Family History

Family History

Dammit, he’s early. The sound of tires crunching over snow had Taylor glaring out her window at the little green Civic. She had hoped that the predicted snowstorm would leave the roads impassable. Clearly, Taylor reflected, dropping the curtain and turning away from the window, the weatherman and I have different definitions of the word “Northeaster.”

He’d have to come in; there was no way around it. She was running late and had yet to wrap her present for the family’s annual Secret Santa party. She didn’t mind spending time with her family, in fact, she enjoyed their company and looked forward to seeing them. It was the hour and 45 minute ride with her father that caused visions of throwing herself out of a speeding car to dance through her head.

She worked her way through the house, closing each door. Glancing down the hallway, she thought that the house looked closed and unfriendly, as it had been in the weeks before the divorce. Taylor sighed tiredly, and turned to answer his knock.

“Hello, dear,” her father wedged himself in the doorway, giving her no chance to shut him out. “How are you?”

She returned his hug stiffly. “I’m fine, running a bit late, though. Do you mind waiting while I wrap Erika’s present?”

He was already in the living room, looking around, assessing the changes her mother had made since he had last been inside. “Not at all, take your time.”

The gift lay on the living room table, and she seated herself on the floor beside it, extremely glad her mother was working late today. Sharon had made it abundantly clear that her ex-husband wasn’t welcome in her home. Taylor’s father sat down on the couch, settling in very much as if he still owned it.

“How have you been?” she asked as she began to wrap the gift; a pretty little ornamental box. Her cousin liked decorative knickknacks.

“Oh, you know how it is, term papers to correct . . .”

Her fingers flew deftly over the paper while he chattered away. With only one week left until Christmas, she was practically a professional when it came to wrapping gifts. When her father stopped complaining about work, he moved on to his second-favorite topic.

“So I’m doing a demonstration for the Sons of the American Revolution tomorrow. They want me to give a talk on how a musket was fired, and what kind of clothes the American soldiers wore. My friend John Canson recommended me, because as a history teacher and reenactor, I’d be the perfect person to give that talk.”

“That’s great, Dad.”

His chest puffed with self-importance. “Oh, and I finished sewing my new officer’s jacket. I’ll show it to you later, it’s in the car. Boy, those colonial women did a lot of work, when I think how long just those button-holes took me to sew…”

Taylor suppressed a laugh. Last year, he had been promoted to officer rank in his reenacting militia group and nothing would do but that he have a coat to mark that. In a quest for authenticity, he had obtained patterns and sewn it himself. Every time she saw him he would go on and on about the kinds of fabrics, thread, and techniques used. Some of it was interesting… most of it was not. She was glad it was finally done. Now maybe he would stop talking about it.

“How was church yesterday?” she asked, in an attempt to change the topic. “I missed it.”

“It was alright.” He fell silent and watched her curling the ribbons. She shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny.

“So, after church yesterday, I heard Marilyn and Virginia talking.” His earlier friendly tone had completely changed. Now his voice was carefully casual, and she didn’t dare to meet his eyes. “They mentioned that you were involved in a wedding. Whose is it?”

“What?” Her fingers fumbled, entangled in the ribbon.

She could feel him staring at her, waiting for an answer. She kept her eyes on the paper, mind racing. She’d been asked not to tell him, but there was no way to lie now. “Oh, Mom’s. I thought they announced it yesterday in church.” Her voice matched his casual tone but her hand shook as she reached for the card.

“I didn’t hear anything about it. But they wouldn’t really tell me anyway.”

“Mm.” She gave the ribbon a last tug, and picked up the pen. “How does Erika spell her name, do you know? With a C or a K?”

“C, I think.”

To Erika, with love, she wrote, taking special care to give the ‘k’ an extra flourish.

Before she left, Taylor splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom and tried to breathe deeply. When she came out, she noticed that the door to her mother’s bedroom was open. She closed it.

Her father was waiting on the living room couch, just as he had been when she left. She put on her jacket and gathered her purse. “Ready?”

“Yup,” he allowed her to precede him. “That’s different,” he remarked as she locked the front door. The new locks were silver; the old ones had been a tarnished bronze. He was holding the screen door open for her and standing too close.

“Yeah, the other locks were old, so Mom had them replaced.” She squeezed by him, and smiled brightly. “I guess that means you don’t have to find that old key anymore.”

He nodded, unlocking the car door so she could climb in.

*

She wasn’t talking. He took his eyes off the road for a moment to study her. She stared out the window and he imagined that she was fascinated by suburbia, she hadn’t looked at him once since they’d left. There was silence in the car, he’d always liked silence, and he guessed the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He glanced at her again; she hadn’t moved.

“So how’s school?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

He wondered if she would keep staring out the window if he drove off the road, maybe into the guard rail, or a ditch. She didn’t want to talk to him, none of his daughters did. Sometimes he wondered if any of this was worth it. He took his pills faithfully, but they didn’t seem to work. His psychiatrist said it might be a while before they took effect, but the wait seemed interminable. Sometimes he thought the only emotions he was capable of were anger and despair.

She had taken a book out of her purse and buried her nose in it.

“What are you reading?”

“Hamlet. It’s for English.” Her tone was distant; grey eyes never leaving the page.

“Oh? What’s that about?”

“A kid with a screwed up family.”

“Ah.” He was silent for a moment, staring out the windshield. It had started to snow again, a light flurry. “You get that from me, you know.” No response. “Being able to read in the car.”

“Mm.”

“Your mother and sisters could never do it. They always got sick.”

“Mm.”

Why won’t he stop talking? Taylor thought, turning a page in the hopes that he would get the hint and shut up. She and her father were alike, a fact she hated to be reminded of, and one she couldn’t escape. Relatives always remarked on her brown hair, her grey eyes, her crooked nose. Taylor sneaked a glance at her father. I hope I don’t inherit the receding hairline. It wouldn’t be the first negative thing she had inherited from him. She also had his digestive system and crooked teeth.

The only useful quality they shared (aside from the ability to read in a car without puking) was a love of history, though even she thought that his interest bordered on the obsessive. She would never name her children after US Presidents, especially not mediocre ones like Zachary Taylor.

But certain shared qualities were worse than others, her quick temper topping the list. Granted, she had learned to control it over the years, a skill he hadn’t yet mastered. Also, they both had a habit of being blind to what they didn’t want to see. Taylor’s sisters had pointed out this flaw often enough for her to acknowledge its existence. She wished her sisters were here now, even if all they did was tease her. Anything was better than being alone with him. But both of them were in college and they rarely came home, especially if it meant they might see their father.

Taylor remembered the day they left, laughing excitedly as they packed their bags. “Don’t worry,” Madison said when she confessed her fears. “You won’t have to see him alone. Sisters have to stick together.” Promises, promises, she thought. It seemed that when it came to their dad, it was every girl for herself.

He reached over and turned the radio on to a pop station, his tenor singing along to a song he clearly thought was “cool.” Taylor slouched in her seat and buried her face in the book. It was going to be a long ride.

Around four, they finally arrived at Aunt Sarah’s house. Taylor tumbled out of the car and felt she could breathe easier, now that the space she shared with her father included the entire outdoors.

*

He rang the doorbell to be greeted by an endless line of his relatives waiting for a hug. He had come to think of this ritual as something akin to running the gauntlet, as it always left him feeling mortified and exhausted. Every one of them had an insincere smile, a look of pity lighting their eyes.

“Only one of your daughters could make it this year, Bill? That’s too bad.” His sister Brigit frowned after Taylor as she disappeared down the basement stairs to join her cousins in the recreation room. “I hear Madison has a new job out at school, how’s that going for her?”

“It’s going well,” he improvised. Madison had stopped answering his phone calls about a month ago. He had no idea how she had been occupying herself, but Brigit seemed content with his answer.

“Well as long as she can balance her job and her studies, more power to her. Maybe she can get Quincy a job there, too. Here, let me get you a drink,” and with that she bustled into the kitchen.

“Hey, Bill, how’s the love-life?” His obnoxious brother-in-law Drew asked. “Meet anybody new? There are a couple of singles bars in the area that I could take you to. I hear the ladies love a divorce story,” he winked and nudged Bill with his elbow.

“Actually, I’m enjoying the bachelor life-style.”

“Ah, say no more, say no more, nobody around to nag you, is that it? Sounds like a great lifestyle to me…” Bill waited, sensing Drew wasn’t done yet. He pushed back a lock of dirty blonde hair from his forehead and shifted his feet. “It does seem a bit unnatural though, handsome guy like yourself living all alone…”

Bill shrugged, not knowing what to say. He wondered what Drew would do if he told him the truth. Drew and Brigit were regular church-goers. Bill decided that the resulting scene would be interesting, but not worth it in the end. The silence stretched out awkwardly and Bill excuse himself to join his parents in the living room.

The party passed in a blur of smiling faces and lukewarm conversation. He stayed away from Drew and his decidedly unhelpful suggestions, preferring instead the relatively safer conversation of his nearly-deaf mother. The effort it took to make himself heard took his mind off of the fact that he barely seemed to know his family.

After dinner, the gifts were passed around. Taylor received ski passes from her cousin Brad, while Erika cooed over the box she had been given, even exclaiming over the card. “You got my name right! Most people still spell it with a ‘C’.” He opened his gift from a sister-in-law: scented candles. The gift you give when you’re clueless about the person you have to give it to, he thought. That’s what they all were, clueless. They knew nothing about him, and he knew even less about them. He got a sinking feeling whenever one of them asked him a question about one of his daughters; he couldn’t even talk about them with any degree of certainty. He felt like a stranger in his own family.

When he could stand it no longer, he found Taylor and told her it was time to go home. After yet another round of hugs from the whole family, they stood outside together in the gathering dusk.

*

As promised, her father fished his “new” jacket out of the trunk of his green Civic before they left for home and modeled it for her. “See the stitching down the front here?” he pointed. And, “This button hole took a half hour to sew!” Taylor examined the jacket, making appropriate noises of surprise and pride at his handiwork. Sometimes she felt as if she were the parent, and he the child.

As he replaced the jacket, Taylor noticed his musket in the trunk and asked about it. He pulled it out and gave her a lesson on its make and model, as well as a short demonstration on how to load a blank. Taylor stared at the sharp pointed edge of the bayonet attached to its barrel. It looked lethal. Of course it does, dummy, she thought. It was made to be lethal.

She remembered when the musket had occupied a place of prominence in her home, resting just above the mantelpiece in the family room. She and her sisters often played in there, though none of them liked its menacing presence hanging over their heads. She could see the familiar scene play out now, always in the same way, though she and her sisters were different ages each time, and wearing different clothes. They’d be playing silent-ball, casting occasional glances at the door of the office, the place where he laired. Quincy would drop the ball, or Taylor would trip. Madison would fumble, juggling for a moment. Whatever happened would send them into a fit of giggles, then boisterous laughter. The door of the office would slam open, and the yelling would begin. “How can I work if you’re all making so much noise? Here I am, trying to do the bills, and I can’t even get ONE MOMENT of PEACE!” Soon they would all be hustled outside, sometimes without jackets or shoes, and the door would be locked behind them. Quincy and Madison always made a game of it, laughing and joking, coaxing a smile out their small sister, trying to hide the worried furrows on their brows. Soon Mom would be home from work, and they could go back inside. At night, the three of them would lie awake, listening to the low angry murmur of their mother’s voice down the hall in the master bedroom.

*

Later, when they finally climbed into the car, Taylor offered a comment on the party. “That was fun,” she said.

“Yes, it was,” he agreed, watching her stow her presents in the back seat. He wondered when she had learned to ski.

“When did Erika change the spelling of her name?”

“Middle-school, I think.”

“Oh.”

He wondered how many other changes his family hadn’t bothered to tell him about. They kept so many things from him. They should tell me, he thought. Secrets ruin things. He should know; his secret had ruined his marriage. He could still see the look in Sharon’s eyes just before she shut the door in his face and buried herself under a pile of schoolwork. She’d gotten her masters degree in an attempt to forget him. He’d tried to explain, calling through the door, that Phillip was just a friend. He should have known she’d be too smart to believe him. Two years ago, he’d had a wife, a family. He had been safe. Now he had no one.

*

Taylor stared at the digital numbers of the clock, willing them to go faster. It was about an hour’s ride until she would be home, and it was too dark outside for reading. She had never been very good at pretending to be asleep; in fact, she had never been very good at pretending at all. That was why she hated this whole charade. It was like a dance where everybody knew the steps, but the movements were robotic and stiff. They knew the lines, but their diction was too perfect to be real.

She stared out the window, remembering the day her mother told her about the divorce. She had been reading in her bedroom when her mother knocked and entered. Taylor had quickly shoved the book under her pillow. She was thirteen, and still too embarrassed to admit, even to her mother, that she had been reading a romance novel.

Her mother sat beside her on the bed, too distracted to notice what Taylor had done. “Your father is moving out.”

Shocked, Taylor forgot her book. “Why?” Her family was normal, she’d told herself. Her parents went out every Thursday night. Every other night they all sat around the dining room table, eating together and talking about their day. The perfect family… or so she had thought. Sure, sometimes Dad was in a bad mood, but then we’d just know to avoid him.

“Your father and I… we’ve been going to marriage counseling for months. Every Thursday,” she paused. “Taylor, your father and I just don’t get along anymore… and added to that, he’s bipolar. I just can’t take care of him anymore. He needs to help himself, now.”

Taylor stared at her mother. Bipolar? She had learned about that during her mental health unit in school. Excessive mood swings, irrational behavior… she had never thought of her father in those terms before, and it shocked her to realize how accurately they described him.

But her mother wasn’t done speaking yet, and now she was blushing. “Also… Taylor, your father is gay. I caught him having an affair, and I just don’t want to be the person he can hide behind anymore.” Gay? It was almost too much for Taylor to take in at once. He can’t be gay; he’s married to my mom. He just can’t be. She didn’t understand it then, but in the weeks and months to come she heard enough from Quincy and Madison to convince her otherwise. They were the ones who told her about the phone bills and hidden magazines. The ones who explained to her that Dad’s best friend, Uncle Phil, had been more than just a friend.

“So when is the wedding?” he asked.

“Um, two weeks,” Taylor shook her head slightly, disoriented from being shaken out of the memory.

“That’s fast. It’s not like your mother to marry someone she’s only been dating for a year and a half.”

She hated what he was insinuating, even if it was the truth. Whatever, she thought at him. It’s not like you didn’t cheat either. Taylor didn’t think her mother should be punished for the same transgression her father had been guilty of.

“Are you three in the wedding party?”

“Yeah, Madison is the maid of honor; Quincy and I are the bridesmaids.” She really didn’t want to talk about this with him, and decided that a diplomatic subject change was in order. She turned the conversation back to history, it was the only topic she felt comfortable with. “So when is your next encampment?”

“Well, there isn’t much going on in the winter, but the militia likes to stay in practice. So I’ve got the SAR workshop tomorrow and then another just for the militia next week on commands and drills. There are also a few new recruits who need to learn how to load the gun.”

“You only shoot blanks, though, right?”

“Right.”

Taylor was reminded of the musket, and how the point of its bayonet had glittered in the dying sunlight. She shuddered, trying not to think of late night crime television. Those shows always had stories about fathers who had gone insane and killed their children. Later, people would always say what a nice, polite man the murderer had been. Dad’s nice and polite, alright, she thought, to everyone who isn’t a member of our family. At times he almost seems normal.

He may haved seemed normal, but Taylor and her sisters knew differently. The incident at Quincy’s birthday a month ago could attest to that. Madison and Quincy had been home for Thanksgiving break. They slept at their mother’s house, but shared Thanksgiving dinner at their father’s new apartment in the city. After a meal served in the only room of the apartment not strewn with half-unpacked boxes, Taylor and Madison surprised Quincy with a cake they had baked earlier that afternoon.

Quincy had been standing in the kitchen, resting her hands on the table and laughing as they sang to her. Their father finished lighting the candles just as they sang “how old are you now?” Vacantly, he stared at the still-glowing match, lowering it slowly until it touched Quincy’s thumb. The three of them stared at him in horror, the song evaporating on their lips. Quincy jumped back, and he just stood there, staring at the match that was still in his hand.

After a moment, he shook his head, and his eyes lost their dull cast. “Well,” he asked Quincy, “aren’t you going to make a wish?”

The sisters exchanged a look, and Quincy stepped up to blow out the candles. None of them mentioned the incident again.

“Dad,” Taylor heard herself ask, “why did you burn Quincy’s hand on her birthday?” The question was out before she realized she had been thinking it. Horrified, Taylor realized that she had broken the pact of understood silence she and her sisters had forged regarding that incident. All three of them knew the kind of reaction that would greet that particular question, and Taylor wanted to clap her hands over her mouth, though she knew it was too late to stop the words that had already come. All she could do was bite her lip and wait for the answer.

“I didn’t burn your sister.”

Ok, cool, I must have been wrong. That’s what she wanted to say, to smooth things over. Instead she heard: “Yes you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did, we all saw you! Me, Madison and Quincy! You leaned over and burned her hand on purpose.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And suddenly Taylor was sick of pretending. She was tired of averting her eyes and acting like everything was ok. “Yes you do.”

“Maybe I dropped the match and it landed on her hand.” He whipped the car over to the side of the road, slammed it into park and turned to face her. “You girls never appreciate anything I do for you! All you ever concentrate on is the bad things. If I do something right, you glare at me, and if I do something wrong, you never let me forget it! I made her a cake that day and I bought her a present! And all you do is nit-pick when I drop a silly match!” His face had gone purple, and the vein in his forehead was pulsing madly.

Taylor’s back was pressed to the door, she fumbled with the latch for a moment before realizing that they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by darkened pine trees. In her mind’s eye, the bayonet gleamed menacingly. “I’m sorry, you’re right,” she muttered. “I’m sorry.”

*

Bill pulled back onto the road, thinking about his daughter’s birthday. He’d baked a carrot cake, her favorite, and planned her party. They really didn’t appreciate anything he ever did for them. He didn’t know why he bothered. He hadn’t burned Quincy’s hand. He’d never do that. Taylor was making it up, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. He was a good father, he always had been. Their mother must be poisoning their minds against him.

*

Taylor’s stomach was twisted in knots. Had her family always been this messed up? She couldn’t remember. Her father was a fuzzy image in her childhood memories, a face at the end of the dining room table.

She thought of happier times, when she had been younger, playing make-believe with Quincy and Madison. Playing make-believe is practice for when you grow older, she thought, when the world changes in ways you don’t like and the only way to make it better is to pretend that it is better.

Taylor thought about her father and how he had turned his world into make-believe. In his mind, he was the perfect father, and his adoring daughters were just like him. Incidents from real life fueled his daydreams, and the daydreams became real for him. The bayonet flashed through her mind again, but this time it didn’t scare her, it just made her sad. Even his hobbies were based on make-believe.

For the first time, she felt sorry for her father. He had pretended to be something he wasn’t for his entire life. It was no wonder he was unhappy.

She wondered if it would be ethical to let him believe his version of events. Quincy and Madison wouldn’t think so. Madison would rant about the importance of truth and reality, and how a superficial life wasn’t a life at all. Quincy would quietly disapprove of anything less than the truth.

But Taylor… it seemed to her that make-believe was all that held him together. Why not let him have that?

The car had pulled to a stop in front of her house; Taylor hadn’t even noticed they were home. She turned in her seat as she unbuckled and looked at her father, really looked at him, for the first time in her life. She saw a middle-aged man who had spent so much of his life pretending that he’d lost every real, good thing that he’d ever had. I’ll never do that, she thought, not ever.

“So I’ll see you next week for dinner?” he asked.

“Yeah, Dad,” she reached over, surprising him, to give a hug. “See you next week.”