My Father’s Keeper

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“Sandy, you don’t need to be buying any more clothes.” And it was true. Mom had so many shoes she had bought a horse trailer, parked it in the yard and begun throwing in black bin bags of shoes until they were piled to the top.

“It’s not just my stuff, it’s the kids’ shit and your shit too.”

“If you stopped buying it, we wouldn’t need more room to put it.”

Mom follows Dad from the kitchen as he plops in his chair, Danny and I clear the table, clanking dishes into the sink. Mom positions herself across from the TV.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d just be tickled pink, you know? I mean, I wouldn’t know how to act, if you would just for one fucking second talk to me. Communicate.”

My father hiccup-belches. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything!”

“Can we do it later? I’m letting my food digest.”

I pinch off a lug of cheese in the fridge and soften it in my fingers, roll it into a ball.

“Later never comes, Dannnn. We have got to talk now, pronto. If we’re going to stay married, you have got to talk to me like man and wife.”

My father shifts in his chair.

“Are you listening to me?”

He tucks his hands between his legs.

“Godammit, Dan, I’m talking to you!”

He laughs at a commercial.

“You motherfucking rotten son of a bitch,” Mom screams, “How dare you ignore me to watch the same commercial you’ve seen a million times.”

“Sandy, leave me alone, will ya? We don’t need to talk about anything.”

“Oh, we don’t, huh? We don’t have to talk about what a loser you are? Or how you can’t keep a job? Or that your kids don’t respect you? Or how you sit there night after night like a lump on a log? Yeah, right,” Mom snorts, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

My father grips the side handle. “I don’t have to take this shit,” he shouts, and jettisons from the chair. But Mom tries to block him and they scuffle at the door. He knocks her against the hutch and crashes out of the house.

“Dad!” I yell from after him, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to hell, Julie.” He storms off the deck. “Straight to hell.”

“Julie, you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand.” Mom holds up a few fingers, demonstrating. “I do and do and do for people and here I am, 39, and what do I got to show for it? Nothing!”

Mom hyperventilates into a brown paper bag. In between breaths she takes a silver table spoon from the freezer and presses its curved back to the swollen puffs of her eyelids.

The fights that started in the trailer and ended when Dad stormed out often saw Mom chasing down the road after him in the spare car. She’d return alone later that night, her red face red streaked with tears.

“Julie, let me tell you something,” she says. “The one you love at 20 is not the one you love at 30.”

The kind of crying Mom did lasted hours and by morning her eyelids were nearly swollen shut. She’d splash water on her face, compress a cold washcloth to her eyes or scrub on kohl eye liner but it just made her look like a raccoon. The only thing that reduced the swelling was a tablespoon from the silverware drawer run under the cold tap and stuck in the freezer until it froze into a thin, rounded ice cube. She would corner me in the kitchen and stand by the counter with the cold curve of the spoon pressed into the hollow of her eye socket. I leaned against the refrigerator, my hands tucked behind me, sliding them up and down the smooth wood-grain sticker she’d applied to the silver handle.

“Does it look better now?” she’d ask as she lifted the spoon from her eye. It didn’t.

“Uh, a little bit.”

“How about now?” she’d say, raising it again, her eyeball popping up.

“Maybe a few more minutes.”

I vacillated wildly between first feeling sorry for my father and then Mom. I hated how she cornered him but I would show alliance to her even as she called him vicious names. I shared an understanding with Dad but hearing Mom sob through the night and seeing her face the morning after, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. What Mom feared most was Dad walking out and no longer being the breadwinner. She painted a bleak picture of life without his pay cheque; no more shopping, no horses, no nice knick-knacks ordered from the catalogues to set around the trailer—all things our mother wanted that didn’t really matter to me. But I was scared when she said she’d have to pull us out of school to live in a shelter for homeless women and if that didn’t work, give us up to foster care. Mom would turn on her best behaviour to win Dad back, but once the threat was over, she unleashed a vengeance for her dependency that cast darkness over our family for weeks. And when Dad lost another job, the cycle of regular fights accelerated to almost daily shouting matches over money.

“Dan, what are we going to do? I can’t pay the mortgage.”

“Let them take the fucking place, I’ll go live in the garage.”

“And what about us?” Mom seethed. “You expect your kids to live in that filthy rat trap with you?”

“They can if they want to,” Dad reasoned.

In the weeks that followed my father’s last pay cheque, Mom was supposed to budget to stretch out the money but instead went on rampant shopping sprees, buying up the outfits she had her eye on. The cheques bounced at the bank and piled up with fees and penalties and Mom, in a dramatic display of righteous indignation, would stand at the window of a teller and bang her fist on the counter trying to get the charges reversed until they escorted her out.

As for Dad, he never saw a dime from his pay cheques anyway. The only thing he had that was of any importance was his record collection.

But without the money to fuel Mom’s fantasy, her world tipped on its axis and rolled straight down to crash into my father’s.

Mom’s hair is a wild windstorm of stray hairs that stick out from the jet-black hairpiece she has wound up into a cone on top of her head. She stomps through the kitchen, slamming plates down on gold-flecked Formica.

“You go tell that good for nothing, son of a bitchin, no good motherfucking father of yours, Dannnn, that his dinner is ready.”

“Hey, Dad,” I sing-song, approaching the dark lair of the garage, “Mom says she’s fixed up your favorite dinner. She’d love for you to come in and eat with us.” I hold my breath, staring into the black abyss of the garage. I can just make out my father’s shadow, stooped on a milk crate sorting through the junk under his workbench.

“Please, Daddy.”

“Well, you go tell your mother that she can just kiss my rosy fucking ass, will you?” he shouts. “It’s going to take more from that lunatic than her slop to get me to step back inside that hell-hole.”

“Okay.” And I crunch back down the gravel walkway.

“Dad said he’ll be in in a few minutes, he’s gotta finish what he’s doing and clean up. He said to tell you that he loves you, Mommy.”

Back and forth, lobbing my own lies, rinsing the filth from theirs, until five to six trips later Dad reluctantly opens the aluminium screen door and tromps back down the hall to soap his hands with a goop of orange hand cleaner.

He looms like a giant at the yellow plastic vanity, with its dainty shell soap dishes scalloped right into the sink. He shakes his hands off on the fake marble of the counter, peppering the mirror. Dirty froth and water streak down the bowl and pool on the counter. Dad stomps out, turning down the hall and I slip in, wiping the basin clean with the guest towel and rinsing the dirt down the drain. I toss the towel into the long cabinet behind my mother’s wigs and pads and the secret stash of Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues she orders them from. I mean, who’s going to use a guest towel in our house?

The threat of divorce hung in the air thick as burning bacon and was a constant force being prepared for in various forms of execution. Mom made a big production of having us load clothes into a paper sack and keep it in the back of our closets for anytime she thought we may need to flee under cover of night. That she announced it loudly while pacing in front of Dad and the TV seemed to defy the intended secrecy of it all, but we followed orders.

And after dinner when she railed on him as he lay beached in the chair, my brother and I sat crosslegged on the floor in the back of the trailer as we once did playing church. But this time we were perfectly still, straining our ears for the recliner footrest to snap shut. If it did, we’d have to bolt to the living room and get between them in their physical fight. Every shout or stomp ricocheted though the trailer and vibrated the glass panels of the hutch, so just as Dad read Mom’s proximity to him by the strength of her voice through the walls, we read the levity of their arguments by the needle on our own internal Richter scale. There was no way to stop them and just as you’d think Dad’s attention might make Mom back off, it only fuelled a desire to make him pay.

“What do you want me do to Sandy?” my father would plead, “I’ll do anything just to get you to stop. Stop, Sandy, I’m begging you to stop.”

My father stands trapped in the vortex of the trailer where the living room, hallway and kitchen all meet. He keeps his eye on the front door but Mom blocks the exit, her arm strung out, gripping the edge of the hutch.

“Dan, you are going to stand here, face me like a man and deal with this.”

My father sighs.

Mom cuts, “Stop acting like a little boy, Dannn. I want to be married to a man.”

Danny and I sneak down the hall to stand guard.

Mom and Dad wedge into the tiny archway opening, my father’s face dropped in defeat. Mom reads our presence as allies and edges in.

“C’mon, Dannn,” she taunts, “What are you going to do? Huhhhh?”

“I’m begging you, Sandy,” my father says quietly, “Please leave me alone.”

“What!” Mom mocks, “I can’t hear you little boy, going to stand there and cry?”

Mom points to us crouched in the hallway. “The kids aren’t going to help you, are you kids? They’re here because they know how crazy you are.”

“Please Sandy, please let me go.” My father looks up from his hand, exasperated. Mom leers with a smirk, “You’re going have to talk louder if you want me to hear you.”

“Mom,” I whisper. “Please.”

He can beg, we can beg but she will not stop.

Her smile fades, “You son of a bitch.” And she gains steam, “You rotten, good for nothing son of a fucking bitch! I do and do and do and do for you and what do I get? You got nothing here, you destroyed this home. I hate you, these kids hate you.”

Danny squeaks, “We don’t hate you, Dad.”

“We love you both,” I plead.

We emerge from the shadows; Danny latches onto the seam running down my father’s jean leg, I slip in against my mother’s hip, placing myself between them. Mom sneers like a heckler in his face, Dad holds his head in his hands inches from her spitting mouth. Pressed against Mom, I can feel my father’s rage building. With a sudden flare his head jerks upright. His fists shoot out of nowhere and he rushes, tangling his hands in her hair, smacking her gutted mouth. He catches her jaw in the crook of his palm, gripping her cheeks. She folds her chin to her chest like a child being tickled.

My father squeezes.

“Helllp! Heeelp me Juwelly, Denny.” Mom’s eyes are as wide as golf balls, pleading over the top of my father’s hand.

“Let her go!” I screech.

“Call her off, Julie,” Dad screams, “Make her leave me alone!”

“I will, Dad, I promise, I’ll make her stop!”

Dad shoves her from his grip; she crashes into the crevice of the couch, separating it from the wall. The pretzel barrel tips and coins spill like a jackpot over my father’s feet. He heaves his foot out of the pile to haul back and kick her and I desperately tug the belt loops of my mother’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, trying to pull her from the slit of the sofa. Dad’s drawn boot hits the wall, tangling in the chains of the clock, a pine cone whips around his ankle. He catches himself against the hutch as heirloom mail-order plates crash from their plastic holders. The clock flies off the wall, crashing at my mother’s feet. My brother rips from his death grip on the seam of my father’s pants and crumples to the floor, crying. We break in the swirling vortex of the trailer, catching our breath. The jostled hands strike the hour and the little birds pop out the door of the clock, lying on its side, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!, they circle on the track.

School was full of kids whose parents were divorced and returned to class with stories of fun-filled weekends spent with either their mom or dad. I envied them. The only reason my parents fought was because they were together. Instead of getting the best of them like the kids of divorced parents, we got the worst of both. We could handle being with one or the other so the only thing stopping the harmony was the fact that they would not split. But while together, Danny and I lived each day with antennas tuned to the brewing of fights that ran in cycles day by day. And they always ended by the same formula; Dad taking off in the car with Mom in hot pursuit, or Dad pummelling Mom until she finally grew silent.

Despite us begging and pleading, cornering them separately or tag teaming them together, the sweet relief of divorce never came. My brother and I sat in one bedroom or the other, secretly plotting how happy our lives would be if only for the love of God they would just separate. Danny cries bitter tears, his lip buckling under the weight. He cannot stand the fighting, the shuffling back and forth between Mom and Dad to smooth them out, the way they pit us against each other and force us to take sides. We focus instead on the future and talk with excitement about the good times to be had once we are with just one of them. Mom or Dad, but never them both. Please, God, we pray together in our pyjamas on the floor in the dark, please never them both.

The only good thing that came of the fighting was the sporadic new beginnings Dad insisted would lead to a happy home life. Convinced all would be forgiven if we just attended church, Dad donned his blistermaking shoes and Mom had a legitimate reason to try on half her outfits. We headed out early Sunday morning for one of the small country tabernacles that dotted the dirt roads throughout the county, the car ride heavy with tension.