War Story

My mother dampened clothes with a sprinkler bottle, rolled them up and let them sit before she started ironing. My father had a screwdriver for tightening or a hammer for pounding whatever had loosened up over the week as my brothers flew through the house.

I came in off the street with salt on my upper lip and a circle of sun heat on my head. I was thirsty but I’d need permission to get the pitcher of Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator. Right away I heard the sound over the radio that I hated: the crackle of the fans, like radio static but faintly and furiously animated. My parents were listening to the White Sox game.

“Can I have—

“Shush!” came the sharp response from my mother.

They’d heard the crack. A hitter had sent a ball into the air.

“Whoa!“ the announcer said, “High fly ball!”

 My mother looked off, holding the iron in the air as steam curled up from the shirt collar spread before her. My father stared into the same middle distance. Both were frozen as the crucial seconds elapsed and I was stuck waiting, waiting before I was allowed to say what I wanted.

“And it’s foul—off the right field line.”

“You can have a glass of water,” my mother said.

It wasn’t hard to tell what I needed, and the Kool-Aid was for later.

I pulled the stool to the sink, climbed up and filled the pink aluminum tumbler that had been assigned to me. I peered over its lip, hoping, as I often did, to catch my father’s eye, but he was back with his tools.

Dad had a hard time making small talk, but after a few Manhattans with my mother, I would hear their laughter. When I was older and asked him what he did in the war, he said his job was piling the dead into trucks. Eventually, cocktails stopped loosening him up and instead shut him down, shut him totally away from all of us.

There’s a picture of Dad when he got back from Iwo Jima. His eyes are blank in a way that I didn’t notice as a child. My father was magic and perfect, and I sobbed every Monday morning when he took off for another week of selling on the road.

In Sudan and in Ukraine, men are dying, or dying inside, and children’s hearts are being robbed.