Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

was smiling. I realized that my mother was doing something a little mad, and, judging from the spun sugar around the room, had been doing something mad for a while, but I thought it was, as my friends and I, my group, my little local tribe, said at that time, “inflated.” In fact, if I had had to define what we meant by “inflated,” I could have done worse than to describe a suburban housewife flinging sugar syrup around her kitchen, turning it into a sugar egg with a little window in the door through which an interested observer could have witnessed the curious diorama of a suburban housewife flinging strands of sugar around her kitchen while her teenage son, bemused but proud, looked on and thought her inflated, blown up like a madman’s dog. It was, for us, a term of praise.

She whirled herself around, and the can swung in my direction. I said, a little tentatively, in awe of her advanced degree of inflation, “Hi, Mom.”

She stopped swinging the can, and the syrup ran in a dozen streams straight down onto the floor. She noticed me for the first time since I’d cracked my way into the kitchen. I was amazed — and a little hurt — to think that she could have been unaware of me for so long, that she had been too wrapped up in what she was doing to pay attention to me.

The expression “wrapped up in something” was common at the time, a time when I and many of the people I knew, perhaps most of the people I knew, still expected that we would be able to shape the future to our liking, long before we had begun to think of ourselves as sailing sinking ships, a time when we were often lost in dreams of our individual futures (mine, for example, were full of complaisant girls who competed for my company, and my father’s were, I think, awash in beer). Recalling my mother now, involved in her sugar work to the exclusion of everything else, I really understand what we meant by being “wrapped up in something.” I had seen it in her expression. It was the expression of a person who has slipped out of context and into something more comfortable: full attention to a single idea. The eyes of such a person seem unfocused, because it is the mind’s eye that’s doing the seeing. My mother’s occupation had become her insulation, like a coat that she might have wrapped around her on a winter’s day and pulled tight at the neck to warm the self that was wrapped within, to protect it from the inhospitable conditions that lay without, to protect her ambitious inner self from the icy reception that she received outside her wrap.

“Oh! Peter!” she said. “I didn’t notice you there. I guess I got all wrapped up in what I was doing. I just — ” She looked around the room, beaming. “I’ve been so busy here,” she said, “making candy. Not ribbon candy — that didn’t turn out too well. Lace candy — Lacy Licks, that’s what I’m going to call it. Ella’s Lacy Licks. See it all?”

She swung the can to indicate everything that she had accomplished, and the syrup followed, but when she turned toward me again, her expression had changed. The smile was gone. She stopped turning and stood there looking at me for a moment, as if she thought that I might want to say something to her, and when it became clear that I had nothing to say, she said, “I’ve made a mess,” and let the can slip from her hand.

MY FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours. I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, because she knew that his attitude toward her would be little changed by the fact that his kitchen was inside a sugar egg. Both my mother and I had made messes before, but mine still made my father angry, while he had stopped being angry about my mother’s messes long ago. He had a much more effective way of showing his annoyance with her now: disdain. I could predict what he would do when he came home. He would give the kitchen the once-over, deliver his opinion with a dismissive snort, refrain from saying “I told you so,” crack the sugar lace around the refrigerator door, open it, get a can of beer, and retire to the living room to watch television. My mother would drop another notch in her own estimation.

Disdain, contempt, dismissal — they all hurt much more than a display of anger. I’m excluding violence from this calculation. I never saw my father strike my mother, and I honestly think he never did, but he battered her by belittling her, and I had reached an age when I knew how she felt because I felt battered when he belittled me. I was also at an age when I wanted to fight back. I was growing, and all my juices were flowing, and I had developed a competitive tongue. I’d begun to give back as good as I got, and I had begun to turn back on him the same abusive trio he turned on my mother and me: disdain, contempt, dismissal.

“We’ve got to get this cleaned up,” I said to her, almost in a whisper, as if he might be somewhere nearby, listening.

“I’ll do it,” she said, dispirited. She looked around the room, and I could see what she felt from the way her shoulders drooped, and I winced at the thought of the load of contempt that my father would be bringing home in a couple of hours.

“We’ll both do it,” I said, and then, as if we were in a movie, one of the Western movies I watched at the Babbington Theater, in a one-room cabin on the plains, where a pioneer woman was going into labor, I added, “We’re