Dinner was like a weekday mass. No red cassocks, no incense, no organ music. No miracles, either. Off-key hymns, less reflection, no homily, no forgiveness.
Stacey had set the table with the collectible Burger King Star Wars glasses from 1977.
The girls picked at the stringy roast beef and pushed the caramelized carrots and potatoes around their plates as if the vegetables would disappear if they slowly spread them out.
“Jesus, how rude, tell them to go home,” Stephanie grumbled.
A couple of kids with no home training were waiting on the front porch for Stacey to finish eating.
“Oh, they’re fine. They’re just kids.” My mother: channeling St. Philomena. “Eat your meal. And watch your language.”
Stephanie quickly rolled her eyes before my father could catch it.
I found it interesting how select shit like sending a wet bathing suit down the clothes chute or picking the stewed tomatoes out of the spaghetti sauce was unthinkable in this house but allowing the neighborhood kids to press their gross noses against the screen while we tried to eat dinner in peace was acceptable.
Stacey tried to eat fast without drawing my father’s ire for eating too fast.
“Where’s Darth Vader?” It was Stacey’s favorite glass.
“Stephanie broke it. On purpose!”
“Nunh uh!”
A squabble broke out. For a minute, it appeared that my father was completely oblivious to the bickering, but then he laid down the law with the flat of his hand.
“That’s enough!” The butter knives jumped.
“Burger King should totally do a series of drinking glasses of cool bands, like New Order or The Smiths or Echo & the Bunnymen.”
Stephanie and Stacey responded in unison, “Like, totally, dude! Fer shur.”
They cracked up. It was like they had been rehearsing it for days. Even my parents smiled.
“Echo and the what, dear?”
“A Joy Division glass featuring an iconic image of Ian Curtis at the microphone would actually be very cool,” I thought while my father opened up a dialogue with my mother about recent developments at the union hall, announcing big news. He wasn’t happy. He did not appreciate how he and his fellow plumbers and pipefitters were being managed at the local level. He had always planned on running for office, but not for years to come. There were men with more seniority who needed to retire.
“I’m thinking about entering the election.”
“What would you run for?”
“Business manager.”
“Already? Not treasurer or president first?”
“Gonna swing for the fence.”
The conversation switched to unemployment. My father was seventeenth or eighteenth on the list but work in Flint was scarce. Construction was going to hell in the whole state. And it wouldn’t make too much sense to run for anything other than business manager—the only paid office—if he was trying to avoid hitting the road.
I wondered if the dinner table side bars and late-night conversations about work and unemployment and the union hall gossip swirled around in the girls’ subconscious the same as it lived in mine.
“Did you hear me?” my father asked.
I chomped on a gob of roast beef while staring over his shoulder at a robin framed by the pink blossoms on the crabapple tree in the back yard.
“What?”
“They’re taking applications at Grand Daddy’s. You’ll probably have to go over to the warehouse.”
“Who is?” How did he know these things?
He had caught me daydreaming about The Viking. Once the robin flew off, the petals had reconfigured themselves to form an effigy of his bearded face. Unlike me, The Viking wasn’t under any pressure to look for a summer job. Work was what my father understood. He had started working at the age of twelve at his father’s party store, until it burned down. Or was it the family cabin that had caught fire? Whichever, my father had been smoking cigarettes and working nights and saving money for his first car—on top of going to school—by the age of thirteen.
I assured my father that I would check into these grotesque rumors.
“Tomorrow morning. Bright and early.”
I nodded.
I wondered how I could get in touch with Burger King about a series of New Wave and punk rock collectible glasses.
The number of kids swarming out front had grown.
I stood up.
“Stuart, is there somebody here? You haven’t finished eating!” My mother had a tone which always awoke in me a feeling akin to the nagging persistence of a car alarm.
“I forgot to wash my hands,” I lied.
I studied my face in the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, lathered, rinsed, lathered, rinsed, dried my hands, straightened the towels, rifled through the contents of the Reader’s Digest.
Passing through the laundry room, I noticed that there weren’t any dirty clothes beneath the chute.
Not one pile.
Nada.
No wasted moments during the day. When my father was laid off, he adopted all of our chores but continued to hold us accountable.
Work was what he knew.
“He’s preparing to leave,” I thought. “He’s hitting the road. He’s gotta get back to work.”
It was a lose-lose situation when he was laid off, but it was not his fault.
Carefully, as if it were a gang initiation and I had been forced to break into a house full of sleeping people, I stole down into the cool particle-swirling darkness of the basement. That was, at least, how the light, or lack of it, appeared to me; all of it crumbling.
The basement was directly beneath the dining room. I cocked my ear toward the nail-studded planks, but I couldn’t make out any conversation.
