reading, something feels funny. You flip to the front cover. The magazine’s date is February 1986.
You remember the year well. It was a few days before your sixteenth birthday when Mom first told you about your father’s schizophrenia. She had to; she’d pulled you out of a track meet to go pick him up at his office. He was being fired. On the half-hour car ride, she told you the story, or part of it, beginning with a diagnosis more than ten years earlier. You were more shocked by the secrecy than the actual news; you would realize your mistake in the following months. Things changed: Dad underwent expensive and ineffective homeopathic treatments (your parents forgoing traditional medicine after his suicidal reaction to lithium in the early 1970s) believing that a food allergy was making him hear voices; Mom went back to work after sixteen years, as a secretary in another suburb an hour away; and, you and your sister retreated to separate caves.
1986. At first you thought Why him? Then Why me? And finally just plain Why? It took you a while to figure it out—in college or in your early twenties somewhere—to realize that some kind of terrible thing—mental illness, cancer, starvation, war, genocide, dentures, etc.—happens to everyone if they only live long enough. Until you were sixteen, you were simply in a kind of “non-trauma window,” as The Professor calls it.
One more quick glance at your sign’s astrological forecast. This one for February 23, 1986: “It’s another good day at work. The comments about you are uplifting. Don’t be afraid to put your creative self out there in front of everybody.” Whatever. You leave the bathroom despite failing to empty your bowels.
Owen and Mom have moved to the kitchen. He is standing on a rickety-looking stool, stirring the macaroni and cheese. He has a big smile on his face and so does your mother. She tells him how his daddy used to be a good helper in the kitchen. You do remember once cooking a piece of steak using every spice in the house and that it was mighty tasty, but you can’t remember taking part in any other cooking as a kid. That was always Mom’s job until, well, things changed.
Owen finishes his project by dropping the spoon into the pot. It sinks slowly and beautifully. Your father comes in the kitchen. Owen suddenly lunges for you to hold him. Typical stranger anxiety. Your father reaches into a cupboard and says to Owen, “Do you want some pop?” You don’t want to cause a fuss, so you let Owen have half a glass.
“Do want some red wine?” Dad says.
This is a recent development. Your father’s father was an unacknowledged alcoholic and your mother never let booze in the house while you were growing up, except for your high school graduation party. But last year your father heard about the antioxidant properties of red wine and so now he has a glass or two at dinner. Grateful for something to take the edge off, you accept his offer.
The table gets set and dinner goes pretty well. There’s the usual squabbling between your parents about his using too much salt, her not wanting ice cubes in her water, etc. These little reruns don’t faze you anymore. Owen is the center of attention anyway. He landscapes his food on the table and then applies it to his face, trying a bit of everything. You aren’t that hungry for some reason.
As you’re getting up to help clear the table, Dad throws out a new piece of information, “Did you hear that they’re outlawing vitamin C in Canada and that it could happen here?
“I don’t think they can do that, Dad.”
“Oh yes they can,” Mom chimes in. “I read it on Alternet. Just because it’s not being reported by the mainstream media doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”
“It’s not a medication,” you say, “that’d be like banning garlic.”
In the background Owen seems to be enjoying this debate, clapping every few seconds.
“Garlic,” Dad says, “has incredible antioxidant powers.”
You resist the urge to bring up his mania two summers ago—twenty cloves of raw garlic per day. Somehow Mom put up with three months of it. Somehow Dad’s stomach survived.
When you and Owen climb the stairs to your old bedroom, which smells of mothballs and old clothes, you recall part of the problem with coming home: the house itself. Growing up you felt comfortable in this place. And you especially liked your bedroom, arranging and rearranging your furniture every six months or so, imagining one day you’d be an architect. The house was a newly built four-bedroom colonial when your parents bought it, moving back to the Midwest from Boston when you were five. The whole subdivision was new, built on grade-A farmland—you can still remember picking clover-like weeds, hundreds of them, from the backyard so that your parents could lay the sod stacked like firewood in the driveway. But the house is now more than thirty years old, and to say that it’s a pigsty doesn’t due justice to either “pig” or “sty.” Although you remember vividly the intense picking-up and cleaning sessions the night before Thanksgiving and Christmas, you don’t recall the house being this bad. In all these years Mom and Dad have never thrown or given anything away. It’s 2200-square feet of cat-scratched furniture packed into rooms, closets jammed with hundreds of thrift-store shirts, blouses, sweaters, pants, jackets, and skirts on cheap metal hangers, and assorted piles of papers, household junk, and baubles.
Your mother comes in with fresh linens and begins making up the bed. As he does at home, Owen starts pulling books from the large bookshelf against the far wall. He has become quite skilled: the books, some of them tomes, barely miss his toes.
“Ma, where are my yearbooks?”
“Your what,” she says, “I haven’t touched a thing.”
“Yearbooks—I’ve always kept them right here,” you say pointing to the bottom of the bookshelf. “This corner. Should be at least two or three of them.”
She shrugs.
“Dad—”
“Oh don’t bother to ask, he doesn’t know where anything is.”
“You two in a fight?”
“No,” she says, and then after a moment, “I wanted him to pick up my blouses at the cleaner’s today. And, for once in his life, pick up the house, vacuum. He didn’t do a damn thing as usual.”
You shrug.
“Come downstairs after Owen goes to bed. Goodnight, sweetie,” she says, and gives the little guy a tight squeeze.
After getting him into his pajamas, you read him one of his favorite books. It is about an elephant and a mouse who fall in love against the wishes of their families, and it only takes eight or nine reads before he looks sleepy. You’re about to do the final tuck-in when he puts his hand in his mouth twice, which is the sign that he’s hungry. But then he pulls at his ears. It could be one of the ear infections he’s prone to.
“Do your ears hurt?”
He covers his ears and then throws up his hands. “Eeeeet.”
“What’s wrong with your ears?”
“Eeeeet,” he says and sticks a hand in his mouth.
“We just ate.”
One more time with the sign.
Back downstairs. Your father is watching TV and your mother has already fallen asleep in an arm chair with a stack of old newspapers on her lap. Most likely she’s been clipping coupons.
You remember why your wife never liked coming here. The last time the three of you visited, the guest room reeked so intensely of cat urine that it was difficult to sleep. And then back home, days after the trip, the smell of the house lingered on your clothes, Owen’s toys, even your bodies. No, Little Ma’s colon cancer notwithstanding, you don’t blame your wife for the six to one ratio of visits to her parents versus visits to yours.
Looking around the room, you realize you can make your peace with the cluttered house and the pack-rat mania; it’s the refrigerators that you can’t bear to open. There are three of them. One is in the kitchen and two are in the