Time to Leave
Handling a strange situation
‘Freddy, don’t they teach you to clean your plate at home?’ Joe’s father eyed me from his end at the head of the dinner table.
The comfortable, small dining nook in sight of the well-lit kitchen was carpeted in a soft thick, beige, a large display cabinet showed the favored dishes and glassware. A wall clock ticked loudly as the small pendulum swung back and forth.
To my great surprise a tiny bird popped out of the clock and chirped.
On another wall an embroidered plaque with the words: Family, where life begins, and love grows…
Joe's fathers’ look was one of spiteful indifference. He put another chunk of steak into his mouth. The tone of his question was neither friendly nor unfriendly. He didn’t want to cross that line.
Or so it seemed at first.
I was spending the night at a friend’s house. Joe and his family were new in Guatemala.
This was my first visit to Joe’s house. This could’ve been the first time I had a meal in an American home. Even the dining space just off the kitchen had the smell I recalled from visiting my aunt’s homes in Fresno and Wisconsin several years before. It was a comforting smell unique to an American household, a pleasant and unique warm mix of food and detergents.
It was quiet, only the ticking clock and the sound of silverware against glass plates. Joe, my friend, was clearly uncomfortable, and yet when I’d look at him, he tried to control a smile. It was a house that I soon realized talked very little at the table. If anyone spoke, it was the father and the soft-spoken mother. She was a sweetie.
Margaret the mother was a curly-haired blonde, blue eyes and wore glasses that looked like little bird’s wings. Thin, and at one time must have been quite pretty. Tired. Now she held her position at the table, so out of her American element that it was almost painfully clear to me. Her eyes were mostly cast downward, and she spoke only if her husband asked something.
‘Honey, how’d it go at the airport today?’ Her way to get her husband on another track. I sensed too that the mother was concerned the husband might cross that invisible line with me.
‘Margaret, I was just asking Joe’s new friend Freddy, right? If he ever finishes his plate is all.’ His tone was full of authority and what seemed a warning. A warning aimed at Joe’s mother. Joe’s mother submissively turned her attention towards her plate.
They may have been from Mars as far as I was concerned. My house was a place to breathe, to comment. Everyone at my families’ table took part, actively and fully. At our table, my dad often chose a moment to read us something interesting from Time magazine or National Geographic or from another source. The difference was stark. I wondered if all American homes were like Joes’.
If someone at my house during a meal or anytime went silent, we just figured they’d come down with something terminal or worse…
While visiting the US with my family, once to Disney in California, I’d seen the TV shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver. My impression of the American household was forever miscast.
This house started to feel cold.
Yet oddly and of great interest to me, Joe seemed hard pressed to bust free, right then and there, of this icy grip this stern man seemed to hold his family with. My friend seemed to gather strength from my being present. I looked like an American; I spoke perfect English. Though I could’ve been a family member to the Beach Boys, bushy blonde and blue eyes, that’s where anything American in me stopped.
Born in Guatemala, I’d lived my eleven years in Nicaragua and Guatemala. We had no TV in the house. For me, the American household presented itself as a thing of true fascination. This was partly because I knew I was American, though I’d never spent more than a week’s time in the US on rare visits.
Even though my parents were US citizens, born and raised, they’d left the US years before I was born in Guatemala. My parents ran their home in which open conversation was encouraged. Art covered our walls. My parents would turn the volume up on their collection of classical and jazz music. My house was very much a place of learning. Each member of my family was active in hobbies such as art, reading, writing journals, camping, swimming, horse riding, the list went on.
The hugely encouraged factor in my home was family cohesiveness. Though I may have questioned its functionality from time to time, it was simply a fact. We were a tight-knit group.
I could tell amidst the silent as ice dinner table that Joe was for some unclear reason enjoying the freeze, enjoying my growing discomfort. And at the same time, Joe was clearly seizing the moment to cause a flap in the usual dullness of this family. It was obvious to me that he smiled derisively at his father. Brave I thought. The man stirred fear.
Joe’s dad was a text sergeant in the US air force. Guatemala was in a civil war, the US backed Guatemalan military were fighting a war with the Marxist rebels throughout the country. Other than an occasional bomb blast in the capital that shook and rattled the windows at night, we never really saw any of the fighting. The killing and atrocities were being carried out by both sides in the mountainous, jungle covered countryside.
Joe’s dad played his part as a career serviceman stationed at the Guatemala airport in a compound that was where the Americans had offices, helicopters and small planes. His dad was involved with the logistics of receiving the giant American cargo planes loaded with war materiel. He helped distribute these to the various secured stock points around the country for use against the insurgency.
He didn’t seem to be a very happy man. This would’ve been around 1963, Viet Nam hadn’t gone full swing yet. It was the cold war. The time of the Berlin Wall, the atomic missile race with the Russians and the growing presence of communist rebels in Latin America. Che Guevaras’ time. The Cuban missile crisis had happened just the year before. I will never forget sitting around the radio at our house patio near the lunchroom those final tense moments the Americans faced off with the Russians in the Caribbean.
We wondered at that moment if WW-3 was about to start.
Most of American might was geared towards holding back the Russian and the Cubans from the Latin world, which was ripe for social change and revolution. The old, right wing, pro-American dictators in the Latin countries were being outsmarted and outgunned by far more savvy Marxist intellectuals, many of which cunningly spread their philosophies to young minds throughout the universities and the rural farm country.
This was long before the USSR imploded into a violent, chaotic mess of stifling corruption and inept management.
As I sat at Joe’s dinner table, the backdrop of the world events filtered in with the American service man sitting across me at the table. It was the man’s behavior which drew my attention.
The man soon noticed I was observing him.
As if not wanting to let the matter go, the man spoke to his wife, ‘I was just asking Margaret if he has to finish his food at his house. I was raised to finish my plate, or I got a thrashing.’ The roundabout insult directed at my family was obvious.
‘Yes, I eat my food. I just don’t like vegetables.’ As I spoke, the table froze. Joe’s sister Melanie, who was a little older than Joe, went stone still in her chair and her eyes suddenly got as big as saucers.
Joe seemed to find the chilling setting, much to his delight. ‘Yeah Dad, Freddy eats like he’s ‘posed to.’ Chuckled to himself and clearly felt rather pleased with himself. Right there before me, I was witnessing a rite of passage coming to pass. Joe was tossing out a challenge to this overbearing man.
‘You don’t like vegetables son?’ Joes father said to me then in the same breath he turned to deal with Joe. ‘One more outta you Joe and you’ll go to your room where we’ll handle this later, and it’s Sir to you, you hear?’ Joe swallowed and despite the palpable fear he must have felt saw room to snort, literally snort and give voice to his discontent.
‘Son means you are my father? You are not my father. I have my parents.’ I spoke sincerely, and a bit confused why this man would refer to me as his child. Of course, this was quite normal back in the US, which I had no way of knowing then.
As I looked into the man’s eyes, the mysterious and confused adult world was rarely more apparent. The man seemed as though he wasn’t here, as if he wished he could be anywhere but here. It was a world I had no desire to experience. I was quite happy right where I found myself at eleven.
If the situation required and permitted, I would take small measures to smooth over the rough spots.
‘Oh Hon, it’s just what we say, you know, um, it’s just a nice way to talk to one another. Do you understand that?’ Margaret, bless her heart. She spoke as though I was in pre- kinder. Just for a second, I almost laughed at her sincere attempt to make sensible communication with this strange and out of step friend Joe had brought home. I wasn’t going to hurt her feelings. She sincerely tried to excuse her moronic husband’s comment. It was clear too she was walking the proverbial tight rope.
It was her gentleness and yes sweetness that provided for a much-needed warm nest in this house.
I just looked at her and nodded my head in understanding.
‘Where are your folks from Freddy?’ The man started in again.
‘They are from the United States.’
At that, all eyes once again were on us. I spoke and everyone turned towards me. He spoke, everyone turned to him. It would’ve been comical had it not been so symbolic, in this instant, of a home rife with dysfunction. I wondered if the man could become violent.
‘Mrs Johnson, can I go to the bathroom?’ My way of asking where the John was.
I got out of my seat and circled around a wall out of sight and instead of opening the bathroom, I kept going and quietly let myself out the front door and walked the ten or fifteen blocks back to my house.
My small way of smoothing out the rough spot.
