One time, Runa’s little boy was playing with an empty ashtray in the living room. Runa sat right by him reading the paper. Suddenly Dad shouted out and pointed to the boy:
“Take that away from him!”
Runa sprang to her feet.
“What?”
“He’s got an ashtray!” Dad shouted like some emergency was in progress.
Runa breathed a sigh and looked sadly at him.
“Can’t he play with it if he’s happy?”
Dad got all offended and acted thunderstruck. Then he looked at Runa like she was an imbecile who didn’t understand anything at all.
“He might chop off his hands!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dad. It isn’t dangerous. Stop behaving like this.”
Dad sighed, leaned back in his chair, and wore an annoyed expression.
“It’s not that the ashtray is worth anything,” he said, apologetically. “It’s just that it has sentimental value for your mother.”
The message to Runa was that she was at once hurting his feelings and slighting Mom. Then Mom called from within the kitchen:
“It’s got zero sentimental value for anyone. It’s a piece of junk I bought at Hagkaup for my fiftieth birthday.”
Then Dad got embarrassed, stopped being pissed, and began thinking about something else.
Sometimes Dad behaved like a small child who could never let others be. He was always interfering, jumping into conversations he’d not otherwise been following, and asking about things he didn’t get or in which he wasn’t interested. If he wasn’t involved, he would continually ask Mom about things that weren’t important in the moment. It was like he was somehow annoyed if Mom was happy or was telling a story and was always interrupting her in order to ruin the story.
MOM:
I’ll never forget when my brother — Gulli — came to our home on Skipholt wearing a Santa costume. It was the height of summer…
DAD:
Who called you earlier?
MOM:
Huh? No one.
(Continuing on with her story).
He tiptoed upstairs…
DAD:
So the phone didn’t ring?!
MOM:
(Irritated).
It was your sister. Gunna.
Silence.
LISTENER:
(Excited).
And he was wearing a Santa costume?
MOM:
(Smiles again).
Oh yes, with the beard and all. And my mother was sitting in the living room watching
Bonanza
…
DAD:
Did she ask for me?
MOM:
(annoyed)
No.
DAD:
Am I to call her back?
MOM:
Oh, for God’s sake, Kristinn, leave me in peace!
Then Dad seemed to get all wounded; he stood up and walked off. Mom was no longer in the mood for telling her story. Everyone had to take care not to offend Dad; it was like being around a child. If you weren’t talking about him or to him, then he interrupted. And there was no point trying to make light of the fact that he was mad.
One time, I went to the basement to paint anarchist logos on a large piece of cardboard I wanted to hang in my room. I was very excited about this project and wanted to paint anarchist signs like those on my Crass albums, where the lines of the A go outside a circle. I found an old brush and used it to paint. Then I hung the cardboard up in my room. A few days later there was a knock on my door. This was unusual. I got up and opened it. Dad stood there with a very grave expression on his face. His features were disfigured by his inner turmoil, his emotional distress. He held up a brush in his hand and extended it towards me. I had forgotten to clean the paint off and now it had hardened.
“Did you use this brush?” he asked, his voice quivering.
He was on the verge of bursting into tears.
“Yes,” I said.
“I just found it on the table…useless.”
“Yeah,” I muttered.
Dad’s eyes flooded with tears as he said:
“And now I have to throw it away.”
I didn’t think it was a big issue. It was an old brush with a plastic handle, and it was small and insignificant. Cheap.
“It’s not such a big deal,” I said.
He looked at me as if he could not believe his ears. In his eyes I was unethical and impudent, cheeky, shockingly selfish, inconsiderate. I was a person who walked all over other people and left nothing behind except destruction and pain. He stopped being wounded and became angry. He got himself totally worked up over this. His eyes shot sparks. He held on to the paintbrush so hard his knuckles whitened and his hand shook.
“Not a big deal?” he hissed. “What do you know about it?”
I was afraid. Dad was a big guy. His arms were as thick as my thighs. It brought back to mind the times he’d beaten my ass when I was little. I was as lightweight as a bag of wheat in his hands.
“What’s that?” I asked, frightened.
“You’ve ruined my brushes tens of thousands of times!” he yelled at me.
I was startled. It was horrifying and ridiculous at the same time. My father was so emotionally twisted that it verged on insanity. I’d mistreated his paintbrush, and in so doing, I’d mistreated him. The paintbrush was one of those things that had, in his mind, “sentimental value.” Countless thoughts zinged through my mind. Was he about to attack me? What did he want me to do? What should I say to him? Should I start bawling, collapse over my mistake, and implore him to forgive me? He would then embrace me and cry, too, squeezing me to him and whispering how he had loved this brush and how the brush had great sentimental value for him. And then we would sit together hand in hand, wiping away our tears, and he would tell me stories about everything he had painted with the brush, and before we knew it we’d both beginning to laugh about how much fun life is. That evening, we’d head outside and bury the paintbrush together in the garden and start crying again. At that moment my thoughts, feelings, and fears got too much, and I burst out laughing. I looked at this strange man standing there with his paintbrush and laughed, screamed with laughter until tears fell down my cheeks. Dad was offended and stormed away without saying a word. He didn’t speak to me for days. I didn’t care and was just relieved to get rid of him. I didn’t care if he was hurt. I refused to participate in this bullshit anymore. This man had been torturing me with crap like that my whole life. Always aggrieved. This wasn’t something to get pissed about. It was just a brush, a shitty unremarkable brush. I enjoyed seeing him sulk. He couldn’t, at least, nag me in the meantime.
After a few days, Mom came and talked to me.
“Please talk to your father.”
“About what?”
“You need to ask his forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness? For what? I didn’t do anything to him!”
Mom sighed.
“I know. I just can’t stand it anymore. Do it for me, ask his forgiveness.”
For Mom. I was in it for Mom. She always forgave him in order to keep the peace. Anything for peace. She begged for forgiveness and let him be mean to her. It was her method to survive living with him. An example of this was when she accidently put food coloring instead of chocolate sauce on his ice cream. Dad ate the ice cream with a hearty appetite while he watched the news. When he came into the kitchen with the bowl, Mom noticed that he was all black around the mouth.
“What have you been up to, Kristinn?” she asked, amazed, though she soon realized her mistake and began to laugh. Dad was not amused and said she had done it on purpose. She had hurt him.