58
Despite my schizophrenic welcome home on my first day back, could
I return to living there as normal?
The following morning I slept very late -- obviously given my
previous thirty-four hour day -- and my exhaustion had protected me
from dwelling on the otherwise Earthshaking news that I was disowned
and my father's divorce from his second wife was due to 'what I was'.
Even after roughly fourteen hours of sleep, I was still not one
hundred percent and only slowly gathered myself, cleaned-up and got
dressed. When I had finally gotten home after my 'birthday party' I
discovered that my bedroom had undergone a thorough rummaging over
the Summer. I don't know what whoever it was had hoped to find but
what had been in my room at the start of Summer was still there, just
displaced.
Often, upon returning to New England, my first day would be devoted
to calling Jonathan and going to his place to show off my new
computer game acquisitions. But as the day was already half over, I
simply called and made arrangements for the following day. I went to
the grocery store across the hayfield to let them know I was back and
ask about my schedule. Everything was set up for a return to work
after Labor Day and I met and briefly chatted with Pete and Van on
the way out. Van said I could just punch in and start working with
them right then, but I passed, blaming it on jet lag rather than let
on about the previous day's events.
And so the stage was set for my return to normal life. My
hope, now, was the same as it had been with the start of sixth grade,
that the familiar environment of school and my friends would give me
stability while my home life was less than perfect.
Within the first few weeks Roberta and her son came back to the
house, when dad wasn't there, to look for more of her stuff that she
had left behind. Always defended by her perpetual smirk, I still
mustered-up the courage to apologize to her. She didn't know
for what and I told her that dad had explained to me that I
was the reason their marriage failed. She chortled and explained
that the night of the variety show, when dad said he'd be working
late at the park to me, but said he'd be at the variety show to her,
he had actually been having an affair with Lois. And had been during
the couple of months he had been 'working late' that Spring. The
divorce had been based on my father being unfaithful and nothing to
do with me. Dad blaming me for the mistakes he made, ultimately
nothing new,
that was just the kind of guy he was. This news left me off
the hook for the break-up, but I didn't bother confront dad about his
B.S. as I was afraid it might bring back up the topic of 'what I was'
and I still didn't have an answer for that.
It was soon clear that Lois was blissfully unaware of the disowning
or what was behind it. She made an effort at winning me over by,
having heard that I liked lasagna, she made me some at the restaurant
and brought it to the house for me: A large pan of ziti with
melted cheese kisses between. I didn't complain as it tasted
fine and lasted me several days. When she heard I was taking
photography class at High School, she brought me her deceased
husband's pricey camera to use and save me from relying on one of the
high school's battered loaners. I soon figured out that dad wanted
to impress Lois with how great a guy he was, and so I would ask dad
about things where I needed to rely on his word when she was
there. Whatever answer he gave in front of her, he was stuck with it
as he didn't want to let-on to Lois how he actually was.
While my father was living with his new girl friend at her house, he
was still putting on a show of being home to share dinner with Pappy,
though he would often skip out on the evenings leaving Pappy to
return to his apartment to have Prime Time T.V. viewing on his own.
Then father would start skipping dinner times and Pappy apparently
saw the writing on the wall; after nine years since giving up his
snowbirding to Florida, he made arrangements to fly back to there for
the Winter. Father was stunned and tried to talk him out of it, but
Pappy wasn't interested in what my father had to say and was gone by
October. Now I truly had the whole house to myself as my father
wasn't going to come home to share dinnertime with me. He'd stop by
once or twice a week just to get the pile of mail I had collected for
him in the meantime, pulling out the bills for myself.
Between my father's car and Lois's truck, they would drive together
in one of the vehicles and leave the other parked in the driveway.
Lois said I could feel free to use her truck whenever it was left
here as dad had told her I could use his car when left at the home.
She showed me where the keys were hidden in a corner cabinet, it
turned out all the keys were hidden there, including the key to the
padlock my father used to keep me out of the basement workshop and
away from my tools.
I decided to build myself a computer desk for my bedroom and used her
truck to pick up sheets of plywood and two by fours. Built in
place, like a tank, it worked well for my needs at the time, with the
computer keyboard in a cut-out hole allowing it to be raised when I
wanted to use it, but lowered and a snug-fit board placed over it for
a writing surface during school work. When I say it was built like a
tank, it unfortunately was: With all the half inch plywood and
interlaced two by four framing, I once had to make an
adjustment from underneath to the computer raising shelf and couldn't
lift the desk up to give me the room I needed. It finally dawned on
me to use the tire jack from a car and get the desk raised that way,
then put bricks underneath while I worked. As the desk was wider
than the door, I realized it was never going to leave the bedroom I
had built it in, but as I wasn't planning on changing bedrooms it
didn't really matter.
With Winter arriving and the heating oil bills rising, I soon
realized I couldn't afford to heat the whole house with my part-time
money from work, so I left the house in the fifties and pulled the
bathroom space heater into my bedroom to keep it warm. Still, it
couldn't fight against the draft from the early twentieth century
windows of the house and I finally nailed one of the old family
sleeping bags over it. That made all the difference in the world for
keeping the room warm, but also cut off any daylight; there was
plenty of daylight that could come into the rest of the house, I
concluded.
One Saturday at work we had one of the biggest snow storms of that
year and I got to walk across the hayfield back home through a two
and a half foot blanket of snow. Leaving work soon after six o'clock
and getting to the house by about twenty past, dad stormed into the
house at six thirty and yelled at me as he and Lois had spent the
past forty-five minutes stuck in the snow at the bottom of the
driveway and I should have had it all cleared out with the snow
blower before they had come. As this visit had been unannounced,
I pointed out I was still working when he had gotten stuck at the end
of the driveway, so I didn't see how I could have gotten it cleared
in time for him even if he had told me they were coming. Dad
realized that Lois had drifted in behind him and was seeing the real
him and quickly finished the argument by yelling at me, ''That's no
excuse!'' While they had come to have a surprise dinner with me, I
instead went straight out to the garage and spent the next two hours
clearing the driveway to make it faster for them to leave while they
had dinner for themselves. Lois had left a plate for me once I was
done. Eating it alone, I then went straight to my room, not having
seen dad again before they left.
After that time, dad didn't make any attempts to come back to the
home for any length of time until Pappy returned the following
Spring.
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