Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

But if I were one of those hidden cameras, here’s what I think I would have seen at my house that Sunday night: I would see my mom in the doorway when Tina and I are starting down the driveway in her parents’ red Subaru wagon. Tina has had her license for about three months, and even though she drives like she’s about ninety years old-we’re talking five miles below the speed limit, always, and she might be the only one of my friends who doesn’t text while she’s passing a manure spreader-my mom is worried. She has worried whenever I have gotten in the car with Tina the first half of the summer. She has no idea that even though I only have a learner’s permit and am only supposed to drive a car when Mom or Dad are right there beside me in the passenger seat, I drive that Subaru all the time around Haverill. Not smart, I know. But not ridiculous, either, because the state police never patrol around here. And so I drive that wagon a lot, and I am, like Tina, a pretty careful driver.

Anyway, Mom is standing in the doorway, and she still has in her arms the big blue bowl with the peas she has plucked from the garden. Her garden. My dad and I really have very little (read: nothing) to do with it. She hasn’t shelled those peas yet. Imagine Auntie Em, but still young and pretty. Remember, my mom was only thirty-eight when she died. I know that’s supposed to seem ancient to a teenager, but it’s not. It’s just not.

So my mom waves once, and I hope I wave back. But there’s no guarantee. Meanwhile my dad is tidying the garage. Organizing. I have absolutely no idea why, but that’s what he is doing late that Sunday afternoon. He doesn’t come out to holler good-bye to me or wave. But the last time I saw him in there, he was drinking a beer. It is at least his second bottle and maybe his third, and the idea has crossed my mind that this is trouble. When he first returned in May, he wasn’t drinking at all. But at a picnic for one of his manager’s birthdays in late June, he started again, and since then he has been ratcheting it up. Mom has said it’s because business is a little slow and we’re in a recession. When things pick up, he’ll-as grown-ups put it-go back on the wagon. But when he drinks, he becomes a total jerk. This month has been three-plus weeks of Mom and me walking on glass, tiptoeing around the house so we don’t piss him off any more than we seem to simply by breathing. Something about Mom’s baptism this morning has ticked him off, and I’ve been unable to put my finger on what it is. Midafternoon I almost asked Mom if it was as obvious as the idea that the baptism involved Stephen, but in theory I don’t know about Stephen, and I have to assume that my dad doesn’t either.

As Tina and I reach the end of the driveway, I have a thought: Dad is puttering around in the garage because Mom never goes there except to pull out the car in the winter. It’s a place where he can hang out and totally avoid Mom and me. Which, with him drinking right now, is probably a good thing for Mom. Something happened on Friday night when I was at a party in Pownal. I don’t know the details, but even by the admittedly very low standards of civility my dad subscribes to, it couldn’t have been pretty. How badly did he hit Mom? I don’t know because I wasn’t home, and almost always he hits her in places no one can see. But since Friday night the house has been especially gloomy, even on the pathetic Happiness Scale in place at the Haywards’. I think he beat her pretty badly, no doubt on the lower back.

After I’ve left, my mom sits down to shell the peas in that bowl. She probably sits down near where I saw her waving, outside in the sun that is still bathing the western side of the lawn in warmth. Eventually she will rise, go back inside, and cook the rest of their dinner. She doesn’t set the kitchen table, because I think they will eat on the front porch tonight. It is a balmy summer evening, and my parents always liked to eat outside on that porch. It didn’t have a table, because it really was just front steps with a landing, and so they will eat that night with their plates on their laps and their drinks on the wooden planking beside them. In my mom’s case, that means iced tea, in my dad’s another beer.

They probably aren’t saying a whole lot as they eat, because by the time they plop themselves down on those steps, Mom is a little scared and my dad is well on the way to being totally hammered. Talking to him right now is like baiting a hungry lion. Why do that? Why go there? The thing is, it could be such a great night for them. Tomorrow is Monday, her day off, and the kid is at a concert and spending the night with a friend. Wouldn’t you think most parents would be having Naked Sunday together?

But not mine. Not that night.

At some point when he is done chewing a bite of chicken, his tongue clearing bits of meat from around his gums in this creepy way that reminds me of a mole tunneling just under the grass, my dad turns to my mom and says something nasty about the meal. Maybe it’s as simple as how her vegetables don’t taste any better than the ones you can buy at the supermarket, but with all the mulch and manure and fertilizer she uses, these ones from her garden actually cost more. Some nights this month, this has been his song. Maybe he says something about her shorts: They’re too short. Too baggy. Too frumpy. Too slutty. My dad had a thing about shorts and my mom’s legs-which were really very sexy for a mom. But most likely it is the baptism he has brought up, planning to use it to find a way to wound her and pick a fight. He says, maybe, that he can’t believe she paraded around like some tramp in a bathing suit before the whole batch of Holy Rollers.

That’s what he called the people who went to the church: Holy Rollers.

He says that everyone must have loved that: Alice Hayward, tarting around at the pond. Now, my dad wasn’t a moron. He has to know on some level that he is being completely ridiculous. So why is he saying these things? So Mom will dispute him.

It was a Speedo, she reminds him, not some bikini. And I was wearing a T-shirt over it, anyway.

Oh, how lovely, he says, his voice taking on that weird, condescending, pretend-upper-class monotone. But do you honestly think that makes it better? Do you think I would prefer to have my wife parading around town like she’s a contestant in a Hooters wet-T-shirt contest?

And my mom will know what’s coming and that she can’t win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there’s no place left to go. And Mom is already hurting from whatever she had endured on Friday night when I was gone. Still, here is the problem she faces: If she disagrees with Dad, he might hit her for challenging him, but if she agrees with him, she is admitting to having dressed like a slut at her baptism, and that will be his grounds for whaling on her.

What does she say? In my mind I see her shaking her head, realizing that she should have gotten out years ago. Or that she should have gone to court when she was supposed to a week or so after she got that temporary restraining order back in February. Or she should have taken the flowers that had started arriving almost daily in May and tossed them into the compost heap. Or she should never have allowed him back in the house when he wheedled his way into a reconciliation just after Mother’s Day. But that isn’t what she did, and now she’s looking at her second beating in three days. And so she stands up with her plate and retreats inside. I have seen her do this before: just take her food and excuse herself from the table. Or excuse herself from the table without taking her food. The upside to this strategy-withdrawal without a word-is that she hasn’t said anything that he can use as a justification for his anger. The downside? She has seriously dissed him. (And when she has done this when I’ve been present, she has also humiliated him in front of his daughter.)