Healing time. Getting better. I could almost feel it, sitting here in Joey's living room, just watching T.V., just feeling free from all that tension I'd always lived with. I told my dad I'd stay with Joey while we sorted this stuff out, but now it seemed like we never would. How do you sort that out? He must have known what he was doing was wrong, whether he could control it or not. I think it was beyond sorting out.
"Supper? Craig? Any ideas?" Joey said. He was running the water over some dirty dishes Angela had left around, and he wasn't screaming at her and telling her what a screw up she was and how he worked hard and she couldn't even do her part. My dishes were already cleaned. I'd learned those lessons early and well. But I just watched him in amazement as he washed dishes and Angela ran around messing stuff up right behind him and he wasn't even mad.
"I don't know. Pizza?" I said, and I could sit here and feel the lack of tension. So often with my dad, even when he doesn't hit me or anything there is this claustrophobic feeling, like the air is too thick, like everything I do is wrong. He has this silent disapproval. But Joey doesn't.
"Sure, pizza," he said, and Angie yelled, "pizza!" and Joey didn't say she was too loud and she was disturbing him and all of that. He tossed me the phone and I caught it.
"Call them, okay?" he said, and set in to do the dishes in ernest, and he told Ang to clean up her toys but it was different. There was no threat behind his words, no silent, "or else," I closed my eyes for a second, breathing deeply. It was so different here. It was hard to get used to it sometimes, even though it was better.
I called up the pizza place and ordered pepperonis and onion and Joey yelled to me that he wanted a steak and cheese grinder, too. Everything was so haphazard here, so spur of the moment. Nothing was spur of the moment at my house. My dad planned out everything. We didn't just order up pizza and grinders because we didn't know what to have for supper. I thought he was so much like that because he was a surgeon and they had to plan out every aspect of the surgery or people could die. Or maybe he was like that before and it was just a good job for him, where he could be neurotic and controlling and everything was sterile. That's how he wanted our lives to be, but they weren't. And for some reason I had to take the blame for that.
But I wondered about him, my dad. What was he doing now? Working late since I wasn't home? Sitting at the table with his hands together like praying, head down, thinking bad things about me? Things like I deserted him just like my mother did and that I was ungrateful and all of that? Maybe he was blaming himself, thinking he'd hurt me beyond repair.
I didn't know. He was unknowable to me. Like that time at supper when he said the mysteries of the universe were infinite to him, that's how I felt about him. He said he loved me, he bought me a ton of shit, he was like that. But he was angry and violent and I felt like I was always the target. At home there was no one to take the pressure off of me. If it was something I had done, or if it was something from work and I was just the easy one to take it out on, either way, it fell on me. And that sucked. It really did.
Sorting it out. How would we do this? I mean, he was angry and impatient and blamed my mother and all of that but what about me? People were awfully big on telling me it wasn't my fault but how did they know? Were they there? Were they there when I was late or when I left shit laying around or when I disobeyed him? I wasn't perfect. I wasn't. And maybe I didn't deserve to get hit because of it but maybe some of it was my fault.
But for now it was nice to be here, to not have to worry about someone's mood and temper every single second of every day. In school I knew that I was coming here, and I could concentrate better. I could sleep at night and not feel so tired in school. I could kind of be myself. I felt like who I thought I was had sort of gone away because I had to be someone I wasn't, I had to try and be perfect. It didn't work, of course. But still, I had to kind of hide inside of myself while I lived with my dad.