family sought tormentor. they shot wrong

FAMILY SOUGHT TORMENTOR. THEY SHOT WRONG FREE
FAMILY SOUGHT TORMENTOR. THEY SHOT WRONG CRACK

My parents’ marriage somehow lasted twelve years. She had not been raised religious, but when her conversion came, it was swift and feverish. When we went to the grocery store, she wore a blue pin with white lettering that read, i got it!, “it” being Jesus, as she gladly told anyone who asked and many who didn’t. Less than a decade later, my mom started a church in our living room, ministering to downtrodden people rather than stray animals. She’d also been divorced and followed up her first marriage with a soul-crushing affair. By the time my father started courting her, she’d found homes for all but three cats. Membership had really taken off during her term, which isn’t surprising she’s always been a gifted evangelist. My father didn’t know that she’d only recently kept more than thirty cats in her small two-bedroom house and been featured in the newspaper as president of the Dallas cat club. They would have smart children she would stay home and keep house he would be a stable husband, parent, and provider, a corrective to her own fatherless childhood. She agreed with reluctance to date my father and then, convinced by the picture he painted, married him with pragmatic resolve six months later. My mom is a blond-haired, amber-eyed whirlwind of charisma, creativity, and passion, the best storyteller I know. So I suppose the fear truly was formative.

FAMILY SOUGHT TORMENTOR. THEY SHOT WRONG CRACK

She watched as he watched through a crack in the door until I did stick out my finger and make contact, whereupon he rushed in to deliver the discipline he’d promised. My mom tells me she came upon him, when I was eighteen months old, leaving a box in the middle of my room and telling me not to touch it, that I’d get a spanking if I did. My dread of his wrath was a dull, continuous ache, a mental, physical, and emotional rheumatism that felt endemic to me. He didn’t spank me if I made less than an A on a math test, but berated me for weeks afterward and made long-division quizzes to occupy my weekends. He spanked me if I failed to finish everything on my plate in the half hour he allotted for each meal he spanked me for being constipated he spanked me for watching Sesame Street, because Black and white children played together on it. Not uncoincidentally, nearly every early memory I have of my father involves letting him down in some way. This was my father’s idea, and over their brief courtship he persuaded my mom of its merits. My parents married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together. I came into being through a kind of homegrown eugenics project.

FAMILY SOUGHT TORMENTOR. THEY SHOT WRONG FREE

Eventually they will do whatever my father wants, just to be free of him. Otherwise, maybe tomorrow morning, but probably this afternoon and quite possibly this very hour, he will ring them up again and start shouting.

If he’s angry about something-and he usually is-upon arriving at work, he’ll pick up the phone and call around until he finds someone with the power to rectify the problem.

He eats breakfast if the scale permits and then he puts on a suit and drives to his law office.

He wakes before dawn, weighs himself, goes for a walk or a jog or rides his stationary bike. Thirteen hundred miles from me, still down in South Florida, my father is going about his day, and I can imagine it. The last time I saw him, more than a decade ago at my grandfather’s funeral, he gave me a kiss. I am unmistakably my father’s daughter, but we’re estranged from each other. When I was a child and we went places together, we were a full-size and miniature version of the same windup toy, our strides clipped and jolting, brows clenched in concentration, pale legs eerily glowing in the brilliant Miami sunlight. I look like my father, move like my father, talk like my father.

Family sought tormentor. they shot wrong