“Come on, Mol!” Polly yelled from the car. My father was in the driver’s seat, swigging a beer. My sister and cousin sat in the back seat. Aunt Roberta made my cousin get out. My grandfather came and made us all get out. He lined us all up against the car and took our picture. Then Gail and I climbed onto the prickly wool back seat of the used turquoise Chrysler, and Ted and Polly sat in the front, with one more unopened beer between them.
Ted finished the one in his hand as we sailed down Route 242, weaving past the corn and oats and timothy.
“Don’t touch that other beer, Ted, you’re driving!” my mother ordered.
Ted drove faster.
“Slow down!” we screamed from the back seat.
He made deep dips in his zigzags.
“Take the slow way,” Polly begged. That meant the back roads.
Ted turned at the entrance to the Thruway. It was so hot that we kept the windows open even though our hair blew and we couldn’t catch our breaths for fifty-five minutes.
By the time the car prowled off the Thruway exit, the afternoon heat, like fur, had covered us up, even though the windows were wide open. The earth held the high temperature, even as the shadows began to lengthen a little. By 4 P.M. we were sleepy, and lazy, and suffocating. “Move over!” Gail cried. “Don’t make your leg touch my leg!” I moved obediently on the wool seat. I didn’t know the difference between her leg and the upholstery, we crawled so with heat. After we parked in our driveway my father fumbled with the keys to our side door. “Here, I’ll do it!” Polly said.
“Goddamn, no, I’m getting it. Ain’t you got no patience?” He dropped the keys onto the hot cement of the stoop. Polly picked them up. They tussled over the keys and Ted got them, holding them over his head. “Gotcha!” he cried, pirouetted damply, and opened the door. The first blast was the mild, cool air from the basement, but then the inner door opened and the second blast, much hotter, barreled into us. “Dogs from hell!” Polly said.
“Hell’s kitchen!” Ted said.
“What’s hell’s kitchen?” Gail asked.
“Where the devil cooks,” our father explained.
The heat created palpable air from the ceiling to the floor. We parted it as we went through the house, Polly opening windows, Ted flying into the bathroom, Gail heading for her stuffed animals, and me keeping going, going through the living room, past the bathroom, through Gail’s room to my room. I opened all the windows on three sides and threw myself down on the bed. Where was my bumpy cotton chenille spread? In its place was a wool blanket, scratchy and blue. It itched my knees, my arms, my cheek as I lay on it, unable to move, sunk into it like quicksand, itchsand, my body dove down, down through circles of heat-sand into sleep.
“Did you actually fall asleep?” Polly stood at the door an hour later. I woke with a rash on my neck and face. “Here, give me those dirty clothes, I’ll wash them,” she said gently. “There’s a breeze outside now, why don’t you go ride your bike?”
Oh, my bike, I’d missed that at La Grange! Stumbling out to the living room, I heard my father from the bedroom. “Go to hell, Polly!” he was shouting.
“You go to hell!” she said back.
Where was Gail? “Where’s Gail?” I interrupted them. There was no point in waiting for them to finish. The argument went on forever. Even the heat of their bedroom didn’t stifle them.
“She’s down the street at Betsy’s,” Polly said. “Are you sick, Mols? You never sleep in the middle of the afternoon.” It was a La Grange habit, when everything seemed to stop after the noon meal. Sleep. Another place you could go.
A place you could go when you couldn’t leave. “I’m OK,” I said crankily. “It’s too hot. Can I have a fan in my room?”
“Go in the living room,” Polly said. “We’ve got both fans set up in there.” We only had two fans. “Or go ride your bike and get a breeze.”
It was 6:30. “Aren’t we going to eat?”
“Molly, you slept right through dinner!” Ted said.
I had never done that before. There were sandwiches on the pink and turquoise Melmac dishes on the table. That was supper. I grabbed two and went out into the end of the day. It was cooler out there. The lawn rolled to the fence. I rolled my bike off its kickstand, a sandwich in my mouth, and one in my hand. I rode down Pilgrim Road, then Ogden Street, then Floradale, eating the sandwiches and wishing I had a drink. Wishing I’d stayed in La Grange. Summer school was next week. I was retaking Algebra for a better grade. Why was there a wool blanket on my bed? Where were Oliver and Jack and Frannie and Judy and my teacher, Margaret? Ruth and Gillie would be sitting under the maple tree on their Adirondack chairs. In the orchard the rabbits would be out on one side, having their dinner, and the woodchucks would be out on the other side, having their dinner. I finished my sandwich in solidarity. But I wouldn’t be there again to stay for a whole year. The days fell before me like flakes of burnt skin. Bonnie Strathem, Jack’s half sister, burnt in the barnfire. Like her arms.
A stop sign was coming up on the corner of Floradale and Ogden. I must have gone around the block again. I pulled to a neat stop and leaned my foot on the curb to wait for a car to mosey through the intersection. On the lawns, sprinklers came on, and people called from their backyards. The smell of wienie roasts came up through the thinning heat, and to waste time I looked at the sky. The sun wasn’t setting yet, but it was low, and behind clouds. The clouds filtered the rays into streaks that fanned out into the sky, the heavens. There was a short fat streak, the thumb, and four distinct thinner streaks, the fingers. They were the Fingers of God. I had seen them at La Grange. They had followed me, coming right down into Sheridan Drive. I didn’t have to ask the stupid son of God to be my own personal savior. I hadn’t done a thing, and the Fingers had come to me. And if they were at Sheridan, and I was at Odgen and Floradale, then I must be in the palm of their Hand! It was heaven, reaching straight down to me, and I stayed at the stop sign, even when a car came up and offered to let me go. I waved. They thought I was waving to them. I was waving to…God, sort of, but not really, God the Father, why would he have any interest in me? He was nicer than Jesus Christ though. It really was the Fingers I waved to, that there might be Heaven in Tonawanda.
Wienies roasted on the backyard grills of Pilgrim Road, but our hot dogs were boiling in a pot on the stove, as they had every Wednesday for the past year. That’s how I made them according to the weekly schedule. The July shadows lengthened on all the suburban lawns. Gail and I were now eleven and fourteen. Ben Franklin Junior High was over for me and Kenmore East Senior High wouldn’t begin till after Bible School and summer school where I would take math again, just like the previous summer. We listened to the swish of each car as it slowed down so that the kids playing baseball in the street had time to disperse, and each slowing down caused us a prick of anxiety because it might be our father’s car. The later it became, the more certain it was that he would be drunk, but what he would do was not certain. His dinner heated on the stove, drying out in the pans. We chewed with a mix of summer doldrums and a kind of haste to finish before he came. Then we wouldn’t have to eat with him. When we finished, it was still light out. Gail put her dishes in the sink and went out to play baseball. I did the dishes, washing the knives first, just as Polly told me, then continuing on with the rest. (“Dry those knives and put them in the drawer before your father gets home. Never leave a knife out!”)
Molly obedient, Molly good, she never left a knife out. Molly wasn’t obedient or good because of moral fiber, but because her dad might kill her. Her mother emphasized that her father might do this. That’s why Molly put the knives away. Wash them first. I slopped through the suds, drenching the scatter rug below the sink. Poopsie squawked in her cage. The sun hung lower in the sky. This time when the sounds of the baseball players dispersed, the car wheeled into our driveway. I dropped the plate back into the dishwater, grabbed the towel, and immediately wiped the knives. Then I pushed them into the drawer,
shut the drawer, and turned around. “Hi, Dad. Dinner’s on the stove. Want to eat?”
His face was rough-red as a piece of ham. “No, I don’t want nothin’ to eat,” the face said. The arm of my father picked up the saucepan full of creamed corn drying out on the back burner from being set continually on “Low.” The arm of my father flung the pan of corn at the wall. The dull creamed corn dripped down the pink kitchen wall.
“You don’t have to have corn, Dad. I made you some pork chops.”
“Don’t want no pork chops!” The workshirted arm of my father picked up the iron frying pan from the big front burner on “Low.”
“Dad! Don’t throw it!”
He didn’t throw it.
Remember what you said just now, Molly, I thought, and remember how you said it. The timing. Remember how you got him not to throw the pan. Maybe you can do it again. While I organized these thoughts in my mind he lumbered to the corner cabinet.
In the cabinet was a lazy susan filled not with food or dishes but with files of receipts for the quarterly taxes of Peacock’s Superette. Pink and yellow receipts, hundreds of them, clipped together, rubber banded, stuck in between notebooks, little pads with columns of figures, and rolls of adding machine paper with columns of figures.
As the arm whirled the lazy susan faster and faster, the receipts came flying out. But they didn’t fly fast enough. The arm of my father, then both his arms, started grabbing the receipts and hauling them down onto the counter, then onto the floor. The kitchen was awash in receipts. Some stuck to the creamed corn on the pink walls, some fell into the frying pan with the chops on the stove.
The frying pan. I should have let him throw the pan. Next time, remember to let him throw the pan. Remember. Don’t say anything. Let him throw it.
Because this was worse. The side doorbell rang.
Ted was swearing, “Fuck the store! Don’t want no dinner!” And mumbling, “Fuckin’ shit, fuckin’ bitch.” He waded through the receipts toward the kitchen table. All this time I’d been moving around the kitchen, keeping at a safe distance. I made no move to clean anything up. If I began to clean it up, I’d have to turn my back. And if I turned, I wouldn’t see him come to kill me. And so I watched in fascination at the destruction. Ted’s legs marched him toward me. I backed up. He pivoted toward the kitchen table. The doorbell rang again. Ted was still swearing. He planted his legs as two columns. His arms choked the tabletop, tipping it over. Salt, pepper, napkins, and his place setting flew off the table. Molly, be glad you cleaned up the other dishes. And put away the knives.
Then my father was down on his knees, bracing them against the upside down table, wrenching off the table legs one by one. It was a solid hardwood table. I’d learned about adrenaline from the doctor who treated my allergies. What amount of adrenaline is coursing through him? I wondered blankly. The doorbell rang again. He continued swearing, “Cunt, cunt,” and methodically braced himself to break the last table leg. So I backed into the foyer and closed the kitchen door just as Ted took a table leg and beat it like a club against the tabletop on the floor.
It was Susie at the side door. “Wanna come out and hang around, go to the drugstore?” Susie was quick-eyed and skinny as a spool. Polly nicknamed her Spindle. Her legs were spattered with what looked to me like cigarette burns. She said they were mosquito bites she scratched and made worse. I stared down at the dish towel in my hand. Behind the door Ted grunted as he methodically beat the table. His work-booted feet made a swishing sound as he shuffled through the flimsy carpet of receipts. How much could she hear? What would she make of it?
“I can’t. Go with you. I…” Think of something normal, think of a regular excuse, what regular parents do to normal kids. “I’m grounded,” I shouted enthusiastically as I located my lie, “I’ve got to stay in and do the dishes. He’s making me.” Imagine, doing something dumb and wrong and normal, and then getting punished, and then having it be over.
Behind the kitchen door it was over temporarily. No grunts, no swearing. Then, “Molly,” he ordered, “get in here and clean up this goddamn mess.”
“You see? Lookit, Sue, I’ve gotta go.”
“Yeah. Well, see ya.”
Inside I eyeballed Ted with every ounce of censure I could muster. “Oh, Dad, what’s Mommy going to say?”
“Don’t worry about your mother. I’ll worry about your mother. Get into your room. I’ll take care of this.” Then he was pale and repentant. I knew he wouldn’t do anything more. He was ashamed and cleaned it up by himself.
After Ted left for Peacock’s Superette, I crept back out to the kitchen, thinking of calling Spindle, but I stood there instead, marveling that the kitchen floor and walls were clean, the receipts piled back into the corner cabinet. Of course the knives were put away earlier. I’d seen to that. And he hadn’t broken the chairs. Our four hard maple chairs stood against the wall, waiting like a police lineup.
It was far too dark to play baseball now. The kids outside were playing a flashlight game. Then parents began to call them in, and my sister wandered home. Though I’d left kitchen lights ablaze, I sat alone in the dark in the living room with only the light of the TV. “Hey, Mol, what happened to the table?” Gail asked when she found me. “I saw Dad dragging the pieces out to the garbage.”
“He broke it. He broke up the table. He threw his dinner at the wall and broke the table.”
“Jesus. Those chairs lined up—they look like Goldilocks and the three bears,” Gail said in awe.
Later our mother arrived. “What the hell happened to the kitchen table?”
“Dad broke it.”
“No wonder he was such a lamb at the store,” our mother said.
—
“What really happened here?” Polly asked the next morning when she opened the door to the cabinet where all the receipts were shoved in disorder.
“Dad. He did it when he broke the table.”
Polly didn’t ask me to tell her more about it, nor did I volunteer. She simply took in the information, groaned, and started reorganizing the receipts. “This will take me a week,” she muttered. She did not say he was wrong, she did not say it was his disease, she did not say she was sorry I had to be there during it all. She treated it like a horrible fact of life, a hurricane you had to clean up after.
This is how it would stay, I thought. And if this is what family meant, I didn’t want one. Now plenty of teenage girls say this to themselves, but change their minds later. I said it, but I wasn’t sure changing your mind was always allowed. After all, Polly hadn’t changed hers. She determinedly left the house at 10 A.M. and returned at 10 P.M. These days Ted usually didn’t get to the Superette to relieve her. He’d stopped being good. I was being good for all of us.
“I’m going out with this great guy tonight,” Gail whispered over the minute steaks I had burned. “Don’t tell Mom, Molly, you’re always such a tattletale.” I was a tattletale; she was right. “He’s coming over at seven and we’re going to the Falls.” Niagara Falls was not within walking distance.
“How old is this guy? Does he drive a car?” I asked.
“Sure he drives. He’s nineteen. He goes to night school, isn’t that cool?”
“Cool…” I said, nonplussed.
“He was at the JV basketball game. He likes basketball.”
“Likes basketball?”
“Yeah, but Molly, don’t tell Mom, what he really likes is cars. He likes to drive ’em.”
“Cars?”
Now my sister was a JV cheerleader. I had coached her for hours before the tryouts. I hadn’t been chosen as a cheerleader in junior high, but like a teenage stage mother I’d decided that my Gail should rectify my inabilities and mistakes. And so I’d hounded and nagged her until she learned a great routine and was honored with a position on the squad. She was too hip, though. She smoked; she never did her homework. I was a rotten mother and worse as a sister. I just couldn’t keep an eye on her. I couldn’t even answer my mother�
��s questions about her.
“Molly, why does Gail hide her underpants in the back of her drawers?” Polly asked me one Sunday when she was relieving me of doing the laundry.
“Don’t ask me, Ma, I’m going to the library, OK? I have to finish my history project.” I was a sophomore now.
“Gail, how come I don’t have your underwear? Go into those drawers and get your underpants!” She opened her top drawer, fished around behind the sweaters, and plucked out her panties.
“Why aren’t they in the hamper with the rest of the dirty clothes?” Polly queried.
“I don’t know,” Gail said. “They just aren’t.”
They just aren’t. Polly seemed to take this for an answer from her when she never would have taken it from me.
—
“Look, I better Call Mom and tell her you’re going,” I began, but Gail mocked me.
“Better call Mo-om,” breaking the word in pieces, like a saltine.
“The guy’s nineteen! He’s three years older than I am!” I squawked.
“So who says you have to be the oldest thing around here? This guy is cool. Wait’ll you meet him. He knows Mom, too. He hangs out at the store sometimes.” The only guys who hung out at the store were dropouts. Polly collected them.
“Keep an eye on your sister,” Gram always said. “Be vigilant. You can never tell what will happen.”
She looked to me as the mother I hated to be. She told the truth to me, more or less. And whatever truth she told increasingly horrified me. She was blonde and sexual and loved danger. Personally, danger left me cold. I was endangered enough waiting for Ted to come home.
“That’s him!” my sister squealed as she heard a muffled noise at the door.
“How could it be him? I didn’t hear a car drive up.” I still listened for my father’s car in the driveway every night. I listened for how he drove, whether the turn was reckless and the brake was jammed on at the last minute, or whether it was a smooth, panther-like crawl, the turquoise Chrysler oiled with only a couple of beers. Late, later, after countless shots of whiskey with beer chasers, meant either rage at full force, or maybe only a dead sleep, or maybe a few slurred questions tucked around an insult and then the blackout. A couple of beers maybe meant OK, he’d get changed and go to relieve my mother, but it also meant fuller consciousness, questions, Where was my sister going? What was I doing?
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 5