My father was the minister of a small Baptist church on the South Side of Chicago. Truthfully I'd lied to him the Monday before, but he was my father, and fathers weren't supposed to lie. I'd told him that morning that I was sleeping over at a friend's house, when actually I was riding the El train to Comiskey Park and sitting under the bleachers with my boyfriend. He'd figured it out when I'd come home with a hot dog wrapper stuck to the back of my blouse.
When my father lied to me it was on Thursday. He looked right at me and told me my mother'd gone to the supermarket for chunky peanut butter when she was really sleeping over at her boyfriend's house. The supermarket was probably the best in a long list of excuses my father would give me when we sat down to dinner each night. Sometimes it'd be an art guild meeting, or a late trip to the library, and every night I was supposed to eat my mashed potatoes in silence and not notice that we were always short one place at the dinner table. My only option was an icy denial that mirrored my father's. When I left the house every night wearing short skirts and layers of mascara, I was going to Tracy's. We were always out of peanut butter. We ate our mashed potatoes chilled because it was the only thing left in the refrigerator and neither one of us wanted to be the one to turn on the oven, search out the right seasonings, and take over the responsibilities my mother had abandoned.
My mother liked the thermostat impossibly low because she was always unnaturally hot. She had that uncanny disposition that all mothers have which always feels 5 or 7 degrees different in temperature than everybody else in the house. My father and I would sit through dinner shivering because we didn't want my mother to be warm when she got home. We pretended we didn't notice that she never actually had a chance to feel the temperature of the house. We were always cold.
Then one Thursday we sat down, plates of bland white mush in front of us as usual, and I decided to actually taste my food. I realized it needed pepper. My gaze steadily fixed on my dad's tired gray eyes, I got up from the table, took my plate to the counter, drenched my potatoes in pepper, and with an unspoken challenge, thrust the plate into the microwave. My dad's eyes just shifted to the constancy of his dinner. He watched himself, mechanically, as he lifted his fork to his mouth and swallowed the potatoes, his abandonment, the inevitability of his life, and his unwavering denial in one lumpy pasty cold glob that slid hesitantly down his throat. We remained, staring, for a least a minute until the sound of the microwave chiming broke into our wordless communication.
Then I thought about the peanut butter. I opened the raw wooden cabinet above me and pulled out the jars. Two smooth, one low fat, one no sodium, one mixed with jelly, and three chunky. And then I saw the note. I saw all I needed to in the bold lettering and unfamiliar male signature. It had been pushed back in the cabinet behind the accusatory peanut butter. I wasn't going to Tracy's. But I got my things.
I couldn't stay in the house, alone with my father, watching our family become a frozen low-cal TV dinner. My father watched me head out the door and then watched his dinner. The safety of routine set in once again and he settled into his cardboard compartment in our pre-packaged, no need to cook, lifestyle. We were an ordinary family in a cold house, eating dinner in silence. It was mashed potatoes three nights a week, and flavorless denial for dessert every meal.
