“Studying with Andrea,” I said automatically, still chewing over the stove. Andrea was my chemistry study partner, and I happened to be getting an A in chemistry.
“Andrea’s a nice girl,” my mother conceded. She went over to the sink and began rinsing the dishes, then loading them into the dishwasher. She wore a wool tweed skirt and a T-shirt with the word Bermuda across the front in pink script. The freckles on her calves danced chaotically as she sponged off the dishes. I watched the brownish spots with detached interest, hoping I could sleep in the aftermath of the acid. I planned to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to study for my math test.
I opened the refrigerator and stood staring at its contents. A half-eaten honey-baked ham draped with foil, a macaroni-and-cheese casserole from the week before, three eggs.
My mother had either been at the real estate office (her new job), touring houses with clients, or playing backgammon. Both occupations had become her antidote to the bedlam at home while also helping to create it. And since she was the first woman in her family to work and to not have a cook, we were often left to forage.
“Is there anything else to eat?” I asked.
“I didn’t have time to go to the store today,” said my mother, switching on the disposal.
I was used to food being a last priority, but I was hungry. It had occurred to me more than once that if my father bought one fewer antique gun each year for his collection, we would surely be able to afford a cook, but the fact was, my parents didn’t care much about good food. Perhaps in rebellion against their more formal upbringings, my father subsisted on Domino’s pizza; my mother, on Campbell’s soup and Saltines spread with Jif. My father hated sitting at the dining room table, and who could blame him? His mother had used the evening meal as an occasion to berate her husband and criticize her sons. As for my mother, she had been kept in the kitchen at mealtimes with the cook until she was nine years old, while the rest of the family was served meals in the dining room.
“Can I order a pizza?” I asked my mother. I was staring at the missing child’s photo on the milk carton in the refrigerator. She was blond with home-cut bangs, maybe six years old. I wondered if they’d found her yet.
“I think Dad has some left over in the library,” said my mother.
I was always hungry. By the time I was ten, I had learned how to make a good omelet, chocolate mousse, popovers, and pasta with bottled sauce. I missed the chickens Ollie would sometimes roast before she left to go home in the evening. But Ollie was gone now, back in Detroit and living on welfare, and with her had gone any sense of order.
“Ollie has to take care of her mother full-time now,” my mother had told me.
I went into the library with a plate. My father sat in his leather chair, a remote in his hand, in his usual postwork outfit—khaki pants, dress shirt, and Topsiders with no socks. With his light-blue eyes and cleft chin, he looked like some famous actor whose name you couldn’t quite remember. A Domino’s box sat open on the floor at his feet with a half-moon of pepperoni pizza.
“Hi, Franny,” he said with an absent smile. “Been studying?”
“Of course,” I answered. My grades were good so my parents never hassled me about my whereabouts. “Test tomorrow.”
I placed a slice on my plate. My father was watching The Incredible Hulk. Ever since the show had premiered, my father had co-opted Bill Bixby’s famous line, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” offering up this threat whenever Whitney or I started to annoy him.
My father’s photographs, painstakingly shot and printed, sat in piles throughout the room, still in their envelopes. Oc casionally one landed in a frame, either at our house or someone else’s, and the rest would eventually go into boxes, and the boxes into the attic. My father’s eighty or so cameras cluttered the clothes and linen closets.
The tragedy of my father’s life was contained in those dust-covered boxes. We hardly spoke about it, except when my mother would say, “Dad is so talented. He really should do more with his photography.”