Leaving

When a child, I had the perspective that every being on earth is subject to one
sort of predator or another, and so grew eyes in the back of my head and developed a leap rabbits would envy.

Many years ago, when the last visit to my father occurred, I remember parking the Buick at the lower end of the driveway so the overgrown junipers wouldn’t snarl a quick getaway, if one had to be made. Before I entered the side door, I gulped great draughts of cold spring air, as a swimmer oxygenates their blood before diving underwater. I was still frightened of what was left of this angry, alcoholic man, but not as much as in years past for today I was armed with knowledge and a canister of pepper spray.

I was a loyal daughter, a responsible safety net for the family, yet I lived with a falsely constructed self-esteem. I would glide through the difficulties by using a feeling of odd superiority that wound its sea serpent self through long ago fears of abandonment. It had kept me going during the years of Mom’s illness, it was the ticket I played to enter my parent’s house time and again. Dad would pitch a swing at me in clumsy fury, to show he was boss if I tried to get Mom to a doctor, or into the bathtub, or had brought too much food over. Then he’d yell in his old man pajamas as to why that bitch, that brat wasn’t ever going to cross his threshold again.

My then seventy-eight year old mother with hands like broken strings of beads would cry. But even though my own tears flowed from anger and frustration, I refused to blink. Both Mom and I would weep; I would wipe Mom's tears and whisper, “I’ll be back, I’ll be back, don’t worry, I love you,” and then wait maybe three days, a week, and then return to check on her. As I would walk into the house, I would consciously relax my jaw muscles so my face wouldn't look tight. I knew how to play along with Dad, so I could come back to Mom and tell her stories of cherry pies, the Chemung River, of long ago relatives and rose gardens, while changing her diaper.

As a kid, I had had enough of his tricks by the time I was two, and realized that I wanted to get rid of him, even though the connection between the two of us was still vague and unformed. He would show up as an anxious, angry knot in the late afternoon after his work shift, get ticked off, yell, and Mom would scurry about with cast down eyes. My mother's movements would change from smooth and spontaneous to herky-jerky mischief. If she went to pick something up near him, her hands would half-approach, pull back, approach, retreat, and finally swoop to nervously grab the object. Her entire body acted stiff and disjointed, like a box of clean bones had been tumbled out, dressed in a skirt, and made to stand up and be a housewife. I knew that she needed help right off the bat, and I started an inner campaign to rid her world of this angry loudmouth.

But here I was many years later, standing on the cement stoop in confusion at half-past middle age, guilty of a ripe deception of daughterly concern for his continuing existence, but also avoiding the desire to travel far and fast from this pale, tormented lump. It had been six months since Mom had died. As I turned the key to enter the house, I did not imagine that this would be the last time I was coming here.

I stepped through the wooden door and the self-monitored, forced behavior took over; it felt surprising to me, for this practiced, mechanized routine was almost forgotten since my visits became rarer. This time the tightness felt unfamiliar, it pleased me that the sensation of tension had become a forgotten stranger in the past months, even as the usual nausea turned into a sharp sensation in my stomach. I couldn't let him know he frightened me, in spite of the inner alarms to run. “Hello Dad,” I enunciated. Carefully.

Heavy and large, an old man shuffled in slippers he had cut open at the toes over the linoleum tile that was once white with gold flecks. A collar of rosaries and religious medals clattered around his neck as if they spoke in tongues. He seemed to be shrinking into himself, in spite of his size, the red-rimmed eyes in gray sockets giving him the appearance of a goggle-eyed skeleton wearing an oversized costume of skin. His forearms still had the musculature of a man who had tempered steel in white-hot tumblers. His face, which usually appeared to be holding back a silent scream, knotted into a grin; this made the skin at the sides of his head pull back, exposing more whites around the blue irises of his eyes. I looked at him neutrally. Maybe he was sober. I could hear him breathing from the effort of walking.

“Where the hell you been, kiddo? It’s been so long that I thought you’d left the country.” He was in a seemingly good mood, or at least he had the impression that he was. Dad often led into conversations pleasantly, until he figured that you weren’t there to deliver his Prize of Prizes, the Keys to the Kingdom, or the entitlement he deserved by the Fourth commandment of Honor thy father. Life had been against him from the start, he never got an even break, people (that-goes-for-you-too), plotted in contradiction, and thus, with belligerent piety, he would pronounce the tragedies of his life and a documentation of the world as he knew it, categorized in remembrances of uproar in the name of justice.

His alcoholism came from the inability to handle life, to be gladdened by it, or the need to obliterate the eternal gnawing in his gut that he wasn’t what he should be. Or maybe it was his wiring. Or his family history. Or a virus. Or he liked to raise hell. Or some other goddam thing. He’d been drinking since he was fifteen, so who knew, who cared? He bragged of his capacity to drink, and contrived an imaginary view of who he was. Mom had cared for him, but after she died, my own ability for forgiveness was honed to a butcher’s edge by a realistic need for calm before I myself became an untidy golem. He was old, old and worn enough to be dead by now, what on earth kept him going?

We stood there in the kitchen, watching and evaluating the other’s movements in split seconds. A casual observer would have missed the ritual. Dad looked for anything less than humility, I watched him for any tightening of his body or irregular motion towards me. You keep your manner neither natural nor exaggerated, so as not to excite or offend. I felt as if I were in a foreign country and didn’t speak the language as the sleepless inhabitants jabbered accusations. It was a good idea to get him to turn around and head for the living room, the kitchen was too narrow.

“I came to see Mom’s stuff.” If I had used the word ‘belongings’, he’d crab not to talk down to him, that I was putting on airs. He paused, then remembered that he had told me to come over to see what was left, things that he hadn't thrown away already. I kept a short distance behind him as we went through the cramped kitchenette into the brown carpeted, brown walled area. He was colorblind, and had one day mixed all the colors in the basement into a bucket of paint large enough to cover the downstairs. It was a garish brown loaded with pink, and it was good enough, dammit. We ain’t rich. The finances apparently hadn’t improved months later, either, for in order to cover divots made by nailing pictures to the plaster wall, he used orange shellac to fill in the blanks. It always made better sense not to complain. It just wasn’t a happy house.

He lumbered over to a green folding lawn chair in a corner of the room, where Mom’s reclining rocker had been a week earlier, sitting on the once beige rug which was so worn that it was flattened to a shine. Being in the house always returned memories of growing up there, of the thick yellow light of the sun as it had entered my attic bedroom, and the odor of the wooden beams, also shellacked orange, heated by any July afternoon.

As a child, I would crouch on the grey linoleum next to piles of books which would produce a peculiar, papery incense in the heat; dust motes stuck to my perspiring body in spite of a large exhaust fan juddering in the window. Shapeless summer clothing hung limply from my scarecrow self as the hot sunlight lay about like a flopped-down dog.

Books were my favorite, I would stay in my room reading for hours, and I remember concentrating on two things: the exotically fascinating island that grew breadfruit in the story of The Swiss Family Robinson, and of not moving, not moving, not moving, in spite of the heat that was roasting me medium rare. If you were quiet, they forgot about you. If you froze like a rabbit in the bushes, they sometimes looked past you. You only had to appear at certain times of the day; dinner, welcoming Dad home from work, and kissing Dad goodnight, as if you would miss him while you slept. Sunday mornings for church required appearances, and holidays. Sometimes he would become offended at me disappearing and yell, “Where the hell are ya? You’re part of this family too, y’know.”

Eventually I was forbidden to stay up in my room, and had to participate. Of course, that meant running beers for Dad as he tossed back three cases of Genny on a weekend, so I brought books downstairs, or sat and watched television. I didn’t want to bring any friends over, and had to be careful to keep outside life separate from the inside one. Permission to go anywhere didn’t matter; I was scared of my own shadow and didn’t ask. For some children, having fun isn’t a workable idea. All the reading that I did, however, eventually paid off for I was reading of other lives, other families. There were other ways to be.

Now I could see that Dad had loaded trash bags with crockery, glassware, clothing, mementos, clocks, anything and everything that represented my mother’s life. I lifted a bag and a small glass vial of lilac cologne clinked out. “You want that? You don’t wear that stuff, do ya.” You bet I don’t, leastways not around you.

When I was five, Mom had happily presented me with a set of bubble bath, shampoo, pink lotion and cologne for Christmas. I glowed at the small glass bottles, but something in my father’s face had changed frequencies. His inward glee could hardly contain itself as he found a reason to blow up this holiday. He began an opening monologue: That’s not something she needs. She’s too young to be putting on cologne, using bubble bath. My sisters never used any. Then, accelerating louder, he’d turn up the drama: Men will come to her, try to make her. You’re making her a whore. She is not to be brought up to be a whore. What the hell’s the matter with you, giving a little girl perfume? Then he’d crank the volume up even further, yelling as if the house was on fire, his eyes starting from his head: WHY? She don’t need it. Today is a holy day and you’re making it a street carnival! She’ll grow up to be a hooker. A whore. You goddam women, sucking the life out of a man.”

I remember feeling my insides churning back then, though I had no idea what a whore was or that one might exist out in the sticks where we lived. The cologne set went under my bed to gather dust, and I eventually threw it away regretfully, because I didn’t want to think of it anymore. I stuck with using the allowed Spic n’ Span in my bath. Apparently men wouldn’t notice you if you were five and smelled like a kitchen floor. Once Mom used Tide to bathe me, and the fresh, sweet aroma created another argument after which I had go through an inspection every night, to be smelled by my father when he got home. Talk about creepy. I had no idea what propelled this man, but when very little, I imagined it was this way in every house, under every roof.

In the living room of the present, I casually examined the row of trash bags filled with everything that had been Mom's. My back was to him temporarily, but I was sure of the pepper spray in my pocket. It is one of my greatest disappointments in life that I hadn’t been able to get Mom away from this hellhole. Now I was bent on getting her things away from him. “You take what you want, I don’t want nothin’, I got my memories up here,” he had said, tapping the side of his head. “It’s all over, I’m just waitin’ to die.” He had been saying he was waiting to die as long as I had known. The family had its hopes, but physically he was strong as a horse. He had prided himself on his strength and endurance, and during World War II, had been stationed down in Georgia as a sergeant in charge of teaching hand-to-hand combat.

During his time in the war, he himself had been no mama’s boy, no homesick sissy, and made it his job to look out for new recruits that were scared of their newfound situation; he was the example of patriotism, itching to get his hands around the necks of a few Krauts. To beat the crap out of another person. To take the violent energy that careened around his brain and let somebody have it good.

His reputation as a fighter was formed into stories that my little brother and I were told on Sunday evenings. “This red-headed woman, y’ see,” he had begun, “ was coming on to my friend in a bar. She was playing him up all night, getting drinks out of him, laying on him on the bar stool. Well he was hot, ready to go, and she wouldn’t give. He was all busted up, didn’t know what to do, his money was gone from buying her drinks, so I slugged her. Knocked her right on her ass on the floor.“

“The other guys wanted to fight me then, but I showed them my fists. ‘This is Beulah,’ I said, holding up the right one, ‘and this is Mariah,’ with the left. You want in?’ Nobody did, nobody wanted to fight me after I showed them what I got.” Here he would chuckle. “I took my buddy out of there and drove him back to the base.” He often talked like that to relive whatever physical excitement he had experienced, and also because of a bratty, prurient fascination to use dirty, painful language in front of his little family, while calling it “the truth.” Mom would object as best she could, but was voted as a conspirator hiding what the kids ought to know, as issued from his mouth. Honor thy father gave him a lot of mileage.

He hid his obvious weaknesses by playing the role of a man who thought his family would be impressed with his strength and experience in cleansing the earth of sin. They should know how hard he had to fight. I only became even more frightened of life, and from then on heard an unusual violence when he was pounding wood together in his workshop.

The vague implications his words introduced weren’t completely recognizable until I became older. I had just lived in the dark all my young, naive life and hadn’t a clue, until he looked at me on my thirteenth birthday and said, “You’re a woman, now,” which made my skin crawl in a new way. I wasn’t sure why, but soon found out that as a woman, I wasn’t considered any better than the rest and had a potential sexual power that drove foundering men onto the rocks.

To know some of the harsh history of the man blurs judgment, for he grew up as the baby in a family of thirteen children in an immigrant Catholic household. My mother, brother and I only knew hints of that side of town, for his family except for two brothers had not attended the religiously mixed marriage ceremony of my Mom and Dad and were not speaking to them.
He had a hard bringing up, Mom would say, him and his brothers would have to kneel on dried peas in front of a shrine to the Pieta if they did anything that smelled wrong. The mother would also beat any of them with a leather strap cut into a cat o’ nine tails till their legs bled. But also, alcohol flowed like milk does in other homes.

They drank for home remedy or pain; they drank to forget. They drank to celebrate a new car; a new suit, if one got a raise, mowed the lawn, or walked in the door. Most of the siblings became stalwart workers whose drinking never interfered with their jobs, but family life was a shambles for all of them.

Nine years into her parent’s marriage a band of resistance broke somewhere, or someone blinked, and a surprise Easter visit was scheduled with my father’s side of the family. This spun me for a wallop, you might of well had said we were climbing into the pink and black DeSoto to go visit the fairies. I wondered if these mysterious people were anything like Dad and was apprehensive. Both us kids were rehearsed in smiling, manners, and being quiet with a capital Q. Mom whispered that if these people seemed a little strange, well, they were. Just don’t touch anything. The tense drive into a strange part of town was weird. Pulling into a narrow yard whose shrubs and poppies looked dollhouse perfect was weird. The sidewalk had been scrubbed.
Our family didn’t have to knock, for suddenly the side door burst open, and a crowd of huge, really white people surged in our direction, wailing and crying; after all these years, come in, come in, see Ma. So far, I hadn’t seen anything that contributed to the anger of Dad’s personality, and began to wonder why these jolly people had been avoided. So far no fist fights. A nine-year-old girl or a four-year-old boy do not want to delve into causal family crises, they just want happiness, over and over. These people were happy, why didn’t we come over earlier? My father’s face was the only one not smiling; it portrayed a glimmer of martyred sulkiness, which smoothed his face into stone.

After the greetings with aunts and uncles, my brother and I began the serious job of being seen and not heard. It was hard, for there was an immense papier-mâché bulldog at the top of the stairs with red thumbtacks stuck in his eyes for pupils. The smell of garlic and mothballs permeated everything making it tough to breathe, but what really floored me was the statuette of a hula girl not only naked but for god’s sake, they had painted her nipples bright red with nail polish. Who were these people? Aunt Yanka was wearing a dress that showed substantial cleavage. If Mom ever wore a dress like that, she’d have the crap beat out of her. These people all of a sudden were crazy foreigners, and I watched Dad as one would a gas tank in a burning car.

Everyone sat in the kitchen; they gave me and my brother the first coffee we ever had, with potato chips. Then they broke out the whiskey. Would the kids like a snort in their coffee? No, no, no said both parents, and that started an argument between my father and his mother, about insults to home and who was who, with the guarded sulkiness Dad had been nursing exploding into shards.

The large aunts and larger uncles first clucked like mama hens in soothing tones, but as the scene escalated, they rose and fell like a wave of flesh, the rolls under their arms cresting and absorbing the love and hate between mother and son. It was the same thing my mother had done for him all the years, trying to keep the boat on an even keel. I couldn’t have known much about the dynamics, for his violent behavior was what affected my view the most, but Mom claimed to understand. Every time, even when she was bruised or reddened from his hands choking her.

Now, with my back still to him, I was crouching down by the trash bags, while keeping an ear tuned in his direction, I delved into the bags with supposed superficial interest, as if I wasn't sure of wanting any of it. Mom hadn’t owned much, any dishes and glassware were often used as punctuation marks during arguments. What was left, everything that represented my mother, her pots and pans, clocks, beads, shoes, photos, wrought iron roosters, a cuckoo clock, clothes, all were mashed together in these trash bags which made the tightness in my stomach reach up and grip my throat. Not so much the idea of donating her things to charity, but the rapid scouring of of them from the house bothered me, as if he had used up a box of tissues and was ready for another. A Protestant King James Bible was in one of the bags. The times he would quote the Catholic Bible in a theology designed for personal justification clamored in my head.

Back in the fifties, he would rant at Jimmy Durante’s television show, before changing channels: “Look at them blonde bitches. Probably sleeping with that old bastard.” Durante always had beautiful women on his show who would incite a diatribe St. Paul would envy. “Bet they’d all show their chests if they thought they had a chance to be on the show. That’s what Jezebel did, showed too many men her breasts and the Lord struck her down for he said Mighty is my word and I am the lamb. That’s how you should be, like a lamb, not like those blonde whores.”

Good god, I would scrunch into the chair trying to look as pure and innocent as possible, and was thankful to be a flat chested rabbit. When I became older, if I got up and left too soon after his commentary, he’d follow me yelling Whaddaya leaving for? How come you’re leaving the room? Cancha face the truth? G’wan, stay in your room, don’t come back.” Mom told me to sleep with the bedroom door shut, for god knows what he’ll do.

As my body changed, I stopped bathing for it was frightening to be naked in the house with him. Hair hung lank and greasy, clothing was unkempt. I learned not to look him in the eye and kept to a point of vision on the ground. Sometimes after an evening argument with Mom, he would come upstairs into my room and sit on the bed in the dark. Explaining. Always explaining. Talk about leaving my mother. He had said, “I don’t usually kiss you on the mouth, may I?” I would beg some god just to get through it, and that sort of worked, but when I started to pray for his death, it just didn’t happen.

So I tied the trash bags of items back up and said, ”Let me take these out of here for you, I’ll go through them at home, and give the rest to AmVets. “ When I lifted the bags, the contents shifted achingly, and every broken dish, smashed plate, glued cup handle, ripped clothing, threat of murder, suicide, accusation, lie, every act of destruction visited on me and my mother and brother and pets cried for mercy.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea, then they don’t have to come in the house if you take care of it.”
I loaded the first few bags into the back of the car, and went back inside for the rest. I’ll see you Dad,” I said, meaning it. He had a sense of humor that could get them laughing till they had to pee. He could do spherical trigonometry in his head. He built the brick house out in Clarence almost by himself. He taught us about the woods and fox tracks and would bring home toys from Western Auto. He had given me and the then husband a down payment on a house. I wanted to be generous in compassion towards him. I had tried to be.

But the nausea came on strong when he reached for me, a peck on the cheek goodbye. “Don’t be a stranger to your old man.” I put the last bag down on the cement step, closed the door, and leaned my hand on its wooden support. “Good bye, door,” I whispered, shocked as I realized that it was the last time I would ever come back. I grasped the steering wheel white-knuckled, as guilt waggled a finger at me, and a mock charade of “we’ll see’s” came to my lying mouth, but a free running girl with a dog was leaping happily over rolling grass fields in her mind.

That summer the sunset shone brightly on the shore of Lake Erie. I sat on the rocks that banked down to the water’s edge, below the eye level of passers-by. I have a favorite niche, a rock with a hollow comfortable enough for a bottom with a supporting stone for anyone's back. Just like Flintstone furniture. The westerly wind pushed columns of clouds into a slow herd of bison that changed to rows of a choir that changed into dogs and round women loaded with full shopping bags in pink and yellow procession. The edges of another country partially rimmed the horizon, as the lake provided a broader band of green and blue beneath. It met the golden sky as liquid, and reflected tiny crescents of light from the wavelets. I remember thinking of a school of minnows skipping up to the surface, to sun their little bellies.

A breeze breathed clear lake air over my face and hair and I lifted my chin to the grandmother of the wind as it patted cheeks and eyelids. My legs were stretched in front, and ladybug beetles of colors red orange yellow purple landed on denim to rest from being chased by swallows. I was glad to be of service and filled a notepad with observations on what the fireboat was doing, as it sounded its immense clarion horn and pumped forty-foot plumes of water from six different hoses, much to the applause and cheers from the strollers-by.

The universe hummed, my mother would have enjoyed the lake air, the affable people. I wondered if Mom would accept that after telling Dad that I would see him next week, I never went back to the house and let the answering machine pick up ranting messages. Later I heard from my brother that Dad had found the devout widow across the street, and was visiting.

There didn’t seem to be any sense in keeping the relationship, that prolonging a non-existent connection would invite him to get a murder-intended swing in, and then cry that he didn’t mean it if he missed just to lure me back within radius. He would hound me to literal death just as he did Mom, with science-fiction demands that spun on an axis. I had tried pity, humility; humor, concern; hiding, and mild confrontation; all of it only brought the destructive course of his agenda closer. I felt stronger for making this doubted decision but no less uneasy, for his face would hang before me like Jesus in thorns in almost everything. To anyone who would observe me as they looked over the breakwater berm down onto the rocks, did I yet remain a brown rabbit trying to melt into the surrounding environment? It has taken a long time to stand up straight.