by Terri Cheney
I blamed my mother for all of this. Granted, I wasn’t the one having to put food on the table or worry about the bills. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that of course we couldn’t survive on one income, and of course my father had to get some kind of job. But why this one, which leached all the color out of his face and left him so catatonic at dinner?
It was a bad time to be broke. The ongoing Watergate scandal had cast serious doubt on President Nixon’s ability to focus on economic policy, and inflation was spiraling out of control—the highest it had been in two decades. The dollar was shrinking, the stock market plummeting, and the threat of recession was on everyone’s lips. According to Daddy, the construction business was particularly hard-hit: steel and lumber were fixed at exorbitant prices, and high interest rates decreased the availability of loans. It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t have everything I wanted. Now, when my mother said we were “too poor to afford a bag of potato chips,” I actually believed her.
Even if I didn’t know the clinical term for the cloud that hung over our house, I was so familiar with the way it felt that I didn’t need a word to describe it. It was as if the Black Beast, in one of his fouler moods, had escaped my body and infected everyone else. Bleak, dark, listless, and cold, the days dragged on with no end in sight. Oddly enough, though, the sight of everyone else’s depression didn’t trigger one of my own. Quite the contrary: I was agitated, excited, on the move. I felt galvanized, as if I had a new purpose in life. I’m ashamed to say just what that was, although at the time I thought it was a noble calling: I intended to reinvent our family, with me as the loving, nurturing mother.
I was already well on my way to usurping her. Ever since I was a child, whenever we went on a family drive, I would sit in the front seat, next to my father. My mother was relegated to the back seat with Zach. She fumed about this, but I was adamant. I had to sit up front with Daddy, or else I wouldn’t get in the car. She put up with this to avoid triggering a tantrum, because my tantrums were horrific. When I was younger, they took the form of explosions: I would scream, kick, bite anything at hand, and bang my head against the sidewalk until I got my own way.
I grew subtler as I got older. By thirteen, I knew the value of a venomous whisper. “He’s going to leave you one day, you know,” I’d say to my mother, under my breath. “You already sleep in separate bedrooms. As soon as you stop being pretty, he’s gone. Are you sure you want to make a scene?” She’d be so shocked, she’d get into the back seat without arguing—anything to shut me up, I suspect.
I continued my insidious campaign at dinner. Now that my mother worked the night shift, it was just Daddy and Zach and me, and Zach would leave the table as soon as possible to get back under his car. That left me alone with my father, his head drooping over the mashed potatoes—the one thing I ever learned how to cook from my mother.
When the Black Beast wanted to, he could coax words from a stone. I’d tilt my head and fire up my eyes until they sparkled with curiosity. “Tell me more about the Volkshouse,” I’d say.
“I’m too tired,” he’d mumble. I never let that dissuade me.
“It reminds me of ‘Goldilocks,’” I’d say. “Not too much house, not too little. Just right. And everybody gets a happy ending. How many rooms do you think that would take?”
At first, he’d answer me with monosyllables. But eventually, as I kept peppering him with questions, his enthusiasm for the project would reignite. After a few weeks, he started to sketch some ideas on his napkin. That progressed to legal pads, until finally, one night he got out the blueprint paper, and I knew that we were home free.
Those were glorious nights, that stretched into the wee hours of the morning. Just Daddy and me, the way it was supposed to be. Every once in a while, on his way to his room, Zach would poke his head in the door to see what we were doing. “We’re working,” I’d say, and I’d shoo him off to bed. And work we did: long, hard hours of musing and measuring, Daddy downing endless cups of the Folgers I’d fix for him. I didn’t need coffee, and I didn’t need sleep. I had the Black Beast to fuel me, and his enthusiasm never once waned.
I quickly learned the tools of my father’s trade until I was as good as a surgical nurse to him. “Hand me the protractor,” he’d say, or the compass, or the triangle. “Beveled or fluorescent?” I’d ask, and I’d slap the right one into his palm. I learned the difference between the ebony sketching pencil and the seven-millimeter drafting pencil; the Pink Pearl eraser versus the Magic Rub. I memorized all the myriad templates: for lettering, landscape design, master ellipses, and my favorite, the lavatory planning template, with its cute little cutouts of toilets and sinks. I stood at his side, eraser at the ready, both of us ensconced in the warm halo of the magnifying lamp. I refilled his coffee before it got cold, trying to anticipate his every desire.
I was there before he realized he needed me.
We kept “the project” secret from my mother, of course. She never would have let me stay up so late, especially on school nights. I’m not sure why my father allowed it, and for so many months in a row. Every now and again he’d say, “Are you sure you aren’t tired? You really need to get to bed.” But I’d shake my head and say something like, “Don’t you think the toilet’s a little too close to the door?” and we’d be off and drafting again. How was he to know that lack of sleep kept the Black Beast in a state of constant arousal?
My late nights never impaired my performance at school. In fact, with the Black Beast kicked up into high gear, I excelled even more at public school than I had at St. Madeleine’s. Although I was getting only a few hours of sleep every night, my energy seemed boundless, my ambitions unlimited. The Black Beast simply would not close his eyes. He just kept driving me on and on, to fill up every empty moment with action and acclaim.
I continued to get straight As, of course, but I also had a finger in every extracurricular pie. In addition to my ongoing tap, ballet, and baton lessons, cheerleading practice, and Student Council duties, I directed the school play: a silly Western in which I also starred as Lydia Sagebrush, a feisty cowgirl whom I conceived as a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. “Stop vamping the audience!” the drama coach kept scolding me. I obeyed her up until opening night, when the Black Beast couldn’t stand it anymore and let loose with a volley of head tosses, hip thrusts, broad winks, and knowing smiles. The review in the school paper was actually quite good—but then, if memory serves me, I wrote it.
On top of all this, I took my homework quite seriously. When Mrs. Gayle told us to memorize a short poem and recite it the next week in English class, I ignored the “short” part and went straight to the Master. Most of the students came back with familiar doggerel, along the lines of “I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.” I marched in wearing my witch’s hat from Halloween and carrying my mother’s best Crock Pot, which was filled with dry ice that billowed, I hoped, like fog on a blasted heath. I can still remember the dumbfounded looks on the faces of the students and Mrs. Gayle as I launched into act 4, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Double, double, toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble . . .”
Vernon Junior High didn’t quite know what to make of me.
As always, I judged my well-being by my accomplishments. I never stopped to consider the toll this relentless pace was taking on my body. I didn’t have any desire to eat: chewing felt like a waste of time that could be spent on more productive things. The few hours that I managed to sleep, I sweat straight through the sheets. But sleep was for sissies, I thought, and what did it matter if I lost a few more pounds off my already skinny frame? I just wore looser clothes to hide it. So what if I had circles the color of bruised plums underneath my eyes, and my skin looked dull and ashen? Daddy was finally happy again, and that made me feel beautiful inside, no matter what the mirror said.
Professor Tremaine’s untimely departure for the East Coast had left me bereft, bored, and much too overeducated for m
y own good. The boredom part was dangerous, since the Black Beast craved constant stimulation. Most of the time, I made up my own mischief—like the time I picked up a scruffy old copy of Das Kapital at the Salvation Army and tried to convert the entire seventh grade to Communism. Although the Cold War was beginning to thaw in 1973, in our little nook of middle-class society, Communism was still a virulent word.
While I can’t say I truly understood Marx’s theory, his anger at the oppression of the working classes came through loud and clear, and it touched a tender nerve in me. I was ticked off that Zach had just had his allowance raised, even though I felt I did more chores around the house, and far more conscientiously than he did. (He was older, my father explained, and had more expenses.) Plus I’d wanted a new bike for ages and was sick to death of hearing why “the economy” wouldn’t allow it. Capitalism clearly wasn’t working anymore; at least not at 1555 North Elm Court. Revolution was long overdue.
Whenever the Black Beast had a passion about something, I figured the whole world must share it. I didn’t realize that in their entire lives, most people never felt as intensely as I did on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. I made up a slew of flyers proclaiming “Down with Tyranny!” “Utopia Now!” and other such vague rabble-rousing phrases. I handed them out at school the next day, exhorting the students to “Unite for a Classless Society!” I’m not sure they understood what I meant by that, but the timing was perfect. Without consulting the Student Council, the teachers had recently cut fifteen minutes off our lunch period and eliminated the afternoon recess altogether. Everyone was peeved, especially those kids who needed the quick secret hit of nicotine that the three o’clock break had provided.
Maybe teenagers are just plain trigger-happy when it comes to taunting authority. In any event, my idea took off, and by the end of that day, we were all calling each other “comrade.” My hot-pink flyers were plastered everywhere: on lockers, on the windows of the teachers’ lounge, and all across the “Do Not Post Flyers Here!” sign on the boiler room. That night, two teachers’ homes were allegedly covered with pink toilet paper. I deny any complicity in this; nor will I rat out my fellow revolutionaries.
The next morning, the unthinkable happened: I was called into the principal’s office. The memory of that long walk behind the hall monitor still makes me shudder. My footsteps resounded in the empty corridors. I had a blister on one heel from breaking in my new tap shoes, and the cruel, hard concrete tortured my feet. There was a pep rally scheduled for later that day, so I was wearing my cheerleading uniform. I wished that the skirt was a little bit longer, to hide the quivering gooseflesh on my legs.
Mrs. Murgatroyd, the principal’s assistant, raised an eyebrow. “I must say, I’m a little surprised to see you here,” she said. “Go in and wait. He’ll be back soon.”
I went in and waited. And waited. Waiting was not one of the Black Beast’s strengths. I grew increasingly anxious, which wasn’t good. Fear often manifested as arrogance in me, and I was in enough trouble already.
“It’s a tactic,” the Black Beast kept whispering. “The son of a bitch is keeping you waiting just to make you sweat.”
“Shut up,” I told him. “Let me handle this. I’m better with authority than you are.”
But the Beast simply couldn’t sit still. After five minutes, I got up and paced, ignoring the pain from my blister. By the time Principal Griggs finally arrived, I’d worked myself up into a lather of righteous indignation.
He was a short man who compensated with a big, booming voice. He never needed a microphone in the auditorium, nor did he need to say things twice. You got him the first time.
“Is this your handiwork?” he bellowed, brandishing a flyer.
Loud noises always unnerved me, but I was prepared. “I hereby invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,” I said.
“So it was you. What on earth’s gotten into you?”
I talked faster. “Every student has a right to free speech under the First Amendment, and a right to petition against injustice, and—”
“Not on my boiler room, they don’t,” he said. He opened up my file and leafed through it, shaking his head. “What do you know about those TP parties last night?” he asked.
“I invoke my Fifth—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” He sat back into his chair, steepled his fingers, and looked at me over them. “Parents have been calling me all morning, complaining that their kids won’t do their chores because it’s exploitation of cheap labor. You disrupted an entire day’s schoolwork. Not to mention that the glue you used won’t come off the windows of the teachers’ lounge. Technically, I have no choice but to suspend you.”
I was torn between terror and outrage. I thought of the look on my father’s face when he heard of my disgrace, and terror won out.
“Please, sir, you can’t suspend me.”
“Give me one good reason why.”
“My father.”
“He’ll kill you?”
“No. It will kill him.”
He looked surprised. Then he did the last thing I expected. He softened his voice and said, “You don’t quite fit in here, do you?”
His question cut me to the quick. I’d never fit in anywhere, but I didn’t think it showed. On the surface, I looked like a winner: cheerleaders had to be popular, just by definition, right? But I knew the façade was shallow and easily pierced. At Vernon Junior High, as at St. Madeleine’s, I had a great many friends but few intimates. And even the kids I was closest to—even Rhonda, my very best girlfriend—didn’t know about the Black Beast.
“What do you mean?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice steady.
“Well, I see here in your file that you come to us from St. Madeleine’s by way of Pomona College—quite impressive, by the way—and that you’ve received nothing but glowing reports from all your teachers about your schoolwork. With the caveat that some of your teachers wish you’d stop correcting them in front of the class.”
I lowered my head. I did have a bad habit of doing that, but then, so many of the teachers just didn’t know how to spell.
“Look at me.”
I raised my head.
“Here’s what I see when I look at you. You look exhausted. There are dark circles under your eyes, and your hands keep twitching. You’ve got a near-perfect record on paper, but I get the sense that something’s not right. Tell me, dear, what’s wrong with you?”
Few things in my life have ever hurt so bad as that single word, dear. I heard echoes of my mother’s proclamation “There’s something wrong with her,” and I wondered if those words would chase me the rest of my life.
Principal Griggs looked tired as well. There was a slight sheen of sweat on his high, balding forehead, and for a moment I thought of offering him my handkerchief, but then I remembered there were no pockets in my cheerleading skirt. The window behind him was open to catch the breeze, and I heard the sound of someone drilling on a nearby street. Going deeper, deeper. Exposing the core. Fixing whatever was wrong, so the world could start out fresh again.
I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.
The Black Beast erupted inside me. He wasn’t my mother’s child for nothing—he knew when he was being threatened. If I exposed him, if I could somehow even find the words to describe him to Principal Griggs, “they” would make him go away.
“Fuck you” bubbled up to my lips, and it took all my self-discipline to break out into a fit of coughing instead. I coughed until my face turned red, and tears streamed from my eyes. The tears were about far more than the cough, but only I could tell.
“Do you want a glass of water?” He nodded at the Sparkletts bottle in the corner.
By the time I’d filled a Dixie cup and drunk it down—not easy, my hands were trembling so—I managed to compose myself. Secrets were secret for a very good reason: they looked too hideous in the light. I knew how ugly the Black Beast was. By now he was a mass of ulcerous sores from constant irritation; no
doubt he would stink in the open air. Better to keep him hidden away, enshrouded in the dark.
Let the drillers drill. I wasn’t ready.
“Thank you, sir,” I said as politely as possible, “but I invoke the Fifth.”
He sighed. “All right. I think what’s going on here, which is unbelievable given all that you’re already doing, is that you’ve got too much spare time on your hands. In light of your otherwise exemplary record, I’m not going to suspend you. But I am going to make you perform some community service. And you’re going to scrub that boiler room until it’s spotless.”
I nearly jumped up and kissed his bald forehead. “Thank you for your clemency.”
“Clemency.” He smiled. “Excellent word.”
I pushed it. “And you won’t tell my father about this?”
“No, you are going to tell your father. I want you to promise me that, or no deal.”
Even the Black Beast had to admit: this guy was good. The last thing in the world I would normally agree to do was tell my father I’d misbehaved. Sully his perfect image of me as his ideal little girl? Never. But there were far more dangerous things lurking in that office: compassion and a keen eye. I had to get the hell out of there.
Reluctantly, I promised.
The next night at dinner, I told Daddy everything except the scary parts. I told him about the flyers, my speeches, and Principal Griggs’s disapproval. To my relief, he chuckled. “Whose idea was it to make the flyers hot pink?” he asked.
Zach slammed down his fork, nearly upsetting his water glass. “Let me get this straight. She gets called into the principal’s office, and you think it’s funny?”
Daddy looked surprised. “Nothing really bad happened.”
“The last time I had to go see the principal, you grounded me for three weeks.”
“There’s nothing funny about being an underachiever, Zach. This was just a prank.”
I winced. Underachiever was undoubtedly Zach’s least favorite word. It had hounded him most of his life, in spite of the fact that when it came to pure smarts, he was probably my superior. He always beat me in Monopoly and chess, and his knowledge of history, math, and geography far surpassed my own. It was strange to me that he knew so much but never seized the opportunity to shine. Maybe he needed his own Black Beast to goad him to success. Whatever the reasons for his reticence, I knew that we were on dangerous footing. Zach didn’t like to be compared to me.