Calypso(33)

“So how are you doing?” my father asked. “How’s your health?”

This was possibly the tenth time in two days that he’d asked me this question. “Fine.”

“You feeling pretty good?”

“I guess.”

I can see him doing the same thing I am, trying to make some sort of connection. We’re like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other’s hands and missing every time. Meanwhile the stage crew has gathered below us and begun to roll up the safety net.

“Thank you for dinner last night,” my father said. “That was awfully generous of you.”

“It was my pleasure.” I returned my attention to the letter I was writing and wondered who might be the first to read it. Someone must surely open the envelopes before they get to the inmates, searching for money and easy-to-hide drugs. By the time I turned back to my father, he was snoring, which was for the best, probably.

Growing up, I never got the sense that he particularly liked me. I didn’t feel completely unloved—if the house were on fire he would have dragged me out, though it would have been after he rescued everyone else. It could have been worse—at least I had my mother—but as a child it really bothered me. What can I do to make him like me? I used to wonder. The harder I tried to mold myself into the sort of son I thought he wanted, the more contemptuous he became, and so eventually I quit trying and founded the opposition party, which I still lead to this day. Whatever he’s for, I’m against. Almost.

Watching my father asleep on my bed, I thought again of the pastel family portrait I’d ruined. If that were an isolated incident I might have a right to my self-pity, but if I’m honest about it, I wouldn’t have liked my childhood self either. I regularly lied, and stole money from him. If there was silence in the car, I’d break it by making one of my sisters cry. “Dad, David keeps saying I’m pregnant and that the baby will have a cat’s body and be born dead.”

“I never—”

“Did too.”

“Did not, liar.”

For a while, when I was eleven or so, I used to drop the empty cardboard toilet rolls into the john. They would take a while to disappear, five or six flushes usually, but I was in no hurry.

The first three times the toilet clogged, my father went at it with the plunger, and that did the trick. Then, for some reason, the plunger wasn’t enough. He ordered me to get his toolbox and to stand in the open doorway, ready to hand him whatever he called for. After draining the tank and turning off the water supply, he used his wrench on the lug nuts and unmoored the toilet from the floor, exposing a foul, corroded, fist-size hole that stunk up the entire house. I held my breath and watched as he reached down into it and withdrew part of the roll I had flushed a few hours earlier. “Who in the hell…?”

That night there was a big lecture at the dinner table. “When I get my hands on whoever’s doing this…”

He didn’t even use a glove, I thought, watching as he took a piece of bread from the wicker basket we had.

A few nights later, I flushed another empty roll down the john, which clogged again. Out came the plunger, the tools, orders to stand in the doorway. The toilet was lifted off the floor, and as my father cursed and rolled up his sleeves, I must have laughed or at least smiled in some telltale way. “You,” he growled, looking up at me from his kneeling position on the floor, “you’re the one who’s doing this?”

“Me?”

“Don’t even try to talk your way out of it.”

I offered some lame denial: “I hardly ever even go to the bathroom. You should ask Amy or Tiffany. They’re the ones—”

“You are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this toilet again.”

As I backed away, he pounced. Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family’s asshole.

And there it has been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.

What I remember more vividly than the stench, and the sight of my hand when I pulled it out of that terrible pipe, was how strong my father was. I’d put up the fight of my life but might as well have been a doll, the way he wrenched apart my folded arms and took me by the wrist. I couldn’t imagine being that powerful. He’s slighter now, of course. Shorter by a few inches and downright skinny—arms and legs no thicker than the bones beneath them. How was I ever afraid of this person? I wondered now, watching his narrow chest as it rose and fell.

“David!” he used to shout from the top of the stairs. “Get up here!”

“What did I do?” I’d call from my room, certain he’d found me out for something. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t me.”

“Get up here, now!”

Half the time it would be trouble—he’d discovered the branches ripped off the tree he’d just planted, or the football he gave me melted on the hibachi—but just as likely he’d be in the living room and music would be playing. It was always jazz, most often something on the radio. My father’s most prized possession was his stereo system, which he housed in a glass-doored cabinet: turntable, amplifier, fancy tape deck, all of it top-of-the-line and off-limits to the rest of us.