DINNER

Maureen J. Patrick                                                                                 1350 words

3411 W. Bay Ave.

Tampa, FL 33611

813-464-9577

yazpatrick@gmail.com

DINNER

by

           Maureen Patrick

6106 Sycamore Avenue. The kitchen.

Friday, October 7, 1955

“Grow up.”

My sister Jeanie was baiting me. Again. Mealtimes were always tense and she reacted the way she always did, projecting onto the nearest target. Me. Five years old, ten less than her. The very bottom of the family pecking order.

We were sitting at the table in the Ozzie and Harriet Configuration. Dad at the head, Mom at the foot, my sister and me opposite each other at the sides. The room was painted a violent yellow, and a rectangular formica-top table took up nearly all the space in the part we called the dining nook. The table was covered, as always, with an embroidered cloth, but I could feel the curving cold steel supports against my skinny legs as I dangled them. My feet didn’t reach the floor until I was nine.

My father was picking at his food in silence, his appetite driven away by some chronic digestive complaint. My mother’s jaw was set. For once she wasn’t telling a rambling story of how she settled someone’s hash at work that day. She was depressed and angry. She always took my father’s illnesses personally, as though he got sick just to complicate her life. I recognized her mood and knew it was dangerous in the same way small fish know when a shark is stalking a meal and not just lazing around the deep. I felt threat building like a storm in the close quarters of the dining nook. Helpless to do anything about it, I fretted in place, my legs swinging under the table, my fork nervously prodding my mashed potatoes. My eyes began to water.

“Hey, crybaby,” my sister hissed. I stared at my plate. Why didn’t my parents ever do anything when she gunned for me? Were they deaf?

“You’re not going to eat that, are you, crybaby? Momma, she’s not going to eat her dinner again.”

My mother replied in a monotone, not looking up. “She better eat it.”

I glanced at my father. He was in another world, preoccupied with his restless gut, lost to private pain, private misery.

“Eat your potatoes, runt.” My sister crouched over her plate, holding her fork in her right hand like a dagger, the tines aimed at me. “Go on. Let me see you eat ‘em.”

A tincture of fear and anger colored my face, now slick with tears. I hated my inability to stop it.

“That’s it, shrimp. Open your little mouth. Let me see you put those potatoes in there. Come on, ohhhhh-pen up, ohhhhh-pen up –”

“Shut up! Shut up! I hate you! Shut up!” I was on my feet and the shout was out of my mouth before I could stop it. It galvanized my mother like electrical current and she shot to her feet, dropping her fork with a clatter on the linoleum floor. That startled Duchess, the Springer Spaniel. She scrambled up from her place under the table and ran out of the room, her nails scrabbling for traction on the waxed tiles. I looked up in horror, first at my mother and then at Jeanie, who sat back in her chair with a look of smug satisfaction.

“Ohhhhh, my God.” My mother was moaning where she stood, clutching her head in both hands. I heard my father’s chair scrape against the floor, but didn’t dare take my eyes off my mother to see if he was still sitting or standing.

“Jean, Jean, come on, now . . .” He had that hopeless tone he got when he was trying, always ineffectually, to stem the tide of my mother’s outbursts. “They’re just being kids.”

“They’re gonna kill me, these kids are gonna kill me! My head, my head!” And with that she fell to the floor with a heavy thud. There was a horrible second of silence, and then everything erupted at once. Duchess ran back in the room and started barking, darting at my mother’s crumpled form. My father stood and slapped his hands against his thighs.

“Now look what you did.” He strode out of the room to get the spirits of ammonia. I began to cry. My sister stayed in her place, glaring and gleeful all at once.

“Somebody should take you away,” she said to me. “Somebody should take you to jail.”

I cried louder. I didn’t know what jail was, not really, but it seemed awful and I didn’t want to go there. I looked down at my mother through my tears. Maybe she was dead. What did they do to little girls who killed their mothers?

My father came back with a small brown bottle and crouched by my mother’s head. He waved the bottle under her nose and she stirred, moaning. She struggled to a sitting position, then clutched her head again.

“Somebody shut that kid up,” she gasped. I stopped crying as though corked. I put my fist in my mouth and hiccupped through my fingers. My nose was congested and I couldn’t breathe and I wanted a hole to open up in the floor so I could fall all the way to China, which I believed was on the underside of the world. Maybe in China someone would adopt me. When I wouldn’t eat, my mother always said, “There are children starving in China,” so maybe they wouldn’t notice if I didn’t eat my mashed potatoes. I would be just one more starving kid in a country full of starving kids, so who would care? It would be okay there, I thought wildly, it would be okay because the hole would close up after I fell through so my sister couldn’t fall through and be in China with me.

My father helped my mother to her feet and took her, still moaning, to bed. My sister got up and went into the living room to watch TV. I stood by my chair, hiccupping into my fist. My thoughts got wilder and wilder. Everyone in China had slanty eyes so maybe I would have slanty eyes when I fell there, just because I was there. Maybe just being in China gave you slanty eyes. In China I would wear a little embroidered jacket with wide sleeves and a round hat with a silk tassel on top. And a pigtail. My long thick strawberry blonde hair would be black and shiny and fit into one skinny braid instead of massing around my face like the Wild Man of Borneo, which is what my mother called me when she tried to brush the tangles out.

Duchess was still in the kitchen. She was sniffing the floor where my mother collapsed. I put my free hand out and rubbed my fingers together in a little scraping sound, trying to make her come to me. She glanced up, then went back to her snuffling on the floor. After a second or two she gave a snort, turned away, and trotted out of the kitchen.

The house was quiet. I could hear the television in the living room, but faintly. We always kept the volume low when my mother had a headache. I tried to figure out what program was on but couldn’t really tell. The Honeymooners, maybe. From my parents’ bedroom at the back of the house I could hear distant noises. My mother keening in a thin soprano, my father talking in short phrases. I looked up at the steel casement windows over the dining room table, where late afternoon sun came in like golden lances. The light was dying and the litter of the table looked like a crash scene. There were wadded up napkins flung here and there, silverware lying at odd angles, plates covered with congealing portions of food.

I stood on stiff legs by my chair. I looked at my plate, at the mound of cold potatoes with a glassine drizzle of brown gravy half on top, half on the side like an arrested lava flow. I sat down again, picked up my fork, and dug into the mass. Tears running down my cheeks, I ate every bite.