Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [93]
“Yes,” my mother said, holding Gaylen, “I know, he’s different now. But sometimes it is too late to change people. Sometimes, you just have to love them anyway.”
It was about this time that the dinnertime fights at our house became fierce and constant. Dinner had never been the easiest hour in our home—in large part because it was the only hour of the day when the whole family was certain to come together. Indeed, to miss dinner, or even to show up late for it, was to violate one of my father’s most inviolable rules. But after his return from MacLaren’s, Gary began missing the dinner hour more and more, lingering after school with his friends, or coming in after dark and making his own meal from what was left over. This offense was enough to result in horrible fights between him and my father, or to induce my father to banish him from any meals in the house until he learned to live by the rules.
My brother Frank remembered these dinnertime bouts vividly. The kitchen was a smallish room at the rear of the house. That’s where we dined. My mother sat at one end of the table and Gaylen sat at the other. Frank and Gary were seated on one side, and my father kept me next to him on the other side. “We’d sit down at that table,” Frank said, “and we’d have fantastic food. Breaded veal cutlets stacked up, baked or boiled potatoes, all kinds of vegetables, dessert, and whatever you wanted to drink. Sometimes fresh homemade bread. I mean, you’re talking eating like a king. Yet there would be no way you could enjoy that meal. We would be sitting down, just starting to eat, and invariably Mom would say something like, ‘Well, I wonder where Gary’s at.’ And that would set Dad off. He’d say, ‘I don’t care where he’s at, I’m glad he’s not here.’ Or Gary would come in, and Dad would say, ‘What the hell are you doing here? We’re not running a cafe. Get out.’ Then Mom would come to Gary’s defense and say, ‘Well, I fix these meals and he’s welcome to eat. I have some say in this.’
“That’s all it would take. Just like that, she and Dad would be yelling and screaming. And if one of us tried to get them to calm down or save it until after dinner, that just made things worse. Before long, Mom would have picked up some part of the dinner—usually the choicest part, like the roast or a pie, or maybe a plate or kettle—and she’d heave it on the floor or at Dad. Then he’d stomp out, calling her a crazy crack-brained bitch, and the rest of us would be sitting there, with her at the table crying, and the food ruined, and no recourse. I’ll tell you, it could really get to you. It became so damn common that for years I dreaded eating; it would ruin my digestion just to think about it.”
Even on the nights when Gary wasn’t the issue, fights were still the rule. “I got so fearful of those dinners,” said Frank, “that I used to pull my plate up close to me at the edge of the table, and I’d eat nervous and fast. Dad didn’t like it when I did that, and this one time—”
I jumped in, because suddenly I remembered the incident. It was one of the few incidents from around that time that, for one reason or another, I could recall. “Father took your face,” I said, “and shoved it into your plate.”
“You remember that?” Frank said. “You couldn’t have been more than five. But, yeah, that’s exactly what he did. He reached over, grabbed the back of my head and pushed it right down into the beef stew. That’s what we were eating.” Frank paused for a moment, then laughed. “I came up with beef stew, carrots, and potatoes mashed all over my face. I’ve got to laugh now, but at the time I wasn’t laughing. It was humiliating and disrespectful and disastrous. I didn’t finish my meal. I got up and left the table, went and washed up and sat outside. I remember Gaylen coming out afterward, sitting down beside me. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘I wish we could eat a meal once in a