Saturday Supper

Saturday was a work day: a quick breakfast, rummage sales, then open the store at 9:00, work till 1:00, go to the rowing club, go as a family to 4:30 mass, head home, and listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” while Mom and Theresa finished getting dinner and the best china on the table.

We’d sit together and chat about the mass and religion, never politics or idle talk. Usually, these group conversations were philosophically inspired, which would devolve into pseudo-intellectual arguments. Regularly they went haywire when John learned to drink too much wine. I learned to ask to be excused with a mouth full of vegetables that I’d spit into the toilet.

This was when the anger began.

Looking in the mirror as I spit my food into the toilet, I could see it in my eyes. I could hear the anger in my voice.

I’d practice saying to my Father:

“You always sound like your perspective is the only one. Why do you struggle to hear me?

Why are you constantly working?

And what are you working on?

Organizing your thoughts?

Re-reading crap you can’t understand.

Constantly daydreaming.

Constantly trying to make a fool of yourself.”

Was I talking to him or myself? Anger confuses everything.

I returned to the table, thinking about how unfair everything was. It’s your only choice when all you’re doing is surviving and feeling a near-constant embarrassment of your Father and his outbursts of rage. Fist slamming on the table, plates bouncing, glasses spilling cheap wine. The wine he made us drink at his formal Saturday supper. The wine I hated, stinking of his drunk Mother’s rancid breath. Mom’s desperate screaming. Occasional tears. Suppressed silence.

My hate for him lies deep in my body, under my belly, shuddering my spine. Sealing it in something steely and stubborn, the viscous muscle that bled and eventually calloused could no longer be pierced. Its contents were never revealed.

It’s curious, the pain beneath the pain. Its magic belies fear. Its love allows vulnerability to let down its guard.

On other nights there was simple bullying. You are choking down the Friday poor man’s lobster, drowning its early rot with melted butter and hating Jesus for recruiting poor fishermen, hating this smell, and hating the bully who required a clean plate.

You stare at his thick fists and broad arms and wonder when you’d be powerful enough to put his rotting rage on a chain. A knife in his heart would cover it quickly. Pressing a steak knife to your chest and wondering how much force would be needed to break through the ribs. You clutch your knife like a baseball bat and begin cutting your meat. Your hatred seals your fate. You think about playing God. You think of murder.