It had been a school night for me, another work night for my stepfather Lenny; he’d gone to the Kozy, or maybe the Townhouse, again. Most times he’d stumble in after last call, lurching right past my room, and pay me no notice, no reason to stop by the bedroom just off the living room. On this night, he didn’t go on up to bed with my mother. He came back for me.
“Get up and get out here.”
I stood in my underwear, squinting from the backlight of the kitchen ceiling fixture that hovered over his bobbing head like a dingy halo. His raggedy body swayed and the noxious fumes of rum and Coke clouded the space around us. I hadn’t flushed the toilet, or so he said. Yellow water. I said I thought I had, but if I hadn’t, I was sorry. I was tired, I had a test in Washington state history the next day, and could I go to bed?
“Do you think it’s funny?” he slurred. A fist—surprisingly fast, considering the difficulty he’d been having just standing upright—shot from his side and into my face, sending me twirling, spinning to the floor. It might have been a beautifully acrobatic maneuver, slightly funny if it hadn’t hurt so badly. With everything to run from and nowhere to run to, I hid behind the holly bush that shielded our dining-room window from that of the Perkins’s next door.
* * *
“I think I see it, Papa.” My son pushed past me and crawled deeper into the underbrush. Scraping away the layer of dead leaves that was the thorny carpet beneath us, he uncovered an egg-shaped rock. “Darn,” he said. “I thought it was a baseball.”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “It’s in here somewhere; we’ll find it.”
* * *
“Warren?” My mother’s voice had called, shaky and pleading. “Are you there? It’s okay to come in.” Lenny had gone to bed, done with all of it. My mother met me at the door, her cheek puffed and darkening, an empty space where a front tooth should have been. “It’s going to be fine.”
He was gone for a couple days after that, sent away by Mom. No man was going to hit her; she’d said this many times before and I believed her. But Lenny was like a tenacious rat, chased out but somehow squeezing his bedraggled body back into the house, and this time was no different. My mother and he had worked something out, had some private conversation of which I was to be no part. As far as anyone else was concerned, my mother had been in a car accident. I’d gotten hit in the mouth by a baseball, a wild overthrow during an otherwise innocent game of catch. Clearly, nothing had happened.
In this family, I was reminded, nothing ever happens.
CHAPTER 3
When I was young, prepubescent, there was no doubt that I looked like my mother. Strangers would remark as we walked into the room, “Oh, I can see he’s your son.” The same fullness of the face, the pale blue eyes, the thickness and light brown shading of our hair gave us away in an instant. Physical traits of movement had also carried over, if only by habit. When my mother walked she favored her right side slightly; an earlier injury had caused a tiny difference in the lengths of her legs. Curiously, I had also developed this gait, a small tilt to one side as I walked, and I’d grown accustomed to people asking me if I’d hurt myself.
But as time went on, shades of my father began to creep through. Snapshots taken at certain angles highlight the shape of my nose, the slightness of my chin. My half-cocked grin and gentle tilt of the head accentuate the fact that, like it or not, I am my father’s son, and when I hear my mother gasp and see her look guiltily away for having done so, I know that she sees it too. Visits to the barbershop would end with a carpet of hair that was increasingly white and as I neared my fortieth birthday, I found myself torn between feelings of desperation and satisfied resolve for having predicted things so correctly. “By the time I’m forty,” I’d begun saying as the first gray strands appeared on my twenty-year-old head, “my hair will be completely white.” My mother had begun dying her hair at nineteen and her father had been completely gray by his fourth decade. I accepted it then and I accept it now, just as I’ve come to terms with my chin, my nose, the shape of my head. That’s the thing about DNA: gifts handed down are given outside one’s control. Short of surgery and chemicals, we are more or less forced to grow within the confines of what nature has mapped for us.
Still, there are moments as I pass my reflection in a storefront window, as I stare back at myself from the mirror while running the razor along the line of my beard, that I fight the twinge of self-loathing shooting through me. A slight movement of the head, a forced furrow of the brow—anything to chase away the image of my father looking back at me.
When asked where they see themselves as grown-ups, my young sons often speak with uncertain hesitation. The idea of being an adult, of shouldering the responsibilities of manhood, of parenthood, is so far removed from the everyday tasks they face as rambunctious boys that the concept is completely foreign to them. I can empathize. As a young boy, I struggled with the image of myself as the adult, the parent, the man. I’d never pictured myself as a copy of either of my parents, neither in appearance nor profession. Most of the time, I’d see myself as a cross between Mike Brady, patriarch of The Brady Bunch, and the dad from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. I’d have dark hair, chiseled features, a forest green split-level house, and infinite patience and humor with my children. I still strive for that—the patience part, that is. It’s hard to be a patient parent to three active boys. I’m long over the desire for a split-level and the rest is beyond hope. The typical stresses of everyday life—work, time, and unmet goals—too often incite me to act on raw impulses rather than foresight and I sometimes find it easier to snap an intimidating retort than to think ahead and construct a thoughtful, proactive response. My sons’ energy, tenaciousness, and drive for natural discovery challenge me as a parent more often than I’m comfortable admitting; after all, I’m a schoolteacher and in the classroom I’m a model of control and reason. So I find it mysterious and ironic that when my youngest son throws a tantrum over an issue I find ridiculous, I might react by stomping toward him, my teeth and hands clenched, my eyes blazing. It’s during those moments that I am my father, and this terrifies me. I force my hands to my sides and when I have the impulse to throw a curt comment, to shame my son into behaving more appropriately, I am my stepfather and that disgusts me beyond imagination. I bite my tongue, take a breath, and try with all my soul to help my child learn without fear. It’s these inherited traits, these toxic hand-me-downs planted in me that I know I must control and shape; I must break the pattern that has been set before me.
It seems like I’ve forever sought to redefine myself behind the shadows of the men who have tried to raise me. For most of my life, I’ve been able to do this with relative ease; simply step outside of the path ahead of me. Wearing a hardhat, dragging on a Marlboro, laying pipe, or running a saw never much appealed to me in my youth and that was fine for the most part. It kept me a safe distance from the less-than-healthy men in my life and allowed me the chance to imagine my own adulthood as a completely open plain.
So what happens when a man finds himself planted in the role in which the only models he has ever had are men whose influence he has spent his whole life trying to escape? It’s not enough to simply say, “I’ll do the opposite of what they did.” My son, rescued from the emptiness of an orphanage, is counting on me to be all that I’d ever wished for in a father and I’m discovering that it’s not so easy to simply “do the opposite” of what has been done to me. It’s horrifying to own, but the spores of my forefathers are in the soil that feeds me, like a dormant fungus lying in wait, and they keep appearing, breaking through in spite of what my heart and my memory are telling me.
So what do I do? Bury my father and stepfather and all that they represent completely? Pick and choose through my memories, taking only the scenes that don’t cause my stomach to tighten with anxiety? Try to construct a