My father stood by the car. I wanted it to be him who was leaving.
5
I lay on the bed listening to the curtains flap. The fishbowl sat on the desk. The fish circled in the fishbowl.
6
My father had a crippled arm. It was crippled in a car wreck the summer after he graduated high school. A friend of his rammed an SS Camaro through a construction barricade at eighty mph then continued at a slightly slower speed into the blade of a bulldozer. Nobody died. They were blotto drunk and that saved them. All were pulled bendable from the wreckage once the authorities arrived, lacerated and vomiting, but nearly pristine; still surly, the story goes, cussing out the cops for hassling them. My father’s arm was the only casualty — made useless when the Camaro’s motor was birthed through the firewall and pinned that side of him against the passenger door.
When I came downstairs — after the cousins left, after my mom was dropped off at the airfield, after Grandpa Amos left in the evening — I found my father on the couch. The TV was on, he was sleeping.
His crippled arm was bent under and behind him. Numb and limp, the hand grabbed at nothing. He was dreaming. His eyelids fluttered.
7
That summer he did handyman work. Laying wood floors mostly, which he managed one-armed. He took me with him every day after my mom left for the desert. He was supposed to drop me off at daycare but he didn’t.
It was embarrassing at the daycare. I was too old to be there, even if it was summer break.
We rolled up to a blacktop driveway in his truck, some place in town, in Indianola, the front of a house painted in Crayola colors, an area to the side fenced in with chain-link where there were plastic slides, a sandbox, a basketball hoop with a metal net. Moms were dropping their kids off for the day. We sat in the truck and watched. Hugs and kisses. Moms with wet hair, in beige slacks. Moms in blouses and jackets on their way to work in Des Moines.
“I don’t want to go,” I told him.
He wouldn’t get out of the truck and make me go inside. I knew he wouldn’t.
He turned the engine over, cranked the column shifter into gear, and we left.
8
He had all the work he wanted in Urbandale and Merle Hay. Word of mouth spread across subdivision lines from woman to woman. Even with the one arm that didn’t unbend he could still hold things in that hand, in a painful, shaky grip, if he angled his body to that side, or used scrap pieces to trap boards plumb against the chopsaw back. The women always wondered how he didn’t lose a finger like that.
Sometimes he had me hold the board, even though my mom had told me to keep away from the saw. More often than not it was easier for my dad to hold the board himself.
I got him tools when asked. Hammer, shim, awl, punch, putty knife, belt sander. I carried him scraps of lumber. He yelled if I banged anything on the door molding (which is why he got full boards himself) or if I dropped something on the carpet, if it was new carpet.
He and my mom had renovated the house we lived in. It was the old house from the farm he grew up on.
I never knew my grandparents on his side. They died before I was born. The farmland partitioned off. The house had been unoccupied for some time when my parents came to fix it up. They met in Des Moines, where she went to nursing school. They tore out carpet and ripped down grease-saturated wallpaper, sanded the floors and crippled in new boards to replace the rotted ones. They scared rodents out of the attic, shot raccoons with a pellet gun. I sat to the side watching them stain the woodwork, or paste long strips of new wallpaper. I remember these things from the photos they took. It must have meant a lot to my father to keep his family in the farmhouse. To do all this even with a lame arm.
“What did grandpa die from?” I asked.
“There was a drunk driver.” He winced, saying that. “It was him, you know. My dad. He’d been drinking and rolled the car. He and mom flew out and nobody could save them.”
9
It was okay with him if I sat out of the way and banged on matchbox cars with the hammer. The carpet fiber was cool to my skin when I laid my face to it, in those houses where women ran the air conditioning all day.
These were stay-at-home women. A few divorced. They were always hanging around. Checking out the work. Complimenting my father on something technical or another they didn’t know the right word for. They made lunch so we wouldn’t have to leave for McDonald’s. Meatloaf, roast beef, chicken casserole. Not just sandwiches — food that made it hard to finish the work in an afternoon. Sometimes they baked cookies or jelly-filled kolache, and hovered behind as we ate.
10
I never thought of my father as good-looking. His arm.
My mom was good-looking. She was different from everybody. Part Cleveland Jew, part Chicago Chicana. A Brasilian diplomat mixed in somewhere along the way, the relatives all swore, who took a bullet during a Chilean coup, and that’s why he never returned from what was sworn to be a legitimate envoy to the Andes.
My father’s line was mostly Germanic. It was linear. Comfortably Midwestern. Middle American, Central Iowan. His name? Ben Schmidt. He wore overalls when he worked and jeans when company came over. Sometimes he pronounced overalls overhauls to be funny, to make my mom and me smile, mocking the way the old-timers around there talked. But I think now he liked talking that way and wasn’t always joking. It must have warmed him inside to say Missour-uh and Ioway and Neebrasskee.
11
My father was tall. He had light hair, a square jaw, a patchy beard that grew up his cheeks. The women he worked for didn’t mind his lame arm. They seemed all the more interested once they heard the story of how he’d been hurt, the car accident, the drunk friend. “Hell. We were all drunk,” he’d admit to a woman he was working for. She’d stare at his lame arm when he wasn’t looking her direction, a woman would. She’d let her fingertips glance over the unmoving surface of his skin when he was done for the day, to see if he’d notice her touching him. Sweat and sawdust collected in the fine whitish hair of his forearms. Women tried to brush the sawdust away.
These strange women of the suburbs.
12
We were three weeks in the house of Trish Schumacher that July, out in Jordan Creek, where she lived by the mall, by a golf course and the cul-de-sac of a megachurch built up like a philistine temple in stucco.
Trish and her husband were loaded. Mr. Schumacher was a lawyer, or a minister, I don’t remember. Trish was in real estate. They had a big new house. Big new cars with lots of chrome and showroom shine. Escalades.
Trish thought the finish work in the bathrooms was botched during the construction of her new house, so that’s why she called my father. “I heard about this Ben Schmidt from my girlfriends,” she said, “and I had to have him.”
13
Trish liked to check on the work. She liked to appraise and laud, to ask dumb questions, to tell about some house she sold that year and its countertops.
Trish talked to me too. I was an easy target for women. My dark complexion, my near-white blond hair. Trish thought I was adopted the first day — she didn’t know what my mom was like. I was scrawny. Like my dad, I wouldn’t start really growing until high school.
14
When we were alone Trish asked me things. How I liked school. If I liked living on a farm. “Are there any kids out where you live? Some neighbor girl?” I shook my head. “I had two brothers and two sisters. A big family, me in the middle. Not too old, not too young,” she laughed. “I think it’s sad for an only child. Don’t you think so? To not have anyone to play with.”
She was just talking. I didn’t even look at her. I sat cross-legged in the dry bathtub bottom, rolled matchbox cars until they were in a row.