form that had invaded their avoid-other-children-at-all-costs daughter, but the next day my mom made the appropriate phone calls. By the following weekend, I had a purple and black uniform, shin guards, and cleats, and my parents had a bag full of sliced oranges to bring to my first-ever soccer game. I was immediately assigned my position as a left forward, but having no idea what that meant, I just ran up and down the soccer field, staying parallel to the ball as Carolynn’s father had told me to.I hoped that if perchance the ball ever got anywhere near me, someone else would come and kick it before I had to. I didn’t know which goal belonged to my team.
A soccer phenom I was not, but thanks to weekly practices and games, I was becoming better and better friends with Carolynn. After going to her house for playdates a few times, I did something I had never done before—I reciprocated.
We didn’t have much yet—a couch, a recliner, beds, a dining room table. I didn’t care if we ever got more furniture; I loved living in a big empty house. Well, almost empty. In the front foyer there was a closet with brown accordion-style doors, and inside my father had started hiding bags of papers. Free local papers that he picked up each time we went to the grocery store, flyers from local discount stores, and real estate brochures he had collected during our house-hunt but wasn’t quite ready to let go of. On the shelves lining the walls of the closet, he kept tools and extra portable radios so that he could carry the news with him wherever he went.
The day before Carolynn came over, I made plans for things we could do together. I brushed all my dolls’ hair and lined them up on my daybed. My big white orangutan, Sugar, was on one side, with the rest of my dolls arranged in a lineup that progressed size-wise from Melissa my Magic Nursery Baby and eventually to my nameless Barbies.
My father had grown progressively more distant since we moved in. While living in a big clean house enlivened my mother and me, it seemed to have the exact opposite effect on my father. He still wasn’t working, but he wasn’t lying in bed with migraines anymore either. Mostly he sat in the car or his room listening to the radio and reading whatever newspaper or bookhe had hidden from my mother’s sight. I woke up for school on my own, thanks to an alarm clock, and he came out from hiding in time to pick my mother up at the train station each night. We still had dinner together at night, at a clear table, and sometimes he could be coerced to be himself for a few minutes and forget that everything he loved had been taken from him.
He was expectedly absent when Carolynn arrived for our play date. She had only been over a few minutes and I was still giving her the tour of our house when my dad stormed into the living room.
His face was purple and he was yelling at me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying—the words were jumbled as he spat them at me. He was calling me a brat, I understood that much.
“All I want is to listen to the news,” he said.
Then there was some more yelling about a broken radio, and I figured it out. He thought I had broken his radio, but I didn’t know which radio he was talking about—there were radios strategically placed all over the house so that a moment of NPR would never be missed. His tirade included the word “closet,” and so I guessed that a radio must have fallen off a shelf and broken. I hadn’t broken it. I tried to tell him that, but he just kept yelling. I thought about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” My mom used to tell me that story all the time during my lying phase, and it seemed that I was in my own version; he wasn’t hearing any of my pleas of innocence. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t appear to be looking anywhere at all, completely unfocused in his rage.
When he taught me how to make a fist to fight off bullies, he had said, “Make sure your thumb is outside, so that you
A soccer phenom I was not, but thanks to weekly practices and games, I was becoming better and better friends with Carolynn. After going to her house for playdates a few times, I did something I had never done before—I reciprocated.
We didn’t have much yet—a couch, a recliner, beds, a dining room table. I didn’t care if we ever got more furniture; I loved living in a big empty house. Well, almost empty. In the front foyer there was a closet with brown accordion-style doors, and inside my father had started hiding bags of papers. Free local papers that he picked up each time we went to the grocery store, flyers from local discount stores, and real estate brochures he had collected during our house-hunt but wasn’t quite ready to let go of. On the shelves lining the walls of the closet, he kept tools and extra portable radios so that he could carry the news with him wherever he went.
The day before Carolynn came over, I made plans for things we could do together. I brushed all my dolls’ hair and lined them up on my daybed. My big white orangutan, Sugar, was on one side, with the rest of my dolls arranged in a lineup that progressed size-wise from Melissa my Magic Nursery Baby and eventually to my nameless Barbies.
My father had grown progressively more distant since we moved in. While living in a big clean house enlivened my mother and me, it seemed to have the exact opposite effect on my father. He still wasn’t working, but he wasn’t lying in bed with migraines anymore either. Mostly he sat in the car or his room listening to the radio and reading whatever newspaper or bookhe had hidden from my mother’s sight. I woke up for school on my own, thanks to an alarm clock, and he came out from hiding in time to pick my mother up at the train station each night. We still had dinner together at night, at a clear table, and sometimes he could be coerced to be himself for a few minutes and forget that everything he loved had been taken from him.
He was expectedly absent when Carolynn arrived for our play date. She had only been over a few minutes and I was still giving her the tour of our house when my dad stormed into the living room.
His face was purple and he was yelling at me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying—the words were jumbled as he spat them at me. He was calling me a brat, I understood that much.
“All I want is to listen to the news,” he said.
Then there was some more yelling about a broken radio, and I figured it out. He thought I had broken his radio, but I didn’t know which radio he was talking about—there were radios strategically placed all over the house so that a moment of NPR would never be missed. His tirade included the word “closet,” and so I guessed that a radio must have fallen off a shelf and broken. I hadn’t broken it. I tried to tell him that, but he just kept yelling. I thought about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” My mom used to tell me that story all the time during my lying phase, and it seemed that I was in my own version; he wasn’t hearing any of my pleas of innocence. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t appear to be looking anywhere at all, completely unfocused in his rage.
When he taught me how to make a fist to fight off bullies, he had said, “Make sure your thumb is outside, so that you
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