and snapping photos, but the wives call them back to the station wagons and their sandwiches and soft drinks stashed in picnic baskets.
And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.
And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.
Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.
Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.
When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.
My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.
“Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.
“You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.
But she just shook her head.
P HIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE of yellow paper—
Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.
He hands the piece of paper to me.
“My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”
I follow him, holding my square of yellow.
Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.
That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.
But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.
I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.
I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”
But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the
And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.
And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.
Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.
Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.
When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.
My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.
“Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.
“You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.
But she just shook her head.
P HIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE of yellow paper—
Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.
He hands the piece of paper to me.
“My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”
I follow him, holding my square of yellow.
Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.
That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.
But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.
I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.
I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”
But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the
Similar Books
