My father had hobbies. He took a loan out five years ago and bought a sixty-thousand dollar camera to film movies and commercials for local businesses. He would go to a car lot and film a car lot owner wearing a cowboy hat or go to a lawyer’s office and film a lawyer talk about disability insurance. Sometimes he would get to be on a movie crew. He especially enjoyed filming horror movies. The man loved horror movies and movies in general. Ever since I was little, whenever we watched a movie, he would tell me about the camera angles and the lighting. He would obsess over movies with bad camera angles and never stop talking about movies with good angles. My mother ran short marathons, not like twenty-eight mile marathons, but little five mile races for charity. She had won several events in her age class. She had a little shrine to the races she had won in the living room.
Sometimes I would think about their marriage. They had been married for twenty-eight years. They had my sister in their second year married and me in their fifth year. Then they stayed married while half their friends and family members got divorced. They stayed married and committed. Some years it seemed like they loved each other and some years I don’t remember them even speaking to each other, but time passed and they would love again. There was a year when my mother got terribly depressed and wouldn’t leave the house, but my dad said nothing, then one day my mom went to a counselor and she started exercising and doing marathons. About five years ago my dad had a small thing of cancer on the back of his neck, but they were able to fix it. I remember my mother crying a lot then. When my sister and I were little, we would take family vacations to Disney World and the Colorado Rockies, but when my sister and I hit our teens, family vacations ended. My father would go to a national park out west and take pictures and my mother would go to Spain, England or France for five days with her friend Donna. My mother loved Europe and couldn’t get enough of it. She would sit and read books on European castles and their kings and queens. My father cared nothing for Europe. He didn’t like cities or even the suburbs, but he knew he had to live there to have a job and maintain his family. Their marriage was full of compromises. I never knew when these decisions were made about vacations or about my mother’s depression. I always assumed they took place at night when they were alone in bed, hiding away from their children. They never discussed their life plans with me. I had to discuss my life plans with them, but they were not obligated to discuss them with me.
When I came in my mother was wiping down the kitchen counters and she said, “Mike, you have a job. Give me a hug.”
I gave my mother a hug. I felt nothing. I don’t know why I felt nothing. We were never close, I don’t think we ever had one real conversation our whole lives. We had lived together for eighteen years and I had known her for twenty-three years. The conversation was always the same. She would ask me about my life, she would tell me positive things, and she would tell me about the accomplishments of my relatives and kids from the suburban housing development. We never discussed movies or how we felt about politics. The conversation was always determined by her and what she thought was important to talk about.
She said, “This is so exciting, your first grownup job!”
I looked at the kitchen table, where there sat a pizza box and a cake with the words ‘Grownup Job’ in frosting.
Then she started, “Is grandpa all right? Are you taking care of him?”
“Yes.”
“Are you washing the dishes on time?”
“Yes.”
“Are you taking the garbage out every week?”
“Yes.”
“But you aren’t treating him like a child, right?”
“No, I’m not treating him like a child.”
“But you can’t let him just do things. He is old and needs to be taken care of,” said my mother.
“Yes, I know.”
“What temperature do you have the house at?”
“I have it set for sixty-eight.”
“Oh no, you need it to be at seventy. Your grandfather will be cold.”
“It seems pretty warm in there,” I said.
“No, that isn’t warm enough.”
“I think I know when something is warm.”
“Are you eating right?”
“Yes, I have been eating a lot of salads and spinach.”
“Spinach? You eat spinach now?”
“Yes Mom, I eat spinach now.”
“You never ate spinach when you were little.”
“I’m trying to eat healthier. I even started taking a flaxseed supplement.”
“What the hell is flaxseed? Why don’t you take a multivitamin?”
“Because multivitamins don’t contain flaxseed,” I said.
“How much are they are paying you?”
“$11.30.”
“How are you going to get married and start a family with that?”
“I put out like forty applications. They were the only place hiring.”
“Did you try your cousin Tony? He’s got a political science degree and does the government contracts for constructions companies. Did you try him?”
“Yes, Tony said they aren’t hiring.”
“I thought you wanted to become a political consultant. Did you try the local consulting companies?”
“Yes, they aren’t hiring either.”
“What about the local non-profits, are they hiring?”
“I called all of them and none of them are hiring a political science major. They want like geologists and chemists.”
“Oh, why didn’t you just become a nurse like your sister? She makes twenty-four dollars an hour and put a down payment on a house, and did you hear about your cousin Carrie? She has an accounting degree and just got a big time job making fifty-thousand a year to start. Oh, why did you choose political science?”
“I don’t know. I get the best grades in it. Shouldn’t you do what you get the best grades in?”
“No, you should do what makes money. I became a second grade school teacher because that was a good job for a woman back then and I was able to pass the classes. With that job I was able to raise two children and pay off a home.”
Then my father came in the room. I looked at him. I could see my nose on his face, my forehead and my mouth, all on his face. I couldn’t look into the mirror without seeing that man staring at me.
Like a good Italian he walked over to the pizza, picked out a corner piece and started eating, and said, “Michael.”
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I said, “Yes.”
“You really want to do this job, I mean I’ve never heard you mention wanting to work in corrections before. You are really nice, a bit too nice in my opinion. I don’t think we raised you to be a person who yells at prisoners all day. I remember that one time we were in the city you saw that homeless black woman standing in the snow with those open-toed shoes on. You made me stop the car, then you took your sister’s gym shoes from the backseat and gave them to her. And how you went to all those volunteer events in college helping poor people get food and Christmas presents. You’re really friendly. This isn’t really a job for friendly people.”
I sat there wanting to leave and said, “I don’t know what else to do. They were the only people that wanted to hire me. And like, the job is helping people. They told me in the interview that it was a treatment center, not a jail.”
My father said in a firm voice, “Sounds like a jail to me. They are locked in there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well that’s a jail, not a treatment center. They might be giving them treatment, but it is inside a jail.”