Knock Wood: A Memoir in Essays

KNOCK WOOD

A MEMOIR

JENNIFER MILITELLO

5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

www.dzancbooks.org

KNOCK WOOD. Copyright © 2019, text by Jennifer Militello. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Militello, Jennifer, author.

Title: Knock wood / Jennifer Militello.

Description: [Ann Arbor, Mich.] : Dzanc Books, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013629 | ISBN 9781945814969

Subjects: LCSH: Militello, Jennifer. | Poets, American--Biography. |

Women poets, American--Biography. | Dysfunctional families. | Man-woman relationships.

Classification: LCC PS3613.I53225 A6 2019 | DDC 814/.6 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013629

First US edition: August 2019

Interior design by Michelle Dotter

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Theory of Relativity

The Witnesses

Knock Wood

Dear Your Honor:

The Town

Duplex

All the Resonance of a Smashed Violin

Memory as the Quince

Knock Wood

On Fragility

The Problems of the Mothers

What to Leave, What to Unearth

On Time

The Mechanics

Knock Wood

Why I Became a Criminal

Latent Print

Procedures for an Outing

Invasive Species

Dead Reckoning

Knock Wood

The Living Room

Flower Girl

The Repairs

The Accidents

Conspiracy to Commit Larceny

The Deaths

Knock Wood

Vow

For all our selves, future and past

The time is out of joint.

—Hamlet

THEORY OF RELATIVITY

I t was knocking on wood in 2016 that caused the death of my uncle three years before. I was on a plane from London, reading a Murakami novel about an uncle with cancer, and felt the need to knock as a protective measure against illness. But I had no wood. I figured paper was close enough, until I felt that ill-fated knock travel back through time. Uncle Jimmy was his name. He had been seventy when he died. He found out he had pancreatic cancer when he went to the doctor about foul-smelling stool, and he was dead three weeks later.

He had been abusive and insane, had gone after his wife with a kitchen knife, and had conned my father out of the money he was due upon the sale of his parents’ house, so we cared as much as we could, but it wasn’t that much.

From then on, I only knocked on actual wood. Recognizable wood. Presswood was okay. Sometimes I felt unsure whether wood was actually wood and would have to weigh the risk. But I already knew it was too late. I had knocked on a newspaper eighteen years before, while dating Harry, and now I was waiting to pay the price.

Harry had been a wreck. He dropped acid like it was going out of style. He drove trucks into trees without remorse. He was the son of a garbage collector and a country western singer, and the first time I saw him, he was passed out in the passenger seat of the cab of his stepbrother’s pickup.

That summer, I was sixteen years old. The grass was growing long in the abandoned lots. Heat was rolling off the pavement in tongues, shimmering up from the blacktop. The rumor was there would be a blackout and people would die. Manhole covers steamed. Gutters clogged. Neighborhoods filled with men in their lawn chairs on the sidewalks at dusk and the shouts of children playing in the street. The rattle of air conditioners echoed from the windows. Construction workers took long breaks in the shade of their trucks.

I had been at a party with Sharon and Kevin, the friends who had sex in the back seat of the car while I drove, the ones who blew pot smoke into each other’s mouths as they kissed, the high school sweethearts most likely to marry. Sharon had said about Harry, He’s trouble, and I felt my curiosity stir.

When I pulled up to the house the night of our first date, he was out front with his arms elbow-deep in the guts of a car. The shadows were getting longer as he wiped his hands on a filthy rag and led me around to the back of the house to the big rabbit hutch there. The rabbits huddled together in the corner of the chicken wire enclosure. Their flattened ears were like remnants of velvet, and their back legs were tucked away like fists.

Harry plucked one from the cage, gathering it into his body, away from the wind. He uncurled the tightening comma of it as it worked to burrow into his shirt. There was a distance in its eye, as if it were at the edge of the sea. The eye looked blind as a marble, dark and shining at the center, without depth. Its nose shivered. The ear veins knitted lines through the thin skin like rivers.

I had read somewhere that they sounded human when they screamed.

When I asked the rabbit’s name, he said it didn’t need a name. I asked whether we could name it. I wanted to name it Hazel. Harry didn’t answer.

He leaned down to see it, then suddenly took his hand and wrapped it firmly around the rabbit’s face. He rattled its head until the animal squirmed and kicked, and then he released it back into the cage.

As we walked up to the house, I thought of the rabbits out there in the night hearing the voices of predators as the dusk set in and of the smells they could smell and how they must feel with no underground to get to. Each tiny rabbit heart ticking like a watch wild with time run away and gone. I had heard of wild dogs ripping rabbits from cages and snapping their necks and carrying them off into the woods, their hot mouths satisfied with the torn belly and meaty haunch.

When I went by Harry’s house to say goodbye the night before I left for college—long after we had broken up—there was no one home. After ringing the bell, I walked around to the back of the house.

The pelt had been hung, stretched on a rack, and maggots crawled over it, cleaning it of flesh. Four solid pegs held it in place and its shape seemed obscene and exposed. Vulnerable. The late light filtered through the rigid membrane like the skin of a drum.

THE WITNESSES

S he had been beaten by my Uncle Tommy in the apartment right below her parents’ house. Her father would have heard the crashes and screams and yelling and muffled shouts. The punches he knew were landing on his daughter’s body must have echoed through his sleep, violence as the soundtrack to his dreams. Even when he couldn’t hear the shouts or the scuffles, he must have imagined he could hear them, must have strained to listen through the floor for a body falling against a table or dresser, or a crashing lamp that held an interruption of air like the sheets rustling as he turned. While the photographs on the wall rattled and loosened like teeth. While the moldings shook. While the clock ticked like fists being stiffened into place. While the walls braced themselves and the kitchen pilot light hissed and flickered like breath let from between curled lips. He’d think he’d hear an open palm slap across a face, but it’d just be the bread settling in its basket.

It was none of his business. He would lie on his back as his head hummed and the pillow was like a sea in that it magnified the sounds, let his daughter’s screams travel in their slow deep way, resonate through the ear bones, resonate through the skull, carried in low frequency from the wild canyon of the mouth, from the throat’s vibrato cave. He could not be more haunted if the sounds were ghosts.

It is none of my business, he would repeat to himself. She was married now. He would wrap the pillow around his head and try to keep the darkness from emphasizing the ticks of the kitchen radiator cooling down or the dead silence of the pages of books that took possession of the living room. Cars passed; their coming swish waned into their going. Rain fell and rattled at the windows. Snow came and muted the loudest of steps.

Still he would lie, through the seasons, guessing at the scenes downstairs, hearing the rage and the plates smash and the steps running for refuge or shelter. His wife would lie beside him deep in slumber. She slept on her side, facing away, and he would wonder at her peace. Somehow, she had been washed clean and made to dress each day and button each button and don each stocking and stir each pot and cook each meal and cluck when a glass was broken and scold when an item was left out of place. They were her words. It was she who would say, It is none of our business.

So he would sleep little and when he slept, he would wake thinking he heard what he did not hear, what had once been a baby crying in the next room—when he had risen to comfort her, tiny helpless wisp in his arms, and she had rested her dark-haired head on his shoulder as he crooned low and walked back and forth, smoothed her shock of hair and patted her knobbed back, and when she fell asleep again, lifted her as gently as he could down into the crib, arranging the blankets so that she was warm, lowering her there onto her belly where she slept best and gazing for a moment