Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(22)

I knew that it was at best ten thirty. Still, though, there was no point in arguing. Down in the basement, I went to my room and he resumed his position in front of the TV. Within a few minutes he was snoring, and I crept back upstairs to join Amy for another twenty rounds.

It didn’t take long for our father to rally. “Did I not tell you to go to your room?”

What would strike me afterward was the innocence of it. If I had children and they stayed up late, singing a song about a bird, I believe I would find it charming. I knew I had those two for a reason, I think I’d say to myself. I might go so far as to secretly record them and submit the tape in a My Kids Are Cuter Than Yours competition. My dad, by contrast, clearly didn’t see it that way, which was strange to me. It’s not like we were ruining his TV reception. He couldn’t even hear us from that distance, so what did he have to complain about? “All right, sonny, I’m giving you ten seconds. One. Two…”

I guess what he resented was being dismissed. Had our mother told us to shut up, we’d probably have done it. He, on the other hand, sitting around in his underpants—it just didn’t seem that important.

At the count of six I pushed back the covers. “I’m going,” I spat, and once again I followed my father downstairs.

Ten minutes later, I was back. Amy cleared a space for me, and we picked up where we had left off. “Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! Gay your life must be.”

Actually, maybe it was that last bit that bothered him. An eleven-year-old boy in bed with his sister, not just singing about a bird but doing it as best he could, rocking back and forth and imagining himself onstage, possibly wearing a cape and performing before a multitude.

The third time he came into the room, our father was a wild man. Even worse, he was wielding a prop, the dreaded fraternity paddle. It looked like a beaver’s tail made out of wood. In my memory, there were Greek letters burned into one side, and crowded around them were the signatures of other Beta Epsilons, men we’d never met, with old-fashioned nicknames like Lefty and Slivers—names, to me, as synonymous with misfortune as Smith & Wesson. Our father didn’t bring out the paddle very often, but when he did, he always used it.

“All right, you, let’s get this over with.” Amy knew that she had nothing to worry about. He was after me, the instigator, so she propped herself against the pillows, drawing up her legs as I scooted to the other side of the bed, then stood there, dancing from foot to foot. It was the worst possible strategy, as evasion only made him angrier. Still, who in his right mind would surrender to such a punishment?

He got me eventually, the first blows landing just beneath my knee caps. Then down I went, and he moved in on my upper thigh. Whap, whap, whap. And while it certainly hurt, I have to say that he didn’t go overboard. He never did. I asked him about it once, when I was around fourteen, and he chalked it up to a combination of common sense and remarkable self-control. “I know that if I don’t stop myself early I’ll kill you,” he said.

As always after a paddling, I returned to my room vowing never to talk to my father again. To hell with him, to hell with my mother, who’d done nothing to stop him, to hell with Amy for not taking a few licks herself, and to hell with the others, who were, by now, certainly whispering about it.

I didn’t have the analogy of the stovetop back then, but what I’d done was turn off the burner marked “family.” Then I’d locked my door and sat there simmering, knowing even then that without them, I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy—and how could that ever be enough? As a full-grown man it seems no different. Cut off your family, and how would you know who you are? Cut them off in order to gain success, and how could that success be measured? What would it possibly mean?

I thought of this as the kookaburra, finally full, swallowed his last strip of duck meat, and took off over the lake. Inside the restaurant, our first courses had arrived, and I watched through the window as Hugh and Pat considered their plates. I should have gone inside right then, but I needed another minute to take it all in and acknowledge, if only to myself, that I really did have it made. A storybook town on the far side of the world, enough in my pocket to shout a fancy lunch, and the sound of that bird in the distant trees, laughing. Laughing.





Standing Still




For a while when I was twenty-three I worked at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh. The place wasn’t strictly vegetarian, but it leaned in that direction. “Natural,” people called it. My pay wasn’t much—three fifty an hour—but lunch was provided and I could occasionally take home leftovers: half-moons of stale pita bread, cups of beige tahini dressing. Lettuce. Twice a week the cook would roast turkeys, and after she had carved off the meat for sandwiches, I was allowed the carcasses, which I would carry back to my apartment and boil for soup. This I would eat with mayonnaise-smeared crackers or maybe an omelet filled with rice.

My average day at the restaurant started at eleven thirty and ended three hours later, earning me, after taxes, around forty dollars a week. My rent was a hundred fifty a month, and in order to pay it, I had to take on other part-time jobs: painting an apartment if I was lucky, or helping out on construction sites—work I got, and very meagerly, through word of mouth. I should have quit the restaurant and found something more substantial, but I told myself I needed the free time, needed it for my real work, my sculpture. This wasn’t completely unfounded. I’d been in a couple of juried shows, one at the state art museum. For a few hours every day I applied myself. I bundled sticks, I arranged things in cardboard boxes. I typed cryptic notes onto index cards and suspended them from my ceiling.