My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan

Author:Chris Forhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

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One night each year, the school was not itself: the night of the spring carnival. The fifth-grade classroom became a pond in which to fish for prizes, the second-grade classroom a maze of high cardboard walls, the kindergarten classroom a candlelit haunted house with narrow corridors of black curtains and a bowlful of mushy pasta—human brains to plunge your fingers into. One year word spread quickly about the fortune-teller in my classroom: she was Valerie Harper’s sister. Really, I was told: Rhoda from TV had a real sister, and she was there, with beaded headdress and bangles and crystal ball, telling fortunes, or pretending to. I liked it all, the tangle of it: the mingling of the fictional, of Rhoda and the fortune-teller, with the real, the woman who was truly there and truly a TV star’s sister—and my classroom that, for this night, was not a classroom. And me, whatever I was.

The grown-up world, inhabited by Valerie Harper’s sister and my teachers and my parents and those strangers onto whose porches I flung the afternoon paper in the dusk, remained inscrutable, although I lived within it, or alongside it. I did not fully comprehend the messages it sent. One weekend, a few of us kids tagged along as our dad drove downtown to his grandmother’s apartment. Grandma Carey, we were told, had decided to get rid of a bunch of her belongings, little things she had no use for but that children might cherish. She would like us to have them—Grandma Carey, who normally seemed indifferent to us, even silently disdainful. Who knew what treasures might soon be ours to divvy up: a conch shell with the sound of the ocean trapped inside it? Bright strands of beads? Books about adventurous orphan boys? Postcards from lands across the sea? This day was one of those unearned and sudden gifts of childhood, like the occasional day when our father thought, oh, what the heck, he’d split his big bowl of spare change among us, and we could buy whatever we wanted with the coins, a Big Hunk or candy cigarettes or a Matchbox car. As we drove home from her apartment, Grandma came with us, her big, mysterious cardboard box in the trunk. Then, while she sat in the living room with my mother, chatting, I waited quietly in the next room. I felt myself being mature, being patient and considerate. I kept waiting. I waited and waited. Finally, I could take it no longer. I entered the living room and approached my mother. “Mom,” I said, “when are we going to look at Grandma’s things and decide who gets what?”

Grandma Carey glared at me. “What a selfish child!” she said.

I understood immediately that I had been misled, that she had never intended to give us a thing. Had my parents misinterpreted her intentions, or had they spoken of them imprecisely enough that I happily misread them to my benefit? Regardless, I felt myself suddenly, and merely, a child: judged unfairly—and helpless to defend myself.

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