find Dad eating a frozen supper. He hadn’t cooked it well and it was
mush. The mood around him was charged, combustible. It felt like he
might detonate at any moment. Mother didn’t even kick off her shoes,
just rushed to the kitchen and began shuffling pans to fix a real dinner.
Dad moved to the living room and started cursing at the VCR. I could
see from the hallway that the cables weren’t connected. When I
pointed this out, he exploded. He cussed and waved his arms, shouting
that in a man’s house the cables should always be hooked up, that a
man should never have to come into a room and find the cables to his
VCR unhooked. Why the hell had I unhooked them anyway?
Mother rushed in from the kitchen. “I disconnected the cables,” she
said.
Dad rounded on her, sputtering. “Why do you always take her side!
A man should be able to expect support from his wife!”
I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept
dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every
thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red,
white to white.
Then it was gone. I looked up at my father, at his purple face, at the
vein pulsing in his neck. I still hadn’t managed to attach the cables. I
stood, and once on my feet, didn’t care whether the cables were
attached. I walked out of the room. Dad was still shouting when I
reached the kitchen. As I moved down the hall I looked back. Mother
had taken my place, crouching over the VCR, groping for the wires, as
Dad towered over her.
—WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS THAT year felt like waiting to walk off the edge of
a cliff. Not since Y2K had I felt so certain that something terrible was
coming, something that would obliterate everything I’d known before.
And what would replace it? I tried to imagine the future, to populate it
with professors, homework, classrooms, but my mind couldn’t conjure
them. There was no future in my imagination. There was New Year’s
Eve, then there was nothing.
I knew I should prepare, try to acquire the high school education
Tyler had told the university I had. But I didn’t know how, and I didn’t
want to ask Tyler for help. He was starting a new life at Purdue—he
was even getting married—and I doubted he wanted responsibility for