FATHER.

(from At Home With The Pumpkin King)

Our mother was the fount of tolerance, our father the test case. Reputedly charming in his youth, or at least good-looking, he’d gone mad, tragically, sometime around the birth of his children. He imagined himself some kind of petty king. His house was a castle, his family only subjects, and he was the lord of his domain, as well as some kind of imperial arbiter on matters of good taste and decorum.

He spoke only in pronouncements, which invariably began “it is obvious that. . .”, “it is needless to say. . .”, “it is unassailable how. . .” and, his favorite, “any idiot would know. . .” My lunatic father was certain he was the only non-idiot left in the world. This was natural, of course, since my father saw himself as privy to all manner of secret information, all of which was about as real as the Loch Ness Monster’s birthday cake, its waterproof blue frosting, its underwater candles.

Since becoming an adult, I have met many people who had fathers similar to mine and suffered. This seems to me both crazy and stupid. Our aunt talked to leprechauns, our father imagined he was in charge. We fed and ignored them both. It did not occur to us to suffer.

The first time your beloved granny imagines you are her English maid, you correct her and feel horrified. After ten times you get used to it. After twenty times you say, “Shall I get you a spot of tea and some scones, mum?”

We did not need to follow his orders, he forgot them. Anyway, it did not matter what we did, he was perpetually aggrieved, the victim of a world of idiots. He made his own unfathomable connections. In the morning he demanded geraniums. In the evening he lamented our deplorable lack of nationalism.

Once my father left the room, there was no pretense that his ravings had any connection whatsoever to reality. We were inconvenienced but not harmed. I firmly recommend this strategy to the American family.

Also, it helped that my father was a pumpkin farmer. Not exactly anesthesiology. Not even as complicated as grapes or strawberries. If he wanted to be the Pumpkin King, let him.

My father decided to have a secret affair. Of course everyone knew. The farm had hired a secretary for pumpkin season, a local aerobics instructor who never seemed at home with herself unless she was clobbering space to Flashdance. Reduced to regular speed she was timid and anxious to please.

How cunningly they plotted. They met for lunch; they hid in the office, in the salesroom, in the pumpkin patch and, once, behind a bin of Blue Hubbard squash. He stayed out late and told Mother he feared for frost.

Our mother was neither hysterical nor stoic. She saw herself not as a woman wronged, but, rather, as a woman propitiously granted free daycare. When he did not come home for lunch, she threw his tomato sandwiches in the trash. We ate food full of the spices he could not digest: ham with hot mustard, curried potato salad, pickled hot peppers.

Taking cues from our mother, my brothers and I remained calm. We did not hate the aerobics instructor. Nonetheless, we matter-of-factly decided, as children will, that she must die. Karl wanted to kill Father as well, but we were concerned that he might yet retain some sentimental value for Mother.

Duncan and Thom wanted to inculcate her spandex with a neurotoxin absorbed through the skin, I favored lethal injection, and Karl, machine gun fire. We were American children, remember. We trusted all these options would be locally available.

In the end murder was blessedly unnecessary. Our father tired of his jumpy lover. He got bored. We read it in his face: to tell the truth, with all due humility, when it came right down to it, to the brass tacks, she just wasn’t good enough for him. Despite her muscular thighs, her green pumpkin buttocks, she was an idiot, like all the idiots who tormented our father, that savant.

And so, his tomato sandwiches reinstated, Father returned to lunch at home. A new lecture series was inaugurated on the necessity of self-restraint. We boys should expect to be visited by temptation. And we oughtn’t feel ashamed--it had happened to him too, when he was a boy. Were we listening? We nodded reverentially to our father, the Pumpkin King. When we felt, uh, you know, overwhelmed by urges, we ought to substitute some wholesome activity, such as swimming, especially in very cold water.