“You couldn’t have spent more than four hundred dollars on these,” she said, fingering each one critically. “You’re lying.” And she made this last statement with a kind of exuberant satisfaction, turning to fix him with her eyes.
“I’ve never told a lie,” my father said, and he looked angry, backing out of the kitchen. I pictured him then with George Washington’s white wig on his head, an ax in his hand and that expression on his face.
My father’s face was so unlike the face of Detective Scieziesciez, who looked sneaky in a calm, professional way, as if his sneakiness were sanctioned by the state. Detective Scieziesciez looked like a man who could pull the wool over your eyes for a long time—winking, calling you sweetheart, looking soulfully into your hungry eyes. He was a man of an entirely different order than my father—or, I thought, Phil.
A man.
Suddenly, I’d become aware of the line between men and men. Men with badges and hammers, and men who doodled all day on legal pads. Men who’d been to war, and men who’d studied accounting. And it was the former I found myself interested in. I found myself staring hard at jocks and cowboys on television—men with balls and helmets, or horses and whips, men who ate their dinners with their fists, always in a hurry, not two words for their women or their fans. After so many years of hearing and believing that men should be gentle, and sensitive, good listeners, wearers of slippers.
Late one night I watched a television show about some archaeologists who found a Mammoth Man frozen in a block of ice. The archaeologists were afraid the ice would melt, and Mammoth Man would step out of it alive. On television, they were panicked, but in our living room in Garden Heights, I felt giddy with possibilities. Under that ice, you could see he was wearing only a loincloth, and he was carrying a club. I could imagine the smell of him as he melted—hairy seaweed, filth and microbes, the wet dog smell of snow turning into mud.
“Teach Your Man How to Talk About His Feelings” the women’s magazines at the grocery store screamed at the check-out line, but why? I was tired of feelings being talked about. All this talk about feelings, it made children out of adults, adults out of children. Instead of men with their emotions, I started thinking about men with guns. Men in trenches. Hunters, and cops, and Vietnam vets. Men who kept their dangerous feelings to themselves.
I thought maybe Detective Scieziesciez was a Vietnam vet. Maybe he had flashbacks. Maybe he closed his eyes at night and saw whole villages burned up, his buddies blown to damp balloon bits by land mines. Maybe he carried all that with him when he walked down the street in Toledo. Unlike my father, unlike Phil, Detective Scieziesciez might not be safe. He might have committed atrocities in the name of democracy, killed children, raped women, just to protect places like Garden Heights, Ohio, so dull suburban people like us could have VCRs and TV dinners.
I thought of the first policeman I’d ever seen up close—Officer McCarthy—who’d come to our fifth-grade class to lecture us against taking drugs we’d never considered taking, never even heard of. I remembered the way that cop had stood, shrugging and armed, before us, cautioning us not to sniff things we had no idea we’d want, so desperately, to sniff—trying to imagine ourselves, in that classroom, as he chatted on and on about high and stoned and dead as a series of white kites above Ohio cut loose from the twine.
Seeing Officer McCarthy in his uniform had stirred something inside me as Detective Scieziesciez had stirred me that morning. Officer McCarthy, I thought, was the kind of father I wanted—the kind who wore a uniform and dodged bullets all day. The kind who could fix the broken chain on your bike, who’d take his uniform off after work to do it, roll up his sleeves, get grease on his face, swear, and make a mess instead of reading a newspaper in an armchair for hours, sipping Bacardi out of a flashing glass, stiff with the kind of stress no child could comprehend—the kind of stress that loosens a man’s muscles instead of strengthening them.
I wanted the kind of father who might guard the house at night with a gun, who could predict which way a storm would head, who would stand up to my mother when she insulted him to his face, who was able to tell a lie.
Men killed things, and women cooked them. It had been that way since Mammoth Man. It was the way things were meant to be.
But neither Phil nor my father had ever killed a thing. Maybe one or both had run over a possum on the highway, but they’d have felt pretty bad about it, a little sick. They didn’t hunt, or fish, or trap. I doubted my father, in fact, had ever once touched raw flesh with his hands. It was always my mother who’d cooked the meat. Those violent pounds of ground round. Cut-up chickens. That dark, cold place inside a turkey, the one you have to reach up into to pull out the plastic bag of livers and gizzards—frozen, awesome.
My father could never have put his hand up there. If we’d had to count on my father to hunt down dinner, or butcher it, or stuff it, we’d have starved to death long ago.
He didn’t even barbecue.
As far as I know, in all the years they were married, my father never made himself a meal. And after she left, he might tear up some lettuce, open a can of olives, but he needed me to go to the grocery store, buy our bloody dinners, and bring them home.
“Why would they ask you to take a lie detector test?” I asked my father, incredulous.
“It’s standard,” my father said, “in cases like this, I guess.” And he shrugged, looking lost.
The test was never mentioned again. My father never told me when he was going to take it, or what they’d asked him when he did, but a few weeks later a woman called from the detective’s office and left a message on the answering machine, very cheerfully, like a doctor calling to let you know whether you’re pregnant or not.
“Mr. Connors, you passed your lie detector test. Detective Shh-shh-shh wanted to let you know that any further investigation of this sort has been called off.”
I listened to the message when I got home from school, feeling relieved at the tone of the woman’s voice, the happy results of my father’s test—maybe even a little proud, uplifted, as if my child had been elected treasurer or secretary of the student council, a position without glamour but carrying with it a few modest responsibilities—and I left it on the machine so my father could hear it for himself. When he came home, I said, “There’s a message for you,” pointing at the blinking red light by the phone, and I stood behind him as he played it, then erased it, and then he looked at me without expression.
“Whoopdeedoo,” he said.
WHEN SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED IN FULL, WITH ITS MUD AND swampy grass and the pregnant dancing of robins in puddles, I couldn’t help but think my mother might show up again. The snow would melt, and there my mother would be in the backyard, where she’d been all along. Blossoms on her branches. A nervous bird’s nest pecked and braided in her hair—
Not that I think she’s dead, not that I believe for a moment that she could be resurrected, but I do believe, wherever she is, whatever she is, my mother has changed.
Of course she has.
It’s been a long time, and everyone changes. Especially women. I imagine her returning as a younger woman. Paper-skinned, exquisite, carrying a pail of white cherries with her, each one with a worm curled sleepily around its pit.