The Language of Men by Anthony D'Aries

Author:Anthony D'Aries
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

IN THE SUMMER, my father was indestructible. He stretched himself out on a lawn chair and baked in the sun for hours. My mother turned red walking from the house to the car but my father, without a drop of sun block, could work outside all afternoon and never burn. Occasionally, his shoulders would peel, but all he had to do was rub his hand over the dead skin and it flaked off and disappeared.

I watched him drive a posthole digger into the ground. His vein-laced biceps trembled as he wrenched the handles apart. Bending at the knees, bracing himself, tendons in his neck pulling the tan skin taut across his throat, he extracted the digger, its mouth shut, metal lips clamped on brown soil and severed roots. The digger left a large hole in the earth, and the root's frayed white ends were bright against the dirt. He emptied the digger into a pile, measured the distance between posts with footsteps, then slammed the digger into the ground once more.

"Gonna look good, boy," he said, twisting the digger deeper. "Not like that plastic piece of shit Mitch put up."

Our neighbor's fence suddenly appeared ridiculous to me, so clean and fake. White plastic passing itself off as wood. It even had phony grain and knots, as if somewhere in the world, white synthetic trees were harvested for this purpose, to give Mitch and a few others on our block the impression of wood, the illusion that plastic could protect them. My father and I used real wood.

Hurricane Gloria had recently torn through Northport, burying the streets in broken tree limbs. Hard rain had pasted oak leaves on the sidewalks like green hands. The Long Island Sound swelled above the docks downtown, backed up drainage systems and choked exhaust pipes. Pneumonic cars of all makes and models coughed up and down our block. Our neighbors' decks and porches, the Hess Station's awning and storefront windows on Main Street, our fence and our swimming pool were all destroyed. I was most concerned about our pool. I had pool parties every year for my birthday and didn't want that to stop. My father said there was a law: no fence, no pool.

I handed him one of the tall, smooth posts, and he dropped it into the ground with a hollow thud. The posts stood at attention like exclamation points, quietly punctuating our progress.

"Better blow up those Little Mermaid swimmies, boy. You'll be floatin' in no time."

My father liked to work, especially after work. In the summer, he came home from Waldbaum's supermarket in the early afternoon with a giant watermelon perched on his shoulder. Tossing his keys on the table, he gave my mother a kiss ("Hey, toots") and walked out onto the deck. I was in the pool, floating on a package of hotdogs. The supermarket often gave my father free pool floats, leftover promotional items from a Memorial Day sale. Each year, my brother and I floated on a different wheel of cheese or processed meat.

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