pounce. When I counted to seven, I noticed the beginnings of a sardonic smile at the corners of Mom’s mouth. She stubbed her cigarette out on her plate, rose and sidestepped the peppercorns, then stomped into the kitchen. I heard her banging pots, and then a lid clattered to the ground, ringing a few times before it settled on the floor. She was up to something, and that was never good.
Mom returned to the table with a steaming pot, still warm from the stove. She lifted it over her head and I screamed, worried she would burn Dad dead. He screeched his chair back, stood up and dared her to throw it. My stomach lurched, as if the table and chairs had suddenly lifted off the floor and spun me too fast like one of those carnival teacup rides.
I closed my eyes and wished for a time machine so I could go back to just last year, when my parents still talked to each other. If I could just pinpoint that moment right before everything went wrong, I could fix it somehow and prevent this day from ever happening. Maybe I’d show them the forgotten box of Kodachrome slides in the basement, the evidence that they loved each other once. When I first held the paper squares to the sunlight, I’d discovered that Mom’s face was once full of laughter, and she used to wear short dresses and shiny white boots and smoke her cigarettes through a long stick like a movie star. She still had the same short boy haircut, but it was a brighter shade of red then, and her eyes seemed more emerald. In every slide Mom was smiling or winking over her shoulder at Dad. He took the photos not long after he’d spotted her registering for classes at Monterey Peninsula College, and invited her for a drive down the coast to Big Sur.
He’d recognized her from a few summer parties. She had been the one with the loud laugh, the funny one with a natural audience always in tow. He noticed how easily she flowed in a crowd of strangers, which drew my quiet father out of the corners. He was raised never to speak unless spoken to, and liked to study people before deciding to talk to them. This made him slightly mysterious to my mother, who was drawn by the challenge of getting the tall stranger with the dramatic widow’s peak and smoky eyes to open up. When he told her his plan to join the navy and travel abroad after college, Mom, who had never been outside California, was sold.
They married in 1966, and within four years the navy relocated them to Newport, Rhode Island, where Matthew and I were born. After his service, Dad worked as an electrical engineer, making machines that calibrated other machines. Mom took us on strolls to the butcher and the grocery store, and made sure dinner was on the table at five. On the outside, our lives seemed neat, organized, on track. We lived in a wood-shingled row apartment, and my brother and I had our own rooms on the second floor, connected by a trail of Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite pins and gobs of Play-Doh dropped where we’d last used them. Dad installed a swing on the front porch, and we played with the neighbor kids who lived in the three identical homes attached to ours. On weekend mornings, Dad came into my room and we identified clouds as they passed my bedroom window, pointing out the dinosaurs and mushrooms and flying saucers. Before going to sleep, he read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and even though every story ended in a violent death of some kind, he never said I was too little to hear such things.
It seemed like we were happy, but my parents’ marriage was already curdling.
I imagine they tried at first to manage their squabbles, but eventually their disagreements multiplied and spread like a cancer until they had trapped themselves inside one big argument. Now Mom’s shouting routinely pierced the walls we shared with the neighbors, so their problems had undoubtedly become public.
I opened my eyes and saw Mom standing there in position, ready to throw the pot of American chop suey. Their threats arrowed back and forth, back and forth, his restrained monotone mixing with her rising falsetto until their words blended into a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I tried to make it go away by softly humming