her eyes and looked at Zach, who shrugged and went back to fiddling with an assortment of bolts and screws he had spread out all over the floor. I was all ears.
“Tell me, tell me,” I said.
“The problem with Wonderland Hill,” Daddy said, “was that it didn’t suit the times. Everything was too big. Too many rooms, too much upkeep. People don’t want all that responsibility; there’s too much on their minds these days. They don’t want more, they want less. So I’m going to give them less, and we’re going to make a fortune.”
Zach snorted, and I looked daggers at him. “Shut up, Daddy’s talking.”
“You don’t believe me, Zach?” Daddy said. “Tell me, what do you think of your car?”
Zach’s eyes lit up, the way they always did when anyone mentioned that hunk of junk. For his sixteenth birthday, my parents had given him a used Volkswagen Beetle—not just any old bug, but one with a Rolls-Royce grille attached to the front and a fake bar behind the back seat. Zach was as proud of that thing as if it had been an actual Rolls. He spent hours every day waxing it, polishing the metal, tinkering with the engine. When he wasn’t in his room, we knew where we could find him: in the garage, under the car, in his heaven.
“It’s the best,” Zach said.
“It’s the best because it’s small,” Daddy said. “Nobody wants huge gas guzzlers anymore, what with the oil crisis and all. Times are uncertain, people don’t want to be surrounded by all that extra space. They want to feel cocooned.”
“My teacher, Mrs. Gayle, told us the universe is shrinking,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Mrs. Gayle is a very wise woman. Everything is shrinking. You mark my words, small is where the next big money is.” Daddy got up and went to his desk. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Go show that to your mother.”
On the page, in my father’s neat, slanted handwriting, was a single word: “Volkshouse.”
She looked at it and shook her head. “No. No more big ideas.”
“But that’s just it,” my father said. “Nothing about it is big. It will be stripped to the bones—just as much house as is needed for a single family starting out. Not a centimeter more.”
I cottoned to the idea instantly. “You mean, just like Zach’s car, except without the Rolls-Royce front and the bar in the back.”
“Exactly. And I know the perfect place to build them: that long stretch of desert between here and Palm Springs, out by Victorville. Nobody’s thought of developing that area yet. Lots will go for a song.”
I felt a slight twinge of fear. The desert was ugly. And heat sometimes drove the Black Beast mad. But I would never let my father see my hesitation. “Brilliant!” I said. “And when we make our first million, can we go to London and stay at the Savoy Hotel?” A steady diet of Jane Austen had turned me into a rabid Anglophile.
“You bet, honey. And Paris too. Whichever hotel you choose.”
“The Ritz?”
“If you like.”
“In a suite?”
“Of course.”
My mother got up, crumpled the sheet of paper, and tossed it onto the coffee table. “While you two are planning your Grand Tour, I’m going to go make the sandwiches for tomorrow. What do you think, Zach? Bologna sound good?”
“Bologna sounds perfect,” Zach said, grinning. “And don’t forget the caviar.”
I hated it when Zach and my mother ganged up together. I could feel the Black Beast stirring, especially when I saw the crestfallen look on Daddy’s face. I knew that I should get up and go to my room, but the urge to say something, do something, protest somehow, was just too powerful. I tried to wait it out, but already my hands were twitching, my eyes darting about the room, looking for something to throw.
Throwing things always made me feel better. The Black Beast especially liked smashing glass; the shattering sound was so soothing. But there was no glassware in reach, so I did the next best thing. I grabbed a handful of Zach’s carefully sorted bolts and screws and pitched them at him as hard as I could. One of the metal pieces was sharp and nearly sliced him in the eye. A tiny trickle of blood ran down his cheekbone.
“You’re a freaking nutcase,” Zach said, and he raised his hand to smack me. My father grabbed his arm.
“You know the rules. No hitting in this house.”
“But she—”
“Terri Lynn, what have we told you about throwing things? Apologize to your brother immediately.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. The Black Beast was fully aroused by then, but I wouldn’t directly disobey my father’s order.
“You go straight to your room,” my mother said, pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket. “And you—” She whirled and faced my father. “What do you think you’re doing, getting her all riled up like that? You know she believes every word you say.”
I longed to scratch and claw at her, to make blood run down her face the way it was still trickling down Zach’s. But I wouldn’t do it in front of Daddy. I restrained myself to words. “Leave him alone! It’s a great idea, and you’re just too stupid to see it.”
“You shouldn’t speak to your mother like that,” my father said. His voice was soft but firm. “But it is a great idea, Julia.”
“They’re all great ideas. And what are we supposed to live on in the meantime? Pixie dust? You just sit around all day and come up with these grand schemes, and I’m supposed to work my fingers to the bone while you—”
“Stop it!” I shouted. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?” My father was leaning his head back on the couch, all the excitement puffed out of him.
“Go to your room this instant, or I’ll—” I didn’t let her finish. I slammed the den door behind me. I already knew this scenario by heart. Without me around to argue about, my parents would turn on each other, while poor Zach continued to bleed. I’d heard their argument so many times, I could have recited it a
s easily as the Lord’s Prayer. My mother was furious that she’d had to take the night shift at the hospital because it paid more, while my father “sat around all day and dreamed,” waiting for a construction-related job to materialize. The kicker was always this: my mother knew someone who knew someone who knew of a job down at Brew 102.
I don’t know why the words “Brew 102” conjured up such fear in me, but to this day, they still do. It was just a brewery, after all. A big, sprawling, smoking factory right off the freeway, a few miles past Skid Row. We’d passed it many times on our way to nicer places. I think it may have been the ugliest place I’d ever seen, and the thought of my father disappearing into that grimy, billowing murk frightened me to the core. I was afraid he’d never emerge again—or worse yet, he would emerge a different man, no longer the pure white soul that I loved.
The men who worked at Brew 102 didn’t wear crisply tailored pin-striped shirts that smelled of aftershave. They didn’t carry neat leather briefcases filled with architectural drawings. They surely didn’t kiss their little girls good-bye with light and happy hearts, knowing that they were off to do what they loved doing best.
I’d seen them. The men who worked at Brew 102 wore thick, greasy overalls the color of chimney soot and carried big metal cylinders that looked as if they could snap a man’s back in two. They trudged, one after the other, like prisoners on a chain gang, each step heavier than the last.
Maybe I understood innocence better than my mother did, because I was closer to it at thirteen. But if I knew one thing, it was that Brew 102 meant more than just my father working at a job he couldn’t stand. It meant the death of dreams.
I knew he would someday capitulate. Nobody could withstand my mother on a mission. And as I had feared, everything changed after that. There was no more poetry in the evenings—Daddy comfortably settled in with his nightcap, me with my latest attempt at a sonnet. He was dead tired by the time he came home. His face was streaked with sweat, and he stunk, quite frankly, like cat piss. Much as I loved him, even I found it difficult to hug him when he walked through the front door.