Christine

Four years ago she decided she was an unsung writer. She began to produce poems about flowers and stories about sweet old men in the October of their years. Every now and then she would get grittily realistic and do a story about a young girt who was tempted “to take a chance” and then decided it would be immeasurably better if she Saved It for the Marriage Bed. This summer she had signed up for a directed writing course at Horlicks—where Michael and Regina Cunningham taught, you will remember—and was putting all her themes and stories in a book she called Sketches of Love and Beauty.

Now you could be saying to yourself (and more power to you if you are) that there is nothing funny about a woman who has managed to hold a job and also to raise her family deciding to try something new, to expand her horizons a little. And of course you’d be right. Also you could be saying to yourself that my father and I had every reason to be ashamed of ourselves, that we were nothing more than a couple of male sexist pigs oinking it up in our kitchen, and again you’d be perfectly right. I won’t argue either point, although I will say that if you had been subjected to frequent oral readings from Sketches of Love and Beauty, as Dad and I—and also Elaine—had been, you might understand the source of the giggles a little better.

Well, she was and is a great mom, and I guess she is also a great wife for my father—at least I never heard him complain, and he’s never stayed out all night drinking and all I can say in our defence is that we never laughed to her face, either of us. That’s pretty poor, I know, but at least it’s better than nothing. Neither of us would have hurt her like that for the world.

I put a hand over my mouth and tried to squeeze the giggles off. Dad appeared to be momentarily choking on his bread and brown-sugar. I don’t know what he was thinking of, but what had lodged in my mind was a fairly recent essay entitled “Did Jesus Have a Dog?”

On top of the rest of the day, it was nearly too much.

I went to the cabinets over the sink and got a glass for my milk, and when I looked back, my father had himself under control again. That helped me do likewise.

“You looked sort of glum when you came in,” he said. “Is everything all right with Arnie, Dennis?”

“Arnie’s cool,” I said, dumping the soup into a saucepan and throwing it on the stove. “He just bought a car, and that’s a mess, but Arnie’s all right.” Of course Arnie wasn’t all right, but there are some things you can’t bring yourself to tell your dad, no matter how well he’s succeeding at the great American job of dadhood.

“Sometimes people can’t see things until they see them for themselves,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I hope he sees it soon. He’s got the car at Darnell’s for twenty a week because his folks didn’t want him to park it at home.”

“Twenty a week? For just a stall? Or a stall and tools?”

“Just a stall.”

“That’s highway robbery.”

“Yeah,” I said, noticing that my father didn’t follow up that judgement with an offer that Arnie could park it at our place.

“You want to play a game of cribbage?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Cheer up, Dennis. You can’t make other peoples mistakes for them.”

“Yeah, really.”

We played three or four games of cribbage, and he beat me every time—he almost always does, unless he’s very tired or has had a couple of drinks. That’s okay with me, though, The times that I do beat him mean more. We played cribbage, and after a while my mother came in, her colour high and her eyes glowing, looking too young to be my mom, her book of stories and sketches clasped to her breasts. She kissed my father—not her usual brush, but a real kiss that made me feel all of a sudden like I should be someplace else.

She asked me the same stuff about Arnie and his car, which was fast becoming the biggest topic of conversation around the house since my mother’s brother, Sid, went into bankruptcy and asked my dad for a loan. I went through the same song-and-dance. Then I went upstairs to bed. My ass was dragging, and it looked to me as if my mom and dad had business of their own to attend to… although that was a topic I never went into all that deeply in my mind, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

Elaine was in on her bed, listening to the latest K-Tel conglomeration of hits. I asked her to turn it down because I was going to bed. She stuck out her tongue at me. No way I allow that kind of thing. I went in and tickled her until she said she was going to puke. I said go ahead and puke, it’s your bed, and tickled her some more. Then she put on her “please don’t kid me Dennis because this is something terribly important” expression and got all solemn and asked me if it was really true you could light farts. One of her girlfriends, Carolyn Shambliss, said it was, but Carolyn lied about almost everything.