Guilt (Reuptake)

There are extremes. Extremes of temperament, weather, temperature. The extremes that are my parents.

My mother was the child of a school-teaching divorcee in New Madison, Ohio. My mother’s father claimed that he left the marriage because he couldn’t bear the responsibility of having children, but then he went and married a woman in Indiana with four kids. My maternal grandmother, now 94, remarried when my mother was in high school, and had another son the year my mother graduated from college. Her step dad was a son of a bitch, a Germanic decorated war veteran with emphysema who cursed like the sailor he was and dropped dead of a heart attack in his garage when I was 16. One too many whiskies will elicit from my grandmother the story of how she and Paul got it on the night before he died, and that their hot action was probably one of the things that contributed to his weakened coronary state. Buzz or no buzz, it’s no picnic listening to your grandmother talk about her sex life.

The last time I saw Paul, I was 10, and my mother and I were driving to Dayton from our home in Canton—we’d left on a Friday afternoon, after school, and by the time we made it to Columbus, I was complaining of an empty, very grumbly stomach. Mom figured that Paul was cooking something and fully expected us to eat when we got there, but by then it would be at least 8 p.m., so she relented, pulled into a fast food joint, and ordered me some greasy grub.

We pull into the driveway on Elsmere Avenue around 8:30, and before we’re even out of the car we smell food wafting from the open kitchen window. Don’t tell him we stopped, Mom says to me. I’ll tell him if we have to. Minutes later, Paul asks my mother if we’re hungry and she responds by telling him that she stopped to get me something to eat because I wouldn’t stop whining. I’ll eat, she says.

Paul will have none of it. He flies off into a rage, screams obscenities at my mother: why the fuck do I even bother, he says, you’d rather eat shit than my cooking. The swinging saloon-like doors between the kitchen and dining room shield me from a direct view of the argument. I stand with my feet tightly together, toes flush with the wall, fingers curled tight around the door trim, and lean my body far to the right so as to peek through the space where the doors meet. This is not easy to do without making the doors move, I might add. My mother yells at Paul from one end of the kitchen, and Paul stands on the other side, his back to the stove. My grandmother stands between them. Paul rants about my father, calls him names I’ve never heard, says that my Dad didn’t come on the trip because he thinks he’s above coming to Dayton. At one point, my mother gets right up in to Paul’s face—he’s about 6’2, she a good foot shorter—and spits the words what did I ever do to you?! right in his face. Paul’s response, besides shut the hell up, is to push my mother, hard, back across the kitchen, where she falls against the counter and slumps to the floor, sobbing.

It was all I can do not to push through those swinging doors, grab Paul by the adam’s apple and rip his guts out through his larynx. Instead, I run. Up the stairs, at the top of which sits an antique dresser and, atop that, an 8 x 10 framed photo of my father, the one where he still has the big mole under his nose (the same mole that would sprout in the same place on my face just a year later). With one swift move I take the picture, open the bottom drawer and stuff my father under layers of hand towels. Then I run into my uncle Barry's room and lock the door. In that moment, with the voices beneath me still rising…then falling…then a door slam…then a car starting…in that moment I swore that I would never again return to that house. And I never did, until Paul’s funeral.

What rises in me while writing these words is not anger at Paul for being such an asshole to my mother, or for keeping my grandmother under lock and key for the whole duration of their marriage. What floods my receptors is guilt. Had I not acted like such a starving whiney twit, we wouldn’t have stopped at McDonald’s or Burger Chef or wherever the hell we stopped, and then we wouldn’t have eaten, and when we arrived on Elsmere Avenue, we would have exchanged pleasantries then sat down to Paul’s cooking. There would have been no bodily contortions, no straining to witness the final blows between my mother and her step father, no ugly words, no bodily harm, no hiding my father in a dresser drawer. If only I’d believed my mother when she said it would be better if we waited. I could not wait. I could never ever ever wait.