first fight
i heard between my parents was in Weatogue, Connecticut, in 1955. our house was a big-box, 3-story, white clapboard wedding cake, with a wrap around porch, acres of lawn, copper beach trees and a massive untended vegetable garden. it was idyllic and the least disturbing, miraculous part of my childhood, until one night, late, after bedtime, when i got up to pee in flannel pajamas, no hair down there, watching the stream, shaking off until i heard something new, an argument in the kitchen. the voices thundered up the backstairs. i heard mom, furious, her tears folded into the yelling. i heard dad screaming back at her and a glass shattering. i tip-toed to the top of the back stairs and the shouting got louder, but the words were either indistinct or i didn’t let myself understand them. i hadn’t a clue my parents weren’t ok with each other. just that afternoon i helped dad paint New Yorker cartoons
on a bathroom wall (a rare collaboration). last night i watched mom get ready for a cocktail party in her incredible gold dress. ‘you look like a movie star, like Tallulah Bankhead’, i bragged. (Tallulah’s voice, deep, low and ironic, had captivated my prepubescent imagination, replacing the Lone Ranger in my pantheon of luminaries.) but that was hours ago. this fight hit me like a rock in the head. I covered my ears and retreated to the back porch, a screened-in, second story ‘day room’. there the sound was muffled. i was ‘intrigued + repulsed at the same time’ (as my friend Jane said once about seeing a strap-on for the first time). it was like finding out that Santa Claus was a lie. i took mom’s side in my little head. she was hurt. i should defend her. but was that fair? i hated hating my dad. sure enough, a month later, things got worse. when he took me on a ski trip, i ratted him out. he was plastered. there were women on couches in our bedroom laughing. one, two? college girls? i wasn’t sure. this was new. they were ‘guests’ i supposed. but they also seemed to ‘be with’ him in some way i didn’t understand. while i’m on the phone checking in i tell mom about it — the drinking, the girls and right in front of him, close enough to get smacked, he went berserk. he said he’d never trust me again, his fairy-assed son. the little boy he calls the Prince as in ‘you pay more attention to the Prince than you do your own husband’. and this after she refused to call in sick for him at the bank. ‘you’re hung over, you’re not sick. go to work’. i thought she was right, but i was never sure. i was proud of how crazy he was. of how easily he could make her laugh. how he liked to fart in the elevator and blame it on a stranger. but i remembered that first fight and i wanted to protect her from being hurt again. so i ratted him out, 100%. i shamed him in front of his college girls and in front of me, his son. i threatened his manhood. two years later on a train from Philly to Montreal for yet another ski trip we kids were about to conk out in bunk beds, the clickity-clack train wheels soothing us down, when dad stumbled in, shattered and loud. mom clocked him one, a sucker punch to the jaw and he went down. it had to be tough for a guy to get punched out by his wife in front of his kids. i realized, deep down, that we loved them equally. it was more painful to take sides than not, even as we did, jumping from one ship to the other in hopes of some miraculous balance. we are never certain where love lies. we wonder if our subsequent luck or ill fortune in the relationship game grew from that fierce, unyielding Yankee tempest.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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