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By Root 304 0

Sometimes, he’d sit down at the kitchen table and open the newspaper wide, lowering it almost to the tabletop, so we’d have to move the serving dishes to the counter. One July Fourth, when I was about twelve and Andy was ten, my father picked up an angel on horseback as my mother was carrying the tray past him. “What is this, shit on a stick,” he said, and knocked the whole plate out of her hands, and then there we were, my mother and Andy and me, scrabbling to grab the hot, damp, oily little things from under the sideboard and out of the ficus plants. My father picked up a couple and put them in my mother’s apron pocket, saying, “You kids crack me up.” He was still chuckling when the doorbell rang and my mother went back into the kitchen and Andy and I went to our rooms, and he was still smiling when he opened the door for Mr. and Mrs. Rachlin, who were always the first.

When I got to college, other people’s stories were much worse. A girl down the hall told her parents she was pregnant her senior year of high school and they drove her to a home for unwed mothers on Christmas Eve and moved out of town. A boy I liked had a long, ropy scar on his back from a belt; my roommate had cigarette burns on her instep. Gross cruelty with canapés and bad temper hardly seemed worth mentioning. (Amazingly, my brother chose to come out to both my parents his sophomore year. He said my mother wiped away a quick tear and hugged him and thanked him for telling her, and just as I was about to say, Good for Mom, Andy told me that Dad had lowered his newspaper, poked him in the stomach, and said, “A fat fag? Not much fun in that,” and gone back to his paper.) In law school, at night, over drinks, everyone told funnier family stories and no one pulled up their shirt or rolled down their socks to show their scars. When it got really late, a few guys told my kind of stories and then they would say, frankly or sadly or fondly, that these things happened only when the old man had been drinking.

My father didn’t drink. He had a glass of white wine at the cocktail parties, and in the summertime, when he was grilling hamburgers, he’d have a beer. One glass of wine. One beer. I didn’t have to watch to see if this was the drink that turned Good Daddy into Bad Daddy; there was no slow, nightly disintegration of the self. I never had to tiptoe around Daddy Sleeping It Off, because my father took a four-mile walk every day, and if it rained, he spent an hour on the rowing machine in the basement. Andy and I always caught the late bus home, and after dinner we did our homework in our rooms, and when I got a stereo for my fifteenth birthday, Andy and I would lie on my floor and listen to loud rock and roll, very, very quietly.

“Am I talking to myself, goddammit?” my father said one night at dinner, and in the silence Andy said, “I guess so, Dad,” and I laughed, which I knew was a mistake even as my lips parted, and my father stood up, hands wandering from head to head, unable to choose which one of us to kill first. I pushed Andy under the table and pulled him down the hall to my bedroom and pressed the lousy little push-button lock on the door. My father threw our dinners on the floor. My mother was still sitting at the table, trying to be calm, which did sometimes work, and sometimes not, as when he took her two favorite silk scarves and used them to stake his tomato plants, or another time, famous in our family, when he drove her car to a used-car lot, sold it, and took a cab home with a bag of cash in one hand and a box of pizza in the other.

“You could kill yourself on these creamed onions,” he said, stepping over them, and I could hear my mother murmuring agreement and I heard him say, pleasantly, that sometimes the kids were too smart for their own damned good. I heard my mother agree with that, too, and my father said he would catch the tail end of the news. About an hour later, my mother knocked on my door and handed us two plates of plastic-wrapped dinner, the meat-loaf slices reconstructed and carrot-raisin salad instead of the creamed onions.