baseball card, a bag of marbles—that whispers to him from a lifetime before us. At one point, my father’s mother moved back into the house for the penultimate stage of her Alzheimer’s, and the former matriarch now wandered the half-renovated rooms like a quiet, baffled toddler. Here was the same backyard and the birch tree that my father and his father planted together. Here were the slate front steps, the blackened shingles, the meadow. Here we were, life circling around once more.
ONE DAY, AS I was lying in my father’s backyard, I pulled a four-leaf clover out of the ground. I was stunned. I hadn’t been looking for a four-leaf clover—or anything else, for that matter. It just seemed to find my fingers as they absently stroked the thick, glossy lawn. When I realized what it was, I ran to show Zeke, who was up on a ladder denuding his blighted birch. At first he didn’t believe me and continued stripping branches. I was nearly five years old, wont to see the world as a magical place. I hounded him until he finally stopped to look.
“Well, for crying out loud,” he said, taking the clover in his hand. “You really did.”
We went inside to show my stepmother, who was standing at the cluttered kitchen counter. She was always overwhelmed by something—groceries to put away, dishes to wash, dinner to cook.
“Isn’t that nice,” she said without looking.
I placed the four-leaf clover on a scrap of paper, which my father dated, and we sealed it between two squares of plastic wrap. Then we had to find somewhere safe to keep it.
“We need a book,” my father said.
Besides my stepmother’s cookbooks, there were only two books in the house at that time, the Audubon Society’s
Birds of America
and a tattered Bible crammed on a basement shelf underneath a shoebox full of loose change. My father and I both agreed that the bird book, which was big and had a hard cover, would work best. We tucked the clover among a spread of blue jays perched on flowering branches that vanished into the margins.
Zeke and I returned to the backyard. He continued chopping down his tree. I peeled swatches of moss off a stone and arranged them into the map of an imaginary world full of countries I named after girls: Victoria, Cassandra, and the Islands of Zoë.
And again without trying, I found another four-leaf clover. I ran to show my father. He wrinkled his forehead in disbelief and perhaps a tinge of envy. He’d already taken one break that afternoon. He wasn’t going to interrupt his work again.
“Go ask Carla to help you,” he said.
Carla was in her early thirties then, and still a very pretty woman. She and my father had recently returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, and she was a quarter-moon pregnant with my younger brother. I went inside and found her standing before her Sisyphean mountain of housework. When I showed her the four-leaf clover this time, she twisted around and glared at me. Spite crackled in the air between us.
“Another one?” she cried.
——
CARLA INTRODUCES HERSELF TO my friends as “the Wicked Stepmother.” She laughs from the belly whenever she says it. I do, too. I love everything about her self-appointed nickname. First, the use of the definite article: Carla does not see herself as
a
wicked stepmother but
the
Wicked Stepmother, a singular character of importance, even if it is an antagonist’s role. Second, the allusion to a fairy tale is as funny as it is true. I have an undeniable Cinderella complex. When I get into a martyr’s frenzy of vacuuming, no one is better than my Wicked Stepmother at putting me back in my place. “Nik, you’re a legend in your own mind” is her chosen refrain.
But the best of all this wicked-stepmother business is:
she said it, not me
.
Because there have been moments of wickedness. Oh, yes. Vicious, primal battles, icy competitions so subtle and silent that they seemed to be fought on a molecular level, and then some scenes so transparently
ONE DAY, AS I was lying in my father’s backyard, I pulled a four-leaf clover out of the ground. I was stunned. I hadn’t been looking for a four-leaf clover—or anything else, for that matter. It just seemed to find my fingers as they absently stroked the thick, glossy lawn. When I realized what it was, I ran to show Zeke, who was up on a ladder denuding his blighted birch. At first he didn’t believe me and continued stripping branches. I was nearly five years old, wont to see the world as a magical place. I hounded him until he finally stopped to look.
“Well, for crying out loud,” he said, taking the clover in his hand. “You really did.”
We went inside to show my stepmother, who was standing at the cluttered kitchen counter. She was always overwhelmed by something—groceries to put away, dishes to wash, dinner to cook.
“Isn’t that nice,” she said without looking.
I placed the four-leaf clover on a scrap of paper, which my father dated, and we sealed it between two squares of plastic wrap. Then we had to find somewhere safe to keep it.
“We need a book,” my father said.
Besides my stepmother’s cookbooks, there were only two books in the house at that time, the Audubon Society’s
Birds of America
and a tattered Bible crammed on a basement shelf underneath a shoebox full of loose change. My father and I both agreed that the bird book, which was big and had a hard cover, would work best. We tucked the clover among a spread of blue jays perched on flowering branches that vanished into the margins.
Zeke and I returned to the backyard. He continued chopping down his tree. I peeled swatches of moss off a stone and arranged them into the map of an imaginary world full of countries I named after girls: Victoria, Cassandra, and the Islands of Zoë.
And again without trying, I found another four-leaf clover. I ran to show my father. He wrinkled his forehead in disbelief and perhaps a tinge of envy. He’d already taken one break that afternoon. He wasn’t going to interrupt his work again.
“Go ask Carla to help you,” he said.
Carla was in her early thirties then, and still a very pretty woman. She and my father had recently returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, and she was a quarter-moon pregnant with my younger brother. I went inside and found her standing before her Sisyphean mountain of housework. When I showed her the four-leaf clover this time, she twisted around and glared at me. Spite crackled in the air between us.
“Another one?” she cried.
——
CARLA INTRODUCES HERSELF TO my friends as “the Wicked Stepmother.” She laughs from the belly whenever she says it. I do, too. I love everything about her self-appointed nickname. First, the use of the definite article: Carla does not see herself as
a
wicked stepmother but
the
Wicked Stepmother, a singular character of importance, even if it is an antagonist’s role. Second, the allusion to a fairy tale is as funny as it is true. I have an undeniable Cinderella complex. When I get into a martyr’s frenzy of vacuuming, no one is better than my Wicked Stepmother at putting me back in my place. “Nik, you’re a legend in your own mind” is her chosen refrain.
But the best of all this wicked-stepmother business is:
she said it, not me
.
Because there have been moments of wickedness. Oh, yes. Vicious, primal battles, icy competitions so subtle and silent that they seemed to be fought on a molecular level, and then some scenes so transparently
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