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.”
“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