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By Root 262 0

especially the kitchen floor tiles. She wants to redo the whole goddamn place, and right now she’s having a royal shit-fit.” These remarks, which might have inspired humor or disgust or exhaustion in others, froze me and inspired in me real terror—in part, because it announced to me we would be dealing with my mother’s formidable madness and unpredictability. But there was more to it than that. As we climbed the snow-covered hill of Oatfield Road, I saw something in my father’s manner—an exhaustion in his face, a resignation in his voice—that seemed to signal something new: a weariness and sadness that I had not heard from him before, and this frightened me even more than what I had seen of his strength and his rage. It’s possible my father had put more hope in the regenerative ability of this new house than the rest of us. Maybe he thought that buying a new home would finally buy not only respectability for his family, but also a lasting peace with my mother. However, we all knew it wasn’t panning out that way. My mother wanted our new home to be perfect in every detail, and when something failed her standards, she would rage at my father, and he would simply give in to her demands and then walk out of the room. From this time on, I would see him more and more as a tired and helpless man—somebody who just wanted a little concord and who looked increasingly drained by all the troubles.

Of course, the other thing my father’s statement about my mother announced to me was a rotten home life for the next few days. Since my mother was having the entire place re-wallpapered and repainted, the rest of us had been told where we could and could not move in the new house. There was a narrow pathway we were allowed to navigate between the downstairs kitchen and bathroom and two of the upstairs bedrooms. We also weren’t allowed to touch the walls outside of the light-switch panels. If we did, there was real hell to pay. The practical result of all of this was that, for the next few days, anybody who wanted to live in that house (and since it looked like it was going to be frozen over outside, that meant all of us) would have to live in the dining room, which was already filled with a TV, unpacked boxes, and extra furniture. Now, during the family’s nonsleeping moments, it would include two adults and three restless boys. I had already made a corner in the room where I could sit and read my favorite stories: tales of Jesus and monsters and Odysseus and Captain Ahab.

That late afternoon, when my father and I entered the house through the back door into the kitchen area—the present object of my mother’s obsessiveness—I saw my brothers Frank and Gaylen sitting around the dining booth. They were looking unmistakably like men who had been trapped in a room with my angry mother for a few hours too long. I saw my mother sitting on a steel chair in a corner of the room, her arms folded over her chest, studying the linoleum patterns on the floor tile that had just been laid that morning. A few days before, when she had picked this tile, she declared it one of the most handsome domestic designs she had ever seen. But now, viewing the new floor under her feet, she decided the pattern was actually a product of somebody’s hellish vision, and she was brooding about it. I saw her sitting there, and I instantaneously felt a great compassion for her. I not only recognized her familiar wrath, but I think I also saw the private tickings of a mind that knew such vast and deep grief and anger that what it wanted and feared most were one and the same thing: the space to live inside its own private madness, unhindered. I remember that in this moment, I simply wanted to go up to her and hug her, comfort her, say to her that I understood, that she should get what she wanted—she should get a floor pattern that truly fitted into her own inexplicable sense of order.

I don’t remember what happened next exactly, but I know that in some way I acted on that impulse. I went up to my mother. I hugged her, kissed her cheek—things we were all forbidden to do, and had