Our father gets caught again, and people enjoy it. Kids at school whisper hints in the halls and lunchroom. The smart ones insult us during class, like in civics, when we study local government, or in English, when we read Shakespeare.
We are old enough to read the newspapers, but we would really rather not. So much is in the air, anyway: kickbacks, state commission. Misappropriated funds. Misconduct. Sexual. We try to shield ourselves. We don’t want to know about our father’s business, which must be bad as he resigned from public office, and must be humiliating because the day the news broke—two weeks ago yesterday—he moved into the basement and hasn’t come up since.
…
Our father now lives in a beanbag chair. We visit him carrying trays of food and then place them on the table we once used for coloring and art projects. He eats with plastic utensils from our play kitchen. It gets drafty in the basement, and sometimes we find him bundled up in coats we recognize from our dress-up bin.
We don’t stay long. It smells like wet carpet and old mushrooms. We don’t know how to help him, or even if we want to.
…
Once, at a Thanksgiving gala, a woman spit in our father’s face. It sprayed on his cheek and dripped onto his tuxedo. Security guards led the woman away shouting, and he dried his face with his handkerchief, folded it into a square, and said, “Not bad. A little salty.”
Dad has a loud, honking laugh. Sometimes we hear it now, traveling up from the basement, over the sounds of cartoons or the bells of the pinball machine, and it ricochets against the walls, following us from room to room.
“Must be nice,” our mother says, “to still have a sense of humor.”
…
Before, we belonged to a country club. Mom sat with friends by the pool, or in the tearoom, or at the patio bar. She planned events we weren’t invited to. Adults always asked if we knew how talented our mother was. Did we know how beautiful her parties were? What a fine hostess she was? We didn’t. We only heard her on the phone saying “yes” or “no” or threatening not to pay for things.
Our parents don’t have hobbies. Not like us. We play computer games and draw comics, and one of us—The Youngest—likes to set things on fire. Time is open and empty. All we do is wait. We pick fights with each other because small dramas keep us busy.
Yesterday, Dad beat our Super Mario record while Mom cleaned the house. She gathered everything with her monogram: pillowcases, button-downs, hand towels. She made a small pile in the backyard and gave The Youngest some matches.
…
Dad starts to complain about the beanbag chair. His sciatica flares. We find him an air mattress and a set of Mickey Mouse sheets. He begs for more food, and we bring him all the chips and juice boxes we can carry. Soon, it shows on his hips and belly. He is soft in ways we never expected. He moves slowly or not at all.
Mom is busier. She cuts our father out of every family photo and throws the severed heads down the laundry chute, so they scatter all over the basement. She catalogs her jewelry, recording values in a little brown book, telling us what we should pass on to our own children, and what we should sell.
She is twitchy and tense. Her voice sounds like an instrument tuned too tight. When the phone rings all day and all through the night, she tears it from the wall and throws it out the kitchen window.
…
Aunts and uncles visit with magazines and comic books, casseroles as stiff as their smiles. They make the rounds: first with Mom upstairs, then with Dad in the basement, finishing with us in the living room. They tilt their heads. They pat our shoulders and ask what we need. “Little Wild Man,” the uncles say, watching The Youngest fling encyclopedias off the shelves. The aunts run their fingers over surfaces, examining for dust, then offer us their housekeepers for an afternoon. What we say: “That’s nice, but no thank you.” What we mean: This mess is ours, now fuck off.
…
We cook, first because we have no choice, then because we start to like it. We don’t let The Youngest use knives, but he helps in other ways. He plans the menus and wheels the cart around the grocery store. We supervise as he runs the garbage disposal. We do worry about him. His need to destroy is nothing new—he was always knocking down Legos or tearing apart Play-Doh structures—but before, it wasn’t our problem.
We flip through our mother’s cookbooks, squinting at her handwriting in the margins. We follow each recipe carefully until we get better, and then we improvise. Canola oil instead of vegetable. Paprika instead of cayenne. Milk instead of heavy cream. We make small, but meaningful, changes, and this way, the recipes become ours. We feel powerful. Like we have cheated and gotten away with it.
Dad praises our food. He tells us he’s proud. We have waited a long time for this, but now, we wonder why. His breath smells like boiled eggs. He squeezes our shoulders too tight. He needs us, and, truthfully, it makes us a little sick.
…
The Youngest’s teacher leaves a message on the answering machine:
“Real behavioral problems,” she says. “He bites. He growls. I don’t think he’s learned a single thing all term.”
We’re annoyed—What are we supposed to do about it?—and, weirdly, a little encouraged—that there’s a person who cares enough to call, a person who hasn’t completely given up.
“I don’t want to leave this in a message,” she says, sighing, “but I don’t know what else to do. I think we should try another classroom. Or medication. Or both.”
She trails off, and we hit delete. The Youngest howls—either to celebrate or to let off steam. It’s hard to tell.
…
In our old life, our name meant something. It got us invited places. It told teachers how to think about us. It came with friends and activities. It helped us see into the future.
One night while watching TV, we notice a shit smell. It’s coming from The Youngest, who sits in the corner tearing up paper. We pull him close so we can sniff him. Like animals, we scan his body until we understand. It’s a problem of wiping.
“Disgusting,” we say.
“Absolutely foul.”
“Grow up,” we say. “Grow the fuck up.”
The Youngest punches his leg, hard, and that quiets us. He surveys our faces. He punches his other leg.
“Stop it,” we say. “What is wrong with you?”
He grabs a blanket from the couch before storming upstairs. Someone should stop him, tell him to stay. We should put on his shrill cartoons and let him sit close to the TV. But we don’t. We want to watch the dating show all our friends are watching—our old friends, who might change their minds about us at any time. Not that we can enjoy it. We are distracted by a question that won’t go away: Who will ever date us?
From the basement, we hear a buzzer and the groans of a game show. That horrible, honking laugh. Now, we let ourselves get angry. We let it really rip.
We hate our father. He’s an idiot, he’s a monster, he’s worthless, even more worthless than our mother, who is cold and unnatural, a drunk, a miserable human, and why did they have children anyway, did they have a single good reason, did they have any real desire, or did they just need a few bodies for the Christmas card?
This kind of thing does lift our spirits for a while. Our anger is a feast, a bottomless buffet. It helps us forget—until the lights are out and our eyes are closed—how The Youngest had looked before he fled. His pinched, wounded face. How small he seemed, dragging his blanket behind him.
Nights are difficult. In the morning, some hope will return. We’ll dress and eat breakfast and wonder what the day will bring. But night. At night, our lives feel long ahead of us, promising only more disaster. At night, we stare at ceiling fans, fluffy with dust, and feel too exhausted to sleep. We wait impatiently for morning, when our badness will have the hazy, confusing quality of a dream.
…
The change is small at first. A shift in the air. A new vibration.
Dad goes to sleep late, talking on the phone all evening.
He demands a number of newspapers.
He spends mornings on a pool chair, jotting notes on a legal pad.
Our parents eat dinner with us, twirling their spaghetti without looking at it, their heads bent toward each other, plotting.
“It’s a step down,” Dad says. “Five steps down.”
Mom stares at the corner of the ceiling. “And?”
“And it’s still a risk.”
Mom places her fork on the table, and it clangs against her plate. Has she eaten a single bite? The pile of spaghetti towers high.
That night, Dad moves into a guestroom upstairs. Mom cleans his suits.
…
People visit. Women who used to pick our clothes for special events, men who ruffled our hair too hard. Dad calls them The Loyalists, and when they’re around, he seems more like himself, leaning all the way back in chairs, rattling the cubes in his iced tea.
The Loyalists linger in all the corners of our house, shuffling papers and punching keyboards. They leave coffee mugs in every room and ash their cigarettes on newspapers. Mom delivers glasses of water and trays of whatever food she can find—crackers and tuna fish, peanut butter and celery, orange slices and cubes of melon—all the things we buy for ourselves.
“Just making myself useful,” she says, shuffling out of rooms as quickly as she entered them. She looks different these days. Brighter, more alert. It takes us a while to realize why. It is the first time in months we’ve seen her with makeup. Her face is thinner than it used to be, the angles more severe, but her eyes have their old shine, and her lipstick is a nice cotton candy pink, and her perfume is in the air again, hanging around the edges of every room. It’s a strong, strange scent, like smoky fruit. Like an orange blossom set on fire. The Youngest holds his nose against her forearm to inhale.
“Knock it off,” she says, between clenched teeth, almost as if she were smiling.
…
One night, our parents try to get The Youngest to bathe. He doesn’t make it easy. They chase him around the house bribing him with treats and threatening him with punishment. But he is too fast and too clever.
We fold our arms and watch them struggle. In some ways, we’re proud of The Youngest. He’s dirty and difficult to be around, but we admire his commitment. He’ll never let them win.
These last few weeks, our parents put the house back in order. They replaced all the damaged items, steam cleaned the couches, and bagged up leaves in the yard. It’s not so easy with people.
Eventually, Dad catches him, pinning his arms back to drag him down the hall. The Youngest cries out, and we know it hurts. We want to help him—to kick our father behind the knees or slap the shampoo out of our mother’s hands—but we are tired and weak, afraid of getting in trouble, afraid of being invisible, afraid of mostly everything, and we flatten against the wall as they pass.
…
We feature prominently in the campaign, of course. In photos, we wear jeans and white t-shirts, and Dad grows a careful beard. The Loyalists give him jokes to practice. They force Mom into a pair of sneakers.
“What about a dog?” one suggests. “Some kind of retriever?”
“They’ll kill it,” someone says. “Or it’ll kill them.”
And that’s the end of that.
We’re skeptical this strategy will work—Family Man Forgiven!—but people seem to buy it. At school, teachers offer extra credit to boost our sagging GPAs. We’re let back into the country club, where we spend long hours on the indoor tennis courts. It surprises us how much we missed it. Not just the little things—the smell of the air conditioner at full blast, the cheerful sound of squeaking shoes—but especially our coaches—Tom, Bill, Mike, and Keith—who give us special nicknames and tease us across the net, who study our smallest movements—the speed of the split step, the tension on the grip, the height of the toss—and finally, we feel visible. Finally, we make some sense again, and we don’t even care that they call us by different names or that they do this for every kid who pays for private lessons, we don’t care one bit, we’re happy to play along, we’ll take whatever we can get.
…
Our father’s old suits are tight. He spends entire evenings in front of the mirror, narrowing his eyes and nodding his head. There are so many smiles to practice: the wry and knowing one, the smirky non-smile, the all-out-toothy grin.
It’s hard to balance the things we feel. We would like to snip every single one of his ties. Or take a shoe to his mirror and watch the whole thing shatter.
But things are easier now. The house feels better with more people in it, like someone has pried open a long-stuck window. The Loyalists are annoying—the way they make everything into a crisis, their certainty on every subject—but we like the smell of coffee, the sound of pens scratching. We like being called “kiddo” and “honey.” We like having something to look forward to, a reason to plod ahead. There’s an event at the end of this, the big drama that folds us all in: an election, only a month away.
When Dad asks for advice about a haircut, Mom holds his hair at different lengths and angles. We study them. We have questions we can’t ask. Do our parents love each other? Does it matter?
…
The Youngest is unpopular at the club. He has no respect for our coaches or the game, and he doesn’t follow even the simplest rules, like the lines on the court or not touching the net.
“We don’t know him,” we say when he throws a ball hopper across the court.
“We don’t know him,” we say, hoping a little sarcasm is enough.
“You’re not funny,” we say after class, ripping the smoothie out of his hand. He whines and paws at it, but we hold the cup high over his head, well out of reach, covering for each other as we drain it of every last sip.
…
Our friends:
“Do you know the comp assignment?” “Is the test next week?” “Mrs. Paley is such a bitch.” “Jason is such a dick.” “You’re so skinny.” “Too bad you didn’t play this year, we’re probably going to state.” “I saw your commercial.” “Can I copy your worksheet?” “Can I have a piece of paper?” “My dad said your dad could win.” “Can I get a ride?” “Can I borrow your notes?”
When we respond, the words feel strange. They don’t seem to land. Sometimes, our friends don’t react, and it’s like we’ve said nothing at all. Which is for the best because we regret what we’ve said anyway.
At home, we replay these moments, finding all the right words. We’ll be ready next time. We will talk our way back. And everyone will hear.
…
Our mother only smokes when she is nervous or drunk. Now, she could be either. She wears a cream-colored silk shirt, and every few moments, wipes away imaginary ash. Her leg spasms. Her cheeks are red from wine.
We have seen our father on TV before. It always feels wrong—like seeing a mouse in the kitchen or a teacher outside of school—but now, it feels especially wrong. His eyes are shifty and unfocused. It looks like his face has slipped a few inches to the side.
“Thank you, everyone,” he says, too loud and too slow. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here.”
We have never seen him this nervous, and we are surprised by how uncomfortable we feel. We must have wanted it to go easy for him. Or if he was going to suffer, maybe we just didn’t want to see it.
“I’ve had the last few months to reflect. And to be with my family during what has been an extraordinarily difficult time.”
My Family. Here we go. Mom stubs out a half-smoked cigarette. The Youngest flips open a Swiss Army Knife to scratch lines into the floor.
“Look,” our father says. “I’ve made mistakes. Not what I’ve been accused of, but I’ve made mistakes. And I need to apologize. To my family and to all of you.”
He’s in the groove now, his shoulders relaxed, his eyes staring ahead, directly at us. We’ve been holding our breath, but we release it now, warmth spreading through our chests. Our mother rests her hand on The Youngest’s shoulder. Our father keeps talking but we don’t hear it. Her elegant hand, his tiny shoulder. How badly we would like her hand on our shoulders. How long we’ve pretended not to care. How we can actually feel it now, the soft, reassuring weight of her hand. How long we have waited for our father to sound like this, to speak and make everything normal again. How even if the words are ridiculous, all of this planned and debated and rehearsed, he is still our father, and we are still his children, and we once rested our heads against him before falling asleep, and if his voice reaches us here, in this cracked open spot in the center of our chests, then maybe that makes it all real, maybe that makes it true.
“I promise,” our father begins, but there’s a commotion. The crowd shifts and groans.
An object flies from the audience in a slow arc, soaring and spinning until it finally reaches the stage where it hits our father directly in the temple. There’s a collective gasp, followed by a long silence. Dad looks dazed. He bends down, out of sight for a moment, before popping back into view. He holds the object in his hands: a hot dog.
The crowd is uproarious. The noise has so many parts to it—people shouting and laughing at different intervals—and the sounds climb over each other, endless. Dad’s smile widens, as if he’s in on the joke, his face now glistening with sweat, and the sight is so awful, so physically painful, that when someone finally switches off the TV, the cool black screen is a bodily relief.
Mom hangs her head, letting it fall into her open palms. She rests there for a few minutes. When she eventually sits up, her face is pale, but she is weakly smiling. She lights a cigarette. The room is quiet except for the sound of her heavy breathing, the crackle of burning paper.
She points to the box of cookies on the coffee table and waits until one of us hands it over. “Thank you,” she says sharply. She eats three cookies, and then dusts the crumbs from her hands.
“These used to be better,” she says. “Did they change something?”
We shrug.
After she leaves, we pass the box around. We each take a cookie, except for The Youngest, who takes a sleeve. We chew thoughtfully.
“Taste the same to me,” The Youngest says, chocolate at the corner of his lips.
But we wonder. We aren’t so sure. Now, we notice an orange flavor, a slight chemical bitterness. Now, we are having trouble remembering—what were they like before?
…
We have a bonfire. We let The Youngest take charge, and he collects newspapers from the house to use as kindling. We grab our mother’s little brown books and legal pads from our father’s desk. We add wood from the garage to really get it going.
For a few hours, we understand The Youngest. Fire is beautiful and scary. We stand close to it, feeling our skin struggle between hot and cold. We watch each other sweat. The glow distorts our bodies—makes us look taller, less like ourselves.
“That fire is too big,” Mom calls from the patio. It’s dark now, and we only see her outline, the bobbing light of her cigarette.
Maybe she’s right, but who’s to say. We ignore her. The Youngest is happy and this is something we can give him. He tends to the fire lovingly, like a pet.
The Youngest is good at starting fires and even better at feeding them. But does he know how to end them? We could teach him. We could unwind the hose, fill up a bucket. Extinguish every last ember, stir the ashes until our eyes itch with smoke. We could work carefully. Do the job right.
Or we could walk back to the house, dewy grass tickling our ankles, and leave it for someone else to clean up.