Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck Read Free Book Online

similar in appearance to the man I had typically ridden ten, twelve miles at a time in the cab with in total silence, spoke to me at great length for about six months. Eventually he shifted his conversations from me to the object of his affection—where by then they were more appropriate—and I probably did not have another intimate conversation with him until seven or eight years later, after their divorce. Throughout our post-Mom period I have never been able to tell whether we are going to have a conversation of grunts or he is suddenly going to start discussing some twist in his life path.
    When all is well with my father’s world, an efficient interviewer will quickly switch to yes/no questions. This is not because my father is particularly inarticulate: it is because his oldest daughter does not have the patience to wait ten minutes, fifteen minutes, two hours until he has composed his answer. (He inherited this from his father, who would carry on his snail conversations while the women in his family darted dialogues over and under him like rabbits playing in an empty field.)
    The affirmative answer to a yes/no question is “Unh.”
    The negative answer to a yes/no question is “Nuh.”
    This can be confusing because sometimes “Nuh?” means “
What?
”which can sound quite a bit like “Hunh,” which is a mischievous answer meaning, “
I’m not going to tell.
”
    My father speaks very softly when he does speak and he hates having to repeat himself—in fact, often simply refuses to repeat himself—so true communication, while sometimes almost agonizingly slow, can turn on a momentary lapse of attention.
    He is somewhat more difficult to communicate with on the telephone because he doesn’t like to talk on the phone (see “repeating himself”) and because that point when you lean forward, raise both eyebrows, and loudly clear your throat, indicating you expect some sort of reaction, over the phone simply sounds like you have a cold.
    Just as proof that the Goddess truly does have a sense of humor, last fall my father had a stroke. He loses words, from time to time, but in particular he has difficulty remembering names. As a result of the stroke, he has moved to Alabama to live with his girlfriend, so if we want to talk to him, we have to call him on the phone.
    I love my father. I want my father to know I love him. I want him to feel he can talk to me anytime, that nothing in my life could be so important that I could not find the time to talk to him.
    But I am his child. Sometimes I would like to just sit back in a comfortable chair, put my feet up, and say to him, “Everything’s fine. Take your time. We can talk whenever you’re ready.”

the stick incident and more
    i was a miserably unhappy child. Some children endured a horrendous childhood to emerge as stronger and healthier adults for their experience: I survived the most uneventful Midwestern middle-class upbringing of anyone I know and emerged just pissed off at everybody. It is a skill that requires constant practice—not many children have the discipline to be as relentlessly miserable as I was.
    Every now and then I will commiserate with friends about the horrible scars one acquires during their most vulnerable and formative years and my friend Rae, in particular, will smile at me and muse, “And how many times did your dad hit you, Cheryl?” She loves that story.
    I was about ten, I believe. It was in the dead of summer when daylight extended on halfway through the night and we children would be sent to bed while perfectly good play hours lay wasting in the evening. My bedroom was directly over the family living room, connected umbilically by an open-air register that let up sounds from the television and, for the determined and easily contorted, sometimes even somewhat distorted images. First I was sent to bed hours before I was even sleepy, then I was sent back to bed from the register where I had lain on the floor and watched