3

Something’s wrong in my house. My father comes in and goes out. He doesn’t stay home anymore. My mother is tired all the time and she yells a lot. My father doesn’t yell that much. Mostly he just looks at you and shakes his head, and that’s as bad as anything.

My mother is always tired. The place she works in is a sweatshop. All day my father hangs around at the union hall with his painter friends. Then my mother comes home and nothing’s done and they fight.

I can’t stand it when my parents fight. I don’t want to hear it. I put my hands over my ears. I want to run out. I want to go to the toilet and lock the door. I look at the shades on the window. One’s up, one’s down. The closet door is open. It looks crazy to me. I hear their voices, on and on, like the bird house in the zoo. I want to run out.

I get between them. “Okay, cut it out, cut it out. Shut up! Don’t fight, please.”

My mother is coughing, spitting into a napkin. Her face is white. There’s black under her eyes. Her hair is black like wire. She sits there staring at the wall, she doesn’t move. My father pats her shoulder. I want her to feel better, to get up and do things.

They never used to fight. My mother was always nervous, but not my father. When he worked, nothing bothered him. He was gone before I got up in the morning. At night when he came home, he smelled of turpentine and oil. My mother had supper waiting. Bubber and I would follow my father into the bathroom while he cleaned up. He liked company. My brother stood on the tub and I sat on the toilet. I liked to watch him at the sink in his shorts and undershirt. My father is big, with hair on his shoulders and arms, and bristly black hairs on the back of his hands. He has big, broad feet that look like hands, friendly feet, like a gorilla’s feet. If my father grabs you, you know you’ve been grabbed.

After he soaped himself all over he rinsed, and then he scrubbed and cleaned his fingernails and rubbed his hands raw to get the paint off. “Take a sniff, Bubby. Do I smell?”

My brother would sniff and then I would sniff to see if the paint smell was gone. My father shaved and put on a shirt and a clean pair of pants. The last thing he did was comb his hair. He rubbed Vitalis into it, then combed it straight back, shiny and flat. Then he went into the other room and hugged my mother.

There are two rooms in our apartment, a main room and a bedroom. The bedroom is where my brother and I used to sleep in the same bed. We slept foot to foot, but we horsed around too much, so now I sleep on a cot in the hall. I can touch the bathroom door and hear the icebox dripping.

My mother worries that the noise we make will disturb the people downstairs. She wants us to sit like statues, not move, not make a sound. Bubber gets yelled at for running up and down too much and sliding on the hall runner, or staying in the toilet too long. “What are you doing in there?” Bubber likes to drop things in the toilet and flush them away. “Is the toilet plugged up?” She rushes in because she’s so afraid that water will spill on the floor and get into the apartment downstairs.

The table where we eat and do our homework is in the main room, where my parents sleep. There’s a stove against the wall and a sink and cupboards. The icebox is in the hall next to the dumbwaiter. Usually my father eats by himself. My brother and I are too hungry to wait. My mother never sits down to eat.

My father holds a piece of potato in one hand, a piece of bread in the other. While he eats I do my homework. He cracks the chicken bones with his teeth and sucks out the marrow. When I get my homework done I can go outside. Not my brother. They don’t let him out at night by himself, so he never wants me to go.

He hangs on me and begs me to stay home and play with him. He hangs on my leg like a leech. “Let go of me. Let go, Bubber.” I whisper it at first, because I’m afraid my mother is going to get nervous. Then I forget and yell. Stupid! Because I give my mother a headache. I do a lot of stupid things, like going out and leaving the lights on in the house. They’re always telling me “Electricity costs money.” Or when I’m on the street with Bubber, I forget about him or I tease him till he wants to kill me. But that’s not the worst. Sometimes I’m really unconscious. Last Halloween I started a fire in the house.

I was having a party with my friends, and I put a paper pumpkin from the five-and-ten in the window with a candle inside. I thought I moved the curtains but I guess not far enough, because they caught fire. I didn’t even know it. We were having a pillow fight on my parents’ bed when my mother’s friend Sylvia walked in. “Boys! Are you blind!” The curtains were burning. “Are you crazy! Don’t you see?” She yanked down the curtains and threw them in the bathtub.

I really got it when my mother came home. I knew I was going to get it. My mother started in on me, and when my father came home, he finished it. Bubber dived under the covers. I was too old for that. My father slapped at me, and I kept ducking and trying to slip out of his reach.

“What do you think?” my father said. “You’re going to burn the house down.”

“Not in the head,” my mother yelled. “In tuchus.” Meaning my behind.

“Say something,” my father said. “Talk. Defend yourself. Do you know how old you are? When I was your age I was working.”

It’s bad to be hit by your father. It’s the worst thing. It’s worse when you’re wrong. Worse because my father never used to hit.