On Monday nights our mother made popcorn and served it to us in mugs with milk poured over. My younger sister and I carried our mugs into the family room and ate the popcorn with spoons, like cereal. We were five and seven. Until we were allowed to see movies in the theater, we thought this was the way everyone ate popcorn.
Little House came on at eight. The plaintive thrill of those four opening notes! Loneliness, isolation, single wagon in relief against an empty sky. Then the orchestra broke in, Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie came tumbling down the grassy hillside, Pa and Ma smiling at them from their wagon seat. No one isolated, no one lonely.
While we watched, Claire and I took turns rubbing our mother’s forearms and hands and swollen feet. She said this made her feel relaxed. We didn’t mind the job, we hardly noticed we were doing it, lost as we were in the gentle trials of the Ingalls family. Our mother was pregnant. I was certain the baby would be a girl, our family a modern-day version of the Little House family. Four months later, when my brother was born, I felt my parents had betrayed my sister and me; felt that we, too, had in some way betrayed the Ingalls family.
The three of us on the couch, our mother’s feet resting on the glass coffee table, her toenails neatly trimmed and painted red. And where was our father? Elsewhere. I imagined him standing over put-to-sleep bodies, fitting bone bits together with pins he plucked from a paper-lined tray. My father specialized in the shattered and crushed and spiraled. I knew clean breaks were also part of his repertoire, but he preferred messy injuries that required one of his long, elegant surgeries.
Sometimes, on a weekend or school holiday, my father would let me come along to his office, where I would sit quietly at a corner table and read or do homework while he visited patients. Behind his desk, a life-size skeleton dangled from a hook on a stand with wheels. I assumed he sometimes brought the skeleton into exam rooms in a sort of instructional capacity: Here is what your bone is supposed to look like. My favorite thing in his office was a plastic torso of a man whose stomach skin opened to reveal the delicate ribs and, behind them, a jumble of brightly colored organs. I would remove the ribs and lay them on the table in the manner of butterfly wings. The organs I arranged in a line, largest to smallest. Divested of their context, the organs looked like candies: black-licorice liver, pink sorbet-scoop lungs, the tiny raspberry heart.
In between patients my father dictated charts. He spoke into his Dictaphone forcefully, too loud, I thought, as if delivering a lecture. Later his transcriptionist would type out these lectures word for word. I marveled that she could manage such a thing. Most of the words my father used sounded foreign.
White-coated and noble: that’s how I thought of my father, back then. Busy saving … if not lives, then personal dignity. The ability to run or eat with a fork. Now my father is eighty-two and wilted. He watches sports, his lower jaw hanging open, or he shuffles about the house in his white tube socks, looking for things he’s misplaced. Now I am fifty, and when I think of my father during the years, I no
