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.

MOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

My mother was an extremely unusual person. She lived in reality. Lord knows how she ever got a taste for it. Obviously not from my father. Sometimes I worry she must have been lonely, all day in reality, by herself. But then the loneliness was also real, and so she must have liked it.

If anyone tried to commiserate with her about our lunatic father, she would cheerfully announce that soon they would both be dead and therefore why not be nice to him? Spilt milk, fine lines, nocturnal emissions, shattered glass, all gave her a particular satisfaction. Here was reality, behaving as it should.

There was a time, I admit, when I thought her cold*. Other children’s mothers waited afternoons on the doorstep for the bus to arrive. I saw other children scooped up and praised. Even my father, when delusion was going well, would wax rapturous about his four sons, though generally he forgot which of us was good at what.

My mother, on the other hand, did not praise or condemn. She was only interested. Honors in Social Studies, failures in geometry, got much the same reception. She’d nod, ask a few questions and that would be it.

We worried about her. She was awfully isolated, wasn’t she? We thought she must be depressed. My father lectured her on the importance of being involved in the community. He himself was terribly involved, to the despair of many. He built bicycle paths as commanded by God in Heaven, who did not recognize that land could be held by private individuals.

Our mother, he decided, should likewise become involved. She ought to help out at school. All her children agreed. We wanted her to be one of the shiny, enthusiastic mothers of the Parent Teacher Association.

How difficult it must have been to balance sometimes, even for one anchored in reality: on one side, love, and, on the other, sanity. She joined. She attended meeting and field trips, saved popsicle sticks and soup labels.

It wasn’t long before the rumors reached our ears. The other mothers told the other children and they reported to us: our mother was a sociopath. She was incapable of being shocked by budget cuts, enraged by Phys Ed teachers, or delighted by art involving macaroni. She had no passion for bake sales. She cooperated but, still, she was unnerving. It was delicately suggested she stay home.

“I was told I am not a team player,” she explained.

The other mothers looked upon us with sympathy forever after: our mother was a PTA apostate.

But this was nothing, really, compared to the trouble she got in at church. We all thought it would be lovely to have a mother who went to church. We hoped she might learn, as the other church mothers had, to bake Black Forest cupcakes and smile with sweet resignation. She seemed amenable to God and even to the afterlife, though whenever we asked her about it she looked at us as if we’d phrased our questions slightly wrong.

If, in her presence, anyone became pushy about theological or metaphysical matters she would leave to the table and stir whatever was on the stove, remarking, half to herself, “Consciousness has many interesting properties.”

For a number of weeks she dutifully attended Bible Study, the Pastoral Search Committee, and Lady Lamplighters. On Sunday morning we accompanied her proudly to church and paid no notice of anyone but her, in her good but practical denim skirt, her gentle milk white face, and the sterling silver owl she wore everywhere. We did not bother trying to understand the sermon. This was her department: Mother was in charge of God.

I admit I don’t know exactly what happened. There was an extraordinary amount of tumult at church to which Mother was somehow connected. For example, the very nice man who directed the choir, and the very nice man who played organ, suddenly moved in together and gave birth to a beautiful Vietnamese girl whom they named Claire, after our mother.

Other people were not so appreciative. Bible Study took a violent turn. The Lady Lamplighters turned militant, and the church as a whole seemed headed for schism. A big meeting was held in the high school auditorium where it was decided -- if I may summarize -- that the church must either reinvestigate its deeply held beliefs, question its assumptions, revamp its politics, rethink its role in the community, or kindly request that my mother choose some other denomination.

Thereafter my mother stayed home. One of the few times I saw her show irritation was when a visitor pressed her to explain exactly what had occurred.

“All I did,” she insisted “was ask a few very obvious questions.”

* My mother’s predilection for reality was not, alas, inherited by me. I take after my father.

GRANDMOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Suicide is a tradition in my family. Of course it is not required. Nonetheless we pretty much abide by it. My father’s mother killed herself on Leap Year Day. (We also possess a doomed fondness for theatrics.) Unfortunately she was caught in the Leap Year Effect, still little understood in 1964, and got persephone’d into the situation she’s in now, three-quarters dead, or nine months of the year. The other three months she spends with us.

March 1st she appears at the door, fresh from death, in her gray cloak smelling like the wet sheep of the afterlife, and her pockets full of candy skulls. My darlings, she says, and one by one picks us up and enfolds us in her cloak so that we will not be so afraid when death comes for us.

Grandmother seems very much to enjoy her time with us. All day she sits in the same corner, humming a song I can never remember when she’s not around.

My father remains formal; he’s never gotten used to having his mother around. The gunshot had seemed so irreparable. Now she only has a small scar on her temple, though she gets headaches sometimes and my mother makes chamomile tea. Apparently suicide is not something you just get over, especially not when it’s your own.

Grandmother doesn’t often speak about death. She spends enough time there as it is. Sometimes she admits it is dreary. Of course it is different for her--she’s still commuting. She’d like to move to a different neighborhood, but first she must finish here.

“There are things that need looking after,” she says and smiles upon her four grandsons: the one who cares only for books, the one who loves dirty pictures, the one who only does right and resents it, and the one who is always drunk, as she was, in her first life.

She admits she is not sure what comes after death. Death is all she’s seen so far. But nonetheless she expects we’ll visit her, not in the dreary suburb of death where she is now, but in the life after. “I intend to race camels,” she said. All of us laughed; she wasn’t kidding.

“You are so lovable,” she says “And at the same time full of poison.” She claps her hands. “Come sit with Granny, my dears. I am the anti-venom.”

To one grandson she says, “Forgive” and, to another “Buckle up!” How stern she looks when she orders me, “Do not remain on the periphery of life!”

There is no question that my drunk brother is her favorite. I remember him as he was then, a boy, his forest full of birds still visible, the forest he would clear-cut and then tar over.

In her chair in the corner, she holds him, rubs his back and coos to him until he begins quietly to vomit. In her white tea cup she catches this and cheerfully she drinks it.

My father leaves the room and all the grandsons cry and only my mother remains at the stove. My sad-eyed grandmother continues calmly to sip her teacup of vomited poison. The scar on her temple, her elderly throat, turn blue as a late summer evening.

She does not allow the cup to be pried from her hand. She says, “I am your granny from death, my dears, and this is what I am here for.”

HOUSEKEEPING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Our farmhouse had a number of staircases, between three and five, and twelve rooms, or three times as many, depending on whether you were scouting beds for relatives, renting out, dusting, hunting for Easter eggs or searching for your car keys at the last possible moment.

The critic in the corner -- see him there, he holds his hand over his mouth because his breath is bad -- he says, “Here we are indulging in magical realism.”

Magical realism my ass*. Anyone who has ever tried to clean such a house will know that I am only telling the truth in the simplest way. And, if I am over-sensitive, it is only because this is how my excellent mother met her end -- at least I think she did -- cleaning this impossible house.

It it conceivable there may have been, in my mother’s vast and comprehensive sanity, a small gap marked ‘housekeeping’. She believed even lunch ought to be accompanied by appetizer and dessert; she regarded the accumulation of dust as a personal failure. She never once allowed herself beans from a can, a jar of sauerkraut.

‘She makes everything herself.’ we say, to praise our mother. But this is a sentence which ought to be reserved for goddesses. Instead we shackle mortal women with it. Little wonder they get tired.

Our mother moved endlessly through the house, sweeping, dusting, washing up, trying to reach every corner, trying to finish before it was time to begin again. A reasonable woman, she expected a reasonable house. But the house, please remember, was from my father’s side of the family and thus prone to fits and manias and, most of all, to frequent self-inflation. Just when she was catching up, the house would sprout another corner, another closet, or even an entire bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a unique perspective on the Civil War.

When we got up, when we went to bed, Mother was cleaning, on her hands and knees, or up on a ladder, straining to reach into the corner and vanquish the last bit of dust. But, like a flock of pigeons, the dust only left one place to land on another, surrounding her always, an inch from the tip of her feather duster. I believe the dust loved her, in keeping with the habit it had learned when it was skin of ours.

Meanwhile the roof leaked, a little here and a little there; the horsehair beneath the carpets got wet and stank like a stable. Lustful knick-knacks fucked and gave birth. The pineapples she’d stenciled fell off the vine and rotted sweetly in corners. The daisies in her wallpaper all died.
To every setback she responded with more energy, more bleach, more lemon-scented polish. My father’s helpfulness can be predicted. One day he insisted the drawer went: forks, knives and spoons. The next day, as any idiot knows, it’s knives, forks and spoons. Most of the time he was the kind of guy who’d leave around coffee cans full of his urine but suddenly he’d want to know--why aren’t the spices alphabetized?

My mother remained proud throughout her battles with our mad implacable house, but perhaps the family madness touched her then, through the gap marked ‘housekeeping’. Who makes their own sauerkraut? What’s wrong with store-bought bread?

One night we arrived home to find a note on the table: Dinner in freezer. Scrubbing North Wing guest bath. Back later.

In the freezer our meals were neatly labeled. In the pantry were three pies: a pumpkin, a pecan, a cherry with a lattice crust.

I am ashamed to say we ate for nearly a week before Duncan asked, “What part is the North Wing anyway?”

Karl slammed his glass on the table. “Don’t you get it? She’s gone.”

Father said, “Your mother has never had a sense of direction. She doesn’t mean ‘North’, she means ‘South‘.”

First in teams, then one by one, we searched the house but none of us were able to find her. Really it is astonishing, it is astronomical, how many rooms a house has when your mother is gone.

At the base of the attic stairs we found her silver owl necklace, her wedding ring, a rag and a can of extra-strength Comet. We assumed she’d chosen to end her life and deposit her body in one of the trunks in the attic. A number of our ancestors have done this**.

We lived as best we could, our mad father and his four sons. We grieved and persevered and sometimes, without warning, one of us would stumble upon a room that was absolutely perfectly clean.

Duncan said, “It’s a big old house. Maybe we’re just missing her.” He was already drinking then or else he never would have said something so ludicrous.

Still, there were questions none of us were willing to ask as we sat together at the kitchen table, waiting for Father to scrape another omelet out of the pan. Not one of us, for example, ever asked, “If all of us are sitting here, who is moving furniture and slamming doors upstairs?” We did not question. We sat silently and we ate in tears.


* We ought to mount an anti-discrimination campaign, don’t you think, to call to task those for whom the world is flat and mute, who must therefore look enviously upon our world and call it “magical”. Imagine what we could accomplish, if every levitating aunt just once spoke up?

** This also explains why, despite many stated intentions, no one ever gets around to cleaning the attic.

BROTHERS.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Is it true other people have childhoods and then become different and are called adults? This progression was never observed in my family. Obviously my father was never an adult--unless the word be synonym for madness. By the age of 8, probably sooner, my brothers and I were pretty much as we are now--bookish, drunk, horny, resentful. The first grudge, beer, novel, dirty picture we recognized as if it were the 10,000th. We did not begin; we continued.

WHAT I MEAN.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Do you know? This thing. Waiting sometimes on the stairs, curled up in the mailbox, or in the eyes of strangers walking toward me. Mostly it’s inside which is, I suppose, why it’s so difficult. A constriction in the throat, an ache in the gut. The usual words: feeling, mood are hopelessly insufficient, even misleading. You might as well call the Emperor mister. Yes, and uranium’s that spunky stuff. This edgy anxiety underlying everything, yes, this anxious ineffable tortoise. For me, that tortoise is a dull gray cloud. At its very worst I can almost see it: it has rusty spots the color of dried blood and coils around my head like barbed wire.

The anxious ineffable tortoise, which is also an evil blood-stained cloud, has two voices. Both speak at once. An urgent whisper: something must be done, time’s running out, something must be done at once. The other voice pleads But what? But what? And never pauses for an answer to the question. Both voice hammer down at once, the panic and the confusion together. (The playing of two songs at once has been known to reduce me to hysteria.) The voices don’t stop, my gut turns to stone, my voice, if it can be heard at all, sounds like a castrato three hills away.

In the morning sometimes I am left alone, but in the afternoon it is almost always there, that demon tortoise, that cloud of panicked confusion. In the evening, well, there are books. There’s beer.

Do you know what I mean? You do, don’t you? Some people say they know, they had it once at 3am. Some people say, “You can get a prescription for that.” Some people say, “Everybody knows that.” Some people switch to another chair. Some people say they don’t know but from the way they clutch their G&T it’s obvious they do.

All four sons have got it, my brothers and I. Our father says it’s genetic. He says he got it from his mother and passed it down. My mother says “it’s always the obvious that nobody notices” and says we ought to get to know it.

We do not. What we have instead are strategies.

THE SAME WORD FOR PENIS AND PROBLEM.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

About my brother Thom it is best to say as little as possible. Almost anything that can be said about Thom is obscene. And why talk about him, when he talks so much about himself? Oh no, my brother Thom is not shy, not even when we wish he would be, when anyone else would be at least discreet, but not our Thom, not even at the dinner table or near surveillance cameras, not on the Sabbath, not even on his dates in court.

No, Thom always has to pipe up and insist that the panicked tortoise does takes off, the anxious cloud evaporates, whenever he’s in the middle of an orgy.

Thom! Not any orgy, of course. It has to be first-rate, inclusive of all orifices, not neglecting the nipples, with him doing everything and everything being done to him, with no fewer than 5 people in all genders and everyone has to be hot or well-hung or there has to be something about them anyway--then, Thom says, that tortoise entirely vanishes.

Such occasions are difficult to arrange. (Forgive me when I tell you things you already know.) There are complications always. Conservative wives come home early. No, no, that’s not lubricant, that’s mousse! Gunshots are fired. Someone shouts Ride ‘em cowboy! and so-and-so, you know, cannot stop giggling. And what’s the chance a number of cocks will perform as required at once? Still, Thom swears it has been known to happen, that perfect orgy, and he swears that he was happy, then.

In between perfect orgies, Thom spends three to five years in chat-rooms, dead bored and buried in self-disgust, exaggerating the size of his prick by two inches at least.

I am sorry if I have said too much. My propriety’s been blasted by living too long with Thom. Our appalling Thom: obscenity for all occasions. I myself am perverse only by association.
Of course I have penis problems of my own. (Somewhere--don’t you think--there’s got to be a culture that uses one same word for penis and for problem.) Unlike Thom, whose penis only garners fines, doctor’s appointments and internet appearances, my penis makes me money. My penis has made me a rich man. Yes, I am living the American Dream.

Not the old American Dream. The new one.

I wanted to be a success. Of course I did. I wanted to strive, to achieve. Then I discovered I’d have to work. Forty hours a week or more. Which seems excessive. And wasteful. Is life so long that we can afford to spend so much time working? Especially those of us who like to read.
My life was over, I thought. No chance for it--I had to work. Then opportunity knocked. I needed a new doorknob, so I went to the local home goods store, which of course was bigger than Greenland on an old map. And I was trying to choose the best doorknob. Of the thirty-nine available doorknobs. I was tired and distracted. What do I know about doorknobs? What in my life has prepared me for choices of this magnitude?

It was then that I was visited by a very American miracle.

A miracle which was the marvelous and improbable conjunction of the stars above and certain events down below: a superstore, a speeding forklift, a selection of doorknobs, a clerk on Ativan, and tired, distracted, near-sighted me.

I went into HomePlus with five dollars. After seven weeks in the hospital I came out with a slight but persistent limp and a penis that does function, no matter how odd it looks, and 1.75 million dollars to support myself in idleness and non-achievement. America! Never mind blindness and amputation: there’s no jury in America that won’t approve a million dollars extra for a penis injury.

You may want to keep this in mind.

As I was saying, we all have our strategies. Let’s continue this discussion and I promise I won’t mention penises again for several pages.

SON OF THE PUMPKIN KING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Of the four brothers, only Karl took self-restraint as a serious option. (When the rest of us appeared restrained, we were just storing up.) Karl breathed deeply until the urge to do that thing passed, and calm was restored--or the next mad urge arrived. We heard him in the corner sometimes, breathing like a horse.

When dull anxiety arrived Karl didn’t drink or jack off. He didn’t even read tales of the Arctic. He just stayed there, remaining alert and uncomfortable, like a 12 hour guard at a summer festival in a polyester faux-fur gorilla suit. Incredible. Herculean, even. Naturally he was somewhat irritable. At night he wore teeth guards. His neck was not something he used. Anyone could see he was thinking, “I’m going to sit right here until the urge to do that thing passes.” And it did pass. But mostly it stayed.

* * *

Karl was actually Karl Jr., which is another thing which ought to be illegal. Everyone ought to receive a name of their own to use, to burnish or to soil, as they choose. Whereas Karl got a name our father was already using. Our father who had zero concept of sharing. No wonder they did not get along, those two big men with the same small name.

* * *

Karl’s voice was always kind and always soft, but the way he looked at me always made me feel like I reminded him of something terrible which, try as he might, he just couldn’t forget.

Karl never did anything wrong, as far as I know. He might even have been a saint, if a new variety of saint could be minted, one with zero forgiveness.

I make him sound harsh. He did not mean to be. I suspect he was incapable of forgetting. His mind was like exceptional historical mud, which is found to carry the imprint of a woman fleeing, three-point-two million years ago and even her panic remains visible there, on the in-step. Likewise Karl could not forget the chocolate I refused to share with him but then left to mold, or Duncan’s attempt at hard cider which ended in such a comprehensive and sticky explosion, or Thom’s theft and humiliating exhibition of Karl’s entire soft porn collection, which really was downright virtuous, at least compared to what the rest of us were looking at. All this along with a lifetime’s worth of snide remarks, small incidents, hurts intended or un--, embarrassments, humiliations.

Still, none of these harms compared to the damage done by Karl’s principal madness, his crucial mistake: Father was real to him. The rest of us dismissed Father as mad and paid little notice of his manias and petty rages. Karl, however, was unable to do this: Father must be proven wrong, Father must be confronted, Father must be obeyed. Karl thus charted his days by the ever-shifting map of our father’s madness.

Father thought Karl ought to go to school for computers, that was where the money was. And Karl should improve his posture. And show more respect and more independence. And be more spontaneous!

Then, with the rest of us, Karl would discuss--was Father right or wrong, should he obey or disobey, or would it be better to compromise? But Karl never seemed to understand that Father was a loony as a cuckoo bird.

Needless to say, Karl’s respect and concern made Father drastically worse. He seldom had a good word to say about poor Karl, his troubled son. The rest of us generally spoke to Father as if he were a Black Labrador Retriever. We were kind but firm and when he was causing a problem we put him outside. Thom, especially, was not above swatting Father with a newspaper when he got out of hand and seemed liable to soil the furniture. Father respected this and ceased to criticize us: even our court dates were only evidence of ’high-spiritedness’. But Karl, who gave importance to our father’s every word, Karl was really a problem.

Father decided that Karl was uppity, going to school for computers. What was wrong with working with working on a pumpkin farm? Did he look down on his father’s honest labor, the sweat of his brow? Father thought Karl ought to quit school and come to work on the farm.
And Karl agreed, which caused even our placid Mother to turn pale.

Pumpkin farming is of course an outrageous bit of larceny which makes even Christmas tree plantations seem honorable in comparison. Untold numbers of city people are conned into believing that, because it is a holiday, it is reasonable to pay thirty-five dollars for a squash. The scribes of ancient scriptures would have added it to the list of prohibited occupations had they but known: the whores, the usurers, the arms-dealers, the pumpkin farmers.

Our father of course thought nothing in the world was finer than being a pumpkin farmer. Also, it was quite a low-impact profession. He paid high school boys to hoe; in the Fall he sat behind the money box.

Not that Karl could take it easy, oh no, Karl must make an effort. Suddenly the pumpkin flowers could not be pollinated without Karl’s help and every sprig of ragweed was a reflection of his bad attitude. Soon Karl was spending all day out in the field, twisting the pumpkins on their vines, making sure they ’ripened equally on both sides’. He seemed to believe it was all some rite of passage, after which he would, once and for all, gain Father’s respect.

Karl was so earnest and so easily hurt. We did not know how to tell him that, yes, it was a rite of passage, but only to being a loony cuckoo-bird.

The Blue Hubbard acquired a scaly fungus, the acorn squash grew lopsided. The pumpkins, unaccustomed to so much attention, became self-conscious, started making mistakes.

One brilliant afternoon in the Fall, we heard shouting and found Karl and Father in Field #3, heaving pumpkins at each other, the small sweet ones which are so good for pie. Pumpkin guts were everywhere and the air was full of the smell of freshly cracked pumpkin, which is so shamefully intimate.

Karl and Father declared they could not work together, which was the first sane thing we’d heard out of either one of them for months. Our mother gathered up the shards of busted pumpkin, skinned them, boiled them down. Karl moved out, then back in, then out again, as all of us did, continually, for so many years. Karl arrived for holidays on time, he brought flowers or wine, he never raised his voice, but we could see from how he looked at us that he had not forgotten, and that he did not forgive us, not for anything.