By Kris Willcox
The first time I saw my father clearly, I was nine. It was a hot night in August and the three of us were eating supper on the porch. My mother was tired. It was the end of school vacation and I was wearing on her. She’d lost weight, and had a tremor in her hand the doctor said was nerves. “I’m frazzled,” she’d say, which I thought was a kind of style, like her Peter Pan collar or coral lipstick.
She’d made cold potato soup, one of her summer regulars along with shrimp salad and tomato aspic. Her grey-green cookbook called it vichyssoise but my father said it was nothing but humble potato soup, showing off. Whatever it was called, I disliked it—the pallid color, the texture that was somehow grainy and slimy at once.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
My father set down his spoon.
“What?” He was a large man who seldom spoke loudly. That look—anger, edged in amazement—should have cowed me into silence, but a recklessness had come over me and I tested it, like a blade.
“I don’t want it,” I said, and pushed my bowl back, just an inch.
Three things happened, instantly: my mother began to cry, my father stood up so swiftly he knocked over his chair, and I was on my feet, running for the screen door, the backyard, the next county if necessary. It was my first true taste of adrenaline, hot and yellow through my limbs to the tips of my hair. The sight of him stepping toward me, arm raised, made me capable of flight. But at the door I stopped—I can’t say why—and looked back.
In his face was something I’d never seen before. The darkening color, pulse straining at his collar: those were not because of me. He wasn’t angry because I refused to eat perfectly good soup. He was angry because the soup was terrible and my mother, with her napkin wringing and tears, hard to come home to. He must have driven home in stifling traffic thinking Lord, if she’s made that soup again and then I lit the fuse, making him a fool whether he smacked me or shouted or merely sat down and stared at his bowl.
I don’t remember which he did. I remember that we were caught, like flies in a drop of tree sap, postures and expressions saved eternally. Afterward, I knew him differently. I knew he was afraid.
Kris Willcox’s work has appeared in Kenyon Review on-line, swamp pink, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cimarron Review, Tin House on-line, Portland Review, Cleaver, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area with her family.
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