The New Black Mask (No 6)

Mean to My Father Carolyn Banks

Carolyn Banks teaches creative writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas. Her fourth suspense novel, Patchwork, was published by Crown in spring 1986, and her previous novel, The Girls on the Row, was recently reprinted in paperback by Fawcett-Crest. She is presently indulging her interest in horses, working on a nonfiction book for Texas Monthly Press tentatively titled The Horse Lover’s Guide to Texas.

My mother and my aunt say that I was it mean to my father. At least, they used to say it when he was alive. They said that whenever he put his arms around me, I would make a face and pull away, and then he would feel sad.

And that’s true.

I never meant to be that way. I always promised myself that the next time he came to me, I would hug him back. Maybe even kiss him on the cheek.

But then he would be there and I could smell his breath and see the red veins on his nose and something inside me would twist up. It was like what the nuns in school called a reflex, except that when they talked about it, it had to do with knees. You hit your knee and it would jerk away, even if you didn’t want it to. Well, that’s the way I was about my father.

My mother and my aunt said I was a cold fish, and I guess they were right.

I wasn’t always like that, though, except that I used to go down in the cellar sometimes and sit all by myself. When I was real little. I guess, if you think about it, that was a sign.

I would sit behind the cabinet where my mother kept cans of soup and stuff and smell the smell of bleach and ammonia. She only did the wash on Saturdays, but it smelled that way all the time. It smelled clean.

And it looked clean, too. We had a coal bin down there for the furnace, but you couldn’t really tell over on the side where I used to sit. The walls had been whitewashed and they were bright-white, because once a week my mother took a broom and swept the soot off the walls, swept them the way she did the floors. I made that part of the cellar my thinking place.

Not that I was that much of a thinker. The nuns in school were always yelling at me, and they would hit me, too, with a ruler across the palms of my hands. The only good thing about school was Nancy Killian, who was my friend.

At least, she was my friend in third grade, when she came to our school. And in fourth. The first part of fourth. Around the middle of fourth, she died.

She didn’t just die. She was stabbed thirteen times. They said her brother did it and he was sent away, but not to jail. To a hospital. But they said he would never get out and, as far as I know, he never did.

Nancy Killian was just like me. She wanted to work in an office when she grew up, just like me. She wanted a puppy and her mother wouldn’t let her have one, just like me. Except that she had a brother, a brother who was home all the time or else at the river, down by the trains. Or hanging out at the store where the pinball machine was. She had a bum for a brother, that’s what my mother said.

Nancy Killian didn’t come to school the day she was stabbed. She had a fight with me the day before and she ripped half of the hem out of my dress. And I said I would never talk to her again, never, and went home.

But my mother yelled at me about my dress and told me money didn’t grow on trees and that decent little girls didn’t go around fighting. I went down in the cellar to my thinking place and wished that I could be friends with Nancy again.

I was going to make up with her at school the next day, the day she didn’t show up. The day she was stabbed.

Most of the kids ate lunch at school every day because their mothers, like my mother and Nancy Killian’s, worked at the linoleum factory down the street. And their fathers worked, too, the way mine did and hers did, in gray shirts and gray pants, and big, heavy shoes. But my aunt lived up the street from Nancy’s house and she would make me soup for lunch, so I was allowed to go there.

I went to Nancy’s house first, though. I knocked on the back door and I went around to the front door and knocked there, too, even though we weren’t allowed to come in that way. But Nancy didn’t come. And then I felt as though Nancy was mad at me forever and we would never be friends again.

So I went home just to be sad instead of going to my aunt’s house to eat. And I went to my thinking place and I thought, not just about Nancy, but about how mad my aunt was going to be that I didn’t go there for lunch and what the nuns would say and my mother.

I heard the cellar door come open and I saw the bottoms of my father’s legs on the top step. Then he came down and I watched him, more of his legs and more and then all of him.

“Oh,” I said out loud. His shirt and his pants had blood on them. Not bright red, but darker. Still, blood. And I went over and even grabbed his hand. I wasn’t mean to my father then. But his hand was bloody, too.

I asked him if he got hurt at work and he said yes. And then he told me to go upstairs and get ready to go back to school. That he wouldn’t tell my mother I was there if I didn’t tell her he got hurt at work. And I said okay.

When I went up the steps I saw him taking clean work clothes off the line that my mother had hung in the basement. And then I heard him running the water into the laundry tub. And then I heard the big roar that the furnace makes when somebody opens the door and the whole cellar turns orange.

And after that, everything was different Nancy Killian never came back to school and the newspapers had her picture in it almost every day for over a week. And her brother got sent away, like I said. And I started being mean to my father.