Back then, on that Saturday night in X-ville, the whiskey dwindled fast. My father was asleep and I was on my way down to the basement toilet, burping up the liquor churning in my stomach and about to explode out the other end from the laxatives. I was drunk, tripped and would have killed myself on the steps had I not been gripping the splintery banister like it was the handrail of a sinking ship. I’d tripped and fallen down those stairs once before, when I was a child running from my mother who was chasing me with a wooden spoon and screaming, “Clean your room!” or something like that. I split my lip and bumped my head on the way down, scraped my hands and knees when I hit the hard dirt floor. I recall looking up at the yellow rectangle of light in the kitchen from the foot of the stairs, my mother’s silhouette appearing like a paper cutout. She said nothing to me. She simply shut the door. How many hours did I spend down there, hurt and terrified? It was dark and full of dust and cobwebs and a dank, moist smell, gray steel tools, the boiler, an old-fashioned toilet with a yank hanging from the ceiling that smelled of old urine. Mice. I got over my childhood fear of the dark that day, I suppose. Nothing came at me — no angry spirits attacked me, no restless ghosts tried to suck out my soul. They left me alone down there, which was just as painful.
By midnight I was back on that cold cellar floor, panting with the effort that my body had exerted in emptying my innards, thanks to the laxatives. The toilet tank ran hard. Part of me, I remember, wished one of my father’s dark angels would materialize from the musty shadows and yank me down into its underworld. Alas, no one came. The darkness spun and spun and then it stopped, and so I floated up the cellar stairs and through the cold kitchen and up to my attic and fell asleep, exhausted, pacified, and utterly miserable.
SUNDAY
That Sunday morning I woke up hungover on my cot in the attic, my father calling up to me to help him get ready for morning Mass. That meant buttoning his shirt, and holding the bottle to his lips because his hands were too shaky. I wasn’t very well myself, of course, vision still blurred from the whiskey, my body a limp rag wrung hard by the laxatives the night before.
“I’m cold,” my father said, shivering. He tugged at his unshaved jaw and winced, looked at me as if to say, “Get the razor.” And I did. I lathered up the cream and shaved him right there in the kitchen, standing over the sink full of dirty dishes, a salad bowl full of cigar ash, moldy bits of bread green as pennies here and there. It may not sound all that bad to you, but it was pretty grim living there. My father’s moods and explosions were exhausting. He was so often upset. And I was always afraid of displeasing him by accident, or else I was so angry that I would try to displease him deliberately. We played games like an old married couple, and he was always winning. “You smell like hell,” he said to me that morning as I curved the razor around his jaw.
So of course I felt like killing him sometimes. I could have slit his throat that morning. But I said nothing: I didn’t want him to know how much he displeased me. It was important to me that he not know he had the power to make me miserable. It was also important not to let on just how much I wanted to get away from him. The more I thought about leaving him, the more I worried he might chase after me. I figured he could rustle up his friends in the police department, call a statewide search for the car, plaster my face in “Wanted” posters up and down the eastern seaboard. But that was all just fantasy, really. I knew he’d forget all about me when I was gone. And it seems he did. Back then I reasoned that if I were to leave, someone would step up to take care of him. His sister could hire help. Joanie could make an effort for once. Not everything was my responsibility, I told myself. He’d be fine without me. What was the worst that could happen?
When my aunt arrived to pick him up that day, she beeped and we bustled out. Her name was Ruth. She was my father’s only sibling. My father waited on the porch — oh, for one of those icicles to break off and lodge in his brain — while I walked around to the driveway, unlocked the trunk of the car and pulled out a pair of his shoes.
“Not those,” he hollered. “Those have a hole.”
I pulled out another and held them up.
“OK,” he said. My aunt barely looked up at me, pinched face squinting from the glare on the snow. I waved as I passed her car. She did not wave back. On the porch I tied my father’s laces and sent him on his way.
What a good girl I was, in hindsight, buttoning my father’s shirt and tying his shoes and all. I knew in my heart that I was good, I suppose. Here was the crux of my dilemma: I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die. I think he understood. I’d probably told him as much the night before, despite my instinct toward secrecy. We’d stay up and drink together often, just my father and I. I have a vague memory from that Saturday night of laying my face down on the kitchen table and yawning, looking up at him with the bottle of whiskey in his one hand, gin in the other. “Not very nice, Eileen,” he’d said, referring, I think, to my splayed legs, lipstick all smeared. This wasn’t unusual for us. We weren’t friendly, but we did talk sometimes. We argued. I’d wave my hands around. I’d say too much. I did the same thing later on in life, when I drank with other men, mostly stupid men. I expected them to find everything about me interesting. I expected them to see my drunken wordiness as a kind of coy gesture, as though I were saying, “I’m just a child, innocent to my own foolishness. Aren’t I cute? Love me and I’ll turn a blind eye to your faults.” With those other men, this tactic earned me brief sessions of affection until I became soured and saw that I had defiled myself by appealing to them in the first place. I failed and failed with my father to win his affection in this way, blabbering on about my ideas, regurgitating barely read synopses from the backs of books at the kitchen table, talking about how I felt about myself, life, the times in which we lived. I could get very dramatic after just a few drinks. “People act like everything’s OK all the time. But it isn’t. Nothing is OK at all. People die. Children starve. Poor people are freezing to death out there. It’s not fair. It isn’t right. Nobody seems to care. La-dee-dah, they say. Dad. Dad!” I’d slap the table to make sure he was listening. “We’re in hell, aren’t we? This is hell, isn’t it?” He’d just roll his eyes. It drove me mad.
Once he’d gone off to church that morning, I cooked myself scrambled eggs with ketchup and heated a beer on the stove, my hangover cure of choice. That doesn’t work, of course. Don’t bother trying it. But it did feel good to eat after having emptied my guts into the basement toilet the night before. I felt I had a blank slate, a clean beginning, though I don’t think I showered that morning. I hated showering, especially in winter since the hot water was spotty. I liked to languish in my own filth as long as I could tolerate it. Why I did this, I can’t say for sure. It certainly seems like a rather lame way to rebel, and furthermore it filled me with constant anxiety that others were sniffing my body and judging me by its odor: disgusting. My father said it himself: I smelled like hell. I dressed myself in my mother’s old Sunday clothes — gray trousers, black sweater, hooded woolen parka. I put on my snow boots and drove to the library. I’d just finished looking through a brief history of Suriname and a book on how to tell the future from looking at the stars. The former had great pictures of nearly naked men and old topless women. I recall one photograph of a monkey suckling a woman’s nipple, but perhaps I’m inventing. I liked twisted things like that. My curiosity for the stars is obvious: I wanted something to tell me my future was bright. I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library — something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.