Read Online Heart and Soul by Sally Mandel - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sally Mandel
Tags: Fiction/General
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Him off by ignoring Him.
Scenes from my life smeared across the cab window like the city lights. The past five years, my relationship with Dutch had deteriorated into the bitter words of open warfare or, at best, the silence of an uneasy truce. He had always tried to impose his will on me, from the time I was three and wouldnât eat anything but Cheerios. He had tried bribery, threats, and finally force-feeding. What I did was learn how to vomit at will. Once you learn the knack, itâs a lifelong skill. If I couldâve figured out how to make money from that particular trick, Iâd have hired myself out for parties and never bothered with waitressing. Anyhow, I won that battle because my mother got the family doctor into it. Iâd lost eight pounds, which is a lot for a pipsqueak.
It went on like that, my dad and me butting heads. The worst were my teenage years. When he thought my clothes were too revealing, he grabbed them from my room and burned them in the barbeque. I retaliated by wearing a tablecloth on my next date. He almost broke my arm over that one. We got into wicked arguments at the dinner table. When I told him I was going to Juilliard, he pounded the table so hard it cracked down the middle. Mumma was always trying to keep us apart. She and Angie were afraid of him, and I was too, but when I get scared I also get angry. I donât like feeling helpless and when Iâm backed into a corner I fight like Mike Tyson, except so far I havenât chewed up anybodyâs ear.
Anyhow, I hadnât thought about the Cheerios for ages, but once the cab crossed the Queens line, other stuff started surfacing that I wouldâve thought youâd need a team of archaeologists to dig up. Once upon a time, back in the paleolithic era when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my father and I had been close. I mean, we had always fought, but there was a tie between us, much more so than between me and my mother. Every Friday before dinner, my dad would walk me down to the beach. Heâd served on a ship in the marines, and also his mother had lived by the sea in Europe and taught him to identify different seashells. We used to collect interesting things that washed up in the surf, like polished stones and bottles from foreign vessels and horseshoe crab shells. Once we found a belt buckle that looked like it had come off a pirate ship. We made up stories about all these things. My father had a great imagination and could spin a yarn about anything at all. Hold up a piece of string and heâd have you on the edge of your seat for an hour while he made up some shit about mermaids and sea captains and the ghosts of everybody whoâd ever drowned at sea. Some of our beach treasures were beautiful. There was still a piece of driftwood on our front lawn that looked like a sculptor made it. But besides storytelling, we used to talk about a lot of other things on those walksâwhich bait to use for surf casting, gossip about guys in the fire-house or about my friends at school. I even used to ask him for advice. Sometimes we didnât talk at all but just enjoyed the ocean and one anotherâs company. Maybe it was the sound of the waves and the gulls that smoothed the tension between us, or just that we were out of the house. The minute Dutch stepped inside the front door, a frown line the size of the San Andreas Fault would split the space between his eyebrows. I suppose the companionship of those peaceful times by the shore made it that much more of a betrayal when he turned on me. Anyhow, once I started at Juilliard, we never took one of those walks again.
So there I was zooming down the Cross Island Expressway, flipping like a channel-surfer from one year to the next, bad times and good, with the question humming in my ears like the tires on the road: Will he die?
Or maybe he was already gone. I realized I was no longer that angry girl who daydreamed about her fatherâs burial. In my
Scenes from my life smeared across the cab window like the city lights. The past five years, my relationship with Dutch had deteriorated into the bitter words of open warfare or, at best, the silence of an uneasy truce. He had always tried to impose his will on me, from the time I was three and wouldnât eat anything but Cheerios. He had tried bribery, threats, and finally force-feeding. What I did was learn how to vomit at will. Once you learn the knack, itâs a lifelong skill. If I couldâve figured out how to make money from that particular trick, Iâd have hired myself out for parties and never bothered with waitressing. Anyhow, I won that battle because my mother got the family doctor into it. Iâd lost eight pounds, which is a lot for a pipsqueak.
It went on like that, my dad and me butting heads. The worst were my teenage years. When he thought my clothes were too revealing, he grabbed them from my room and burned them in the barbeque. I retaliated by wearing a tablecloth on my next date. He almost broke my arm over that one. We got into wicked arguments at the dinner table. When I told him I was going to Juilliard, he pounded the table so hard it cracked down the middle. Mumma was always trying to keep us apart. She and Angie were afraid of him, and I was too, but when I get scared I also get angry. I donât like feeling helpless and when Iâm backed into a corner I fight like Mike Tyson, except so far I havenât chewed up anybodyâs ear.
Anyhow, I hadnât thought about the Cheerios for ages, but once the cab crossed the Queens line, other stuff started surfacing that I wouldâve thought youâd need a team of archaeologists to dig up. Once upon a time, back in the paleolithic era when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my father and I had been close. I mean, we had always fought, but there was a tie between us, much more so than between me and my mother. Every Friday before dinner, my dad would walk me down to the beach. Heâd served on a ship in the marines, and also his mother had lived by the sea in Europe and taught him to identify different seashells. We used to collect interesting things that washed up in the surf, like polished stones and bottles from foreign vessels and horseshoe crab shells. Once we found a belt buckle that looked like it had come off a pirate ship. We made up stories about all these things. My father had a great imagination and could spin a yarn about anything at all. Hold up a piece of string and heâd have you on the edge of your seat for an hour while he made up some shit about mermaids and sea captains and the ghosts of everybody whoâd ever drowned at sea. Some of our beach treasures were beautiful. There was still a piece of driftwood on our front lawn that looked like a sculptor made it. But besides storytelling, we used to talk about a lot of other things on those walksâwhich bait to use for surf casting, gossip about guys in the fire-house or about my friends at school. I even used to ask him for advice. Sometimes we didnât talk at all but just enjoyed the ocean and one anotherâs company. Maybe it was the sound of the waves and the gulls that smoothed the tension between us, or just that we were out of the house. The minute Dutch stepped inside the front door, a frown line the size of the San Andreas Fault would split the space between his eyebrows. I suppose the companionship of those peaceful times by the shore made it that much more of a betrayal when he turned on me. Anyhow, once I started at Juilliard, we never took one of those walks again.
So there I was zooming down the Cross Island Expressway, flipping like a channel-surfer from one year to the next, bad times and good, with the question humming in my ears like the tires on the road: Will he die?
Or maybe he was already gone. I realized I was no longer that angry girl who daydreamed about her fatherâs burial. In my
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