The first thing I noticed about the house that my father chose after my sister was born so that we could move out of the one-bedroom apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, and move to the suburbs, was the rats.
Actually, since I was only four, I thought they were small gray cats. They sauntered across the yard as if they owned it, just like a neighborhood cat would. Of course, being four, I ran closer to them, calling, “Kitty!” And, of course, my mother grabbed me by the hair and yanked me back through the knee-high grass of the unkempt yard.
“You stupid little brat!” she snarled. “Those are rats!”
In less than a blink she’d turned toward my father and changed the pitch of her voice from shrewish to a whining implore.
“Phiiiiiil,” she sniffled, “do we have to move here?”
My father sloshed phlegm back and forth in his throat as he did whenever he had to take charge of things. He curled his fists against his hips as he surveyed the white clapboard house surrounded by a meadow of weeds and grass.
“Well, Betty,” he said, molding his face into a bland let’s-be-reasonable expression by raising his bristly black eyebrows so high that they touched his hairline and rounding his eyes in such an innocent way that no one would ever believe that he was prone to rages.
“Well, honey,” he amended, sloshing phlegm to emphasize his sincerity. “We can’t live in that tiny apartment with two kids.”
“But this place is falling down around us!”
My mother’s voice had drifted even closer to childhood, becoming soft and babyish. She shifted my baby sister into the crook of her left arm and poked her right thumb into her mouth as tears trickled down her cheeks. Even though I was only four, my heart sank as I watched the exchange. I was too young to have words for what was happening, but I watched their body language closely.
I’d learned very early to watch my parents’ body language. Not directly, of course. Just like staring at a wild animal can be seen as a challenge, I knew better than to watch their exchanges openly. So I pretended to hunt for bugs in the tall grass, keeping my eyes and ears open to what my parents were saying.
Even as a toddler, I knew that when my mother tucked her chin into her chest and sucked her thumb, that she was going to order me to vacuum the floors or make her toast or even go to the store for cigarettes. Yes, the vacuum was almost as big as I was, and yes, I burnt myself on the toaster. And no, the store clerk wouldn’t sell me cigarettes and instead sent me home with a police officer since I was too young to be out alone.
But when my mother’s body language shifted from resentful wife to sniveling baby, I knew that nothing I did would be right anyway.
My father’s body language was more subtle, and more dangerous. The worst my mother would do was make me do chores, grab me by the hair, or whip me with my father’s belt. It was a very funny thing, and by funny I mean interesting, like an interesting phenomenon, not ha-ha funny. Anyway, it was a very funny thing to watch my parents.
My mother seemed more helpless and childlike in public, but in private she could say words that were so mean that my ears felt scorched after hearing them. My father appeared to be a diplomatic, everyone-get-along kind of guy. So gregarious, in fact, that unless a person watched him closely and without judgment, no one would suspect that beneath his public veneer lay a layer of fierce rage that was colder than ice.
