A night of heavy drinking would kill me now. I don’t know how I managed it back then, though I’m sure my shame and embarrassment were far worse than the hangover. I shook off my fractured recollections and tried to gain access to the house. The cellar door was locked, of course. I considered busting through a back window with the heel of my boot, but I didn’t think I could reach up high enough to get my arm through and undo the lock on the inside of the back door. I pictured severing my arm on the broken glass, blood spewing across the snow. Surely my father wouldn’t stay mad at me if I was bleeding to death in the backyard. The image of blood-stained snow turned my stomach and I bent down to retch but all that came up was yellow bile. My head throbbed remembering the frozen pile of vomit waiting for me in the car. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my dress.
When I went back around the front of the house and rang the bell again, I saw that my father was missing from the chair. He was hiding from me. “Dad?” I called out. “Dad!” I couldn’t raise my voice too high or the neighbors would hear. And given that the day was starting, mothers sending their kids off to school, men leaving in their cars for work, they would soon see the old Dodge smushed into the bank of snow. The car was fine, but clearly the person who’d parked it was out of her mind.
Already we, the Dunlops, were regarded as something of a case in the neighborhood. Even my father’s reputation as a cop — an upstanding citizen, a man of service to his country — couldn’t make up for the fact that in recent years our lawn was never mowed, our hedges never trimmed. A neighbor would do that once or twice a summer, to keep up appearances, I’m sure, but it was passed off as a gesture of appreciation for the old man’s good work and sympathy for me, the skinny girl with no mother and little hope for a husband. We were the only house on the block without Christmas lights strung in our bushes, no fancy tree twinkling through the living room windows, no wreath on the door. I’d buy treats for Halloween, but no kids ever rang our doorbell. I ended up eating all the candy myself, chewing it up and spitting it all out in the attic. I didn’t like any of our neighbors any more than my father did — not the Lutherans, none of them, no matter their gifts or favors. They were goody-goodies, I thought, and I felt they judged me for being young and sloppy, and for driving a car that filled the whole block with smoke when I started it. But I didn’t want to earn any more of their scorn. I didn’t want to give anyone more fodder for gossip. I had to get the car into the driveway before it aroused suspicion. This was my thinking. And I had to clean the seat full of vomit before my father saw it.
But, of course, he’d seen it already. I suppose he’d been waiting up for me the night before and came out and yanked the keys out of the ignition after I’d passed out. It occurred to me all at once: He kept me from carbon monoxide poisoning that night. He may have saved my life. Who knows whether the engine had been running when he came out and yanked out the keys. It’s possible. The windows were up when I came to. Perhaps he simply wanted his shoes from the trunk, and that’s why he took the keys. Still, I like to think that somehow his instincts as a father — his desire to protect me, to keep me alive — kicked in that night, overrode his madness, his selfishness. I prefer to tell myself that story than to believe in luck or coincidences. That line of magical thinking always leads to too fine an edge. In any case, I was grateful to be alive, which was nice. At first I was all the more frightened at what my father would have to say, what he might want in return for saving my life. But then I thought of Rebecca. With her around, I didn’t need to beg for my father’s mercy. He could yell and cry, but he couldn’t hurt me. I was loved after all, I thought.
Again I tried to knock on the front door, but my father still ignored me. I climbed over the wrought-iron handrail that went up the brick steps and jumped down behind the front bushes and looked through the living room windows. They hadn’t been washed in years. I rubbed a spot through the frost, but there was still a thick layer of dust on the inside. I could barely see in. I caught then a weird vision of my father — pale, naked from the waist up, thin and frail but full of tension, jolting slowly past the living room windows with a bottle in his hand. He seemed to have grown small breasts. And when he turned, I thought I saw long purple bruises up and down his back. How he stayed alive for as long as he did is sheer proof of his stubbornness. I pounded my fist on the thick glass, but he just waved his hand and kept on walking. I ended up sneaking in through a dirty living room window. It was, strangely, unlocked.
I was an adult, I knew that. I had no curfew. There were no official house rules. There were only my father’s arbitrary rages, and once he was in one he would only relax if I agreed to whatever odd, humiliating punishment he came up with. He’d bar me from the kitchen, order me to walk to Lardner’s and back in the rain. The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties. Evidence of a will of my own was seen as the ultimate betrayal. I was his nurse, his aide, his concierge. All he really required, however, was gin. The house was rarely dry — as I’ve said, I was a good girl — but somehow everything I did, my very existence, rubbed him the wrong way. Even my National Geographic magazines gave him cause to bewail my unruliness. “Communist,” he’d call me, flicking at the pages. I knew he was furious that morning. But I wasn’t scared. I stood on the carpet in the foyer, snow sliding off my boots. “Hey,” I called out to him. “Have you seen the keys?”
He emerged from the closet with a golf club, thudded up the steps, and sat on the upstairs landing. When he was truly enraged, he got quiet — the calm before the storm. I knew he would never try to kill me. He wasn’t really capable of that. But he seemed sober that morning, and when he was sober, he was especially mean. I don’t recall exactly what we said to each other while he sat up there, tapping the golf club along the rungs of the banister, but I remember I held my hands over my face, in case he threw the golf club down.
“Dad,” I asked again, “can I have the keys?”
He picked up a book from where they were piled along the hallway walls and threw it down at me. Then he went into my mother’s bedroom and took a pillow off the bed and threw that down, too.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, setting himself on the top step again. He rapped the golf club against the rungs of the banister like a prison guard with a baton against iron bars. “You’re not going anywhere till you read that book. From cover to cover,” he said. “I want to hear every word.” It was a copy of Oliver Twist. I picked it up, turned to the opening page, cleared my throat, but stopped there. A week earlier I would have acquiesced and read a few pages until he got thirsty. That day, though, I just put the book down. I recall looking up at him, still shielding my face with my hands. Through my fingers, to my regret, I caught sight of his gray scrotum peeking out one side of his billowy, yellowed shorts.