“I skinned it.”
Dad slowly removed his reading glasses. He placed them delicately on the table next to him.
“We’re through here,” he said.
“What?”
“Finito. Kaput. I’ve had enough of the deceit. I’ll tolerate it no longer.”
“What are you talking about?”
He stared at me, his face calm as the Dead Sea.
“Your fabricated Study Group,” he said. “The flagrant bravado you’ve cultivated when it comes to lying, which, to be frank, is more than a little pedestrian in its execution. My dear, Ulysses is an implausible choice for a study group in a secondary institution, however academically progressive. I think you might have done better with Dickens.” He shrugged. “Austen perhaps. But as you’re standing there in stunned silence, I’ll go on. The returning at all hours. The running around town like a hairless stray dog. The alcoholic binges, which, granted, I have no proof of, but can infer with little difficulty from the innumerable tales of America’s wayward youths saturating the airwaves and those unattractive caves around your eyes. I have said little, every time you so eagerly ran out of that door resembling a Cocoa Puff, wearing what the freethinking world would unanimously identify as a piece of Kleenex, because I assumed—unwisely it seems — that given the advanced degree of your education, you’d eventually come to the realization at the end of this hootchy-cootchy-with-the-ho-dawgs game, that these friends of yours, these puppy fats with whom you choose to pal around, are a waste of time, their thoughts about themselves and the world, stale. Instead, you seem to be suffering from a severe case of blindness. And poor judgment. I have to step in for your sake.”
“Dad—”
He shook his head. “I’ve accepted a position at the University of Wyoming for next term. A town called Fort Peck. One of the best salaries I’ve seen in years. After your final exams next week, we’ll orchestrate the move. You can call Harvard Admissions on Monday and notify them of the change of address.”
“What?”
“You heard me quite well.”
“Y — you can’t do this.” It came out a shrill, quivering whine. And it’s embarrassing to admit, but I was trying not to cry.
“And that is precisely my point. If we’d had this conversation a mere three or four months ago you would have recognized this as an opportunity to quote Hamlet. ‘O! that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.’ No, this town seems to have affected you like television on Americans. It’s turned you into a side order of sauerkraut.”
“I won’t go.”
Thoughtfully, he twisted the cap on his ink pen. “My dear, I understand in full the melodrama that is about to transpire. After you inform me you’re running away to go live at the Dairy Queen, you’ll go to your room, sob into your pillow that lahf ain’t fair, throw things — I suggest socks; we’re renting — tomorrow you’ll refuse to speak to me, a week from today you’ll have fallen into a pattern of one-word replies and amongst your Peter Pan playas you’ll refer to me as the Red Mafia, one whose life’s sole intent is to reduce to rubble your every chance at happiness. This pattern of behavior will doubtlessly continue until we blow this here town, and after three days in Fort Peck, you’ll be speaking again, albeit between eye rolls and grimaces. And in a year, you’ll thank me. Tell me it was the best thing I ever did. I thought by having you read The Annals of Time we’d circumvented such sludge. Scio me nihil scire. But if you still insist on putting both of us through this tedium, I suggest you get the ball rolling. I have a lecture to write on the Cold War and fourteen research papers to grade, each penned by a student with no concept of irony.”
He sat there, his face burnt-tan and brutal in the gold lamplight, supremely arrogant and unapologetic (see “Picasso enjoying the fine weather in the South of France,” Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 210). He was waiting for me to retire, retreat, as if I were one of his limp-jawed students who’d shown up during Office Hours, interrupting his research to pose some crackpot question about right and wrong.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would have done) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled, soul-ripped Ahhhhhhhhh! the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.
“I–I’m not leaving,” I said again. “You go. Go back to the Congo.”
He gave no indication he’d even heard me, because his cherished lecture on the ABCs of Reaganism had already snagged his attention. His head was down, glasses returned to the end of his nose, an implacable smile. I tried to think of something to say, something huge and thrilling — a hypothesis of some kind, an obscure quotation that would knock him off his seat, turn his eyes to quarters. But as so often happens when one is thinking and feeling in the commotion of the present moment, I couldn’t think of a thing. All I could do was stand with my arms at my sides, arms that felt like chicken wings.
The next few moments transpired in a detached haze. I felt the same sensation convicted murderers saturated in inmate orange describe in detail when asked by a keen news reporter wearing crummy bronze makeup how he/she, so seemingly average a human being, came to brutally wring the life out of a certain harmless person. Such offenders speak, a little dizzily, of the lonely clarity that settled over them on that fateful day, light as a swooping cotton sheet, an awake anesthesia that permitted them for the first time in their quiet lives to ignore Prudence and Discretion, to give Good Sense the cold shoulder, to snub Self-Preservation and look right through Second Thoughts.
I walked out of the library, down the hall. I stepped outside, closing the front door behind me as softly as I could, so the Prince of Darkness didn’t hear. I stood for two or three minutes on the steps, staring at the barebones trees, the strict light from the windows quilting the lawn.
I began to run. It was awkward at first in Jefferson’s high heels, so I took them off, flung them over my shoulder. I hurried down the driveway and then down the street, past the empty cars and the flower beds cruddy with pinecones and dead flower stalks, past the potholes and mailboxes and the fallen branches grasping the street and the greenish puddles of light leaking from the streetlights.
Our house, 24 Armor Street, was buried in a densely forested section of Stockton known as Maple Grove. Though it wasn’t one of those Orwellian gated communities like Pearl Estates (where we lived in Flitch) with identical white houses lined up like post-orthodontics teeth and the entry gate an aging actress (shrill, rusty, temperamental), Maple Grove still boasted its own exclusive Town Hall, Police Force, Zip Code and its own Unfriendly Welcome Sign (“You are now entering the Township of Maple Grove, an elegant and private residential community”).
The fastest way out of the Grove was to cut directly south off our street, head into the woods and skulk through some twenty-two elegant and private backyards. I carefully made my way, hiccupping and crying at the same time, the houses noiseless and sedate, slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks. I crawled through a barricade of blue spruce, scrambled through a reef of pines, shimmied down a hill, until I was unceremoniously emptied out, like water from a gutter, onto Orlando Avenue, Stockton’s answer to the Sunset Strip.