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