Sunday Best by Bernice Rubens Page A

aversion to any trait in a man that could possibly be construed as womanish. Even gentleness did not become a man, a theory that all his life he managed to put into practice. I don’t want to think about him, but I cannot think of Parsons either, and as I quicken my pace towards my wardrobe, he voids my mind of all but himself; he pounds it as he pounded my chest as a child with a viciousness he hoped his paternity could confound. He tramples on my nerve-ends as he trampled those icy fields, pitch dark in the winter mornings, dragging me over the hard-frosted grass that pierced my toes with fire. ‘Come along then, breathe, breathe, open your lungs, man’, and he would pound my chest to bruise it open to the menacing fresh air. I don’t want to talk about him. It is too late now anyway. I am er-forty-two, and my teeth are panic-loose, and a man lies rotting in the earth. If now I were to tell you about my father, or even to tell me about my father, would my teeth tighten and that man resurrect? Would I have to cast off my wardrobe too in order to come to terms withhim or must he remain the eternal discordant accompaniment of my only joy?
    A crude man, my father, a bitter man, a drunk with a loosened vulgar tongue. I hear his voice, his voice in my mother’s bedroom at the end of a drunken orgy. ‘Clap yer thighs shut, woman. Yer meat stinks.’ With a father like that, who needs literature. I hate him, I hate him, because in the end he forgave me. One day, I will have to tell you about him.
    I am weary of this confession, and find myself eager to get on with my story which would excuse me from further exposure. But I know it to be cheating. The real story is that which went before, the story that engendered this thin narrative line that I am trying to get away with. I remember how often in my childhood I wished him dead, and sometimes now I wish he had survived so that I could wish him dead again. But he cut off that hope for me by actually dying, and now I can only wish him to rot, a poor plea, for he will do that in any case, and without my participation. He is beyond my evil eye. I was more comfortable, I suppose, when he was alive.
    He would drag me over the fields – our home was isolated - our nearest neighbour, two miles away. Every morning, tho’ in the winter I thought it was still night, I had to shadow his demoniac stride across the fields, and all I had to look forward to was the cold shower on my return. ‘I’ll make a man of you,’ he shouted, and I thought for many years he was talking to himself. Until the first time he forced me under the cold shower, running back and forth from the garden with handfuls of snow to rub on my body. And when I shivered, he hit me, and said I was like a woman. It was then that I started to hate him.
    But I have spoken of him enough, and I feel no better for the telling. I know what I ought to tell you about my father, but that is the one thing I shall never tell you, at least not yet, so early on in my story, for it could prejudice you, and I have to be fair to myself. Perhaps when I am dying, I shall whisper it out, for it is a secret that would not lie easily in the grave. But should I shed it now, much else would peel off with it, including, heaven forfend, my Sunday clothes. So I’d sooner settle for the disease for the cure is too costly. Let him rot, my father. I shall try not to speak of him again.
    I was glad that my wife was out when I returned home.Although my study is absolutely private and it is on pain of death that she enters, I always feel more free when my wife is not at home. Her presence, no matter how muted, is an invasion, an onslaught on my train of thought. So I took my time with the dressing, talking to myself all the while, a practice I can indulge in only in private and when I feel free. What I say follows a repeated pattern, and it is a practice for perfection in women’s speech and mannerism, rather