After I opened the door and walked into the room, he looked at me like he wanted to murder me. I told him I was sorry, I didn’t see the red dot on the door.
That wasn’t true. I saw the dot. It was made from a piece of red gift wrap.
“What do you want, Martha? Who let you in?” he asked.
Nobody had let me in. “I let myself in. Nobody answered when I knocked.”
He shoved himself and the chair he was sitting in away from his desk, then swiveled around until his back was to me. “Don’t ever do that again. If someone doesn’t answer the door when you knock, that’s not an invitation to let yourself in,” he said. “That’s what the red dot is about.”
I thought it was ridiculous, the whole “man cave” thing my father started harping on after he married a woman the same age as my younger sister and started creating a whole new set of noisy, boundary-ignoring offspring. Imagine someone like my father insisting he needs “a room of his own.”
For one thing, he’s a white man born in the middle of the 20th century. He has never not had a room of his own. For another thing, in addition to the home he shares with his child bride and their inheritance vacuums, he owns a cabin on the lake in Michigan and a small ranch in New Mexico. If he has such a desperate need to be alone, he could take off to one of those two destinations.
What I really wanted to know more than anything else: what was behind this strange insistence that he be granted a daily dose of complete privacy? What was he doing? Getting high listening to Pink Floyd and David Bowie? Googling my mother? Conducting secret Facebook conversations with his high school girlfriends?
“I knew you were home—what’s the problem, Dad?”
“Don’t give me that. Martha,” he said, then turned around in his chair to face me. “You know the rules about visiting.”
“Um, no I don’t,” I said.
That wasn’t true. I knew the rules: DO NOT VISIT.
He’d decided he didn’t want me around his crib lizards after my sister Lori flapped her trap about a little misunderstanding between us. For the record: I was not stealing her son’s anti-convulsant medicine. What kind of monster would steal medication from a child? I thought it was my brother-in-law’s Percocet. It was a happy mistake, though, I have to admit.
“I think it’s just best for all of us if you keep your distance,” he said.
Well. Not all of us. I was between places to lay my head, and I was also between meals, the last real one having been a couple of days previous. I made a fist and covered my mouth, closing my eyes and pretending to take a deep breath to brace myself (in fact, it was a deep breath to make it seem as though I were bracing myself). “Dad, look, I wouldn’t have come, but I couldn’t think of anyone else to—”
He held up his hand and made a noise to stop my talking: “At-tat-tat-tat!”
I stopped talking.
“Save your breath. Lori already warned me,” he said. “And the answer is no, you cannot stay at the cabin or the ranch until you pull yourself together and find a place to live.”
Lori. God, how I hate her! When I went to her to ask for a few bucks to hold me over, she stopped me before I could ask, too, and told me our mother had already called to warn her.
Sadly, nobody had called to warn my mother, but she still wouldn’t give me any money.
I decided to switch courses. “I don’t want to freeze to death in that cabin or get baked alive in the desert,” I said. “That’s not why I came to see you.”
He gave me a look that said, Oh, come off it! before he told me, “Okay, fine. Then you want money. You always want money. All you ever come here for is to ask me for money.”
That wasn’t exactly true. I came sometimes to ask for money and also to look at his wife, Shari. She’s pretty hot. Why she stays with an asshole like my father is beyond my powers of understanding, especially since becoming one in the eyes of the law has turned Shari Silver into Shari Silver-Shovel. I’m sure if she were paying any attention to the way he treats me, his firstborn child, she would leave him in the dead of night and take those last-born ankle biters with her.
“Martha, you’ve got to stop this race to the bottom! You need to figure out your life,” my father said.
As soon as that phrase hit my ears, I thought it sounded familiar.
“You need to figure out your life.”
Where had I heard that? On TV? Was it from a song? Did Taylor Swift sing those lyrics to an ex-boyfriend at some point in her career? Maybe I had said it to someone! Probably that street preacher who’s always trying to shame me while I’m waiting for the liquor store to open up, the one right across from the Luckie Duckie Lounge on Highway 323. Yes, I think I most likely had said to Pastor Keenan that he needed to figure out his life. Surely he could find a better way to serve the Lord than to thump his Bible all along Highway 323 while the good people of Kilter go about their business?
Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t said it to that crazy preacher. Lori had said it to me only a month or two before. Though I couldn’t recall why, exactly, I was pretty sure it was right before she also made a rule about not visiting her and her family—but sometime after our mother made the rule about not visiting her and my stepfather.
“Why did I give you money to go to college for eight years if you can’t even use the degree you got?” my father asked.
I didn’t go to school for eight years. It was, at most, six. And if there’s one thing most people know, it’s that an English degree isn’t good for much except getting a job teaching or tending bar.
I’ve taught and I’ve tended bar but didn’t care for either. Honestly, I can’t think of any job I’ve ever had that I would want to go back to. Since I’ve had an endless variety of occupations, I have a feeling I’ll never be employed ever again—not willfully, anyway.
I wasn’t going to say this to my father, but it’s not unlikely that he already knew this. Otherwise he wouldn’t be hassling me about “figuring out” my life, a phrase that’s almost always code for, “Write when you get work.”
Like hell I will.