Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

~

I have never wanted to hang myself, or slit my wrists, if that’s what you are thinking. There are certain ways of talking — sometimes I am capable of this — where everyone shuts up and listens. I don’t know why they do this.

6

I ALWAYS paint my dad as a boor. I always tell people, “My dad says he saw you at the mall today. He thinks you dress funny.”

People never take anything I say seriously. People say, “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t mean a thing he says.” This always surprises me. The fact is, I mean everything I say.

~

My sister used to stay in her room. She would take a piece of toast in there and she would eat her toast and read until Mom came and got her to take her to school. This was nineteen years ago.

~

We were on holiday at a campground and we were having a pretty bad day, so we all went over to the camp store to buy some chocolate bars. At one point we bought some chips. Tutti said they were the lousiest chips she ever ate, and she wished she had gone ahead and spent the big bucks and got a decent brand of chips. How the chips tasted to me was, it was as though someone had taken regular chips and decided at the last minute to sprinkle them with sour cream and onion flavoring, but then they ran out of sour cream and onion flavoring and said, Oh well. Tutti said she thought they would have at least been rippled.

~

I wrote what I thought I could understand. Like the tunnel your foot makes when it drops through the air.

7

I’D LIKE to put my fingers into his beard and believe that that is all there is. His beard, with its silver streaked deep toward the skin. I’d like to believe it never makes it deeper than the skin.

~

I eat chocolate from a bag of chocolates Tutti and I bought and put on the couch beside me when I was sitting on the couch, trying to read my magazines. I have five magazines. Each magazine has an article on a certain subject, and I read them as the wind blows outside, and the waves crash on the beach. Some of the magazines have pictures. One of the pictures is a picture of a sunset over a lake.

~

The only one who has died so far in my life is my cat, Foufou. After she died, we put her in a Xerox box and drove up to my mom’s place in the country. We dug a hole. When Tutti wanted to put a cross on the grave, I took one of the shoelaces out of my work boots and used it to lash two sticks together. Then we threw dirt on the Xerox box and Tutti and I started to cry.

~

They have a waterfall here, with a wooden walkway going out over the water, so you can get a better look at the waterfall, but without causing the kind of erosion thousands of tourists a year tend to cause. Right after we looked at the waterfall, we went over to the store to get the chocolate bars.

~

Things ground into the carpet here include cigarette butts, just plain dirt, oil, wood chips, dead bugs, urine maybe, beer, possibly semen.

~

Dad meditates. He has been meditating for some time now. He says it brings him peace of mind. Lately he has been saying it also stops crime.

~

I may be wrong, but back then, at the time I was sixteen, I think maybe there was talk going on, talk amongst members of my family, and this talk made me think I was somehow central to something, but right now, looking back, I can’t think what.

~

Sometimes I will go out to the porch and just stand there wearing her sweater. I smell Eau de Lauren. I see dogs.

~

I felt there had to be somebody else. There had to be another person, some other person, in some capacity, perhaps at the bank, someone in some position of authority, who was going to be looking at Mom’s checkbook, and Mom was keeping this person in mind whenever she went to fill in that section of her checkbook where she kept track of the things she was spending money on.

What I think is, I think the way she wrote in that section of her checkbook, I think this handwriting of hers had something to do with the divorce. I am not saying I think Mom’s handwriting caused her to have a divorce, or her having a divorce caused her to write things down that way in that section of her checkbook. I am not saying that.

What I am saying is, I am saying I was six years old. I thought there might be somebody else.

~

People really don’t have any point to their life, I thought. I saw some other people who seemed to have no point. Everyone was walking along slowly, not looking for anything to happen. Nothing will happen, they seemed to be saying. But then I saw a young fellow, in a trench coat, which hung open around the suit he was wearing. The fellow had black hair. He was smiling, laughing, talking to some girls.

I see, I thought. That fellow has some point. He wants to talk to those girls. The girls were laughing and the fellow grew more and more animated. Then I went down into the subway.

~

I was driving. Just out for a drive one day. Driving along some road or another, stopping at stop signs without really noticing houses along the way, or vacant lots, or parks, or dogs. I turned a corner and looked in the rearview mirror and saw a woman I had never seen.

~

I might stand out here all night, and people will drive by, laughing at me, saying to each other, “Is that guy waiting for the local bus?”

8

HIS HAIR was caught in the wind. The wind was making his hair into things his hair had never been. He thought he would just lean his head against the seat in front of him for a moment. He was riding the bus and the window was open and things were happening to his hair. He thought if he could just lean forward for a moment and put his head against the seat in front of him everything would be okay. Everything he had accomplished was coming out through his skin, as though his skin were stitched together loosely and everything was coming out.

~

Dad kept coming back down the gravel driveway in his boots. He came back like something big. When Mom moved us kids and herself into another place, Dad came back one more time. He stood at the end of the driveway of our new place with the snow getting on his shoulders. First just his shoulders. Then his hair. I was thinking, He won’t come in. He won’t come in because he is too big. That man is too big for our new house.

~

Some of us used to go there when we were teenagers. Most of the time we went to this other place, but sometimes we went there. And there was this other place downtown. They were always having this guy named Lorne Lofsky, who played the guitar. The place was called Somebody’s Spaghetti House. I can’t remember whose. You didn’t have to eat spaghetti.

~

The young lad with the red tie says, “I would rather not be here.”

The old man in the bowler cap says, “You’re here, aren’t you.”

~

I remember coming down Tunnel Mountain, hearing the girls’ laughter. And then later, being in a shop with them in Banff, hearing them talk about their life at home. I wanted to run.

~

It makes you think they have had their mouths in places their mouths should not have been. They are so busy trying to keep their lips down over their teeth and, at the same time, they are wanting to go ahead and smile. It makes you think there is something in there, in their mouth, that they do not want you to see.