them, my bother had the other. It seemed room enough then.
When I plugged in a space heater in my room, it threw a circuit breaker and I don’t dare try that again. There is no escape from a blaring television announcer, shouts, screams, cheers, commercials: a basketball game. Dad likes to watch basketball, and Mom is pretending an interest. They both have significant hearing loss and probably don’t realize how painfully loud the sound is. I should buy some ear plugs, I think, and wonder why I didn’t do it before. For upstairs, earmuffs would be more appropriate.
I am trying to resolve our dilemma, to all appearances one that has already solidified beyond resolution during the past seven months, since Dad’s stroke in June. Now he is in a wheelchair, and my mother and I are in straitjackets. Also, I am trying to decipher the curious message my own brain is sending me by way of a train whistle.
The first time I heard the train whistle in the night, I paid little attention, simply rolled over, pulled the cover up and returned to sleep. I gave it scant thought the following day. Just a fluke of a wind current carrying sound abnormally, I decided. I knew no train track was within miles, far too distant to hear the trains.
The next time I heard it, a week or two later, I sat straight up in bed. There was a line of light showing my door from the downstairs hall. It was three in the morning and it was very cold in my room. As children we left the door open for heat from below to drift in, but when Eleanor reached puberty, she kept it closed, because Roger’s room was right across the hall. Now I keep it closed at night. If Dad got up and saw a light upstairs, it would set him off in a rage.
The whistle sounded, drew closer, faded away. In the silence that followed, I heard Dad going to the bathroom. His wheelchair makes a squeal at random intervals. He claimed not to hear it, and my mother agreed. If he said black was white, she would nod.
I must have been dreaming, I thought uneasily, and translated a squeal to the sound of a train whistle. I knew it would be a long time before I could go back to sleep; I was too sore and it had been hours since a hot bath had relaxed my muscles enough to allow sleep in the first place. I had spent much of the day in the orchard, trying to rake up the fallen apples. Dad had insisted it had to be done.
By way of mild protest, I had said, “I thought Mr. Garry cleaned it up when he did his.”
“They had a falling out,” Mom said, even as Dad started one of his ranting ranges, cursing their neighbor Garry for being nosy and insolent, and me for being too lazy to earn my keep.
“Let it go,” I ordered myself in bed, wide awake, listening for the squeal on his return to bed, thinking of how my feelings for him had changed. What had been fear had become simple hatred.
All through childhood and adolescence, I had feared him, not because he was physically abusive, but for his rages that came with ferocity and unpredictability over major things, like not coming straight home from school, to minor ones, like leaving a light on at night. At those times he had yelled obscenities, cursed all three children and his wife, the world and everyone in it. He had knocked things off tables, flung chairs over, broken whatever was within reach.
As much as I feared the rages, I came to dread even more his cutting, mind-numbing sarcasm and insults. “You fat pig, the boys must line up just to get a smile from someone as fat and ugly as you are.” Eleanor would run from the room in tears. It wasn’t just her. He had a trigger for each of us. My brother fled when he was sixteen, and Eleanor when she was seventeen. I left the day after graduation, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and although I have visited frequently, I have not lived here since then until now.
At twelve, when Eleanor left, I was too young to run away, and I couldn’t understand then why Mom stayed, but now at thirty, I well
When I plugged in a space heater in my room, it threw a circuit breaker and I don’t dare try that again. There is no escape from a blaring television announcer, shouts, screams, cheers, commercials: a basketball game. Dad likes to watch basketball, and Mom is pretending an interest. They both have significant hearing loss and probably don’t realize how painfully loud the sound is. I should buy some ear plugs, I think, and wonder why I didn’t do it before. For upstairs, earmuffs would be more appropriate.
I am trying to resolve our dilemma, to all appearances one that has already solidified beyond resolution during the past seven months, since Dad’s stroke in June. Now he is in a wheelchair, and my mother and I are in straitjackets. Also, I am trying to decipher the curious message my own brain is sending me by way of a train whistle.
The first time I heard the train whistle in the night, I paid little attention, simply rolled over, pulled the cover up and returned to sleep. I gave it scant thought the following day. Just a fluke of a wind current carrying sound abnormally, I decided. I knew no train track was within miles, far too distant to hear the trains.
The next time I heard it, a week or two later, I sat straight up in bed. There was a line of light showing my door from the downstairs hall. It was three in the morning and it was very cold in my room. As children we left the door open for heat from below to drift in, but when Eleanor reached puberty, she kept it closed, because Roger’s room was right across the hall. Now I keep it closed at night. If Dad got up and saw a light upstairs, it would set him off in a rage.
The whistle sounded, drew closer, faded away. In the silence that followed, I heard Dad going to the bathroom. His wheelchair makes a squeal at random intervals. He claimed not to hear it, and my mother agreed. If he said black was white, she would nod.
I must have been dreaming, I thought uneasily, and translated a squeal to the sound of a train whistle. I knew it would be a long time before I could go back to sleep; I was too sore and it had been hours since a hot bath had relaxed my muscles enough to allow sleep in the first place. I had spent much of the day in the orchard, trying to rake up the fallen apples. Dad had insisted it had to be done.
By way of mild protest, I had said, “I thought Mr. Garry cleaned it up when he did his.”
“They had a falling out,” Mom said, even as Dad started one of his ranting ranges, cursing their neighbor Garry for being nosy and insolent, and me for being too lazy to earn my keep.
“Let it go,” I ordered myself in bed, wide awake, listening for the squeal on his return to bed, thinking of how my feelings for him had changed. What had been fear had become simple hatred.
All through childhood and adolescence, I had feared him, not because he was physically abusive, but for his rages that came with ferocity and unpredictability over major things, like not coming straight home from school, to minor ones, like leaving a light on at night. At those times he had yelled obscenities, cursed all three children and his wife, the world and everyone in it. He had knocked things off tables, flung chairs over, broken whatever was within reach.
As much as I feared the rages, I came to dread even more his cutting, mind-numbing sarcasm and insults. “You fat pig, the boys must line up just to get a smile from someone as fat and ugly as you are.” Eleanor would run from the room in tears. It wasn’t just her. He had a trigger for each of us. My brother fled when he was sixteen, and Eleanor when she was seventeen. I left the day after graduation, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and although I have visited frequently, I have not lived here since then until now.
At twelve, when Eleanor left, I was too young to run away, and I couldn’t understand then why Mom stayed, but now at thirty, I well
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