1037: My father . . .
Inflating a Dog, the Preface continues
MY FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours. I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, because she knew that his attitude toward her would be little changed by the fact that his kitchen was inside a sugar egg. Both my mother and I had made messes before, but mine still made my father angry, while he had stopped being angry about my mother’s messes long ago. He had a much more effective way of showing his annoyance with her now: disdain. I could predict what he would do when he came home. He would give the kitchen the once-over, deliver his opinion with a dismissive snort, refrain from saying “I told you so,” crack the sugar lace around the refrigerator door, open it, get a can of beer, and retire to the living room to watch television. My mother would drop another notch in her own estimation.
Disdain, contempt, dismissal — they all hurt much more than a display of anger. I’m excluding violence from this calculation. I never saw my father strike my mother, and I honestly think he never did, but he battered her by belittling her, and I had reached an age when I knew how she felt because I felt battered when he belittled me. I was also at an age when I wanted to fight back. I was growing, and all my juices were flowing, and I had developed a competitive tongue. I’d begun to give back as good as I got, and I had begun to turn back on him the same abusive trio he turned on my mother and me: disdain, contempt, dismissal.
“We’ve got to get this cleaned up,” I said to her, almost in a whisper, as if he might be somewhere nearby, listening.
“I’ll do it,” she said, dispirited. She looked around the room, and I could see what she felt from the way her shoulders drooped, and I winced at the thought of the load of contempt that my father would be bringing home in a couple of hours.
“We’ll both do it,” I said, and then, as if we were in a movie, one of the Western movies I watched at the Babbington Theater, in a one-room cabin on the plains, where a pioneer woman was going into labor, I added, “We’re going to need lots of hot water!”
We fell into a frenzy of cleaning. We worked without pausing, and we worked without talking. Now and then we exchanged a glance. I think each of us was checking to see whether the other was tiring. Each time our glances met, we grinned and winked. We had become conspirators, and we were enjoying ourselves.
The closer six o’clock drew, the likelier it became that my father would pull into the driveway, and the thought that he would surprise us still at our work was beginning to send us into a panic. My mother stopped working for a moment, stood up, and said to me, tentatively, “I’ve got an idea.”
“Great,” I said. “We need an idea. What is it?”
She told me, and it struck me as such a good idea that we put it into effect immediately. We carried my father’s favorite chair out onto the front lawn. We carried the table that stood beside it out there, too, and placed it beside the chair. We carried the television set out and put it in place in front of the chair. I ran the long extension cord that he used for his electric drill through a cellar window and plugged the set into it. We carried a few more pieces of furniture out, and two small rugs, and by the time he came driving up, the effect was quite convincing. I know that it was, because when my father got out of the car and walked across the lawn, he said, “Spring cleaning?”
“Right!” said my mother. “Peter’s helping me, but we didn’t get started until he got home from school, so we’re not quite finished. You don’t mind sitting out here, do you? It’s a nice night.”
I came out the front door with six cans of beer in a bucket full of ice and set the bucket on the lawn beside my father’s chair. I handed him an opener. He sat in the chair and opened a can. I turned the television on.
“We won’t be much longer,” said my mother, and she and I went back inside to finish our work.
At the door, I paused for a moment and stole a look at him. He was sitting there in his chair in precisely the attitude he assumed every night when the chair was in its accustomed place in our living room, watching television as he always did, but his chair was not in its accustomed place, and neither was he, and that alteration of the ordinary arrangement of things had a wonderful consequence: he looked ridiculous.
Just then, Mr. Morton came by, walking his chickens as he did every evening. Raising chickens in the back yard was at that time and in that part of Babbington a popular hobby among adult males, and Mr. Morton had a flock of champion birds. When he reached the end of our front walk, he stood there and worked his jaw without speaking. My father squirmed in his chair. I like to think that he was experiencing the unsettling feeling that he looked ridiculous in the eyes of the chicken champion of Babbington Heights.
Finally, Mr. Morton spoke. “Sitting out on the lawn, Bert?” he asked.
My father snapped his head in Mr. Morton’s direction and said, “Spring cleaning.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Morton. He looked up at me for a moment. I shrugged and rotated my forefinger beside my head. Mr. Morton nodded, gave a shake to the leashes on his chickens, and he and his little flock went on their way.
[to be continued]
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