“Sorry for me? Well, you can shove that one, Helena. With a goddamn sharp stick.”
Paulie blanched.
“Yes, Milo,” said my mother. “Sorry for you. Didn’t you know? Don’t you know that we all still feel sorry for you? That’s why we’re all still here. Why don’t you go find another one of those five-dollar little friends of yours and just get the hell out of our house.”
“You’re the little five-dollar whore around—”
Paulie’s boot hit the wall near his head.
When I stood, my father wheeled. “And you,” he said. “You should never have been born.”
“I feel sorry for you, Mom,” said my sister.
“Well, I feel sorry for her, too! Mother to a deadbeat like him.” He jabbed his finger at me. “Pissed away every goddamn talent I ever gave him.”
“Milo, get out of this house.”
“You get out. All three of you, get out! All three of you fucking ingrates!”
“Tell me, Dad,” said Paulie. “Did I piss away my talent?”
“What?” he said, without even turning. “No, you didn’t, Paulie. You never had it to begin with.”
When my mother swung the floor lamp, the cord yanked it from her hand, so that instead of smashing the wall, it leaped backward and wobbled against the baseboard. My father leaned over, picked it up, and threw it through the window. The pane thought for a moment; then was gone. Shatters covered the carpet. He stepped over and began stomping them. Paulie screamed.
My father reached through the empty window frame and lifted something in from the porch. When he turned, I saw my mother’s crowbar in his hands. Paulie launched herself against him, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” Dad lurched toward the wall, smacking the floor with it as he tried to shake her from his back. “I hate you! I hate you!”
“Milo,” said my mother evenly. “Put that thing down.”
“Fuck all of you.”
“Put it down.”
“Get her goddamn off me, then!”
“Hans,” said my mother.
“Paulie,” I said. “Perhaps—”
My mother grabbed for him.
When he swung it, I don’t believe he intended it to come anywhere near her, but by the time it cleared his shoulder, she was standing right next to him. I saw the dark flash and thought, This is how—
But she ducked, and it passed over her head. He shouted “Jesus, Helena!” and a spray of dust shot out from the wall.
“Oh my God,” said my mother. She straightened, trembling, and Paulie dropped from his back. “I hate you,” Paulie said. “I truly, truly hate you.”
The hook of the bar was still wedged into the plaster, and with a grunting lurch he twisted it free. But then he brought it to his shoulder and rammed it in again. The boards splintered, and a bright triangle of lake appeared. The next blow shook the house and opened a gap to the corner. He smashed again. The planks tore away like cardboard. I could see most of the dock now and our two boats tied together in the sun. Then the whole run of land to the water. Bernie was barking wildly. My father kept smashing. A quivering tangle of vines popped into the room. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he shouted. Paulie screamed, “Idiot!” He shouted, “Fuck you all!” Paulie screamed, “You crazy idiot!” He tore at the vines, then hooked the blade over the slats and pulled. When they ripped clean, he crashed backward onto the carpet, glass scattering all around him and the crowbar skittering away.
As I bent to pick it up, I heard my mother say, calmly, “Enough.”
When I turned around again, she’d dropped to the floor and was wrapping him in her arms.
“No!” Paulie shouted. “You can’t do that!”
“Quiet, Smallette.”
“You make me sick! You make me sick! He’s crazy, Mom!”
“Quiet now, Paulie,” I said. “Just, let’s be quiet.”
Then suddenly my sister calmed. She cocked her head and brought her hand to her mouth. On the floor, my mother had blanketed him with her body, the way she might have blanketed a child, leaning down over his chest and cupping his face in her hands. Under his harsh breathing, I realized that she was whispering to him. Paulie stood above them, ashen, and even Bernie had flattened himself against the rug, so that after a moment I was able to make out her words. Her lips were pressed close to his ear. “I love you,” she was saying. “I love you, Milo. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Disciplina in Civitatem
THAT WEEK, I waited for the apocalypse, for the universe to finally acknowledge the rent that had been torn in the fabric of Andret family life. But first one day, a partly cloudy one and mild, then the next, sunny and humid, floated peaceably by. My mother cleaned up the mess. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We spoke, though somewhat cautiously, when we passed one another on the paths. In the daytime, Mom went back to working on the clearing. Dad went off to his shed.
Today was Saturday, finally, and my father was washing the hallway rug in the lake. It seemed to me that this was his first acknowledgment, in any form, of what had happened. Mom and I were sitting together on the porch, watching him. From the end of the dock, he dipped it into the water, then lifted it, spread it onto the boards, and squeezed a bottle of soap over it.
I couldn’t imagine him ever apologizing: but this was close.
“Those things,” my mother said suddenly. “Those things I said. I want you to know that you had nothing to do with any of them. What I said about why I’m still here with your dad, for example. You must know how upset I was.”
“I do know, Mom.”
“I wish I’d never uttered a word of any of it. I wish none of us had.”
“I know that, too.”
“Of course you do. We were all crazy up there for a few minutes.” She set down her mug. “Except for you, I suppose. You kept your head better than the rest of us. Thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome. I guess.”
We turned to watch him again. He was leaning over the fabric, kneading the soap into foam, his fingers picking out what must have been the last bits of plaster in the weave.
“I think he’s a little better now,” she said. “I think he might be back to normal.”
I lifted my head and looked over the cove.
“What’s the matter?”
“Normal people don’t swing crowbars at their wives,” I said.
“He wasn’t swinging at me.”
“Then who was he swinging at?”
She looked down at him, then up at the woods. “He was swinging at that,” she said. She pointed. “At whatever’s going on in that shed up there.”
“Well, normal men don’t rip holes in their houses either, just because a proof isn’t going perfectly.” I pointed the other way, behind us at the cabin, where a man from the hardware store had nailed up a sheet of plywood the day before. “Or because they decide a job offer is some kind of insult.”
“Ordinary men don’t do what he does.”
“Please.”
“He goes in there every morning with no idea of what he’s going to find, Hans. He never knows if any of it will pay off. For him or for us.” She shook her head. “For you and Paulie, I’m talking about.”
Out on the dock, he pulled the rug back up onto the boards, rolled it, and began pressing out the water.
“That’s why he swung a crowbar at you?”
“He was mortified about that.”
“Mortified? And how about the stuff he said to Paulie?”