Greg Ames - Physical Discipline

Physical Discipline

Open City 21

In the winter of 1983, when I was twelve years old, my older sister Cathy carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cathy that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but was in fact a charred strip of bark from our fireplace. But what could we do? Cathy skated freely on the frozen pond of her imagination, and as she wasn’t hurting anybody but herself, we generally ignored her eccentricities. She had just turned thirteen. Every night she slept with this burnt, splintered wood in her narrow bed, she snuggled with it on the sofa after school while she watched soap operas and sit-coms, and she left big black streaks across everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to my previously white gerbils. Mr. Barker, Cathy’s homeroom teacher, was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or a fiery car crash. My father answered in the negative. Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cathy three times a week after school for private consultations.

We lived in a squat, crumbling, yellow brick house on Hood Lane in Kenmore, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. All the houses on Hood Lane were the same size. Our street appealed to young couples just starting out, elderly folks in pajamas, recovering addicts trying to get a fresh start in life one day at a time, single women in their thirties who owned many cats, and struggling small business owners. There were no block parties or street fairs, but every now and then some drunk kid would crash his father’s car into a tree, and we’d all gather around, swimming in the headlights.

My mother’s absence from our lives — she said she was “just getting her head straight” in Tampa, Florida — forced my father to become the sole nurturer in our household, a terrible burden added to his already overwhelming duties as paragon and provider. He was a dry drunk. He hadn’t touched a drink in over five years. But when my mother left for Florida, he stopped going to his meetings and stayed home with us.

“The other kids will make fun of you. You don’t want that, do you, honey?” he said to Cathy. Unwrapping a lollipop he paced in front of my sister, who was seated on the family room sofa clutching Marilyn to her breast like some horribly burned infant. I sat cross-legged on the floor at Pops’ feet, paying close attention because I knew that someday I’d need to write all this down, just in case somebody asked me why I behave the way I do. “Ventriloquists are...” He thought for a moment. “Annoying,” he said and winced. “And nobody really likes them.”

Arms crossed, Cathy brooded silently on the sofa. “That’s not true,” she said. “A lot of people like them.”

“Well, sure, a few morons in the audience chuckle,” he said, “but only because they’re embarrassed for the ridiculous sap who totes a stupid dummy around. Really. It’s old hat. Fifties Vegas crap. That type of humor doesn’t appeal to us anymore. We’ve outgrown it.” He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. “And I’m only talking about the traditional stuff. What you’re attempting here — Well, believe me, Cathy. Nobody will have any patience for some poor confused little kid with a burnt log for a freakin’ dummy. That’s for damn sure.”

“I like them!” Cathy said, her braces glittering. “I do. I know you don’t care what I like, Dad, but I like them. Ventriloquists make me happy.” She squeezed Marilyn tighter. “And I’m gonna be a world famous ventriloquist someday, whether you like it or not.”

“Honey,” he said, “it’s burnt wood.” He chopped the blade of his hand through the air. “Am I the only one in this house who sees that? Just look at it, Cath. It doesn’t even have a mouth or — or even a face!” He turned to me. “Gary, could you back me up here?”

“Join the Dark Side, Luke,” I said.

My father stared at me for a few seconds without speaking.

“Mom would let me do it,” Cathy said. “Mom would encourage me.”

My father twirled the lollipop stick in his mouth, ruminating. “I just don’t get the attraction of ventriloquism. Really. I’m at a loss here.” He shoved his hands in his back pockets. “But okay, if you insist, I’ll buy you a real dummy—”

“Stop it!” Gawky, crazy-legged, swinging her pointed elbows, Cathy ran out of the family room and stomped up the stairs, trailing a pungent whiff of scorch behind her. We heard her bedroom door slam shut overhead.

Still seated on the floor, I smiled at my father. Shrugging, I turned up my palms, as if to say, “Pubescent girls: a mystery to us all.” I felt pretty good about how things had turned out in our family. At one time I was the biggest troublemaker around. I was a source of constant concern. My parents’ fear for my future was the mortar that held the bricks of our family together. Now, Mom was staying at Aunt Connie’s house in Florida, trying not to snort cocaine with bikers. Cathy had fetishized a piece of firewood. My father was veering closer to his next alcoholic relapse. I was sitting pretty for once, and I wanted to savor it.

Stroking his goatee, that gingery hamster of hair on his face, my father gazed out the family room window at our snowplowed suburban street. Cathy’s strange behavior had called into question so much that he had taken for granted, including his own coolness. He was thirty-eight years old, a Marketing director for Studio Arena Theatre, a job that allowed him to dress and act like an artist — ponytail, earrings, jeans — yet still collect a businessman’s paycheck. He liked avant-garde theater, but he was not hip enough to deal with the grotesque in his own home. Standing at the window, he crunched into the lollipop dreamily. Flakes of green candy clung to the inverted triangle of hair beneath his lower lip. He would have welcomed my mother’s input in a situation like this. Her absence galled him. He looked down at me and frowned. “And what do you find so damned amusing, mister?”

Simple. I was pleased that for once I was not the one being yelled at. Regardless of her sometimes curious whims, Cathy was a straight-A student and I was not. She played her clarinet with a dramatic flair that charmed adults and music teachers, and I couldn’t even whistle. She had won awards for academic excellence, and I was often stuck in detention, which in my school was called JUG: Justice Under God. I was forced to write “conduct” and “discipline” repeatedly, in neat columns on lined paper, until my right hand and wrist throbbed painfully. Father Timothy sat at his desk, scowling at me. So I was actually elated to see Cathy challenged by the same type of patriarchal oppression that I had grown so accustomed to and had been forced to counteract with an elaborate system of snorts, guffaws, and, on occasion, feigned loss of hearing.

Like most children, I was a watchdog for hypocrisy. I spent up to twelve hours a day studying the erratic behavior of adults.

Recognizing my father’s discomfort, I changed tactics. I wasn’t quite sure if he had noted that, for once, we were on the same side. In my sweetest model-son voice, I said: “Cathy is behaving very badly....Isn’t she, Father?” I motioned with my crooked forefinger, so that he might bend down closer for a secret boy-to-man chat. “Your daughter is disobeying you,” I said. “Maybe a little physical discipline might not be out of place. A belt whip across the calves?” I raised my eyebrows, alternately lifting and dropping my hands to indicate the scales of justice. “Or a whack on the shoulder with an umbrella?”

“Stop it, Gary,” Pops said, “that’s terrible. Where do you come up with these things?” He squatted before me like an aging baseball catcher, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Does she seem a little...Do you think Cathy’s...”

“Spanking?” I said. “Good old spanking.”

“All right, cut it out. You’re not helping matters.”

“Cathy’s in trouble here,” I reminded him, “not me.”

“Shut up, Gary,” he said. “This is serious. Does she ever talk to you about her school or her friends there? Is she having problems?”

Cathy went to Kenmore Middle School. It had an enormous student body, close to four thousand kids, with a substantial population of headbangers, gasoline-sniffers, Dungeons and Dragons freaks, sex addicts, and video arcade loonies, and he thought that I might be prone to temptation there. I needed extra attention. The previous summer he’d found caffeine pills in my sock drawer. It concerned him. Pills at twelve meant heroin and LSD by sixteen. So I went to a private school, a Jesuit school, where vigilante priests roamed the halls like disgruntled cops walking a beat. One in particular, Father Joe, who smelled like hot mustard and sweat socks, would stop me in the hall and ask an inane question just so he could peer into my eyeballs to see if my pupils were dilated. To this day, I don’t know if he recognized in me a future stoner and was trying desperately to prevent this terrible fate, or if all his excited talk about illicit substances and “what they could do to a boy” actually drove me to the hookah by the age of fourteen. I was so ready for marijuana when it was invented back in 1985.

“She’s your sister, Gary. Aren’t you concerned?” my father said.

“Don’t yell at me. I hardly ever see her anymore.” It was true. I woke up at hellish six o’clock to catch a bus to another zip code. It was dark as midnight each morning when I mounted the steps of the yellow bus. An hour later, Cathy walked to school with her girlfriends from the neighborhood. I imagined them laughing and trading gum and stickers and gossip. She had nothing to complain about.

My father leaned closer. His nose was inches from mine. “Hey,” he said, low. “I’m not yelling at you. Okay, pal?” He squeezed my collarbone lightly. I smelled the sour apple of his lollipop. “But I want you to stop talking like that,” he said. “Cathy is your sister. You don’t really want me to hurt her, do you?”

“Physical discipline,” I said.

“Christ!” He turned away from me and walked out of the room. In the kitchen a cupboard door banged shut. “God, grant me the serenity...” he said. A moment later my father returned, his cheek bulging with fresh lollipop.

“I’m gonna check on Cathy,” I said, getting up from the floor.

“Okay! Now you’re talking.” He nodded in approval. “Good man,” he called after me. “That’s the spirit! Report back to me afterwards and we’ll compare notes.”

I climbed the stairs and knocked on Cathy’s closed bedroom door. “Get lost, Gary,” she said, sniffling. “I just wanna be alone.”

I opened the door and stepped in. The bonfire aroma blended with all the other exotic smells of her bedroom: damp towels and washcloths; nail polish remover; sticky bottles of cheap perfume spot-welded to the dresser; cherry and grape lip gloss. Sprawled chest-down on her bed, her ankles crossed up in the air behind her, Cathy was flicking through a Seventeen magazine. The charred log, Marilyn, was reclining (face first? or on her back?) on the once-white pillowcase, just under Cathy’s swaying feet. In the virginal setting of her bedroom this black log was as conspicuous and disconcerting as a man standing naked in traffic. I sat down on the gray-smudged pink comforter and placed my hand gently on her back.

“You’re right, Cathy,” I said solemnly. “Ventriloquists are cool.”

She swung her face toward me. “Really, Gary? Do you think so?”

“Definitely.” I nodded.

“I’ve been practicing every night,” she said. Her forehead was covered with dirty fingerprint swirls. “I’m getting better, too. I think I’m pretty good. Do you want to see me do a routine?”

The smell of scorch and the mystical word “puberty” coalesced in my mind. Cathy had been damaged. A dark shadow had passed over our house like a smoke-raveling zeppelin. Dimly, I understood that it would come for me too. Nobody could pass through fire unscathed.

“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

She propped the burnt log on her lap. The front of her oversized yellow T-shirt was sooty and streaked with grime, calling to mind a demented crossbreed of Charlie Brown and Pigpen. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

She took a deep breath and shouted, “It’s a nice day today, isn’t it, Marilyn?” Cathy bounced her left knee once, hard, and ashes clumped to the rug. “Mm-hmm,” Marilyn said in response. Cathy shook Marilyn back and forth.

“Do you like going to junior high school, Marilyn?” Cathy yelled.

“Mm-hmm,” said Marilyn.

“That’s good.” Cathy laughed. “School is important. Will you be ready for high school next year?”

Marilyn thought about it for a moment, then answered definitively: “Mm-hmm.”

Cathy stared at me with raised eyebrows. “So? What do you think?” A loose strand of blond hair fell over her eyes. She pushed her lower lip out and blew the curl back. Her face was filthy.

“Wow,” I said.

“Right? I’m getting good at it. So why won’t Dad let me be one then?” Cathy searched my face with her trusting eyes. “Remember I told you about when Mr. Charleston and Woody came to my school for assembly? They were really great and everybody loved it when Mr. Charleston drank that orange juice and Woody sang ‘Feelings’.” She laughed and hugged Marilyn closer to her chest. “Ventriloquism makes me happy and it’s, like, good and really really fun. Why can’t he understand that?”

I understood my sister’s sadness. Another beautiful dream was smashed.

“Because sometimes Pops is a dick,” I said.

Cathy smiled at me. I smiled back. And soon we both broke out snorting and cracking up. At that moment, we were as close as we had been since Mom left for Florida.

It didn’t last.

“Hey Cath,” I said, regaining my breath. “I know how we can use Marilyn for something really great.”

“How?” she said uncertainly. A vertical crease appeared between her eyes.

“Well, what Pops needs, I think, is a little physical discipline.” I nodded my head at this inevitable conclusion. “He’s being very bad, isn’t he? So maybe you could bake a chocolate cake.” I raised my eyebrows. “And we’ll crush the stupid log inside it. He’ll eat the cake and then he’ll flop around on the kitchen floor, choking, and we can cram his nostrils full of peanuts while he cries!”

“What?” Cathy blinked at me, self-righteous horror spreading on her face. The chasm between her thirteen years and my twelve seemed to widen immeasurably. “I’m not gonna feed Marilyn to Dad. What are you, a maniac? It would kill him.”

“Well, maybe we should try Plan B, then. We tie him to the tree out back and pour honey and Kool-Aid all over him, and then break an ant farm on his head.” I laughed and reached for Marilyn.

Cathy jumped up. “What are you talking about, Gary?” she said, shielding Marilyn from me. “He’s our father. Are you joking, or what?”

“Just forget it.” I glared at the John Stamos poster on her wall. “I was only kidding.”

Regrettably, in that instant, I saw that nothing had changed between us. Oh, Cathy could dabble in darkness, as if it were an educational field trip, she could press her cute little button nose to the tour bus window and snap photos with her camera, but when foolish, spontaneous and possibly fatal decisions were required, my sister invariably turned her back and went skipping toward the light. Cathy never understood my twelve-year-old world and I didn’t have the patience to instruct her in its finer points. As far as I could tell, she was a lost cause. Acne had colonized her chin. Her bedroom was off-limits to me. Something secret and horrible was going on behind that closed door, something that didn’t involve me. I couldn’t save my big sister from the future. She would go to Kenmore West high school the following year and become involved with music clubs, Track and Field, and animal rights organizations. She’d earn high grades and head off to a university in Boston. Her days as an innovative ventriloquist would be long forgotten.

That night I left my sister’s bedroom with hardly a backward glance. I trotted down the carpeted stairs, kicked open the back door and hopped down the slushy cement steps. Snow crunched underneath my sneakers as I trudged across the driveway.

Bones was galloping around the backyard, his ears flapping. I noticed that he’d knocked over his water dish and had chewed up one of Pops’ winter gloves. “Up to a little mischief again, are you, boy?” I shook my finger at him accusingly. His wet brown eyes flashed at the sight of me. “Maybe you need somebody to teach you some manners.” Bones started panting and hopping around as I neared him. “Follow orders! Pay attention!” I shouted. “Get in the coat closet! Listen to Father Timothy!” I grabbed Bones’ collar and yanked hard on it until he yelped. “What you need, I think, is a little physical discipline. Then you’ll know how to behave.”

But Bones, he didn’t understand. He was just a puppy.