Love your child! Reese wants to shout through the window, although he suspects his words would go unheeded. Love requires a loss of control, of power, something the shouting father would never surrender. Nor would Roberta. If she felt herself coming loose she would grab a wrench and tighten her bolts. Reese has watched her with their children, always hoping to see a connection between mother and child, the sense that they form a whole. But Roberta pulls back. She cannot tolerate weakness. When her children falter, she doesn’t listen but urges them onward, imagining that this is positive reinforcement. Her unyielding positive attitude has immobilized his children. They fear nothing more than appearing to be “negative” like their father. They tell their mother only the good, and harbour the bad deep in their souls.
When Roberta banished him from the bedroom, he slept on the futon in the basement where Clara would join him for snuggles. The warmth of her, the solid trust of her body gave him strength to go on. Clara would mutter in her sleep, and occasionally wake from a nightmare that Reese would ask her to describe. Often they involved witches and monsters with green hair but sometimes the “dead” dream would recur. In Clara’s dreams her parents were dead. “We’re not dead,” Reese would assure her, holding her closer. “We’re not going to die.”
“You said nobody knows when anybody’s going to die.”
“That’s true. But I have a strong feeling we’re not going to die in the near future.”
Unconvinced, Clara would continue to whimper quietly, reminding him of her mother before she took anti-depressants.
Roberta would find them in the morning, groggy on the futon. “You’re a big girl, Clara. Big girls don’t sleep with their daddies.” Roberta’s sociopathic mother, whom she loathes, has nevertheless succeeded in programming her daughter into believing that sleeping with children is detrimental to their mental health.
The bus halts in traffic. Beside him, Reese observes a newspaper being read by a sweating man. The headline “Husband Found Guilty in Axe Killing” catches his interest. Between the sweating man’s thumbs Reese reads that a stay-at-home-father, who took care of his three children, including a severely disabled daughter, picked up an axe and hit his wife in the head twice, stuffed her body in the trunk of her car, then dropped off the vehicle at Blockbuster Video. They’d been arguing in the garage when she revealed that she’d been having an affair with her bowling partner and wanted a divorce. She said that she would take the boys and that he could keep the severely disabled daughter. She threw tools at him, hit him with a hockey stick, and kicked him in the groin. In court, the husband admitted that he’d killed her but insisted that it was not premeditated. But the jury had no time for this.
If the wife had axed the husband because he’d been throwing tools at her, hitting her with a hockey stick, and kicking her in the groin, would she have been found guilty of murder?
Photos of the axe murderer and his wife show them both in part profile, heavy-lidded, smiling, showing teeth. Their noses are similar, as are their ears. What can this mean? That they grew to resemble each other and in so doing nurtured already well-established self-hatred? Did the mirror-imaging foster mutual loathing to the point that they had to throw hockey sticks at each other? Reese has never thrown things at Roberta, but an acquaintance whose cottage they visited two summers ago greeted them with the words, “It’s happened.”
“What?” Reese asked, disliking the man because he’d been a boyfriend of Roberta’s once.
“The transformation,” the cottager said, laughing heartily. “You look identical.”
Reese did not want to believe this but feared it was true. He and Roberta went to the same optician, same hairdresser, ate the same organic foods, drank the same reverse-osmosis water, walked the same hypoallergenic dog. The transformation was inevitable.
He knows the day will come when his daughter, like his son, will not allow herself to be cuddled by him. He does not know what he will do on this day.
Why are there so few storybooks involving loving fathers? Why is it always Mummy bunny who finds baby bunny? Why is it always Mama bear who tucks in baby bear? Occasionally Papa is portrayed as Mama’s assistant, doing the dishes and cooking meatballs, but rarely is he doing the intricate work of soothing the day’s pains, rarely is Daddy doing the kissing and hugging.
Reese sniffs his hands. They still smell of vomit. His father has fallen off the toilet.
“He was trying to transfer himself to his wheelchair,” Reese’s mother explains, scuttling up the stairs.
It’s been some time since Reese has seen their bathroom. The grime coating its formerly shiny surfaces alarms him. He kneels and tries to shift the bulk of his father.
“Bloody hell,” Bernie responds while Reese’s mother frets in the hall.
“He never even wears underwear anymore,” she complains. “It’s disgusting. Naked from the waist down. All day he sits in that La-Z-Boy eating croissants and Campbell’s soup made with cream and he asks why he’s fat.”
“The soup’s not the same,” his father grumbles into the bath-mat. “The fuckers’ve changed the soup.”
Reese pulls the hall rug into the bathroom and tries to roll Bernie onto it. “I can’t do this by myself, Dad, you’re going to have to help me here.” His father stinks because he no longer washes. Congestive heart disease has caused neuropathy in his hands, which makes it impossible to grip, to turn taps, open shampoo bottles or toothpaste tubes, put on pants.
“It’s like living with a homeless person,” his mother says. “Spill some liquor on him and you’d think he was a homeless person.”
“They usually wear pants,” Reese says. He begins to drag the rug with his father on it into the hall.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Bernie demands.
“To the stair glider.” “He doesn’t even shave anymore,” Betsy says. “I say, ‘Use the electric one, what’s so hard about that?’ But he waits too long. You try to shave now with the electric one and you’ll break it.”
“Who said I was going to shave?”
“Easy for you to say, I have to look at you all day.” “Stay in your room. She only comes out for booze anyway.”
Reese, experiencing twinges in his lower back, drags his father by inches.
“Did you get me my Crispy Crunches?” Betsy asks.
“Yes.” Reese has begun to buy them in bulk. At the top of the stairs he lifts his father’s legs, swollen with edema, onto the glider. He can’t avoid seeing the penis, sagging and purple, meaningless.
How do you know Lainie? Kyrl Dendekker e-mailed.
We were lovers.
She never mentioned you.
“The superintendent wants to rent the parking space,” Betsy says, “and even has a buyer for the car, but do you think your father will sell it?”
“You can’t drive the car, Dad.”
“It’s worth three thousand.”
“What’s he offering?”
“Six hundred,” Betsy says, “which we could use right now what with all the cab fares to the hospital.”
His father farts. “It’s worth three thousand.”
“It’s an old car, Dad.”
“It’s a good car. American, you can get your legs in it.”
“Ford Escorts aren’t exactly hot properties these days.”
“I’m not taking a penny less