Page 62 - WTP VOl. X #4

What We Hold On to (continued from page 48) page, the page onto the world.
When I lift up the blue-lined paper the words stay on the table. They mar the smooth surface like the ring
a stone leaves when it drops into a lake. In the bright light the words glimmer. My mother yells at me for do- ing this, leaving my trace, ruining the glossy surface.
~
At night, the low voices of my parents are getting louder like sharp pieces of glass cutting air. I have nightmares about fire, everything engulfed in white heat. I am afraid when my parents go out for dinner that they won’t come back. Daddy is angry all the time now, I can tell from the way he snaps drawers shut with a mean look on his face. He tells me to be quiet while he watches the football game. I imagine smoke hovering over the picture frame of Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World hanging over the living room fireplace. I believe that girl has useless legs. She can’t struggle up the hill toward the faraway house.
~
Sometimes my sister and I wrestle like small animals, rolling and clawing until one of us is mildly hurt and weeping. My mother was an only child and doesn’t know how it is to be connected through skin and bone like this. She yanks me over to my bedroom and says something about finding something constructive to do until we can play together again. My mother says to my “aunt” (who is really her best friend) on the phone in the kitchen, “I can’t take the stress with him and the girls right now.” My sister and I fight over everything, how I breathe, who gets to play with the troll house, even the wishbone from chicken. We have my mother wash it, cleaning meat from the white, smooth remains until only some beige strands and gristle are left. She holds it by the flat curved top and scrubs it under the faucet. But we have to wait for it to dry, to sit on the windowsill in the next morning’s light while we ache to split it. And then, perhaps a few nights later, my mother brings it down for us. I didn’t think then that we were fighting about sides, about our parents. We’d just wrap our small fingers, mine with the nails bitten, and pull. Pull as if it was the most important thing for one of us to get the big- ger part.
~
Daddy and I are having a pizza-eating contest to see who can eat more. I eat four pieces, feeling a little sick, and nobody stops me. He still wins. He high fives
me and then asks me to scratch his back while we watch TV in the master bedroom.
My sister finds some wires from where the phone people were working in the street. She plays with them until Daddy asks her where she found them. My mother comes into my room later.
“He thinks I’m bugging the house,” she says. “Don’t bring things in like this, ok?”
~
Daddy is not working, but my mother says she won’t move again, that she likes it here and we are stay-
ing. I overhear her talking on the phone and know there is a question about his hitting a boss. She says something about valium and hiding it. Some nights we have a babysitter from up the street, so they can go see a doctor together. My mother is sleeping in Missy’s room most of the time now because she has trouble breathing from her allergies, and she says she doesn’t want to wake Daddy up. One night he comes home and there is throw-up on his shirt. He tells us he feels terrible. I want to go help him. My mother rolls her eyes and says, “Don’t feel bad for him. He was drinking while taking the medicine he needs.” My father slams the door to the master bedroom, “He’s sick in the head,” my mother explains, “and the doc- tor we see told me we can’t do anything about that.”
For weeks, he lies in the bed in a big mountain of sheets and doesn’t get up in the morning or even after my sister and I come home from school. He has a golf club next to him, and sometimes he smacks it on the bed. Sometimes he opens his eyes when I scurry past him to go to the master bathroom, and I see his hand
55