My Father’s Keeper

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“I love you so much, baby.”

A tear drops from his chin to my face.

“I love you, too.”

It trickles down and we are bonded; his tear in my eye, sealing me as my father’s keeper.

With Dad at home in his slings, Mom tries another approach with Grandma Madge. We pick her up at her own crack jack house a mile away and drive to a pool party of one of the neighbours.

“Whatever you do Madge,” Mom warns in the car, “for God’s sake don’t embarrass me.”

I spotted her first when she stepped out of the changing cabana. My grandmother ran a band of long black hair from her belly button to her thighs and there it was in all its glory. When she spotted me and Mom across the patio at the bowl of chips, she waved over the heads of a pool of people, “Sannndy, Jeweeelly, over here!”

Mom walked straight in the front door that night and said, “Dan, I could have died.”

When Dad’s casts came off he returned to the base, only to find he no longer had a job. In the time he’d worked as a plumber, he’d racked up almost more time off with pay than he’d spent working.

And that’s how we ended up leaving Phoenix, and back in Ohio, moving through a series of apartments and mobile homes in a never ending quest to be settled. I went to four different kindergartens alone; just making a new friend before being yanked out again. We finally spent six months in a rented trailer, long enough for Dad to till a garden and mound rows of dirt to plant cantaloupes. On Saturdays, he’d load great baskets of ripe melons into the back of the car and drive us over to the new base where he worked, parking at the edge of the gates to wait for the military men coming and going on shift. I sat on the tailgate of the family station wagon, swinging my legs, happy as a clam to be with my father. Dad was a master melon grower and the men of the base always pulled over to share a joke or a story with my dad and walk away with an armful of juicy cantaloupes. I watched them as the sun set and laughed with them, even though I didn’t know what they talked about. But it was just the warmth of the people who sought out my father that I liked so much; men who smiled and laughed and didn’t carry the weight and anger of my mother. And Dad was never like this when they were together. I experienced my parents separately—and it was my father who stole my heart.

And who knew that it would be in the hollow of Burns Road where we’d finally settle or that I’d come of age on the same track of isolation in which my life began? But we were driven to the ends of the earth by the 22 different jobs Dad had over the years and his increasing need for shelter, each loss a slit in the fabric of my father’s well-being and an obvious indication that the world was conspiring against him. After all, the proof was all around us. Grandma Madge was crazy. Former bosses were crazy. The people who got him fired were crazy. The only one who was not mad, my father insisted and I wholeheartedly agreed, was him.

Chapter Three (#ulink_70bc45f4-af65-5753-b6b3-78abc35624ff)

I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.

We weave our little fingers together;

Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.

When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.

“Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.

Ooooga-ooooooooga.

The other car would honk back and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.

Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.

Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.

Danny was too small to remember the cool car so he didn’t know what he was missing. But Dad lived so vicariously through my little brother’s Matchbox car collection, expounding big plans for the day he would build us our own classic car, that Danny became as obsessed with the idea of us getting one as I was nostalgic over the loss of the one we’d had.

The outside of our used trailer was dingy white and had interior features Mom referred to as “top of the line.” Doorknobs and bathroom fixtures were cast in gold plastic, some with a marble swirl and little crankout handles jutted from windows far too narrow to let the light of day in, let alone the tang out.

Our mother’s rampant decorating saw us pasting up orange velvet wallpaper and painting accents with gold leaf on everything from the drain stopper to the little plastic clips that held the mirror to the bathroom wall. When the sink faucet she’d spraypainted silver began to fleck, we’d dab at it from a luminescent jar of my brother’s model car paint. Bark art from the Circleville Pumpkin Show displayed a riveting image of Tecumseh’s Last Stand, which was shellacked onto a slab of stained and charred wood and fitted with a toothy mount on the back, suitable for display. Needless to say, the trailer, and all that was in it, was rightfully Mom’s domain. Tan press board was eventually sided up over the aluminium of the exterior and the shutters were drenched in chocolate brown paint.

My mother, wanting to give our trailer some European flair, ordered a plastic cuckoo clock from the back of The Swiss Colony catalogue and hung it next to the hutch that held my father’s blue felt coin collecting books, to which the best years of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters were pressed after being panned from a large clear plastic pretzel barrel that sat wedged in between the couch and the wall. The cuckoo clock chimed on the hour and two plastic birds, one blue, the other yellow, popped out a miniature barn door and circled on a track. The clock’s long chains cascaded down the wall and moulded plastic pine cones dangled at the ends of them, inches above the carpet.

Just like Arizona, time was spent with either Mom or Dad, but rarely both. Even at Christmas, when my father parked in the living room to watch us open presents, Mom scurried through the trailer tending to forgotten tasks. It was as if a hotplate existed just underfoot and began to heat up whenever they landed in the same room together.

Only one photo exists of my father on Burns Road in his boyish state, taken just after we’d moved in. It is a picture of me, Danny, Dad and his two best buddies from the base where he worked. Rolly Polanka and Tommy Templeton were happy, good-natured men, just like my father. Always happy to see us and a joy to be around, they cracked jokes with Dad about gas and crap and never tired once of the same ones. Danny and I laughed just because they did. Excited in their company, we snuck up on the couch and jumped on their heads, rough housing with them for attention.

Life with my father is resurrected as much in memory of our place on Burns Road as it is in the pain found at the end of it. Our one-acre yard was a sea of brilliant lush grass that surrounded the trailer like a moat and I remember riding on a tractor mower in a lime green bikini, leaning into curves around weeping willow saplings, planted to give an air of permanence against the transience of our home. Yellow insulators hung on an electric fence and billowy seeds of milkweed drifted lazily in the summer breeze. A faded canvas halter tied up with baling twine hung just inside the tack shed, next to thick braided reins draped over rusty nails. The call of a lone bobwhite haunted the early summer dusk when I’d pad out in my bare feet and lock the shed doors to keep the raccoons out. A rusty horseshoe dug from the loose earth was haphazardly balanced over the mouth of my father’s garage, a treacherous structure at the edge of the driveway he had cobbled together with twelve-foot-long pieces of rusted sheet metal nail gunned over rough frame.

The garage itself was a dark maze of car parts, milk crates overflowing with a jumble of tools, hand saws and claw hammers dangling from hooks overhead. And back in the dimmest, eeriest corner, in a place no child or budding teenage girl would ever willingly wander, lurked my father’s long metal workbench. The solo fluorescent light that lit his cave buzzed like a fly zapper from where it hung by a dog chain from the low ceiling to shine a five-foot radius on the concrete floor. But even on the brightest of summer days, there were parts of this creepy edifice that remained pitch black.

Our hollow held the kind of raw beauty a band of wild hill children might—shy and innocent, but you could never quite trust them. You weren’t scared of the woods down on Burns Road; you were scared of who might be in there with you.

With the passing of each season, memories of civilization faded and life dwindled to a crawl. Where once I hummed songs from the Sunday schools we used to go to, the lines and eventually the chorus were washed over by the jingles of toy commercials that rang through the trailer on any given Sunday’s worth of television: Mon-chi-chi-Mon-chi-chi, oh so soft and cuddly my pretty po-nee, she gives me so much love Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. Danny and I strung them back to back, changing key and pitch to mimic the TV as Dad clicked through the three country channels again and again and again, waiting for a new rerun to start.

By the time I was twelve, my father had grown to be one with his chair, plopping down in it from the time he came home from work until well after the late evening news. And, although I knew where he was physically, I couldn’t for the life of me find the dad I once felt so close to. He was still happy to see me when he walked through the door but, once he sat in his chair, efforts to reach him were futile. When I could, I’d sit on the couch for hours just to be there should he wish to talk to me. But he didn’t. I would rack my brain, think, think, trying to come up with something that might turn his attention from the television set. But the parting of my mouth, sensed out of the corner of his eye, would elicit a shush or be met by the swish of a forefinger in the air as he winced, leaning forward to piece together what he might have missed. As a last resort, I watched with him, anchored to whatever time we could have together. But even though I didn’t have the right things to say, I believed with all my heart that if I could find the secret words or right way to be, I could unlock the mystery and win back my father. We were so close when he broke his arms, surely I could find a way to resurrect our bond.

“Who’s the King?”

“You are, Dad!”

“Who’s the King in this house?”

“Dad is!” Danny and I ring in unison.

“That’s right. I’m King and you better obey.”

My father cackles with good nature while my brother and I disperse from the end of the couch to carry out orders. Dad’s throne was his La-Z-Boy chair and the food that piled up around it—corn nuts, pork rinds, almost empty boxes of popcorn, bags of corn chips—was the gold on his altar. The empties surrounded him like gilded gifts to be fingered when he needed reminding of his total reign. His was the authority to yell from the seat of his throne and have anything within a five-hundred foot radius delivered to him, without complaint and with total servitude by us kids.

“Fix me some toast Sissy, would you? I want the good jelly, not any of that marmalade shit your mother gets.”

And I would drop whatever I was doing and trot off to make the toast, trying extra hard to get it right.

Our mother, with her ears like a bat, never missed a chance to pot shot him.

“That’s right, Dannnn,” her voice spat from somewhere beyond the thin wall of the living room. “Turn the kids into your niggers. Make them wait on you hand and foot.”

“You just go back to whatever you were doing, Dingbat,” my father would shout, then turn his head to snigger at us, his face scrunched up like a little boy and we’d snigger back, because we knew no better.

If our mother was at least two rooms away, Dad called her the names of the wives and hated mother-in-laws he picked up from television sit-coms—Dingy, Dingbat, Dummy—all gauged by how thin her voice was as it hammered through the panelling. Otherwise, if she yelled from the open kitchen behind his chair, he squirmed from the embarrassment of being caught and fiddled with the remote.

I didn’t mind running for Dad. The errands were usually quick and painless and he responded with exaggerated thrill to receive the fetched item—often making it into a game.

“Let’s see how fast you can run out to the car, Sissy, and get me the bag of gumdrops on the seat. If they ain’t there, check the floor. Okay…ready, set, go!”

“Whoa, you did that in 60 seconds?” he’d shout when I returned breathless with the bag. “Way to go, Sis!”

It was only on the rarest of occasions when we were lucky enough to be left at home with our father and without Mom around, that a bit of the veil would lift, lightness would blow in the skinny windows and trailer life didn’t seem so bad.

My father bellows out the kitchen patio door. Danny and I hold hands and jump from the deck into the gem green water of the pool, flourescent from the double cups of chlorine we dump in at random to clean it.

“Don’t you guys go pee-pee in there.”

“Dad!” I shout, “That’s gross!” But I can see my little brother, soaking to his neck in the water like a little snow monkey. “Danny!”

Home alone with our father, we are just kids. When Mom goes to town on a shopping trip, she claims our time with a list of chores to do before she gets home. We follow her to the car, faces drawn. But as soon as she rounds the first bend, Danny and I run in the trailer and shriek down the hall to change into our bathing suits.

My father slaps his hands together in jubilation, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!”

He loads up a ham sandwich with sweet pickles in the kitchen and, as we run past, we beg him to watch us dive off the deck into the pool.

“Dad, Dad, Look!” I dunk my brother, who lurks just under the surface ready to spring up on my shoulders and push me under.

Dad stands on the porch in his stocking feet and cut-off jean shorts and waves to us with a mouth full of food. He trumpets his nose on the hem of his shirt then pins one nostril with his finger, blowing the rest out. It bolts like a slash against the side skirt of the trailer, painted tan to coordinate with the plastic brown shutters. I can see it from the edge of the pool, where I hook my elbows over the side to watch my father.

“You kids have fun, I’ll be in the garage if you need me.”

“Dad, Dad, can we listen to some of your records?”

“Yeah, Sissy, put on Sergeant Pepper!”

I was eight, and the trailer was still in my future, when I first discovered the coolness of my father’s extensive record collection. I lay on the floor after school, bobbing my feet above me, panning through the long stack of albums leaned up against the wall, relegated to the one room in the house that Mom let him keep his things. At first I pulled out all the albums with the cool covers but there was only one I listened to all the way through: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles were my father’s favourite band and John Lennon was his hero. If we were lucky enough in the car to catch Hey Jude on the radio, my father would stretch his arm back over the seat and wiggle his fingers for me to hold his hand. He sang through the verses, growing ever more melancholy. As the song neared its end, I would catch my father looking at me in the rear view mirror, his eyes glassy with tears.

“Sing it with me, baby. Na, na, na, nananana, nananana, Hey Jude.”

I leaned forward to sing along with my father and saw in the mirror that a tear had run down his face. He squeezed my hand as his cheeks grew shiny, his voice cracking in song. A lump rose in my throat and I could feel my own tears falling down my face. I held my father’s hand as tight as I could and laid my wet face against it, showing alliance. I did not know why I cried or even what the song was about, but such was the power of my father’s tears.

Now that we’re stuffed into a trailer with no extra room, Dad’s record collection has been delegated to the last tiny corner left. The only time a record of Dad’s gets on the turntable is when Mom is gone; otherwise she says it’s the devil’s music.

I run in the house dripping wet and lug one of the big stereo speakers all the way out the patio door to the edge of the deck. I dry my hands and carefully place the record on the turntable, making sure to only hold the album between thumb and forefinger, and lower the needle ever so delicately as Dad has shown me. Then I crank up the volume. The crazy calliope guitar of the first song on the Sergeant Pepper album hits the still air and we know it can’t be heard for a country mile.

The sun beats down on my tan shoulders and I bask in a plastic tube chaise longue in the yard, painting my toenails, bobbing my head to the beat. Danny mock sings on the deck of the pool, using an inflatable duck ring as a microphone. He jumps off sideways and a great tsunami wave careens over the side. Life is good. But even better than the rock and roll booming through the yard on a country summer Saturday, is knowing that Dad is listening right along with me all the way in the garage.

At the first sign of fall, my stomach drops. Pressed Wranglers lie stiff on my bed, paired with back-to-school tops from K-Mart. The impending first day of school brings with it a flurry of anxiety as spiral notebooks and ring binders are picked out with painstaking care, knowing that one false move could destroy your entire year. If you pick the Hang in There, Kitty and everybody else has the pack of galloping horses, you might as well forget it.

“Kids are cruel, honey,” my father pep talks me as I cry in frustration. “And if you opened your eyes, you’d see that half of the school is making fun of you behind your back. You don’t need those kids. Stick with Daddy, I’ll be your friend.”

And for a moment things don’t seem so bad.

Mom takes her fork and perforates another slice of pumpkin pie. The pan is dotted with black lava-like bubbles of carbonized pie juice after being baked at a scorching heat.

She unbuttons her trousers, the pink skin of her belly rushing down her zipper like a flashflood. Mom throws down her fork in a huff. “Dan, you shouldn’t have let me eat so much. God, I’m stuffed.”

I sit on the couch in the living room while my father tips back ninety degrees in his chair. He looks over and rolls his eyes. He flicks a chunk of black crust off his own piece of pie and whispers in conspiracy, “I don’t know why your mother has to fucking cook everything on high.”

Early in life we had to develop a taste for our mother’s tendency to scorch food, and to eat of its ruin without flinching—crispy spaghetti, seared chilli and rubbery hot dogs permanently watermarked from being boiled on high for an hour.

“Jesus, Julie, look what you made me do, talking to me when I’m trying to cook, taste this—is it scorched?” and she’d shove a spoonful of charred chilli to my lips.

“No, it’s good, Mom, you can’t taste the scorch at all.”

It’s best to lie to my mother, with her quick hands that strike like lightning. A brutal woman, with nothing gentle, romantic or mysterious about her, she would backhand me in the grocery store and bloody my nose, then walk off with the cart leaving me to feel embarrassed like it was my fault. So we ate our crisp salmon patties moulded out of a can of fish and an egg without gripe or complaint, quietly pressing the soft cylinder bones to the roofs of our mouths until they burst.

At school, I bummed quarters from the kids in my class to buy potato chips and snack cakes but on the weekend I was left to fend for myself inside the dank avocado-coloured refrigerator, overstocked with a mixture of stale meat soaking in its own blood, expired dairy products and vegetables left in there so long they had turned to algae in their respective produce bags. Any hunk of cheese I discovered came with its own layer of green mould.

“Just cut it off,” Dad would yell from his chair when I’d protest. “Hell, that’s all cheese is anyway, good mould.”

I’d rummage through to find the only item safe enough to eat: single-sliced, individually wrapped, processed American cheese. Even if there was some kind of dripping or weird indistinguishable smear on the plastic, it still meant this cheese was sealed for my protection. I’d peel the sticky wrapper off and voila, the perfect food.

My brother and I lay our torn-off pieces of cheese on stale tortilla chips and microwaved on high. We cracked the molten shape of cheesy chips off the paper plate and broke it into equal shares and were left to scrap for bits of petrified cheese sunken into the grooves of the paper plate. It did not matter if there was a bit of paper melded in; this was still a breakfast of champions.

Besides, Mom’s cooking was worse than faring for ourselves in the refrigerator or navigating the greasy orange interior of the microwave. A staple at her dinner table was chipped beef on toast made from packets of lunch meat. Stirred with lumpy gravy, our mother cooked it on high until it was scorched to a brown paste, then scooped it out onto toast we had to decarbonize by scraping the black off with the edge of a butter knife.

Breakfast was even worse. Mom would whip up an industrial-sized box of powdered milk, pour it into empty plastic milk jugs—still with a milk ring curdled sour around the rim—and stick them out in the 40-cubic-foot freezer in the garage.

When we ran out of milk, we would have to lug out one of these frozen ice blocks from the freezer depths and let it thaw on the counter. With the half-thawed milk floating in the jug like an iceberg, Mom would pour the thin liquid over breakfast. Our Saturday morning bowls of exciting cereals—the Sugar Smacks and Fruity Pebbles we’d begged for so laboriously in the supermarket aisles—now sat lifeless in their watery tombs. We spooned them to our lips with trepidation, the magic of the commercials long gone.

But when Dad snapped his chair upright and said, “Get me the mitts,” excitement filled the air.

“Dad’s cooking!” Danny barrelled down the hall, shouting at the top of his lungs. I’d run back down with him, equally overjoyed and we’d stand attentive as Dad gussied up in preparation to turn the stove burner on.

Dad was the best cook—even if it was like prodding a large slothful animal with an electric zapper to prize him out of his chair long enough to get him to the kitchen. But when we did, it was magic. Suddenly, in my father’s hands, food became edible and delicious. There was not a film, rind or fleck of black carbon you had to remove from your dish before you could put it in your mouth. There was not a cluster of strands from our mother’s hairpiece to pick off your tongue. You just forked up the food, thought nothing of it and ate.

Granted, we had to stay in the kitchen with our father and do nearly everything except stand at the pan. But it was worth it. We’d beg him to make his special spaghetti recipe and he’d sprinkle sugar in the sauce. We’d beg him to make bacon-and-egg sandwiches, and he’d sprinkle sugar on the bacon as it sizzled in the skillet.

Everything my father touched turned golden and delicious. When we ate we did so with rapture, urgency, as if we could not remember the last time we did so and did not know when food like this would ever come again. There were never leftovers. When my father cooked, I squirrelled away every last thing he made. It was the only material proof of him I could take with me.

My father sits in a cloud of his own gas. Mom stands at the kitchen counter, rolling pin in one hand, the other cocked and loaded, a dusting of flour on her hip.

“For God’s sake, Dan, would you get up off your lazy ass and give me a hand in here?”

A tuft of my father’s hair pokes from over the top of the La-Z-Boy, his back to the open kitchen. A commercial is on.

“I told you, Sandy, when a commercial comes on.”

My father sneezes cataclysmically; everything exists for him large.

My brother does a proper table setting, circling round and round the table, setting our cheap flattened silverware on picnic napkins as carefully as if they were damask.

We all sit down to say grace. Dad scratches his head with the prongs of an up-flipped fork.

“Dear heavenly Father,” he starts.

Mom flicks my wrist with her finger, “Stop smacking your lips or I’m gonna smack them for you.” Her eyes still closed in prayer.

Dad continues, “We thank you for this delicious food. Amen.”

“I want to know, Dann,” Mom starts, “when you’re going to get the addition built on? I’ve been hounding you for what, I don’t know, eight months now? We’re running out of room for my stuff.”