In the morning sunshine my parents looked cleansed of their reinforcing farm dirt. They looked translucent and a little frailer than they had even in the fall, when the black potato muck beneath their nails and the mud on their shoes and clothing seemed to anchor them to the earth. Now they could — and might — ascend in a shaft of light, for all I knew. I scarcely recognized them, as if they were only slightly animate in their holographic shimmer. In the past their soil had warmed and defined them. Now they were like figurines made not even of glass but of translucent sugar. I felt hearty and fleshy and bloody by comparison, feeling the thick heated meat of myself even in my bathrobe. We were all in our bathrobes, which struck me as funny. Probably we would all get dressed before opening presents, bowls of Fiddle Faddle on the coffee table. The presents I was giving this year were merely three-by-five cards with drawings of the items I had intended to give but had had no time to get and so would get later. This was something of a traditional joke. This year I had drawn them all pictures of sports cars, a cruel spin on the tradition, since it meant I had given it very little thought and was probably getting them nothing. I even ran out of three-by-five cards and for my brother’s used a four-by-six, with a larger drawing of a larger car — and so a larger jokey lie. Arguably, it was better than that unfortunate year when I was twelve and too old for such a thing but had nonetheless wrapped a candy box jammed full of puppy poop from our dog, Blot, and given it to Robert, with a little tag that said MMMMMM … good. Merry Christmas from Blot. “Look what the dog-do did,” I said at the time, studying his reaction. Which remained one of quiet perplexity.
My mother was now smoking. “Should I make breakfast?” she asked again. My father, who’d been too tired to talk last night, said, “Yeah! Make breakfast! Robert and I want to sit Tassie down and make her tell us about college.”
“Yeah, right,” said Robert. He padded out of the kitchen. “I’m taking a shower,” he called back, claiming our one bathroom.
“Sooo …” My dad smiled at me. “How’s college?”
“Oh, OK,” I said inarticulately, but I figured all my dad really needed to hear was positive things in a tempered tone he could trust. My mother was heating up oil and had taken the cold bowl of latke mixture out and peeled the Saran Wrap off the top. I started to help her, molding handfuls into plump mounds, the oil and egg white slimy in my hands.
“Any boyfriends?” My father’s eyebrows went up and down, dismissively, mockingly, letting me know I need not answer. My mother gave him a look anyway. “Bo.” She said his name like that to warn him of trespass. She claimed to call him Robert in private, never liking his family nickname but needing within the house to distinquish between Robert junior and senior.
I liked my dad. Nothing he did ever bothered me, not even his recent drinking, which didn’t usually begin until late afternoon anyway. Still, my unblaming affection had not kept me from feeling the occasional shame of him. “Your father’s a farmer? What does he farm?” acquaintances back in Troy would sometimes ask. In Dellacrosse he was barely considered a farmer at all. “Nothing,” I would sometimes reply. “He farms nothing. Dadaist agriculture.”
“Oh, I get it,” an East Coast boy with a glass boot of beer might say, or a girl with narrow dark-framed glasses like the Nana Mouskouri of my mother’s old LPs.
I’m not sure where this small, slightly thrashing, not quite deforming shame had come from. Somehow I had learned it, perhaps even at Dellacrosse Central, where having a father-farmer should have been no shame at all, and wasn’t, despite my father’s miniature operation. People knew his produce was coveted. And among the kids the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade, our homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, “I would rather not say.” This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street — Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment — his, or her mother’s — and did not want to speak of how he earned his living.
Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.
“So your classes then,” said my father. “Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?”
“Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?” I asked brightly.
“That’s how he got his name,” said my father. “Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the Fine.”
“Bo! Sheesh.” My mother shook her head.
A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.
“It’s OK to sit while you help,” said my mother to me, “but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup them into thick shapes.”
I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.
“Next term?” he asked.
“I’ve registered for another literature survey — Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930—Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.” The Sufism did not throw him.
“Dating rocks?”
“I need to learn!” I said, laughing.
“Don’t let them kiss you,” he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious direction. I’d left out my PE requirement, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.
Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, “They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.”
“Wine tasting?” He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.
“I need a gut course, to make the others go better,” I said. “I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things were too intense.”
“But aren’t you underage?”
“Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course, so I guess they let you.”
“Will you make dean’s list again?” asked my mother.
“Possibly,” I said.
“Well, you have to be careful which dean,” said my father. “You don’t want to get on the wrong list!”
“Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.”
“You got a job?”
“You got a job?”
“Is there an echo in here?” I said.
“Well, tell us,” said my mother. “Don’t just sass us to death.”
“It hasn’t really begun. It’s a babysitting job. But there isn’t a baby yet.”
“Oh, yes, one of those,” said my father, amused.
“What do you mean, no baby yet?” asked my mother, who looked puzzled. My father was grinning ear to ear, as if to say, Now here’s a how-de-do.
“There will be one. Or should be. In January,” I explained.
“The mother’s pregnant?”
“Well, the birth mother is pregnant, and the woman I’m working for is going to adopt the kid.”
There was silence all around, even from my dad, as if this were a situation to be considered for all its various and deep sadnesses.