At home I gulped water from the tap and swallowed a handful of laxatives which I kept below the kitchen sink. Then I sat down and drank a beer. My father raised his hand, saluting me gravely, mocking my mood.
“Cops brought whiskey,” he said, pointing to a bottle of Glenfiddich with a bow tied around its neck. It sat by the door to the cellar stairs. “How was the movie?”
He seemed calm, in a better mood. Gone was the cutting fury of earlier. He seemed to want to talk.
“It was dumb,” I answered honestly. “Should I open it?” I went and picked up the whiskey.
“By any means necessary,” my father said. I didn’t always hate him. Like all villains, he had his good side, too. Most days he didn’t mind that the house was a mess. He hated the neighbors, as I did, and he would rather have been shot in the head than admit defeat. He made me laugh now and then, like when he’d attempt to read the papers, bristling with contempt at any headline he managed to decipher, one eye shut tight, finger shaking at the words, drunk as he was. He still ranted about the Reds. He loved Goldwater and despised the Kennedys, though he made me swear I’d keep that a secret. He was a hard-liner about certain duties. He had a stern attachment to things like paying the bills on time, for example. He’d sober up once a month for that task and I’d sit next to him, opening the envelopes, licking the stamps, making out the checks for him to sign. “That’s terrible, Eileen,” he’d say. “Start again. No bank would accept a check written like that, like a little girl made it out.” Even on his dry days he could barely hold a pen.
That night I poured us each a few fingers of whiskey and pulled my chair up next to his, stuck my frozen hands toward the burning oven.
“Doris Day’s a fat hack,” I said.
“Waste of time going to the movies if you ask me,” he mumbled. “Anything good on the tube?”
“Some nice static, if you’re in the mood,” I said. The television had been broken a long time.
“Ought to have someone come take a look at it. Bulb’s broken. Must be the bulb.” We’d had the same exchange once a week for years.
“Everything’s a waste of time,” I said, collapsing a bit in my chair.
“Have a drink,” my father grumbled, sipping his. “Cops brought me good whiskey,” he said again. “That Dalton boy looks like some kind of weasel.” The Daltons lived across the street. He stopped, paused. “You hear that?” He put his hand out, perked his ears. “Hoodlums are rowdy tonight. What day is it?”
“Saturday,” I said.
“That’s why. Hungry as rats.” He finished his whiskey, absentmindedly fumbled through the folds of the blanket spread across his lap, pulled up a half-empty bottle of gin. “How was the movie? How’s my Joanie?” He was like that. His mind was not quite right.
“She’s fine, Dad.”
“Little Joanie,” he said wistfully, somberly. He rubbed his chin, raised his eyebrows. “The kids grow up,” he said. We stared into the hot oven like it was a crackling fireplace. I warmed my thawing fingers, poured myself more whiskey, pictured the moon and stars swirling as they would through the windshield if I’d sped off the side of that cliff and down onto the rocks earlier that evening, the glittering of broken glass over the frozen snow, the black ocean.
“Joanie,” my father repeated, reverently. Despite her whorish ways, my father adored my sister, pined for her, it seemed—“my dear, sweet Joanie”—spoke of her with such admiration and decency. “My good little girl.” Those last years in X-ville, I’d stay up in the attic most times she came to visit. I couldn’t stand to watch how he’d give her money, eyes filling with tears of pride and honor, and how they loved each other — if love was what that was — in a way I could never understand. She could do no wrong. Although she was older than me, Joanie was his baby, his angel, his heart.
As for me, no matter what I did, he was certain it was the wrong thing to do, and told me so. If I came down the stairs holding a book or a magazine, he said, “Why do you waste your time reading? Go for a walk outside. You’re pale as my ass.” And if I bought a stick of butter, he would hold it between his fingers and say, “I can’t eat a stick of butter for dinner, Eileen. Be reasonable. Be smart for once.” When I walked through the front door, his response was always, “You’re late,” or “You’re home early,” or “You’ve got to go out again, we’re in short supply.” Although I wished him dead, I did not want him to die. I wanted him to change, be good to me, apologize for the half decade of grief he’d given me. And also, it pained me to imagine the inevitable pomp and sentimentality of his funeral. The trembling chins and folded flag, all that nonsense.
Joanie and I were never really close growing up. She was always much more personable and happier than I was, and being around her made me feel stiff and awkward and ugly. At her birthday party one year, she teased me for being too shy to dance, forced me to stand and grabbed my hips in her hands, then squatted down by my nether regions and rotated my body side to side as though I were a puppet, a rag doll. Her friends laughed and danced and I sat back down. “You’re ugly when you pout, Eileen,” my dad had said, snapping a picture. Things like that happened all the time. She left home at seventeen and abandoned me for a better life with that boyfriend of hers.
I’m reminded of one Fourth of July when I must have been twelve, since Joanie is four years older and she’d just gotten her license to drive. We’d come home from an afternoon at the beach to find our parents hosting a barbecue in our backyard for the entire X-ville police department, a rare social event for the Dunlops. A rookie, whom I recognized from around town — his little sister had some sort of disability, I recall — was made to sit next to me at the picnic table, a situation that afforded my father a chance to joke to the boy that Joanie and I were “jailbait.” The meaning of this term eluded me until years later, but I never forgot him saying it, and I’m still resentful. I remember it irritated my thighs to sit on the raw pine board set up on two pails filled with rocks that served as a bench at this barbecue, and when I went inside to change out of my swimsuit, the boy followed me into the kitchen and tried to kiss me. I refused his advance by steering my head back and away from his, but he took me by the shoulders and spun me around, gripping my wrists behind my back. “You’re under arrest,” he joked, and reached his hand up my shorts and pinched me. I ran to the attic, where I stayed for the rest of the night. Nobody missed me. I know other young women have suffered far worse than this, and I myself went on to suffer plenty, but this experience in particular was utterly humiliating. A psychoanalyst may term it something like a formative trauma, but I know little about psychology and reject the science entirely. People in that profession, I’d say, should be watched very closely. If we were living several hundred years ago, my guess is they’d all be burned as witches.