A few years ago, my father gave me a pair of clear glass swans for my birthday. They were about ten inches tall, eight inches long, and six inches wide, with thin necks and hollow backs-hollow, I suppose, so that I could put candy or money in them. But what if, reaching for a quarter or a Tootsie Roll one day, I pulled my hand back too quickly, caught the swan by its fragile neck, and knocked the bird to the ground?
I don't recall expressing any unusual interest in swans to my father. When he asks me what I want for Christmases and birthdays, I always say, "I don't care. I like books. But you don't need to get me anything."
He always buys something. He never buys books.
I don't have space on any of the surfaces in my room for a pair of glass swans. My bookshelves are full of books, lined in rows, rows in front of rows, stacks on top of rows. When I got the glass swans, I had just turned my dresser into a third book consign, with foot-tall stacks two deep and five wide.
I readjusted a few of my books and put the glass swans on my desk. They had no eyes, but I still felt them staring at me while I worked at my desk, or read in my chair, or went to bed. I felt them staring at me like blind priests might. It seemed as if, when I read in bed with lamplight just touching those swans, they were turning their heads towards me.
Searching for a new place to put one, I caught my reflection in the surface. It looked like I was upside down and trapped inside.
I moved the glass swans onto the top shelf of my closet, in the dark. But later, when I nearly forgot about them and would reach onto that shelf for an old sweater, a beak would pinch my hand.
I wrapped them in newspaper, put them in a box, taped the box shut, and wrote, "Stupid Glass Swans" in thick black marker.
I put the box in a corner, under a stack of books.
I AM NOT going to tell you everything. Part of this is logistic: everything is a much-encompassing word. But I might also leave out important details because I want to force your perception of my father as a monster. I will probably write more bad memories than good.
So here, at least, are some nice ones:
INTO THE WATER we walk, nudging smooth stones loose, the sand rising into clouds behind us. I watch bass and trout dart past my ankles, glide between my legs. I look at my feet tiny and pale next to my father's big, tan, hairy ones. I look at us and the trees and the clouds and the sun all reflected on the surface, dark and calm enough to be a mirror.
On either side of this bend in the river a current ripples. Half a mile to the north men are fly-fishing in waders, and to the west they are worm-fishing from banks. But here, in the bend, there are no hooks or worms or flies but families like mine, families who have driven deep into the forest to this bend-Blue Bend, in West Virginia's Greenbrier River-bringing sandwiches, juice boxes, peanuts, sunscreen, blankets, hats, towels.
My mother will stay in the shallow water near the bank and play with my baby brother, Thomas, teaching him to float. Logan (at ten, three years younger than I am but already as tall) will find a group of boys to join in water-tackle games. And Dad and I will wade out to the drop-off to deeper water and he will throw me.
Dad is a fisherman, but here, in the bend, he swims with his children while other fathers are casting lines. Later, he will join Logan's new group of friends for whatever games they choose, and swim with Thomas on his back.
But in the bend, I am first.
We wade over stones and through fish until we cannot see our knees, cannot see our stomachs, cannot see our arms. He takes a big breath and squats down, lacing his hands into a platform on which I place my feet as I grasp his shoulders and make myself a cannonball, small, with my own breath held. He leaps up with legs straight and toes tip-toed, his arms catapulting me high as I stretch out like a flying squirrel, watching the sky as I dive backwards.
DAD IS GRADING papers at the kitchen table in our apartment. We're living in Hurricane, West Virginia, a good middle ground between Dad's job and Mom's graduate classes. Dad is correcting math problems and placing symbols on their edges which I have recently learned, at age three, are letters.
"I want to write, too," I say.
"Okay." He finds a blank piece of paper and hands me a pen.
I write all the letters I know: a, e, t, c, o, r, d, g.
"I can't remember the rest," I say.
He pushes his papers aside and goes through the alphabet with me, singing the ABC song and writing down the letters for me to copy. Then he goes back to grading, and I start forming tiny words, sounding them out. Dog and cat I can remember; I try new ones. B-u-g. R-a-t. C-a-r. T-i-e. This is fun.
D-a-d.
"Look," I say. "That's you."
He smiles.
D-o-t-t-e-r, I write.
"Look, that's me."
"That's not how you spell it," he says.
"It has to be. Look. Dot-ter," I say, stretching the sounds long as I move my fingers under each letter.
"No, I'll show you," he says. D-a-u-g-h-t-e-r.
"It doesn't look right," I say.
"It will when you get used to it. Some words have letters we don't expect."
HE DRIVES ME to preschool every day on his way to work. We ride in his big blue Chevrolet truck, he with the window rolled down and an elbow sticking out, me in my car seat. On the first day, or one of the first days, we sit around the main table talking to my new teachers. The table is lowered to fit young children, so my dad looks comical with his knees poking up towards his chin.
The teachers like him, I can tell. Everyone does. He is funny and smart and nice and a good storyteller. And perhaps because he is training me to be a storyteller, too, he has me help him with an anecdote he thinks might entertain my teachers.
"Hey, Stephie," Dad says. "Tell Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Crawford how I spank."
This is an easy one. I've told it before.
"First, he puts you over his lap. Then he pulls down your pants and spits on his hand and spanks hard."
Dad grins and I know I have not left anything out.
"You don't get into trouble too often, do you, Stephanie?" asks one of the women.
"Naw," Dad says. "She's a pretty good girl."
WHEN I AM SEVEN, we move out of the apartment and into a new house, deep in a hollow in Ona, West Virginia, down a winding gravel road which turns in succession to dirt road, bike path, Boy Scout trail. My mom's parents move "next door," on a hill out of sight but accessible-a five-minute walk. None of the homes of our neighbors are visible from ours, nor ours from theirs. If you ignore the single road, it seems like the hills are the sides of a bowl, and we are at the bottom.
"Let's play Pretend," Logan says, or I say. Pretend is our favorite game, invented in the cow pasture behind the apartment and perfected here. We are pioneer children who have just moved to Kentucky after a long wagon journey. Our papa is still building a cabin, our mama is making candles, and they have sent us to fetch water and kindling. We wade in the stream, fill our buckets in a deep pool, wash our hands in a tiny waterfall.
We also play Explorers, Indians, Cowboy and Cowgirl, and Nature Scientists. We play in the same thirty-yard stretch of rocky, murky stream every day. Though we do not go out of sight of our new house, we forget it is there.
A YEAR LATER, we all have a week off for spring break. Mom and Dad spend it fighting, all day, every day, or so it seems to my brother and me. Our grandparents are out of town, and the hills absorb the noise my parents were unable to make when we lived in the apartment.
For several days we hear the Fight in the background as we roam the woods, play on the swing set or in our rooms. The Fight is, anyway, a relief: when we wake up to shouting, we know we have a free day because Mom and Dad will probably be too busy yelling at each other to yell at us.
The Fight starts on a Monday. By Thursday, we have had enough. I don't remember why. Maybe someone breaks a plate, or throws the phone, or we hear our names pop up so many times in all the din that we worry they are finally getting tired of punishing only each other.
"Let's run away," I say.
"Okay," Logan says.
And we run. We don't have shoes or socks on; they are in the laundry room, behind the kitchen, which is where The Fight is happening at this moment. We light barefoot out of the door, run down the bank, and leap across the stream. We call for our dog, Zipper, to come with us and she does, her big furry golden body bounding from the garage. We sprint up the hill, over dead leaves and sticks and poison ivy, farther than we have ever climbed before, until all we can see is the back yard because everything else is hidden by the leaves.
We sit down on the steep hillside, in a groove that seems perfectly fitted for a trio of runaways. We listen to The Fight. From here words are indistinguishable, and all we can make out are the rises and falls in voice.
All of a sudden, it is quiet. We watch Dad walk into the backyard, wearing only cut-off jean shorts, a white X on his back from wearing suspenders without a shirt while working in the garden. He turns to the opposite hill and calls for us.
"Kids?"
We sit still.
He turns towards our perch.
"Logan, Stephanie, I can see you. Get back here right now."
I thought we had gone so far.
"Right now!"
Logan sits still, petting Zipper, but I leap up.
"We're not coming down until you two stop fighting," I say. "This is the worst spring break ever."
He seems to soften, surprising me, and calls in a voice that is now pleading.
"Please come back," he says.
"We're fine here," I say. "Leave us alone. We'll come back when The Fight is over."
"It's not a fight, honey."
"It sure sounds like a fight."
"It's not a fight. Your mom and dad were just discussing things, and we got a little upset."
"That's a fight."
"Well, it'll be over if you come back."
"I don't believe you."
"Stay right there; I'm coming up."
And we stay.
We stay while he goes into the house and puts on his shoes, probably stopping to tell Mom where he's going. We stay while he climbs up the hill, picking his way over the briars that scratched our legs, avoiding the poison ivy to which he is deeply allergic and we are immune. While he sits and talks to us, calmly trying to convince us to come home, we stay and pet Zipper. I talk a little and Logan does not talk at all. And then we stand up and walk with him back to the house, slowly, avoiding the briars and poison ivy.
LOGAN AND I do not use the forest as a refuge anymore. We start hiding in the house, and we replace Pretend with Anne Frank and Her Brother. While our parents are busy outside, we carry stacks of blankets from the linen closet up the stairs to my bedroom. We each claim a newly empty shelf for our bunk and make nests out of the remaining blankets before we shut the door from inside. Logan uses a flashlight to illuminate his Game Boy; I, my novel. After a while, we turn off our lights and whisper stories to each other.
Really, of course, Anne Frank and Her Brother is just another form of Pretend. We are pretending that our parents do not notice the missing flashlights, the hastily replaced blankets, the whispers. The missing children.
DAD: I AM NOT okay tonight. I am cold, because of the sleeping pill I took an hour ago that isn't making me sleep, is only lowering my temperature and preparing me to hibernate. Last week, I stayed awake for nearly twenty-three hours-which is not much for me compared to the thirty-seven hours I lasted after that last fight we had, two summers ago, when I was twenty-despite the sleeping pill and antihistamines I put in my body. After nearly a day awake, I took half a sleeping pill and finally succeeded. I slept all afternoon, all night, half of the morning. Nearly eighteen hours. For three nights after that I slept well, too. And yet a few days of good sleep has ruined me, like it usually does, and I am back to this. Back to being tired all day, back to an unhealthy combination of caffeine and tranquilizers, back to not knowing the difference between nonsense and sense, back to being cold and hot and cramped and sore and feverish all at once. Back to difficulty concentrating, my mind jumping from topic to topic: Mom Tommy Logan you the war in Iraq graduate school George Bush socialism my living grandparents my dead grandparents-your parents-Million Dollar Baby Edinburgh my history project my English project my advisor my professors my friends my enemies my fear of my death my fear of your death my fear of what you can still do that will hurt me or my brothers my fear that I am hurting you.
A FEW TIMES a week, for five or ten years, first in the apartment and later in the house in the woods, Dad tells us stories before bedtime. I cross the hallway from my room to Logan's and climb into his bottom bunk. Logan takes the top bunk, and Dad stretches out on the floor, his hands behind his head, so that he is facing the ceiling and his arms look like wings. Logan and I each get at least one, sometimes as many as three, choices for objects or characters that will appear in the story. Cowboys, walruses, b. b. guns, books, and princesses are staples, but when we challenge Dad with purple giraffes and juggling monkeys, he always fits them in somewhere. His stories keep going like they are never going to end, and we never want them to. He often concludes a tale only because Mom is shouting up the stairs that it really is time for the kids to be going to sleep.
But.
On many of the nights when he isn't keeping us up with stories, he is still keeping us up.
It starts at what seems to be any time. One of us might leave the dinner table without asking to be excused, or fold bath towels improperly, or answer basic questions in the wrong tone of voice. Soon Logan or I will be In Trouble, and it doesn't take more than a roll of the eyes for the other one to be In Trouble, too. Dad takes a dining room chair into the middle of the living room.
"Logan Anthony and Stephanie Eve Boone, come stand next to me."
We walk over and stand a few paces away.
"Closer," he says. "So I can reach you."
We know we ought not resist, but usually can't help doing so a little.
He reaches out, no matter how far away you stand, and grabs you by the wrist. He throws you over his lap and yanks down your pants, exposing your bare bottom. Holding his hand a few feet above you, he threatens for a while, asks if you are sorry, if you will be more respectful and grateful, less selfish.
Sometimes there is a reprieve. But usually he strikes a few times and lets go. Lets you get ready for bed. Calls you back and hits you again. So many times in a row you lose count. And Mom sits on the back porch, smoking. And whoever isn't being spanked is watching, knowing their turn is coming, at least once, maybe more, again and again, and there will be no story tonight.
THIS IS THE LAST story of my father's that I remember, told to us a few months after Thomas was born, when I was twelve and Logan nine:
Once upon a time, there was a farmer. This farmer had ten kids, and he worked hard all day in the garden to grow enough food for his big family. But his kids wouldn't help him. While he plowed, and dug, and planted, they pointed and laughed at his muddy clothes. They told him that he did not buy them enough toys or books or videogames, and that they hated him. But he ignored them and kept working.
Then one day his heart almost broke, and he fell to his knees in the garden. He cried out, "Oh, won't one of my children love me!"
And then his baby son, who had just started walking and talking, stepped forward and said, "I love you, Daddy."
And all the other children felt shame for how bad they had been.
IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE that I am a bad person. Not sociopath/murderer/plotting-to-take-over-the-world bad, but bad still. Normal person bad. Selfish, lazy, cruel. The kind of person who makes fun of others-not their appearances, very often, but their intelligence-spends a lot of time feeling sorry for herself, sitting in her room watching television and taking tranquilizers. The kind of person who does not accept responsibility for her problems, who says she hates herself but really, when she says that, what she means is that she hates you for being smarter than her, better-looking, happier. Or if you are not as smart, good-looking, and happy as she is, she hates you for being there, reminding her that things could be worse.
I SIT on the carpet. Dad pries pins out of hinges with the crook of a hammer, freeing my bedroom door.
"Please, Dad," I say. "I need privacy."
"Privacy," he says, "is a privilege. A privilege you lost because of your bad attitude."
"When can I have my door back?"
"When I say so."
"But when will that be?"
"When you learn some respect and get a better attitude."
"Please, Dad."
"I don't want to hear about it anymore. Quit asking me about the door unless you want a beating. Is that what you want?"
"No."
"What's that? No what?"
"No, sir."
He finally gets the door loose and carries it downstairs, through the living room and kitchen, and stores it in the garage. I sit on the floor and look at the useless hinges, and across the hall to my brother's bedroom door. I have never envied him so much.
I cannot tell my father that I want privacy so I can read with a flashlight until 2:00 A.M. That I close the door at night so that I will have time, once I hear his footsteps in the hallway, to turn off my light, hide my book, and pretend to be sleeping. Because at our house, lights out means lights out, and insomniac is just a fancy word for people who are too lazy during the day to be tired enough for sleep by night.
I try to rig up a blanket over the doorframe, but it keeps falling down. So I build myself a tent out of chairs, clothespins, and enough blankets to block a flashlight beam. I read late into the night, clicking off the light when my father comes upstairs to make sure I am asleep, fooling him still.
He decides to build me a better tent. He buys two-by-fours from Lowe's and nails together a coffin-shaped frame which takes up the center of my room for the next few months, covered with afghans and quilts.
I miss my original tent until I smell the pine of the new frame. I run my fingers along the boards, gently feeling for splinters and dents, as I did during Anne Frank. I fondle the afghans and quilts, remembering when Logan and I used to carry them upstairs to make room for our game.
I turn off my flashlight, breathe in the pine, and sleep.
WHENEVER I TELL people the tent story, they are more amazed at the oddity of it than anything else. But at the time, I did not think it was weird. I thought it was wonderful. I loved that tent, and I was almost sad when he took it down and put my door back up, I think. It was really cool, I thought, to sleep in a tent on your bedroom floor. I felt bohemian before I knew what the word meant.
So now, yes, I realize it was a little strange for a man to spend two days building his daughter an elaborate miniature home instead of simply putting her door back. But as with most of the things my father did, I suspect that I attributed it to his being kind of a weird guy, and the act itself relatively close to normal.
I always knew that my father was weird. I knew from the way people stared at him as he rocked back and forth on his heels and sang, "The Battle of New Orleans" while we waited in line at the hardware store. I knew from the way he always wore suspenders, watched Duck Tales religiously, wrapped Christmas presents in newspaper, ran into the snow wearing only underwear. But I put the funny weird things he did in the "unique" category, and the harmful ones in the "normal" category. Because, well, no one wants to think her dad is a monster, especially not when she still depends on him for food, favors, driving lessons, money.
SHITTY CHILDHOOD equals I don't have to be a good person.
Thomas, who is ten, is going through his own shitty childhood, so he's the only one I really need to be nice to.
I AM SIXTEEN years old, it is a lovely July day, and I spend it listening to my dad shout at my mom about property deeds and deerskins. Mom is ignoring Dad, because she, too, has learned that shouting back only provokes violence.
Perhaps he tires of waiting for her to yell back, and consciously decides to do one of the few things that will inspire a response-he picks up four-year-old Thomas in one quick swoop.
"George, you put that child down," Mom says.
"Why should I put him down, Gail? He's my son, too." Dad is gripping Thomas tight, and Thomas is crying for Mom.
"Leave him out of this."
Dad only wraps another arm around the boy.
There are more words, and louder words, and then a chase and tussle of bodies from the porch to the garage to the kitchen to the living room, me and Mom against Dad. In the living room, Dad upsets the chair on which I've draped freshly ironed curtains and lies on the floor with my screaming brother in a vice grip.
"Let him go," Mom shouts, but Dad just clamps his mouth and arms tight.
"He can't breathe," I say. "Let him go, let him go, let him go."
Dad isn't ticklish, I know, but I remember a trick that always gets Logan in wrestling. I grab Dad's ears and twist, and as he reflexively loosens his arms, Mom manages to get Thomas free. She hands him to me and strikes at Dad.
"Run," she says.
I carry Thomas out the door in my bare feet, across the front lawn. The keys are in the van so I buckle Thomas in the back, and as I'm about to climb into the driver's seat Mom runs out of the house and takes the steering wheel. As she turns the van around, Dad jumps in front of her; when she stops, he yanks up the hood and rips out the fan belt.
But behind him is my grandparents' car, with my grandfather in the driver's seat-they have just gotten back from vacation.
We live with them for the next three and a half weeks. When Mom tells Dad she wants a divorce, several court orders are required before he leaves our home.
DURING THE TWENTY-SIX days we live at my grandparents' house, I read fourteen books. I read any magazine I can find, even Better Homes and Gardens or TV Guide. I read on my grandparents' front porch swing, from which I can see the point where our shared driveway meets the road. When I hear the rumble of wheels over gravel, I look to see if it's my father's blue truck. When it is, I watch him drive, elbow out the window, and hope he does not look up at me.
THE JUDGES SAY that since Mom cannot definitively prove that Dad is abusive, she must give him visitation rights with Thomas. Logan and I are old enough, legally, to choose for ourselves whether or not to spend time with Dad. Logan chooses to, and I choose not. When Dad comes to our house to pick up my brothers, I hide upstairs and listen to his voice. On other days, when he calls for them on the phone, and I answer, he asks how I am doing. I say, "Fine." He says he loves me, sadly, and I sometimes say that I love him, too. But just as often, especially when he tries to convince me that he has not done anything wrong, I just say, "Okay," and hand the phone to Logan or Thomas.
So he buys things for me:
A television.
A VCR.
Gold necklaces.
Diamond earrings.
A diamond tennis bracelet.
A down comforter.
A cedar chest.
Clear glass swans.
MY FATHER IS driving trucks now, and has been to each of the contiguous forty-eight states, according to Thomas. He recently divorced his third wife, or perhaps she divorced him, or perhaps the rumors of their divorce have been greatly exaggerated and they are only separated. He lives in a half-sized trailer, has creditors calling from many of the forty-eight states he has driven to, spends much of his money on cholesterol medication he does not have insurance to cover. The remaining joys of his life are, as far as I can tell, my two brothers. But he alienates them sometimes; he does not pick Thomas up when he promises to, argues with Logan over money, was arrested a year ago for punching Logan, then seventeen, on public high school property.
IN THE SUMMER when I was twenty, I fled home to West Virginia. I had a job lined up in Michigan, a job at a resort that would pay relatively well, be a new experience for me, a chance at independence. But in May I called my employer, tendered my resignation, packed my car and went back home to my mother and chaos. I don't know if I would have quit the job if I hadn't had a minor nervous breakdown in April, when panic attacks and insomnia took over my body after my boyfriend ended our four-month relationship. My father leaves many things unfinished, my mother very few, and I am somewhere in between.
One evening, that summer, I was playing basketball in front of the garage, bare feet on the pavement as the sun considered setting. Dad drove up the long gravel driveway, slowly, parked a few feet in front of the paved square on which I stood, ball at my hip. He took off his glasses, pinched his nose, stepped slowly out of the cab.
"Mom went to pick Tommy up from his friend's house," I said.
"Okay," Dad said, reaching for the truck door to sit and wait, like he could do so well if he wanted. I saw him reaching and I knew I had two choices. I could go into the house, take a Xanax, and hide in my bedroom. Or.
"Do you want to play?"
He turned, smiling big with his perfect white teeth, his eyes happy like when we went fishing, went to Blue Bend, when he and I went for our morning walk-run, he walking and I running.
"Your old dad's not very good, you know."
"I know. Neither am I."
So we played. I don't remember what. Was it one-on-one? H-o-r-s-e? I am angry at myself for forgetting, already, the details of this like so many other good memories. But we played, I remember that, laughing and talking, both of us shooting badly, the ball bouncing off the rim or missing it altogether, airball, airball, airball. My mother was late getting home, and I savored my last wonderful night with my father. When he left, I hugged him goodbye and went into the house. I sat down and smiled, smiled like I had not in so long, falling in love with him once more.
But the next day, bad things happened again. I will skip to the most crucial part: my father and I stand in that driveway, sun glaring down on us, and he is screaming at me, his face red with rage, muscles tensed like he is ready to attack but can't, because I am twenty and not afraid to call the police, and I am screaming back, just as shrilly, because he is taking Tommy away again, and I do not trust him to do this when he is so enraged, and I beg but there is no stopping him, none at all. And so when he leaves I resolve, steadfast like Scarlet O'Hara, that I will never trust him again, not even for an evening.
I LIKE TO GO to the movies alone. I saw Million Dollar Baby at a matinee, and sat half the row down from another women who was there alone, much older than me, forty or so. I cried through most of the movie, started sniffling within the first twenty minutes and was a red-faced, ear-aching, snotty mess by the end. I was thinking of how my father loved Clint Eastwood. How he and I had watched the Spaghetti Westerns together, and Paint Your Wagon. How we listened to a CD of music from his films, played "Claudia's Theme" from Unforgiven over and over.
Single guitar in mourning.
In Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's character has been writing his daughter a letter every week for twenty-three years, asking forgiveness for a crime which is never named, and each week he gets a letter back marked "Return to Sender."
I HATE him because I still love him, love him because I feel guilty for hating him, and so it goes.
ON A DAY TRIP to Warwick Castle, at the beginning of a college study-abroad semester in Britain, I grew bored with the touristy parts of the site and wandered onto the grounds. I found a bend in the Avon River, hidden from the castle by trees. It was a warm, Indian Summer day, and the bend was full of geese. I rolled up my jeans, took off my shoes, and waded in. I photographed the geese, watched them swim away from me.
And then, through the lens of my camera, I saw a swan approaching. And then another. I was surrounded by big white swans with big black eyes, and as I took pictures I thought of my father.
Now, a year later, I imagine this:
My father walks into the bend, past me, up to his neck. He swims until he finds a drop-off. Cupping his hands, he waits while I put the camera away and wade out to him. We plunge together and he launches me high, just as the swans leave the water, so that I am flying amidst a cluster of big white wings so close they could be my own. I fall back into the water, and I swim to him. I twist my body in new ways, and he throws me backwards and sideways, and we do not care if anyone walks by.
