Faery Tale (30 page)

I was sucking on a watermelon Blow Pop when my dad opened the door. Clicking the lock on my diary I took out the sucker and sat on it. I could feel it sticking to my comforter . . . and my leg.

“You're eating
candy
at this time of the night? Jesus, Signe,” he said, shaking his head. “Throw it in the trash.”

Busted, I reluctantly extracted it from my leg, wrapping it in a tissue so I could pick it out later, and dropped it into my wastebasket.

“Now you've got to go and brush your teeth again.”

“I don't mind,” I answered defiantly, moving past him into the bathroom. He followed me and leaned against the doorframe.

“Sig, have you noticed that your clothes aren't fitting so well lately?”

“Nope.”

Yes.
But I didn't care.

“Why don't you come running with me tomorrow?”

“I don't want to go running.”

“Signe, don't be perverse. It's the best exercise you can get. It works the whole body—every muscle group.”

I paused, midbrush, to look at him.

“I don't like running.”

“You've never tried it.”

“I only like running in soccer.”

“Damn it, Signe!” he exploded, banging his fist on the doorframe. “Why are you so goddamn argumentative?”

I looked back at him, and he had that really scary look in his eyes like he always got when he yelled.

Because you always make me do things I don't want to do
.

“I don't know,” I said quietly.

 

Mom tucked me in. I tried to fall asleep, and I even had my polar bear, but I was worried. What if I fell asleep and accidentally rolled over on him and then he wouldn't be able to breathe and he'd die? I sadly relinquished him to the floor. Everybody thought that stuffed animals weren't alive, but I knew that when we weren't really looking, they were. So you had to be careful. There were probably lots of girls who killed their bears by accident in their sleep.

The next morning Dad took me to the bike path behind the house. Normally I loved the bike path. My favorite days I would steal carrots or apples from the fridge and follow the path to where it cut through the fields—that was where the Cornell polo ponies were kept. There were always a few horses waiting by the fences in the pasture, and I fed them treats while I stroked their velvety noses.

Today Dad was teaching me how to jog, but he was running too fast, singing a Navy song to try to make it fun. It actually felt like I was trapped in a box with no air.

“Your left, your left, your left, right, left,” he sang, his voice intoned with some weird accent, like a drill sergeant.“Your lef, your lef, your lef, raght, lef!” he droned.

It reminded me of an evil marching song that the Orcs would chant when they were hunting hobbits in
The Lord of the Rings
. They were going to catch me. My lungs were burning and his legs were so much longer than mine and he kept running, running. He tried to teach me how to breathe.

“Come on, Sig! We're going to run for forty-five minutes. Look, I'm timing us on my watch.” He jogged in place next to me, showing me his Casio watch. I glanced at the timer. It'd been six minutes and I couldn't breathe.

I stopped and he continued to jog in place.

“Come on, Signe. Don't be a wimp. Don't be a quitter . . .”

I could feel how hot my face was, and I hated him for making me do this.

“Signe,” he sang, “don't be a quitter.”

I hated him for making me feel like a quitter.

“Signe . . .”

“Dad!” I shouted. “I'm not doing this. I hate it . . . you go too fast!”

His face got tight, and I could tell I'd made him angry.

“Fine,” he said, after a moment. “Go home then. I'm going to finish my run.” I watched him run down the path in his stupid short little shorts until he got smaller and smaller and smaller.

Tears stung my eyes as I turned to walk back home. This wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to get out of running, but why did it have to feel so bad? I found my mom weeding in the front garden.

“You're back early,” she said, straightening, brushing the dirt from her gloves.

I told her about Dad running too fast and feeling like a quitter. She thought for a while and said, “Do you think you might like running if you could do it on your own?”

“I don't know, maybe.”

“Well, maybe you could save up some allowance and get your own stopwatch. Then you could time yourself, and do your own runs?”

I considered this. “Okay. But how much do they cost?”

“Hmmm . . . I bet we could find one for five dollars or so.”

Oh, brother. That was going to seriously cut into my candy money. Big time.

“Jeez!” I exclaimed.

She laughed. “Well, if you want to do this, maybe we can think of a couple of extra chores to earn you the extra money. I'll give you two dollars for mopping the kitchen floor.”

I thought for a moment. If I did this, maybe my dad wouldn't think I was such a loser. Maybe I could learn to run in my own way, a way that didn't hurt.

Maybe I would even like running!

“Deal.”

I was drawing flowers over the i's when suddenly my bedroom door burst open, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Goddamn it, Signe!” My father stood in the doorway, his arm raised, and I could see he was clenching something in his fist. He was waiting for me to look at him.

I thought as fast as I could.
What did I do this time? I didn't do anything!

His body looked like a spring that was being stretched too far.

“I told you to get this out of the goddamn living room!” So loud that my neck automatically tucked into my shoulders in a cringe.

“Alan, give her a break, will you?” I could hear Mom rushing down the hallway.

“Linda,” he said as he rounded on her, “stay the
hell
out of it!”

She melted away. He looked at me, his jaw clenched. The next moment I saw his arm fly back, and I watched in slow motion as my brand-new stopwatch came sailing from his fingers. It arched across the room, sailed over my head, and hit the wall, nearly colliding with my pink African violet. There was a sharp crack and its guts spewed onto the floor. I clenched my fingers. Open and closed, open and closed. His eyes were piercing mine.

“You live like a goddamn pig. Learn to clean up after yourself.”

He turned and left. The house was still again. I turned my face into the carpet and pulled my polar bear over my head. His soft fur protecting me, I could imagine we were just hibernating until spring. I heard a shuffling on the carpet and hoped it was my mom. She gathered me in her arms, her sweater smelling sweet and clean like Navy perfume.

“Siggie, we can get you another one,” she murmured into my hair. “We'll get you another one, okay, sweetie? Don't cry . . .”

I pulled my head up from her shirt. “I don't want another one.
I don't want another one ever again!
” I drooled through my tears.

I hated him. I hated him and his stupid running. I hated him so much that sometimes I wanted to kill him.

—JOHN MATTHEWS,
THE SECRET LIVES OF ELVES AND FAERIES

 

 

 

 

I
LOOKED over at Kirsten and her pretty golden hair, gleaming in the sun. I always wanted to have blond hair like hers. She seemed almost unaware of me as I sat there, admiring her profile as she concentrated on the road.

“Sig.”

“Yeah.”

“Put something else on. We've heard this CD like seven times.”

“Mmm, okay. You want Mix One, Two, or Three?”

“Don't you have any CDs we haven't listened to already?”

“No. These were all from Eric. And I'm traveling light.”

“How about the radio?”

“Mmm, okay.” I fiddled with the tuner.

“Can I ask you something?” I turned to her.

“Sure.”

“You remember the time Dad broke my stopwatch?”

“No. He broke your stopwatch?”

“Yeah. When I was nine. He threw it against the wall and it shattered into pieces. He never apologized or anything.”

“Wow.”

“Sometimes I wonder—why didn't Mom do anything? Why didn't she stop him from acting like that, yelling at us the way he did?”

She thought a moment. “I guess she was like me. She stayed out of the way.” It was true, Kirsten was always somehow better at avoiding Dad's fits than I was.

“I wish she hadn't.”

“You know, Signe, interfering only made it worse. I think she could have pushed him to physical violence if she had gotten in the way. I mean, don't you remember? Can't you hear her? She'd say,
Alan, just leave her alone! Linda, stay the
fuck
out of this.This is not your business.
I can hear those voices in my head. I mean, can't you?”

“Yes.” I turned to gaze out the window. “Yes, I can.”

“I think she
did
try,” she said, after a moment. “But the reason you can't really remember is because it was so ineffective.”

“She couldn't stop him?”

“No. No one could.”

“I remember he never wanted anybody in the family to comfort anyone else,” I said.

“Nope. Because that would make it seem like he'd done something wrong. If we had to . . . console each other against his wrath.”

“But where did it all come from? All that anger? I think about it sometimes, and I just can't understand why leaving a pair of shoes in the hallway could justify that kind of reaction.”

“It might've had something to do with the fact that he was smoking all that pot.”

“Self-medicating for some kind of depression . . .”

“Yes. He was also a control freak. That didn't help, I'm sure.”

“But after the divorce, it was like everything changed. I guess it must have happened more slowly than that—probably in retrospect things got better once they told us they were getting a separation. He realized that now we could choose. If he lost his temper, we just wouldn't want to be around him.”

“The old Dad and the new Dad—they were like different people,” KP said. “I guess after the divorce I just wanted to leave the yelling one behind. So I did.”

My sister has always had a way of deciding something, and then making it so, when it comes to her emotions. It's a behavior I'm not able to summon. I couldn't decide to forget how it made me feel, even though so many years had gone by. I
still
hated running. With a passion. And after all those years of practice, I still couldn't stand to be yelled at. Where some people could handle it, I still had to fight not to burst into tears in a conference room filled with people. I blamed him for that. In fact, I realized I still blamed him for a lot of my fears. Maybe that was a part of why I was having so much trouble getting over his passing, letting him go.