Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Read online

When I was three years old, my mother discovered me sitting in the gravel driveway of our house, scraping off the ends of matches with my teeth and swallowing the scrapings. I was also eating pieces of gravel, plucked off the driveway. She took me to the doctor. In retrospect I think I might have had pica, which is caused by an iron deficiency (a problem I still have). People who have this tend to eat odd things, like clay or coal dust, because it is their body’s way of seeking to redress a nutritional imbalance. The doctor and my mother both told me to stop eating gravel and match heads, and I did. But I can still remember how sulfury good they tasted.

  Before long, I graduated from eating matches to lighting them. Though I hadn’t yet started kindergarten, I was already a pretty proficient match-lighter when my older brother and sisters hatched a fun way to play with fire. This new game was more exciting than merely flicking lit matches into the road. We sequestered ourselves in one of the upstairs bedrooms in the large and pretty house we lived in at the time (the house and furnishings were given to us by my grandparents). First, we lit little pieces of paper and quickly tossed them into the wastebasket. That was fun for a while, but the thrill of it gradually drained away, the way it does when you’re watching a fireworks display. For us, flaming paper was losing its awe factor.

  I don’t know which of us had the idea to light the toilet paper on fire; it might have been my brother, Charlie, because at nine he was the oldest of the four of us. Or it might have been an idea that sprang up spontaneously among the group, as the best and worst ideas tend to do. I was not allowed to hold, light, or let the strips of flaming toilet paper drift through the room—not because it was too dangerous for a five-year-old but because I had not yet earned the right. As a snivelly gravel-eating tagalong and chronic tattletale, my rights were often contested.

  Lit toilet paper has a way of floating and briefly rising toward the ceiling that is mesmerizing to watch. It was especially fun to watch the flaming paper bump up against the filmy curtains lining the bedroom windows. My job was to stamp out any remaining flames when the charred pieces hit our grandmother’s oriental rug. I was good at this. But as my pyromaniac siblings got more creative, the pieces of toilet paper got longer and more flamey. They rained down with a higher frequency and velocity, and I had a hard time keeping up. Soon enough, everybody was forced to help extinguish them.

  Our mother, Jane, heard the stomping overhead and came up the stairs.

  It’s almost magical how good you can feel in the split second before you get caught. The moment just before everything goes bad feels so much better than all the moments that precede it. Our mother twisted the ball of her foot onto the smoldering rug, like she was putting out a cigarette. Then she ran to the bathroom and returned with a cup of water to dowse it. The five of us—mother and children—stood looking blankly at each other, surrounded by the scent of sulfur (yum) and airborne pieces of toilet paper ash, as Jane shook drips out of the cup and onto the rug.

  Jane had never punished us. She would get aggravated, wag her finger, mutter under her breath, and occasionally slam a pot or pan or deliver an empty threat to leave one of us by the side of the road and drive away. Beyond that, she had no system of punishment. If she was disappointed, she told you. If she was furious, she ignored you. She always claimed we were just really good kids and didn’t need to be punished. Her limited experience with discipline held no category for what we had just done.

  Jane decided to send us to bed without any supper. I’m not sure where she came up with this idea, but as we lay in our beds whispering to each other in the late afternoon of a long summer’s day, it felt Victorian and punitive, like something out of a fairy tale. We were told we could not leave our beds, and from our quilted prisons we had lots of time to consider and be sorry for what we had done. Rachel (age eight) immediately started writing notes to our mother, apologizing, challenging the sentence, and demanding clemency. Anne (age seven) was trying to think of ways to coax our dog Tippy up the stairs to join us. Charlie was silent, from his room on the other side of the hallway.

  Jane put on a record downstairs: Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. She liked its throbbing score when she was feeling riled.

  I was worried that she would tell our father, Buck, when he came home. Buck wasn’t home all that often. He was either on the road selling paint for Sherwin-Williams, doing construction, or farming. During those years, we were unsure what our father did for a living. But when he was home, he was definitely in charge. Unlike Jane, who could be counted on to eventually side with us, Buck was completely unpredictable. He didn’t have to deliver punishments. Mainly, keeping us afraid of him was his primary parenting technique. For instance, that previous Easter, when we bounded down the stairs in the morning looking for our Easter baskets, Buck was waiting for us. He was sitting calmly in front of the woodstove in the dining room, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, and smirking. No baskets.

  He looked at us. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got some bad news. Red got out last night. I’m afraid he got the Easter bunny. It was a real mess.” Buck took a slow drag and looked at us impassively. Red was our neighbor’s psychotic junkyard dog. He often strained powerfully at his chain, menacing anyone who came within his worn-out circle of terror. When passing Red’s house, we walked on the other side of the road.

  Charlie, Rachel, and Anne looked skeptical. Buck was famous for being a mean tease who nonetheless always referred to himself as “a kidder.”

  I burst into tears (my specialty). Buck sat there, calmly looking at us, until our mother came into the room, carrying our baskets. She had gotten up early and had been hiding colored eggs and little piles of jelly beans around the house and yard. “Oh now, stop it,” she said to me. “He’s joking.”

  Oh… humor, I thought.

  Now we lay in fear in our beds after our house-burning episode. Because Buck seemed capable of just about anything, his coming up the stairs was the worst-case scenario. At around six o’clock we heard our mother’s footfall on the staircase. I wondered if she would spank or beat us with a switch: These were punishments she had never even hinted at. However, after being sent to bed without supper, anything seemed possible.

  Jane opened the bedroom door with her foot. She was carrying a tray on which were cut-up hot dogs, milk, fruit, and pie. She served each of us on our beds. I wondered if this was what it was like to stay in a hotel, having your meal served to you on a tray like that. Jane sat on each bed and asked us if we knew that what we had done was wrong and dangerous. She said how scared she was that the curtains would catch on fire and then the rest of the house would go. She stroked my head when I got sniffly and overwhelmed with remorse. She never told our father.

  My parents met in high school. Jane was a 1940s cutie who grew up in Washington, DC, but spent her summers in Freeville, until her father’s health forced him to retire from his job as an economist with the Department of Agriculture. Then the family moved full-time to their house on Main Street. My precocious mother graduated early from her huge high school in Washington but then repeated her senior year at tiny Dryden High, where she fell, fatefully, into my father’s orbit. Any ambitions she might have had to go to college (as both of her parents had done) were demolished on the tracks of my father’s runaway train. They were both twenty when they got married in my grandparents’ living room in Freeville.

  Buck moved my mother around a lot. They lived in over a dozen different houses and farms around Freeville before I was born. Sometimes they had plumbing, and sometimes an outhouse out back, with a hand pump for water in the kitchen. They rarely owned a phone. Buck had a habit of neglecting to pay the rent. He would come home from his various jobs as a salesman, construction worker, or hired farmhand and say, “We’re moving.” My mother gave birth to four children in five years. She lived in ten different houses during that time.

  Just before I was born, the family moved into the home given to them by my father’s (more prosperous) parents. Unlike the broken-down farmhouses and country ap
artments my mother and her babies had been living in, this house was a large and elegant local landmark. It featured a grand curved staircase and a fancy carved fireplace that a young itinerant carpenter named Brigham Young had made for the house, before he pushed west and founded Mormonism. The house was full of antiques and heirlooms. The immediate family’s poverty was well concealed.

  Setting fires was a skill Buck encouraged. He had a survivalist streak and went through a phase of taking the four of us into a forested area on some land he owned, in order to test our woodland skills. On one of these trips he gave each of us one match apiece with which to start a campfire. He made us scatter into the woods. My brother, Charlie, had mentioned bears during the ride up the steep hill, as we rattled around in the back of the pickup truck, clinging to its sides. After the bear mention, I lost enthusiasm for that afternoon’s goal, which was to survive on your own in the woods for the afternoon, or possibly forever.

  My match was quickly spent, due to an overall lack of enthusiasm and the choice of fresh moss as an accelerant. I wandered over to my older sisters’ campsites to watch them earnestly try to light their fires, which can be surprisingly hard to do in the damp, dank forests of upstate New York.

  Buck had chosen his spot outside the woods, in the middle of a pasture of tall, dry, golden grass. Jane spread a blanket on the ground. She had brought drinks and raw hot dogs to cook over our campfires. I have a memory of Buck stomping down a large circle on which to build his, there in the middle of the grassy pasture. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then again, I was in first grade.

  Our father’s campfire (lit expertly with one match) spread to the dry grass and quickly raged out of control. We heard whoops and rushed into the clearing. Jane urged us to stand back as she poured Kool-Aid onto the flames and then whipped out the picnic blanket to smother them. Our uncooked hot dogs, cups, and plates went flying. Buck raced to the truck and pulled out the floor mats. He started beating the burning grass as it migrated into an ever-widening circle. My siblings and I started flame-stomping with our boots and sneakers, and we used our jackets to try to beat the flame into a smolder. Flying sparks made new fires in the dry grass.

  We got lucky. After about ninety minutes of panicked extinguishing, the fire seemed to be out. An acre or so of grassland was blackened. We stayed on, sullenly circling and watching for fresh flames. Buck got a shovel from the truck and dug around to make sure the fire was extinguished. He seemed furious. The color had drained from Jane’s face. “It’s okay; it’s okay,” she repeated as we hovered. As dusk fell, we gathered our dirty, smoky jackets, climbed silently into the back of the truck, and bumped down the hill. Then our mother made a joke about going back to the picnic site for our (now thoroughly cooked) hot dogs, trying to retrieve the day. No one laughed.

  It is a unique challenge to be the child of a character. My old man, Buck, was one. He was a handsome, chain-smoking loudmouth whose defining characteristics were his vulgarity, his volatility, and his willingness to do whatever he felt like doing, without feeling the consequences. He was a dairy farmer who did iron work on the side, a womanizer (as I learned later), a brawler, a drinker at roadside taverns, and a world-class abandoner.

  Jane was his opposite. She was reserved, bookish, and so passive that she would get a sick headache rather than tell somebody no. Where my father sowed chaos, my mother craved and created stability. He was a punisher; she was a forgiver. He set fires. She put them out.

  We have only one photograph of our family together, taken on the porch of our aunt Anne’s farm in Pennsylvania. Buck is sitting in the center of the picture, his dark hair rakishly swept back, like a 1950s matinee idol. His four children are seated around him. Our mother is leaning to the side, slightly out of focus. She always referred to this photo, wryly, as “the sun, surrounded by the planets.”

  My father was obsessed with lineage, property, possessions, livestock, vehicles, and everything he saw as rightfully his. As young children, my siblings and I followed suit. I remember tamping down a line of grass in our yard and declaring it to be the “official property line.” Along with my brother and sisters, I taunted the neighbor kids—a band of toughies whose uncle, it was rumored, was doing time in Attica. (Like our father, these kids rolled their own cigarettes, using dried leaves instead of tobacco from the mulberry bush that was on our side of the official property line.) I was emboldened by my belief in the magical properties of the invisible force field protecting our yard. “Stay off our land!” I yelled over the imaginary line, until one of the neighbor boys twitched in my direction, and I ran into the house and told my mother.

  When I was seven, we left the lovely historic house with its antique four-poster beds, empire furniture, oriental carpets, and mahogany spinning wheel. Buck had started farming eight miles away in Freeville, on a farm and a hundred acres that my mother had recently inherited from her father. Without notice, Buck sold the furniture, the piano, the rugs, and moved us to the ancient drafty farmhouse at the edge of Freeville. Our new house had started life as a cabin, which had been added to over many different eras. The rooms were small, the floors sloped, the doors didn’t shut, and the ceilings were low, but the barn was spectacular and cavernous. We became full-time farm kids.

  The next few years of my childhood were a pastoral complication of living on our rough dairy farm within walking distance to the village. My siblings and I tramped through the fields and woods. We learned to swim at the base of a glorious waterfall and swung from a rope tied to the cupola in our enormous hip-roofed barn. Charlie took an axe and broke through the winter ice on Fall Creek, which flowed through our property, ran a line of muskrat traps, and sold their pelts for spending money. On the village pond, Rachel and Anne let me skid behind them wearing my rubber boots as they skated and played hockey with other kids.

  Jane was physically isolated, probably bored, and was starved of television, radio, and other entertainment during my early childhood. She owned every Broadway musical LP she could get her hands on and played them all day long during those times she had a working record player. She had perfect pitch and played piano by ear, picking her way through show tunes and pop hits on our wheezy wooden Edwardian pump organ, which she had taken from the Freeville church when they were getting rid of it.

  I would lie in bed at night in our farmhouse and listen to my mother power up the pump organ by stomping on its wooden pedals until its bellows filled with air. Then she’d start to play the chords to Burt Bacharach’s “This Guy’s in Love with You.” Given the organ’s overall creepy pipe tones and asthmatic volume changes as my mother pedaled faster or slower, it sounded like a lounge act in a horror movie.

  As soon as I was old enough, I followed my two sisters and joined the Freeville United Methodist Church choir. Walking by ourselves up to the church on Main Street on Wednesday nights for rehearsal felt like an important privilege. Our grandmother had been choir director and organist. After her death, Mrs. Ayers, who lived on Main Street and taught music at our school, took over the choir. I remember the moment when I realized I could finally read music. It was like tumblers clicking into place.

  On the farm, I trundled along beside my father on his tractor or in his truck, rolling cigarettes for him as he drove. When I turned eight, he started letting me ride my bike to the store on Main Street with a note for the shopkeeper and a dollar to buy him rolling papers and tobacco.

  During the evening milking, Buck would crouch beside our muddy Holsteins, who were lowing and locked into their rusty stanchions. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he would attach the milkers to their teats and hop, crouching, from cow to cow. He swore prodigiously at the cows, calling them “the Girls” or “Goddamn Filthy Bitches” as they shifted their bovine weight and switched their powerful tails into his face. My job was to hold their manure-encrusted tails as my brother and two older sisters carried full pails into the milk house. In between chores, my sisters and I sang to the rhythm of the milking machines and
practiced being cheerleaders or baton twirlers on the long concrete floor of the barn, until Buck barked at us to cut it out, goddamn it.

  My father seemed blind to both his behavior and the tough luck consequences that always followed. Every skirmish he waged was lost, but it was somehow always the other guy’s fault. The people running the milk plant didn’t know what they were doing. The superintendent on his latest construction job was an idiot. Our neighbor didn’t know where the property line was and needed a solid punching in the nose.

  Buck insisted on seeing himself as a winner, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the latest of our broken-down cars finally quit for good and Jane drove us to school events in a dump truck, he pointed out that this goddamn truck was more expensive than a limousine.

  Buck expressed contempt for professionals and intellectuals, whom he referred to as “eggheads.” He hated the government in every form. His way of expressing affection toward his children was to declare that we were better-looking and smarter than everyone we knew.

  Even as I gained a growing awareness that our father was a bigoted gasbag, I was still fascinated by him. He moved through the world with the ease and optimism of someone who knew he would simply move on if things didn’t work out.

  Our way of life ended when I was twelve years old, when Buck suddenly moved on from us. He took a construction job up north and only came home on weekends. Charlie, then sixteen, kept milking the cows, along with Walt, our hired man. During the slurry season of a dismal March, Buck simply stopped coming home. We later learned that he had taken up with a local waitress and was living with her in a sad town on the Black River.

  Without telling my mother, Buck sold our herd of fifty cows to a nearby dairy. One day I got off the school bus to see the dairy’s cattle trucks pulled up to the barn. They were taking the Girls away. Like all farm kids, I had a complicated relationship with our livestock. I both loved and loathed our Holsteins fiercely, and I knew I would miss them.