My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

the man is in a mellow mood, teasing and not accusing. No.

      Fact is, much of the time we saw our father, later in the day, he’d been drinking. Even when there were no obvious signs, not even the hot fierce smell of his breath.

      Mom had a way of communicating to us—Don’t.

      Meaning Don’t provoke your father. Not right now.

      This Mom could communicate wordlessly with a sidelong roll of her eyes, a stiffening of her mouth.

       Your father loves you, as I do—so much! But—don’t test that love …

      A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?

      Like leaning too close to the front burner of the stove, as I’d done as a small child, and in an instant my flammable pajama top burst into flame—you can’t believe how swiftly.

      But swiftly too as if she’d been preparing for such a calamity for all of her life as a mother, Mom grabbed me, pulled me away from the stove, hugging me, snuffing out the fierce little flames with her body, bare hands smothering the flames, before they could take hold. And trembling then, lifting me to the sink and running cold water over my arms, my hands, just to make sure the flames were gone. Almost fainting, she’d been so frightened. We won’t tell Daddy, sweetie, all right?—Daddy loves you so much he would just be upset.

      Comforting to hear Mom speak of Daddy. As if in some way he was her Daddy, too.

      And so when Mom called Daddy “Jerome” it was in a respectful voice. Not a playful voice and not an accusatory or critical voice but (you might say) a voice of wariness.

       Oh Jerome. I think—we have to talk …

      The hushed voice I would just barely hear through the furnace vent in my room in the days following Hadrian Johnson’s death.

      EVEN NOW. SO MANY YEARS LATER. THAT STRONG WISH TO CRAWL away, die in shame.

      WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL IN THE EARLY 1980S MY FATHER WAS A tall solid-built man with dark spiky hair, hard-muscled arms and shoulders, a smell of tobacco on his breath, and (sometimes) a smell of beer, whiskey. His jaws were covered in coarse stubble except when he shaved, an effort made grudgingly once a week or so by one not willing to be a bearded man but thinking it effeminate to be close-shaven too. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter and something of an amateur carpenter and electrician. In the army he’d been an amateur boxer, a heavyweight, and while we were growing up he had a punching bag and a heavy bag in the garage where he sparred with other men, and with my brothers as they came of age, who could never, not ever, quick on their young legs as they were, avoid their father’s lightning-quick right cross. It was the great dream of my oldest brother Jerome—“Jerr”—that he might someday knock Daddy down on his rear, not out but down; but that never happened.

      And Lionel, Les, Rick. He’d made them all “spar” with him, laced big boxing gloves on their hands, gave them instructions, commanded them to Hit me! Try.

      We watched. We laughed and applauded. Seeing one of our brothers trying not to cry, wiping bloody snot from his reddened nose, seeing our father release a rat-a-tat of short stinging right-hand blows against a bare, skinny, sweating-pale chest—why was that funny? Was that funny?

       Try to catch me, li’l dude. C’mon!

       Hey: you’re not giving up until I say so.

      Girls were exempt from such humiliations. My sisters and me. But girls were exempt from instructions too. And Daddy’s special glow of approval, when at last one of our brothers managed to land a solid blow or two, or keep himself from falling hard on his ass on the cement floor of the garage.

       Not bad, kid. On your way to the Golden Gloves!

      Daddy’s girls had to suppose that Daddy was proud of us in other ways, it wasn’t clear how just yet.

      He wanted us to be good-looking, which might mean sexy—but not too obviously. Staring at Miriam—her mouth, lipstick—not knowing what to think, how to react: Did he approve, or disapprove?

      He’d seemed to be impressed by good grades but report cards were not very real to him, school was a female thing, he’d dropped out of high school without graduating, never read a book nor even glanced inside a book so far as I knew, pushed aside our textbooks if they were in the way on a counter, no curiosity except just once that I remember, pushing aside a book I’d brought home from the public library—The Diary of Anne Frank.

      What was this, he’d heard of this, vaguely—in the newspaper, or somewhere—Anne Frank. Nazis?

      But Daddy’s interest was fleeting. He’d peered at the cover, the wan girl-face of the diarist, saw nothing to particularly intrigue him, dismissed the book as casually as he’d noticed it without asking me about it. For always Daddy was distracted, busy. His mind was a kaleidoscope of tasks, things to be done, each day a ladder to be climbed, nothing random admitted.

      And what pride we felt, my sisters and me, seeing our father in some public place, beside other, ordinary men: taller than most men, better-looking, with a way of carrying himself that was both arrogant and dignified. No matter what Daddy wore, work clothes, work boots, leather jacket he looked good—manly.

      And the expression on our mother’s face, when they were together, with others. That particular sort of female, sexual pride. There. That’s him. My husband Jerome. Mine.

      To their children, parents are not identical. The mother I knew as the youngest of seven children was certainly not the mother my older siblings knew, who’d been a young wife. Especially, the father I knew was not the father my brothers knew.

      For Daddy treated my brothers differently than he treated my sisters and me. To Daddy the world was harshly divided: male, female.

      He loved my brothers in a way different from the way he loved my sisters and me, a fiercer love, a more demanding love, mixed with impatience, at times even derision; a hurtful love. In my brothers he saw himself and so found fault, even shame, a need to punish. But also a blindness, a refusal to detach himself from them.

      His daughters, his girls, Daddy adored. You would not have said of any Kerrigan that he adored his sons.

      We were thrilled to obey him, we basked in his attention, his love. It was a protective love, a wish to cherish but also a wish to control, even coerce. It was not a wish to know—to know who we were, or might be.

      Yet, Daddy behaved differently with Miriam, and with Katie, than he did with me. It was a subtle difference but we knew.

      He’d have claimed that he loved us all equally. In fact, he’d have been angry if anyone had suggested otherwise. That is what parents usually claim.

      Until there is a day, an hour, when they cease making that claim.

      TWO FACTS ABOUT DADDY: HE’D FOUGHT IN VIETNAM, AND HE’D come back alive and (mostly) undamaged.

      This was about as much as Daddy would say about his years as a soldier in the U.S. Army, when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

      “I enlisted. I was nineteen. I was stupid.”

      We knew from relatives that Daddy had been “cited for heroism” helping to evacuate wounded soldiers while wounded himself. He’d been awarded medals—kept in a box in the attic.

      My brothers tried to get him to talk about being a soldier in the U.S. military and in the war but he never would. In a good mood after a few ales he’d concede he’d been God-damned lucky the shrapnel that got him had been in his ass, not his groin, or none of “you kids” would’ve been born; in a not-good mood he’d say only that Vietnam had been a mistake but not just his mistake, the whole country had gone bat-shit crazy.

      He’d