The Glass Doorknob

My grandmothers house has the most exquisite glass doorknobs. Maybe they’re crystal. Octagonal diamonds, set in patina crusted brass, they imbue grandma’s house with a sense of tired elegance. They expose how much we’ve lost over the years. Deco declined, meandering to mundane until the only sense of whimsey we find is downloaded in an app.

We moved in with Nana when I was a teenager, brimming with testosterone and anti-authoritarian angst. Dad lost his job at the cabinet plant. It happens, there’s no shame in that. And yet.

Dad is a proud man. His whole existence predicated on the idea that he would take care of us. I didn’t know that then. What do teenagers know? You can’t grasp the soul-crushing frustration when you can’t provide for your children, not until you have your own.

I think Dad was so steadfast to contrast his own father. We don’t talk much about grandpa Larry. There’s nothing good to say in Dad’s estimation. The silence tells the story of him.

Dad picked up odd jobs and construction work. In a town filled with out-of-work cabinet makers, there was a glut of handymen. It’s neigh impossible to face reality when what you’ve done all your life, the craft you’ve mastered, goes away.

Staying with his mother-in-law compounded his depression. Nana was nice enough about it, but sleeping with your wife in her childhood bedroom, across the hall from her mother takes a toll.

Those doorknobs watched us, unblinking Palantir to a better time when they belonged to a better-off house, to a better-off family. They caught the light from the setting sun, cast rainbows on tired, dusty carpet to mock my father. Dust floated through indigo, blue, green; twinkling commentary on who we were in this place, in this time.

I don’t remember how the fight started. My memory is a self-redacted testimony at the trial of my life, or will be if I’m lucky enough to stand before Saint Peter for my court date. I do remember it was over dinner, Nana away to visit a sick friend. He died the next week. My redactions of memory seem random.

Yelling. Foot stomping. Palms slapping at tables in anger.

Go. To. Your. Room.

“We wouldn’t even be here if you were a better cabinet maker,” I muttered, heading towards the stairs.

I don’t think he meant to push me. My father never laid a hand on me, even when I deserved it, as I did now. He meant to grab me, to shake me, to draw back a hand, instill some fear, thinking he still could when we were almost the same height. It’s a rude realization when your child has grown too old or too large to spank.

My head hit one of those glass doorknobs as I fell from the shove. The cut glass wasn’t sharp, but there was an edge. It scraped across my skull, above my ear, gouging enough to draw blood as I tripped at the base of the stairs. Who puts a door at the base of the stairs? People who lived before forced air heat, people who built my grandmother’s house.

“Oh God,” Mom gasped. It’s the last thing I remember hearing. A slow motion collapse, my head impacted with a crack on the first step. Those words stand out, in the Swiss cheese memory that is my birthright. Oh God. Not a scream, not a yell, a gasp of horror. A realization of what had happened, how far we’d sunk. Our world contracted to this, pushed us to the breaking point until something snapped.

I don’t remember walking to the kitchen, my mother washing the blood from my head. I don’t remember my father leaving, too ashamed, too angry to remain. I remember my mother, scrubbing a glass doorknob that refused to come clean. It seemed like it should. Blood wipes away easy from glass, it’s supposed to. She scrubbed and she wiped, she spritzed Windex and bleach. It would never come clean.

Even today, all these years later, when I visit Nana, that doorknob watches me. It shows me a picture of the past, when our family fell apart. When I grew up.