Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(4)

“But can’t I just—”

“You want an after-work snack, get a job,” he said, forgetting, I guess, that I was eleven.

“So who’s this kid who called your mother a bitch?” he asked. “Give me his name so I can go talk to him.”

I said I didn’t know, and he looked at me with disappointment, the way you might at anyone who was woefully unconnected. “Well, can’t you at least guess?”

“Beats me.” No one on our street had reason to hate my mother. It was likely someone just road testing his new curse word—a little late too, as our end of the block had discovered it months earlier. “It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.’”

The day that someone called my mother a bitch was not remarkable. My father returned from work, like always. He had his drink and his fancy snack. When my mother announced dinner, he took off his jacket, stepped out of his trousers, and took his seat alongside the rest of us. From the tabletop up, he was all business casual—the ironed shirt, the loosened tie—but from there on down it was just briefs and bare legs. “So I understand from your mother that someone called her a not very nice word this afternoon,” he said, turning to my older sister. “You were in the car with her. Any idea who it was?”

Lisa speculated that it was Tommy Reimer, not because she got a clear look at him but because it happened near his house.

“Tommy Reimer, huh?” My father looked across the table to my mother. “Isn’t that one of Arthur’s boys?”

“Oh, Lou, let it go,” my mother said.

“What do you mean, let it go? A kid who uses language like that has got a problem, and I’m going to see that it gets fixed.”

“Maybe I misunderstood him,” my mother said. “Or maybe he thought I was someone else. That’s it, most likely.”

“I’ll be sure to clear that up when I talk to him,” my father said, his cue that the subject was closed and that now we would move on to something else. When her children were grown and gone from the house, my mother would eat late, often by herself in front of the TV, hours after she had served our father, but back then, like most every other family on our street, we had dinner at six. On this particular night the sun was still out. It was early September, and though I don’t remember what we were eating, I can clearly recall cringing at the sound of the doorbell.

Oh God, I thought, as did everyone else at the table. For when it was dinnertime and someone came calling, it was always our father who insisted on answering the door and on telling whoever it was, very firmly, that it was not a good idea to interrupt people while they were eating. It could be a woman from down the street or maybe one of our friends. It might be a Girl Scout selling cookies or a strange man with a petition, but when that door was flung open, everyone on the other side of it wore the same expression, a startled, quizzical look that translated, in that gentler, more polite time, to “Where are your pants, sir?”

Lisa had left school early that day. A classmate was supposed to drop off a homework assignment, and worried that it might be her, she jumped up and ran into the other room, calling, “That’s okay, I’ve got it.”

My father raised himself and then sat back down. “You tell whoever it is that we’re eating our supper, damn it.” He scowled at my mother. “Who the hell drops by at this hour?”

We all strained to hear who our visitor was, and when Lisa said, “Oh, hi, Tommy,” our father leapt up and ran to the door. By the time we got there, the boy, who was one grade behind me, was pinned against the redwood siding of our carport. My father had him by the neck, raised off the ground, and his little legs were flailing.

“Dad,” we called. “Dad, stop. That’s the wrong boy. You’re looking for Tommy Reimer, but this is Tommy Williams!”

“It’s who?” In his work shirt and underpants, he looked powerful but also cartoonish, like a bear dressed up for a job interview.

“Lou, for God’s sake, put that boy down,” our mother said.

My father lowered Tommy to the ground, where he doubled over and gasped for breath. He was a chubby kid, and his face, which was freckled and normally pale, was now the color of a valentine.

“Hey, son,” my father said, so sweet suddenly, so transparent. He put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You all right? Want some ice cream? How about some ice cream?”

“That’s okay,” Tommy croaked. “I think I’ll just go home.”

“Actually, no,” my father said, and he guided the boy through our open door. “We’d like you to stay for a while. Come on inside and join us.” He turned to me and lowered his voice. “Find some ice cream, damn it.”

If there’d been anything decent in the house, anything approaching real ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color of pus. It had been frozen for so long that even I, a child, was made to feel old by the price tag. “Thirty-five cents! You can’t get naught for that nowadays.”