Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,63

over

You stink

You suck

Fuck you

You asshole

It’s not my turn to do the dishes

You never help around here

Pansy

You are such a girl

Take it outside

Grow up

Margaret braced herself. On Thanksgiving, it fell on her, now ten years old, to iron the linens and place the silver and the napkins on the table. These chores kept her close to her mother and away from the boys. Keeping with the family tradition, there were assigned seats. Don, the patriarch, was at the east end of the table, with Donald to his immediate right, where he could be closely monitored. Mimi’s place was on the table’s north side, with a view out the window, with chess-playing Mark and introspective Joe nearby, and rebellious Peter closest of all, so that she could keep an eye on him. Margaret always sat at an end because she was left-handed, and little Mary, still just seven, not far away. Matt sat across from them, near Jim and Kathy. But they weren’t seated yet this year when the worst happened.

Jim and Donald were more at odds than ever. They fought every time they were in the same room now. Jim looked at Donald and saw a weakened foe, someone he could finally defeat; he also might have seen an unwelcome image of himself, suffering from delusions just as he was. Either way, Donald had to be expunged, and Jim had to be the one to do it. Donald, meanwhile, looked at Jim and saw a pest who never seemed to go away. He’d been humiliated enough—by a wife who would not agree to stay married to him, by brothers who did not obey him the way he’d once hoped. For Jim to walk through the door and assume that he was in charge was, for Donald, the final insult.

So they fought—wrestling, like in the old days, in the living room, the usual spot. Donald used to have the advantage, but not anymore; Donald had been in the hospital, and was weakened by neuroleptic drugs. They seemed evenly matched now. As someone got little Mary safely out of bounds, the fight escalated.

It wasn’t long before they could not be confined to one room.

The living room at Hidden Valley Road opened out to the dining room. If you wanted to take a fight out into the backyard, you would have to cross through the dining room to get there. On this Thanksgiving, the brothers started to move in that direction. The only thing in their way was the table.

Donald ran to the far side of the dining room. He lifted up the table, with Jim on the other side, coming closer. In Margaret’s memory, he tipped the table over onto its side, and everything on it came crashing down onto the floor. In Mark’s, Donald actually picked up the whole table and threw it at Jim. In either case, Mimi’s perfect Thanksgiving was destroyed.

Mimi looked at the house now, at the table keeled over, at the plates and silver everywhere, the linens crumpled in a heap. There may have been no better, more precise manifestation of her deepest fears than this, no clearer way of illustrating the way she felt just then—that every good thing she had done, all the work, all the attention to detail and love, yes, love, for her family was in pieces. There was no sugar-coating this. Her mother, Billy, if she’d been there to see it, would have known without a doubt how bad things were—how profoundly Mimi had failed. Anyone would.

She turned her back on everyone and walked back into the kitchen. That was when everyone heard another noise, softer this time: the gingerbread house, being smashed to bits by the woman who had made it.

“You boys don’t deserve this,” Mimi said, in tears.

* * *

Running almost as a dividing line between the Galvin and Skarke properties at the end of Hidden Valley Road was a small trail that had gone unused, seemingly, for years. One day, the Skarkes bought a Honda 90 minibike. Carolyn Skarke, who was about Margaret’s age, would ride up the trail between her house