At home, while Dad is away, Jim beats up Tom, Tom beats up me, and sometimes Jim skips the middleman and beats me up directly. He has a litany of tortures at his disposal. They have names like Indian Burn, Dutch Rub, Purple Nurple, Swirly, Sudsy, and Snuggy—also known as a wedgie—but his favorite is the 99 Bump. He pins my biceps to the floor with his knees. It’s like pinning spaghetti noodles to a plate with a fork. With the raised knuckle of his middle finger, he gives me ninety-nine shots to the sternum, pausing for a beat between each blow. Sometimes he enlivens the exercise by hocking up a loogie while kneeling over me and letting the bolus of phlegm dangle pendulously before he sucks it back into his mouth. Occasionally, he sucks too late, and he can’t retract the loogie.
If I tell Mom on him, he’ll give me some other torment—a Pit Viper, a Hertz Donut—or narc on me for my own transgressions: spitting back at him, perhaps, or missing the toilet when I pee. This sometimes happens when Tom and I play Crisscross Crash, in which we stand at opposite sides of the toilet and try to make our ropy urine streams intersect in the hope that one will overpower the other, because even peeing has to be a violent collision between brothers.
A portrait of Christ above the credenza in the hall sees all of this, but He keeps His counsel.
Depending on how we’ve behaved, we ache for Dad’s return or dread it. We check our metaphorical bingo cards: Has Mom claimed to be “on the brink of a nervous breakdown” from our “constant bickering”? Has she invoked the phrase “Wait until your father gets home”? If so, the wait can be agonizing, like waiting for some anti-Christmas. Have we “smarted off” to her or “talked back” or given her “lip”? Is there a broken lamp, stained upholstery, a shattered curio resistant to restoration with Krazy Glue?
Long-distance calls are so expensive that Dad phones home only once during his week (or weeks) away, and when he does, we follow the coiled yellow cord to Mom’s seat in a floral easy chair in the “living room,” the room we are not allowed to use or even to set foot in unless our parents are hosting company. (That this is the most prominent room in the house and takes up a good deal of its square footage is beside the point.) From a safe remove, we eavesdrop on Mom briefing Dad with news from the home front. Will she tell him about the 99 Bump or the loogie hocking or the Crisscross Crash or any of the other bodily expulsions that have set off our fistfights?
But no. To listen to her chat, it’s as if she has been witness to an entirely different house. Mom regales Dad with stories of school achievements, of neighbor illnesses, of Amy’s latest milestone. Like Christ above the credenza, she keeps her own counsel, and Dad comes home bearing gifts: a marionette puppet from the Bavarian Alps, a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some European soccer team, Corgi brand toy cars from London. And then, our family made whole again, we eat a fatted calf at Shakey’s.
Given all the travel, Dad begins to salt his conversation with phrases picked up from abroad, of which “C’est la Guy” is just the most badly butchered. He now sends us to bed with “Bonne nuit” or sometimes “Buona notte.” Other drivers are denounced as “pazzo.” Tom is suddenly “Tomasso” and I have become “Stefanino.”
“Buona notte, Stefanino,” he says from the Archie Bunker chair every night before bed.
But if we have been very bad, exceptionally bad, or if our many sins have accreted over the week to form a coral reef of misconduct that Mom cannot reasonably ignore, then we must be disciplined with a masculine hand and we dread Dad’s return.
It is possible to wear Mom down. If our horseplay turns to roughhousing and our roughhousing turns to fist fighting, and the yardstick from Lattof Chevrolet cannot becalm the house, and a “smart-aleck” comment brings her to tears, we instinctively stand down. But then every night bedtime comes as a shock and an outrage, and we meet it with our usual Kübler-Ross stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before the reluctant last gasp of acceptance, which comes only in the form of sleep.
On exceptionally rare occasions, when Dad comes home after a week or two of such behavior, one or more of us will get a spanking.
Terrified, trembling, already screaming, I’m brought to my bedroom holding my bottom with both hands, and as he peels my palms from my buttocks, my index fingers grasp instead at my belt loops, so that by the time he gets my pants down an epic battle is engaged. And then I am bent over his knee and whacked three times with an open hand, each one sounding like a gunshot.
Those spared a spanking, or those who are next, can hear it through the walls and down the stairs. They will cover their ears and reflexively clench their cheeks. There comes a realization afterward that it didn’t hurt as much as I expected, but the humiliation of the de-pantsing, and of being physically overpowered, is excruciating. When I am a little older, I come to think of being embarrassed as being em-bare-assed, like the opposite of embraced.
For the rest of the evening I devise theatrical plots to run away, featuring operatic exit lines, after which I’ll live as the hoboes do in the Tom and Jerry cartoons of the 1940s, which play on Saturday morning. I’ll hop aboard a boxcar, filch pies from windowsills, wrap all my possessions in a red bandanna and tie it to the end of a stick. Dad will wonder how he could have been so cruel, and Mom will weep with regret for ratting me out.
The next morning, after a heavy sleep induced by shoulder-heaving sobs, life returns to normal in South Brook, this sceptered isle, this other Eden, this little world, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this subdivision of not quite one hundred houses on seven streets and three circles. (“Cul-de-sac” is another French word we don’t yet know.)
In most other respects it is a world I am coming to know intimately: which backyards can be used as cut-throughs, which yards have climbable fences, which ones have dogs and “dog doo” and angry homeowners. The two old ladies in the white Colonial—sisters? some say they’re twins—are known to neighborhood children as the Sea Hags. They share a name with Popeye’s nemesis, a weather-beaten witch who sails the seven seas in her boat The Black Barnacle. If our Nerf football rolls into the Sea Hags’ yard, we leave it there, to decompose or disappear into their house, where they have, I am certain, the ultimate ball pit, a room filled with Nerf and Itza balls that rolled across their property line.