Part of the Argument

I had gathered no evidence when presented the opportunity over the last couple of years, but that did not shake my conviction that my parents were farting more with age.  The initial shock at their frequency had diminished, and my sister and I had stopped making a note of it out loud to one another or to my mother and father when we found ourselves at home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, funerals, or other moments of great import.

I had only started tracking since I had graduated from college four and a half years prior.  I’m sure that if I had started earlier in my life, while in high school, I could have compiled a rather robust data set, which I could have then contributed to a medical or environmental journal at the humble price of being cited when the article on human aging, flatulence, and the effects on climate change.

I had been more consciously collecting data not on a physiological, but rather a marital phenomenon: the number of times that my mother and father would raise their voices in front of their two children.  I did my best not to take sides when this happened, instead issuing an impersonal, loud Would you two shut up, sometimes introducing the request with the epithet Children, and sometimes adding in a the fuck for flavor, and to see if they would tell me not to cuss so much, a situation which I welcomed but which never arose.

With little success, I had told my mother two summers ago that I didn’t want to hear her talk about my father in disparaging terms or tell me the various ways in which their marriage was failing (each with a corresponding reason as to why she wasn’t actively pursuing divorce (her favorite being the cost of insurance for a self-employed woman in her sixties with a pre-existing condition)), or how she was still waiting for the right moment to move out (the most believable of which was when my sister graduated from College, which had now happened a year and a half ago).

Get divorced or stop talking about, I said.  Come to think of it, just stop talking about it anyway.

You’re just like him, she replied, a common response for when I didn’t agree with her (You try living with him, was another favorite.  My silent reply was that I did for 17 years).

She had stopped talking about the shit state of affairs to me personally, so in that respect, I was successful.  She had taken a very narrow reading of my request, however, as she had taken to narrating out loud, in front of whoever happened to be within earshot.  On this particular day after Christmas, it was my sister, her boyfriend, my father and myself, listening to a somewhat minor scuttle about a somewhat unmeasured response to my mother accidentally stepping on a blueberry in the kitchen.

My sister and I had already witnessed heated discussions carried out in front of us on my mother’s sleeping problems and medication regimen, the unreliable nature of her friends, and who took better care of the universally overweight cat population.  The day prior, as everyone but my sister made our way through a number of bottles of sparkling wine that we later stopped counting, her boyfriend found that he had front row seats to what was for us siblings a rerun.  I’m not certain my sister had primed him on what he would likely observe when he spent more than twenty minutes with my mother and father in a non-group setting.  He handled it well, at least publicly.

My sister and her boyfriend were making preparations to leave on the morning of the twenty-sixth.  They had to pick up the keys to their new apartment, in anticipation of the movers showing up the next morning.  I was to help my father move a bookcase out of my dead grandfather’s apartment.  My parents were having trouble selling the apartment, and were apparently furious at the board and administration of the building; at least they were able to unite around common enemies.  My father had just plowed the driveway, and was apparently loading the minivan up with trash for a visit to the landfill.

This was apparently the source of great conflict.  I had been playing piano and had not heard any commotion.  I had received a hand signal from my father giving me a five minute warning before we were to leave.  I played one more song, put on shoes and a jacket, and entered into a veritable shitstorm.

My mother and father were arguing about the logic of my father and I stopping at the landfill on the way to move the bookcase.  There was also some athletic disagreement on why it was imperative that we dispose of two VCRs and a computer printer on this particular day.  It was necessary to raise voices, and for my mother to add commentary that had nothing to do with the landfill visit, inspiring boisterous rebuttals from my father.  The electronics would only add on a few extra minutes, she explained.  Minutes mattered, however, in his estimation.

I need to get him back here for lunch at one! my father exclaimed, either looking or pointing at me.

Great, I thought.  I am now part of the problem.  I tried to explain that I could probably delay lunch with a friend in town.  I’m not certain he heard me.

The argument spilled over into the garage, as my sister and her boyfriend packed the last remaining items in their car, and then just looked on from the driveway, trying not to make eye contact, for fear of turning attention towards them.

My mother asked me to put two of the items in the car instead of three; she believed this to be a workable compromise (Jeff, since your father is refusing, could you please put the printer and one of the VCRs in the car).

My father yelled at someone:  I don’t want those in my car. And then, when the request was repeated, I’m not dropping those off.

I stood frozen between the two of them:  he was closer to his van, and my mother closer to the entrance to the house.  I was standing between their cars, and was trying to articulate that I was not going to take sides.  I think I was only able to lift up my arms in a questioning manner, mouthing inaudible words that weren’t even entirely clear in my head.

Finally, Put them in the frickin’ car, from my father’s corner.  I was surprised he did not just say fucking; it could have been because of my sister’s boyfriend, but I can’t be sure.  He had certainly not been shy about using the word in front of my ex-girlfriend a few years ago.  So I obeyed, and stacked the printer and VCRs in the backseat of the van.

Frickin’ ridiculous, he fumed as he stomped around, directionless for a moment.

My sister and her boyfriend, having seen the making of a fragile ceasefire, decided to seize on the opportunity to make an exit, an intention that they were polite enough to narrate out loud.  Everyone shook hands with an awkwardness that bordered on cinematic in its beauty.

I then took a seat in the van.  My mother went to get the cookies we were supposed to give to my dead grandfather’s still living neighbor, and my father went with shovel in hand to where a car had just been parked.

I think I’m just going to move to Gramps’ place, she said, referring to my dead grandfather’s apartment which they were having trouble selling.  I think that’s the easiest thing to do, she repeated, to no one in particular.  My sister and her boyfriend had already left to drive back to Massachusetts and I had closed the door to my father’s minivan.  My father was shoveling the driveway where their car had been, likely out of earshot, especially when considering that his hearing was declining, despite his insistence to the contrary.  I suppose I was the intended audience.  I buried my nose inside the neck of my jacket and put my feet on the dashboard.

I don’t deserve this, she half-yelled, half-sung, and closed the door the house in such a way that fell short of slamming, but was a few notches above civil and orderly conduct.

I’m fairly certain that my father heard neither her conclusion of undeservingness nor the door; it could have been that she wanted only me to hear, in her unflagging efforts to recruit me as an ally.  My father returned the shovel, and got in the car, huffing, but was otherwise silent.  He navigated the slushy suburban roads, and the car began to smell slightly of household refuse and cat food cans.  Neither of us spoke until we were able to change the subject.

Lessons Before June

It had all played out beautifully for the advanced eighth graders at Avon Middle School – after surviving Mr. Loman’s 6th grade math class in which we wrestled with the commutative and associative properties and did great battle with the distributive property, we were whisked through seventh grade, taught by a silver-haired woman with gaudy jewelry whose name eludes me with little to report on the subject.  Mr. Fuller, my English teacher that year, who was one of those teachers who was born to do exactly what he was doing, commanded more of my attention than linear equations and x-y graphs.  In that final year of that donut-shaped school, though, math was once again exciting, as the advanced students had the joy and privilege of studying with Mr. Daigle, an average height, average build man (maybe a football player in his past life; he had broad shoulders) with blondish hair and a light colored mustache to match.

We called him Daddy Daigle, probably not yet knowing that this was called alliteration (or maybe we learned it later that year).  The nickname was accurate:  he was a kind man, with a gentle voice whose somewhat high register betrayed his otherwise imposing-to-us figure.  He wore loafers and a collared shirt every day, probably with khakis recycled throughout the week that our adolescent eyes did not catch.  It was our last year in this circular school; puberty was in full swing for both genders to our amazement, but our sense of fashion lagged greatly.  We were still reliant upon the well-intentioned tastes of our parents for picture day.  In certain, disastrous cases, we had parents who were more or less deferent to what our demographic thought was cool.  The yearbooks from that epoch proved, if nothing else, that it was impossible to be attractive with nascent or full blown acne, large glasses and braces, no matter what one wore.  It was a fantastic time for all of us.

The highlight of that particular math class was creating tetrahedral kites from drinking straws, tissue paper and floss, a prelude to ninth grade geometry.  It was our final project for the class, and we flew the kites out on the fields which bordered West Avon Road one spring afternoon.  We kept our kites, proud of that which we had rendered with crude raw materials, until zealous mothers bade that we discard of them, as they took up too much space in either our childhood closets or the shared spaced of the basement.  Either that or they disappeared without notice or comment.

My standing with Daddy Daigle had greatly improved since earlier in the season, which is the focus of this entire story.  I do not remember what exactly what we were learning but I do recall that it was quickly going over my head, and, to make matters worse, my father was no longer able to help me (we had had enough trouble muscling our way through the distributive property together; the quadratic equation was a different universe with too many variables; the plus/minus sign served only to make things only more unpleasant).  Being the grade obsessed child that I was, exacerbated by the fact that my graduating class happened to be particularly intelligent (what a drag), I resorted to drastic measures.

In class, we sat four to a table.  I’m guessing we were twenty strong at five tables, but that is just an estimate.  I sat at the table second furthest from the door to the classroom, and, given my seat, was probably furthest from the chalkboard.  During tests, we would set up brown dividers which for some reason had fake grain on them to make them look like wood although they were cardboard, so that we could not look over at our peers to copy their answers.  Or, if we did, it would be made painfully obvious; given the height of our chairs, we would have had to crane our necks in such a manner that would have made subtlety impossible.

The way around it, however, as my friend and table-mate Brian would discover, was to slide our tests under the divider to avoid detection.  Brian sat to my right, and both of us faced Daddy Daigle’s desk, so during tests, we knew we had to be sly to avoid detection.  The slide method seemed to be the solution.  The relationship slowly began to sway in my favor as Brian’s understanding of these eighth grade concepts continued to develop while my own steadily declined.

I think it was a small, individual study room, with no windows and a small table with some things taped to the wall, adjacent to the classroom.  We sat perpendicular to one another, Daddy Daigle on one of the long ends of the table, and me on one of the short ends, closest to the door.  It wasn’t during class time; he had asked if I could meet with him individually during a study hall or something like that.

He had caught me cheating; he had seen me looking at Brian’s answers from across the room for the whole test.  He dove into the wrongness of cheating, of how it was not a good show of character.  He then talked about tires.  Had I heard about the Firestone recall?  It was the same idea:  the company had cheated and now innocent consumers were being seriously injured or killed as a result.  When he asked me if I had heard, I told him I had heard about the problems, but not about the recall.  I remember a comic about it in the tire shop in town, taped to the counter.  It was a revelation to me that if I continued to behave in such a way that, I would likely cause car crashes, be on the news, be blamed for flipping SUVs, and be responsible for destroying lives.

He was giving me a zero on the test.  As an act of charity, however, he wouldn’t tell my parents this time; he trusted that I would learn from this mistake and cease copying my neighbor’s answers.  He might have inferred this from the fact that my face was red and swollen and I was at this point sobbing in earnest.  I probably apologized, and he probably said that that was not the point.

At some point, the meeting ended; I left the windowless room to go scrutinize myself in the bathroom mirror down the hall.  I don’t recall if my grades improved or suffered, but at least a few months later I got to fly a kite.