Poached Egg on Toast (24 page)

Who brought it back inside? Rescued the surviving bulbs, the frosty angels? Who went down on hand and knee to shake the snow from bruised needles and limbs?

Christmas Eve: Burr and I are eleven. Father sits in his green chair in the living room and begins a slow and steady binge that will last until New Year’s Day. He holds his glass in a salute to anyone who walks through the room, and sings:

He tries to whip up speed in the lyrics, but his tongue thickens and he’s lodged in his chair and only one arm is able to beat itself against the upholstery.

The last three days, he carries his whisky to his room and stays there. Mother comes downstairs to sleep on the couch. On New Year’s Day, he emerges. Showers, shaves, and comes into the living room, whistling. It’s as if he’s been away on a slightly wearing trip. He reaches under the tree and pulls out our gift, the one he’s refused at Christmas. It’s a photograph of Burr and me, taken at Woolworth’s in Greenly and framed by ourselves. He rolls his eyes towards the ceiling as if to a distant agreeing oracle and says, in a way that only he seems to understand, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” which drives Burr and me back to the cave, despite the icicles and the slippery climb.

“Do you think we’re like him? That we’ll turn out like him?”

“We’ll leave before that can happen,” says Burr.

Where was Mother during this time?

She was keeping the peace.

There were acts of Mother’s that we admired. Her capacity to avoid argument. Her ability to feign sleep; so practised was she at this, she was able to fool Burr and me some of the time. We admired her resolution. Four days a week, she took the bus to Sadie’s Dress Shop on Greenly’s Main Street where, from the day Burr and I began school, she was head seamstress. Mother, in fact, had a narrowly circumscribed life of her own. She had a small income; she had a few friends who, like herself, worked at the shop and with whom she went out occasionally, but whom she never invited home. This, Burr and I understood; our own best friends were more or less kept in hiding over a period of fifteen years.

Long after Burr and I left home, we phoned each other, going over and over the same ground. By then, we were married and had children of our own. But we talked as if there was still something we could do about Father’s drinking: acknowledge it, make it public, somehow. To free Mother, we said. To free ourselves. “The patterns are entrenched,” we said, into the phone. “Thank God we got out. But how can she put up with him? How can she have stayed with him all these years?”

“Too late to leave,” said Burr. “Neither of them can make a move now.”

We sent each other identical newspaper clippings:
Nine out of ten wives stay with alcoholic husbands. One husband in ten will stay with an alcoholic wife.

Once, we went into hysterics when Burr, having put her children to bed a few minutes earlier, told me she’d just poured herself a sherry.

“Do you drink alone?”
I said, in my behind-the-waterfall voice.

We continued to make the climb in good weather, even after our bodies had grown too large to fit the cave. During our early teens, we sat on the ground at the bottom of the falls and scratched boys’ initials onto flat layers of rock. We knew we were too far from home to be found; in any case, there was no one to come looking. Mother was at the shop until five; Father at the cheese factory until six when the truck dropped him off.

Some days, he brought home a block of cheese, which he stored in the root cellar, the entrance of which was a double trapdoor around one side of the house. Burr and I seldom lifted those wooden slats; a few times, while Father was at work, we did so on a dare, and descended the wooden ladder. Once down in that stifling space, we had to hunch shoulders and bow our heads. Father had run a wire through the floor of the house and hooked up a swinging socket, but this rarely contained a bulb. Burr and I encouraged each other to hold our breath so we wouldn’t have to inhale the underground. I believed the place was alive. Burr called it the rat cellar instead of the root cellar.

While we were there, we inspected Father’s whisky, for this is where he kept his stash. He’d banged shelves into an earth wall. One shelf held aging blocks of cheese. Surprisingly, there was little dampness in that room underground. Another shelf held his whisky—five or six bottles at a time. Never fewer than three. The store, he called it. Go down and see what I’ve got in the store. And Burr and I, even though we might know the answer, would hold our breath and go down.

Father walks through the back door each evening and reaches for the bottle he’s brought up the night before. He’s taken to announcing in a loud voice, “The bar is officially open,” as if granting himself licence. As if this is a safe joke, an opening line to which there is no reply.

How does he know we won’t speak? That we won’t scream, throw plates, dump whisky down the drain. That we won’t cry or despair or quietly plead, “Please go somewhere and get help. You have a drinking problem.”

How can he count on our silence?

This is the part that is most difficult to understand.

Father has to take only two drinks now, before he starts to weave his way across the room. “I can hold my liquor,” he says, but doesn’t look us in the eye. “Don’t ever think I can’t hold my liquor.”

We hear him from the green chair:

Then, silence. We don’t need to see his face to know that he’s begun to weep, as he often does, now.

“Think of his face,” I said to Burr one day when I was sitting in the kitchen of her apartment.

Burr looked over, saw me as I saw her, saw the cold stone that lay at the bottom of our lives.

“Flushed,” she said. “Moist eyes.” She sat down.

“Moist around the lips,” I said. “Soft chin. Wrinkles from the corners of his mouth up across the cheeks.”

“Extra folds of cheek.”

“A wonder, really.” We knew plenty of statistics. “He should be emaciated, malnourished.”

“Mother keeps feeding him, meat and potatoes.”

“What’s she supposed to do? Let him starve?”

“Maybe,” said Burr. “I mean, think of his liver.”

We giggled dangerously, as if Father were in the next room. And then found ourselves doubled over.

Burr stood up, held onto her chair, addressed an unknown audience. “If you wonder why we laugh,” she said, “if
you’d
spent the first fifteen years of your life edging away from tears, you’d laugh, too.”

She sat down. We stopped laughing, but continued to wipe our eyes. We were in a place we hadn’t allowed ourselves for years. But the place still had no outlet, no escape.

“Enablers,” I said. “That’s what we’re called now.”

“The people who made up the word never had to look Father in the eye.”

“Did
wet”

Father has become tricky. We know this, but we never say it. It’s something about his eyes, the red horizontal streaks through the whites, the narrowing of focus, the pulling of the look into himself, fast, so we get just a flash, a quick hint of what he might do next. This is our cue to move sideways, exit, make a swift getaway. Sometimes I wonder if, from above, we look like a family of crabs, picking our way sideways to get around one another.

By now, he has bought a car, a second-hand Pontiac with a stick shift behind the wheel. The car is two shades of green and breaks down a lot, but Father manages to keep it going and no longer relies on the factory truck to travel back and forth to work.

During summer evenings and weekends, before
the bar is officially open
, he teaches me to drive on the dirt road. Burr and I are fifteen. Burr refuses to learn. I see it as a means of escape. She sees what’s coming next.

And what’s coming next is this: Father, on Friday nights after work, drives home and drops off the Pontiac before he heads now farther afield to do his drinking. He’s picked up by the men he calls his drinking partners, but tells us he’s too smart to drive home with them. “They’re all pie-eyed by nine o’clock,” he says. “They can’t hold their liquor worth a damn.” But he, he wouldn’t get behind the wheel after three drinks. To ensure that he gets home safely, he’s decided that I will pick him up when he’s ready to come home.

“Don’t do it,” says Burr, upstairs in our room. “I wouldn’t. You’ll only be helping him drink as much as he wants.”

This is decades before the words
emotional blackmail
begin to appear in the articles we seek out and read.

Friday nights, Saturday nights, I don’t know how long it goes on, Father phones when he is drunk and ready to come home, and I climb into the Pontiac and edge my way close to the shoulder of dirt roads and back highways, and collect him. I am always to wait in the car and this I do, watching for his swaying figure in doorways of hotels, houses, bars. A greenish sort of light shines across these openings; music blurts into the air with a suddenness that surprises; voices erupt and subside as if severed by the closing doors.

My father reaches out to steady himself against the passenger side. He slumps rather than slides in, and as soon as the door is shut he raises his head and begins a conversation as if it’s normal for us to converse. Truth is, at home we hardly ever speak. The two of us face forward in the close, whisky-breath space of the front seat. I can escape him no more than he can escape me. His slurred questions are barely understandable; they don’t seem connected to my life or his. One night, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of coins, which he says are for me. When we get home, he scatters them over the front seat. I wait until he goes to bed, and then I go out and scoop up the coins, wondering if he’ll remember and take them back the next day.

Each time I get him home, I believe I have saved his life. It never occurs to me that if he is at the wheel, he might kill someone else. I concentrate only on him and me: if he drives, he might die; if I drive, I keep him alive.

He is my father.

The summer we finish high school, a Saturday, Burr runs away. Father, who descends to the rat cellar and comes up bearing a bottle, opens the bar early because it’s the weekend. After two drinks and some prowling around, he comes upon Burr’s diary and reads portions of it aloud, making fun. Burr is furious. She will never forgive him, she says, never.

I know where she’s gone, of course. Not far. There’s only one place to go.

Father walks out to the road a couple of times, glass in hand, looks both ways, comes back to the yard and leans into the Pontiac.

“Where’s your sister?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she?”

“How should I know?”

He rolls his eyes, and when he does this I’m reminded of the New Year’s Day he surfaced to open the framed photograph of us, his children, his twins.
By their fruits ye shall know them
. I’m possessed of a rage I didn’t know I contained, a rage I could not have let fly even moments before.

“It’s your fault she ran away! It’s your bloody fault!”

Me. Shouting at Father.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

His rage is greater than mine. His stance threatening. It stops me. Right there. The closest I’ve ever come to naming it, naming him. I have a momentary insight into how Mother must feel. The reasons she leaves him alone. The incident closes over the way water closes over a mudhole.

I sneak a chunk of ham and two apples out of the fridge and take them to the base of the waterfall. Burr comes out of hiding and I tell her that I’ve shouted at Father. I’ve come close to calling him—a drunk.

“But you didn’t,” she says, and her voice is flat. “Did you.”

At the first sign of shadows in the fields, we walk home and go up to our room, unchallenged. Leggings over psoriasis: like every other encounter with Father, this one is never mentioned. After we leave home, we say to each other. After we leave home if he so much as touches a drink in our presence,
we’ll tell him
.

But after we leave home, nothing changes. Except that Burr and I move away. Mother stays; they go on living together as if there’s no escape.

“He’s coming here,” I tell Burr. “They’re both coming for a visit. Only one night, and they’ll be staying at a hotel.”

“So he can drink without censorship,” she says, on the phone.

“Do you realize that this is the first trip they’ve taken away from home?”

Burr and I have distanced ourselves, put a hundred and thirty miles between us and our childhood home. We can visit, but we can also get back to the city quickly. I think of the old dirt road, dust rolling in over the fields and settling on the long grass. Greenly has stretched out to the country now. It has surrounded and encompassed the waterfall—now a picnic site—and our parents’ home, which is part of the town. I think of the cheese factory, shut down years ago. I think of Father’s stash underground. Is it still there? Who buys the whisky? We know, of course, that Father doesn’t drink the way he used to. Can’t. Indirectly, Mother has let us know this as his health has become worse and worse. She does all the driving now. The bus service has stopped; the roads are paved. And she, too, has retired.

Because Burr’s apartment is small and located on the outskirts of the city, we decide that it will be easier to have the family meal at my home. Burr’s family will stay overnight. “I’m not serving liquor,” I say. “One bottle of wine for the adults, and that will have to be shared. He can’t get drunk on that.”

Father brings his own. A large bottle of cheap red wine, which he sets at his feet under the table. Before dinner, he pulls two miniature whisky bottles from his shirt pocket, and drinks the contents of those.

Burr and I are mute. The children chat with their grandmother and, after dinner, go out to play. Our husbands have heard our stories over and over again, but they’re not entangled the way we are, in our past. No one interferes with Father, who stays aloof and sinks into silence at his end of the table.