Perhaps it was inevitable that my brother would bring his trouble-making home. Over the course of a few short months toothbrushes and favorite drinking cups vanished, mysterious stains began to appear on the carpets, two of the dining room chairs’ wicker seats suddenly developed frayed holes, an ugly scratch marred a kitchen cabinet. One day, returning home from my after-school hours at the nursery, I opened the door to my room and saw that my collection of discards had been swept from the shelves, and now a strange brew of styrofoam peanuts, buttons, tiny bones and dirty coins, glass shards, feathers and nail clippings was strewn across the floor. I’d long since lost interest in them, and so I decided to keep this latest example of Dan’s vandalism to myself. Yet when I emptied that mess into my wastebasket, the sound of those incompatible pieces jostling against each other filled me with a peculiar sadness.
A week later the living room houseplants all died at once, an inexplicable mass suicide. Of course Father blamed this latest disaster on Dan, who stood before him and declared his innocence in nearly convincing, stuttering frustration. “I didn’t do it, why d-do you always blame me?“
“Why do I always blame you?“ Father returned with mocking contempt. He swiveled his recliner away to face the wood paneling on the wall.
“Why? W-why do you—”
“That’s enough, son.”
Again, Dan was nothing. Torment distorted his face, and he turned that face on me—on me, who hadn’t done anything—before rushing from the room and the house.
Father’s chair rocked back and forth while I stood by the window and watched Dan’s unhappy figure striding down the block. He was surely off to seek revenge somewhere out in the neighborhood, revenge that would certainly invite further punishment. But couldn’t this cycle be broken? I had to bring him back. Without a word to Father—who rocked and rocked and thought whatever thoughts he locked inside himself—I slipped out of the house.
My brother was already far off and walking a good imitation of a run, and I hurried to catch up, silently willing my brother to please cool down, please come back. Turning down one street, then another, Dan seemed to be following a well-worn path, each angry step habitual, and then I decided to follow, to see where he would lead me. I lagged behind, keeping a careful distance between us.
At the edge of our town’s small business district Dan turned a sharp corner and when I reached the street he was gone, as if he’d been biding his time to lose me. Was he peering out through one of the shop windows, pleased with his little trick? No, I thought, he’d never once looked back: if my brother was inside one of these stores, he wasn’t thinking about me. I paused—maybe Dan came downtown to shoplift. If so, I needed to find him quickly. My eyes scanned the street for the most likely store.
I tried the comic book shop and stalked the aisles, prepared to come upon Dan paging through a new adventure, surrounded by racks of superheroes and monsters. But he hadn’t sought refuge there and I hurried out, skipped a flower shop and the law office, then sped through the stationery store so swiftly the cashier seemed to suspect me of shoplifting.
The toy store farther down the block was another likely candidate. Like some cartoon version of a detective, I edged along the storefronts: a deli, then the model train museum called Tomtown. Devised by a Tom somebody, this sprawling little world was one of our town’s few prides, though I hadn’t wandered in there for years. At the sound of a tiny train’s shrill whistle, I couldn’t help glancing inside.
There was Dan, his back to me, and so preoccupied that I easily snuck in and stood a few feet behind him. Three sets of trains rolled with restless energy through a miniature downtown much like the one I’d been sneaking through: fast-food restaurants, clothes stores, mom-and-pop shops, a church and travel agency. Those tiny trains must have turned in the same circles and tracks for decades, past the carefully sculpted hills, an abandoned factory, a drive-in movie and a fairground’s tacky carnival. The thought of such relentless repetition made me queasy.
Dan hadn’t moved or shifted his head once since I’d come in. Instead of following the trains, he was watching something in the miniature town, where nobody moved, no matter how pressing the business of those little plastic figures. A mother led her reluctant son to the barbershop, a drunkard hunched over in an alley, two kids peeked into a toy-store window, a dogcatcher reached out with his net for a mongrel, a hook and ladder crew hurried before a house engulfed by red-paper flames, and every action was locked in place. Which of these scenes held my brother’s attention?
Then I noticed Tom himself standing quite still in a corner, an old, old man with alert, shifting eyes, enjoying us taking in his carefully constructed world. He began to shuffle down the aisle, ready to point out some little detail that we might have missed.
But I didn’t want Dan to discover me so I stepped backward, trying to keep out of his line of sight. Then I was out the door and down the steps, hurrying across the street to Young Miss Fashions—somewhere my brother would surely never go—where I’d wait for him to leave.
Unfortunately, the saleswoman seemed to think I had no business wandering in her shop. She dogged me down the aisles, interfering with my lookout on Tomtown’s entrance and I had to feign interest in the racks of blouses and skirts. “I’m looking for something for my girlfriend,” I offered as she hovered beside me, and she finally left me alone.
I still had no idea how to even ask a girl out for a date and doubted I’d ever learn, yet I pretended the smooth, pleated skirt in my hands belonged to an actual girlfriend rather than someone I’d invented for the sake of a saleslady. Blushing at my ignorance of the secret world offered by this store, I stroked the shoulder pads of a blouse, lightly touched a skirt’s belt loop in an attempt to defeat my shyness. I discovered that skirt zippers were thin, almost delicate, and that blouse buttons buttoned on the wrong side—I flushed at the thought of my clumsy fingers ever undoing them. Then I saw Dan march down the street and out of sight.
I didn’t follow. Instead, I returned to Tomtown and stood right where Dan had kept watch. Crouching slightly to reproduce his line of sight, I peered at the crowded downtown street of meticulously painted figures, searching for whatever had drawn my brother’s attention.
I heard Tom’s steps behind me and then his hand was on my shoulder. He coughed lightly and said, “You know that boy who just left here?”
Had Dan stolen something? Afraid of betraying myself, I shook my head no without turning around and lightly shrugged off his hand.
“You sure? You look a little alike I think. And that was you who came in a while ago, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, stalling for time. “Uh-huh … I, I remembered I had to post a letter for my dad.”
“You always walk backwards out a door?”
Speaking quickly to distract him from my blushing, I said, “I do if I don’t want to miss what the trains are doing. I haven’t been here for a while and I’d forgotten what a great place this is.”
Tom didn’t reply, then sighed. “Well, too bad you don’t know that boy. I’d ask a question or two about him if you did.”
Afraid anything I might say would give me away, I didn’t reply and continued my survey of the little figures: a mother and daughter holding their hats against the wind, a dog eyeing a fire hydrant, two old men taking it all in from a storefront bench.
“Y’know,” Tom broke in, “he comes in here about once a week and he doesn’t move from that spot you’re standing in.”
I nodded, straining for disinterested politeness, and peered at a tiny man slipping a coin in a parking meter.
“He can stand there for up to an hour, real interested in whatever it is you’re looking at.” Tom coughed. “Though perhaps you could move just a touch to the right.”
While thankful for his advice, I didn’t move, still not trusting Tom enough to give him satisfaction. Eventually he walked back to his captain’s chair in the corner, and of course I shifted before he turned around.
At first I saw no difference: the barber staring out his window remained the same barber, and the young mother kept pushing a baby carriage past the same streetlamp. Then I noticed a tiny arm raised in the air, cut off by the sharp corner of a hardware store—Damn it, I thought, I hadn’t moved enough to the right. Tom was watching me now, so I took infinitesimally small, infinitesimally slow sideways steps until that upraised arm became a man leaning over a child, a little boy who crouched down and shielded himself from a coming blow.
They were father and son, two tiny figures that never moved, the father’s threatening gesture always held in check. This terrible stalemate must be what drew Dan here week after week under Tom’s watchful eye, a little sculpture of what he came home to every day after school, for weren’t Father’s angers and silences a kind of beating, inflicted without lifting a finger? I remembered his harsh words the opening night of Laurie’s school play, remembered her later that evening, her cheek as raw and pink as if she’d been struck.
A train and its five little passenger cars chugged by, and I stepped away, ready to leave.
Tom called out, “Find anything?”
I had, and with his help, but this was nothing I could share. “Sorry,” I managed, and ran outside.
Unable to bear the thought of returning home just yet, I took a detour through the park, passing beneath shade trees, and with a quick glance here and there at the shadows at my feet I easily tossed off oak, maple, dogwood. But while my abilities now approached Father’s, they didn’t nourish me in the same way.
I stopped and sat in the gnarled crook of an oak tree. The spreading branches above shook their leaves as if in rebuke, and beneath me, I knew, was a broad echoing skein of roots. I was locked in the middle of the tree’s grasp, and I closed my eyes for an escape that offered no escape: the image of those two toy figures returned as if bestowing some unsettling secret. That little posed drama played inside me the same way I’d long stood by and watched my brother and father combat each other day after day.
I’d always been more than a mere spectator. From the look of fury Dan had trained on me today, it was clear he understood this. My silence supported Father, a price I’d been willing to pay. Yet what had I received in return? During my hours of transplanting and weeding at the nursery I would sometimes sit, transfixed, by a simple sight: a caterpillar chewing a leaf studded with holes, or a grub boring tunnels into a delicate stalk, and I’d despair of ever finding a way inside my father’s private world.
If I was tired of silent green things, then perhaps it was time for my brother to work at the nursery: as an employee he would never be called “son,” Father would have to be fair with him, and I could oversee the transition in the next year before leaving for college. Already I let myself imagine Dan and Father murmuring protectively over sickly plants, trimming and pruning, planning the spacious curve of a garden.
*
Father’s recliner still faced the wall when I returned home. Only a slight pause in the steady rocking acknowledged my entrance.
“Dad,” I said. The rocking stopped. He was ready to listen to whatever I had to say, and so I said it. “Why not give Dan a job at the nursery? He’s old enough.”
Father swiveled around, his face guarded and surprisingly weary. “Why? So he can vandalize my business as well as my home?”
This wasn’t an outright rejection. I continued. “I don’t think he’ll do that. Anyway, you know how he hates to stay indoors. He might even like a job out in the open—”
Father shook his head no.
“If he does mess up,” I said, “you can just fire him.” Suddenly inspired, I added, “And if he ruins anything, I’ll pay for it, out of my own salary.”
Father kept silent, as if we hadn’t spoken. But his rocking eased to a relaxed rhythm, convincing me that soon he’d agree: this family matter had now become something more manageable, a business proposition.
Convincing Dan that evening was less easy. The mere suggestion set him flinging his comic books about the room, and their colored pages flailed eloquently in the air—briefly, magically animated—before falling to the carpet.
“Never. Never. No way—”
“No—wait, Dan. He’s different at work.”
“So?” he shouted, kicking through his collection.
“So, maybe—I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get along.”
Dan laughed bitterly, but he stopped his rampage.
“He pays attention at work,” I added, encouraged. “He has to, to teach you stuff.”
Dan’s lips trembled, and he knelt to gather up his comics. “What makes you think he would?” he whispered.
*
I sat beside my brother in the backseat as Father drove us to work without comment, withholding the sort of advice he’d offered me on my first day. After parking he strode off alone without a glance back at us. Dan loitered by the car and pretended indifference, squinting at the reflected light of the greenhouses, while I struggled with my own sense of injury—Father was barely honoring the bargain we’d agreed to.
He’d left me with the job of introducing Dan to Bob. We set off across the grounds, and I found Bob behind the main building, overseeing the stacking of plastic bags of peat moss and ornamental wood chips. He’d kept away from me since the end of his thieving days, and if we ever found ourselves working together he restricted himself to deferential smiles, faintly tinged with resentment. Now he set down his clipboard as we approached, that familiar smirk on his face, and I decided I wouldn’t play the fiction that Dan was just another employee.
“Bob, this is my brother Dan. He’ll be working here too now.”
“I’m pleased to meet any relation of such a fine worker as Michael,” he said, shaking Dan’s hand.
Turning to my brother, I tried to assume Father’s crisp authority. “You’ll work under Bob today. He’s the man to listen to.”
Bob nodded with satisfaction. “That’s what your father always says.”
Unimpressed, Dan said nothing, and while he waited for his first orders I left for my own chores.
All morning I resisted the impulse to check on my brother, wishing I could have kept him close to me this first day. Half expecting his temper to erupt, once or twice I stopped, listened for any hint of trouble, then returned to my work.
During lunch break Dan brooded through every bite of his sandwich while Bob went on and on: “Oh, it looks like he’ll fit in, it looks like he’ll fit in fine, just fine.”
When Bob snuck outside for a quick smoke, Dan muttered, “Jeez, what a creep. Wherever he is, he keeps staring at me. I think Dad said something to him.”
I shook my nearly empty soda can and listened to the harmless sizzle of its fizz. “I don’t think they talk much. Don’t worry—just do your work and you’ll be fine.” I crumpled my lunch bag and tossed it at the trashcan, hoping to impress Dan. It bounced against the rim, somehow dropping in, and I offered my brother a triumphant grin. He stared at the ground. “Hey,” I said, “I have to check the sprinkler system. You want to come along?”
He groaned. “I can’t. Bob said I gotta do some stuff with a bunch of seedlings.”
Maintaining the sprinklers involved too much tightening and loosening, then tightening and loosening again with a wrench that nourished blisters. The metallic groan of each tug echoed my discomfort and at one point echoed the distant shouting that carried across the nursery. It was Father’s angry voice, then Dan’s. Dropping the wrench, I tore through rows of potted juniper bushes, turned the corner past a tool shed and hurried toward the tight circle of my father, Dan and Bob.
“He—he did!” Dan cried out, his hands waving almost in supplication before Father’s ominous stillness.
“Of course he did not.”
“He did,“ Dan repeated, now turning to me. “Bob popped open the snack machine and just lifted a candy bar—”
“I never did such a thing,” Bob insisted. “Michael here has worked with me for three years now. He knows I’m not like that. Isn’t that right, Michael?” He turned to me a cruel little smile that revealed how badly I’d misjudged him. Petty thievery had never been the point, after all.
Father mistook my hesitation as a reluctance to condemn my brother, and he took a sharp step toward him. “Liar!” he cried, now actually shaking with rage, and Dan flinched before him. They both hesitated an instant before the logic of what must follow, and before me was the scene my brother had stared at for months as if in preparation for this moment. I couldn’t let it happen.
“Wait!” I shouted. “Dan’s telling the truth. Bob … Bob’s been filching stuff for years.”
“That won’t work,” Father barked. “You’re protecting your brother.”
“No! I’ve seen him do it too. Lots of times.”
“Aw, now—” Bob protested, but Father cut him off with a flick of his hand. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked me, his voice hushed, trembling.
“I, I, I didn’t…” I stuttered, remembering with despair Father’s hand resting on my shoulder, how in the spell of that long-awaited moment I’d forgotten to report Bob. “You, you see …” I tried again, but the only explanation I had was in a language my father didn’t speak—the language of family, not business.
“Bob, you’re fired,” Father announced without even bothering to glance at his shocked face. Instead, my father regarded me with the determined expression of an employer who is certain of what he must do. Yet there was regret, even tenderness in his voice—I’ll always believe this, I have to believe this—when he said, softly, “And you’re fired too.”
*
My father never again uttered a word about that afternoon. As for my brother, he sometimes offered me surreptitious, apologetic glances whenever he and Father discussed the nursery over dinner. I’d pretend to enjoy my meal, while Laurie gazed at a wall, silently rehearsing another school play.
“You think mulching is enough?” Dan might say, unable to hide his happiness. And why shouldn’t he be happy? In an instant he’d changed from bad son to good, a transformation as radical as anything in those comic books he loved. And my transformation was just as complete: I’d become another false face, an unhappy surprise like Mother. I was even haunted by the thought that now Father suspected me of Dan’s brief run of domestic terrorism, but I didn’t dare deny something I hadn’t been accused of, afraid any protest of innocence might instantly brand me guilty.
The debacle at the nursery attuned Father to other possible betrayals. Increasingly he confronted Laurie about the Theater Club at school—he knew where playacting could lead, and was more than ready to revoke a host of household privileges if she didn’t “stop all this pretending.”
As if she’d been an understudy for Father’s hurtful ways, Laurie matched him, insolence for every blustering threat, usually goading him into a theatrical bout of shouting. Then, with a smile of satisfaction, she’d walk away, and her bedroom door slammed so hard Father would step up his raging again, laying down the law to living room walls that wouldn’t talk back, practicing his lines for the next confrontation.
Unwilling to jeopardize his overnight favor, Dan used the occasion of these disputes to find an errand outside the house. But I refused to repeat my mistake of silence and served as Laurie’s ally, even if Father barely acknowledged my attempts. In the wake of one particularly bitter quarrel, when Father and Laurie had howled at each other in eerie harmony, I tried to calm him but he turned away with a dismissive wave of his hand, a farewell more cutting than any harsh words he might have said.
He left me alone in the living room. Longing for any hint of the last bit of tenderness I’d heard in his voice that day he fired me, I slumped onto the couch and stared at the furniture arrangements that hadn’t changed in years. Yet Father’s silence had changed: it now contained the refusal to forgive. Is this what Mother had hurled herself against? Even if this offered an explanation for my parents’ troubles, how could I ever discover what Mother had done that Father wouldn’t forgive? It was a story that would never be told.
I held my hands over my ears, as if this might stop my thoughts, and then I rose from the couch and walked to my sister’s door. I knocked, a few quiet taps, but there was no answer. I entered anyway and found her sitting before the mirror, examining her flushed face. She spoke in a voice made husky from all that screaming. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Michael, but don’t waste your time. Your word doesn’t mean a thing to Dad any more.”
She began working up her latest display of what eyeliner and blush could do, poking through her extensive makeup kit as if I weren’t there, and I had to retort, “Whether he listens to me or not, you can’t win, you know.”
“Oh? Just watch me,” she replied, so drawing out the dark tones of her ragged voice that I suspected she employed her arguments with Father for their hidden artistic opportunities. But Laurie had more parts to play than I could have predicted: when she was done with her elaborate application, she turned to me with a face that appeared absolutely plain, as free of makeup as one could imagine.
The following day my sister applied a similarly deceptive makeup: she set her face to Obedient Daughter and stopped arguing with Father. She even renounced her school’s theater club, and this became her best role, one that established a false calm in our home. When Laurie waved good-bye with a demure flick of her hand and walked out the front door, she usually headed for her job at the local magic shop. There she gave makeup demonstrations and modeled wigs and costumes. Freed from scripted dialogue, she so effortlessly assumed the roles of an angel, witch, or vampire, even a pirate and a soldier of fortune, that her impromptu performances drew more than enough customers to constitute an audience.
I spent that final year at home waiting for my graduation and eventual escape to the state university. Yet sometimes I’d spend an early evening by my bedroom window, watching flocks of birds navigate elegant geometries above their chosen tree before roosting for the night. I wanted to join them, hoping that those supple, weaving formations offered a hint of how to alter my family’s separate trajectories, which were taking us farther and farther from each other.