Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) Eric Kraft (beautiful books to read .TXT) 📖

We fell into a frenzy of cleaning. We worked without pausing, and we worked without talking. Now and then we exchanged a glance. I think each of us was checking to see whether the other was tiring. Each time our glances met, we grinned and winked. We had become conspirators, and we were enjoying ourselves.

The closer six o’clock drew, the likelier it became that my father would pull into the driveway, and the thought that he would surprise us still at our work was beginning to send us into a panic. My mother stopped working for a moment, stood up, and said to me, tentatively, “I’ve got an idea.”

“Great,” I said. “We need an idea. What is it?”

She told me, and it struck me as such a good idea that we put it into effect immediately. We carried my father’s favorite chair out onto the front lawn. We carried the table that stood beside it out there, too, and placed it beside the chair. We carried the television set out and put it in place in front of the chair. I ran the long extension cord that he used for his electric drill through a cellar window and plugged the set into it. We carried a few more pieces of furniture out, and two small rugs, and by the time he came driving up, the effect was quite convincing. I know that it was, because when my father got out of the car and walked across the lawn, he said, “Spring cleaning?”

“Right!” said my mother. “Peter’s helping me, but we didn’t get started until he got home from school, so we’re not quite finished. You don’t mind sitting out here, do you? It’s a nice night.”

I came out the front door with six cans of beer in a bucket full of ice and set the bucket on the lawn beside my father’s chair. I handed him an opener. He sat in the chair and opened a can. I turned the television on.

“We won’t be much longer,” said my mother, and she and I went back inside to finish our work.

At the door, I paused for a moment and stole a look at him. He was sitting there in his chair in precisely the attitude he assumed every night when the chair was in its accustomed place in our living room, watching television as he always did, but his chair was not in its accustomed place, and neither was he, and that alteration of the ordinary arrangement of things had a wonderful consequence: he looked ridiculous.

Just then, Mr. Morton came by, walking his chickens as he did every evening. Raising chickens in the back yard was at that time and in that part of Babbington a popular hobby among adult males, and Mr. Morton had a flock of champion birds. When he reached the end of our front walk, he stood there and worked his jaw without speaking. My father squirmed in his chair. I like to think that he was experiencing the unsettling feeling that he looked ridiculous in the eyes of the chicken champion of Babbington Heights.

Finally, Mr. Morton spoke. “Sitting out on the lawn, Bert?” he asked.

My father snapped his head in Mr. Morton’s direction and said, “Spring cleaning.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Morton. He looked up at me for a moment. I shrugged and rotated my forefinger beside my head. Mr. Morton nodded, gave a shake to the leashes on his chickens, and he and his little flock went on their way.

AFTER THE CANDY-MAKING FAILURE, my mother tried nothing else; she didn’t even talk about trying anything else. She had been defeated. She was finished. One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining room table, looking straight ahead, weeping. There was something so bleak and hopeless about the way she was just sitting there, with no obvious provocation for her weeping, no sad letter in front of her, no bandage on her finger, that I stopped inside the door, dumbstruck, immobilized, unable to go to her and ask her what was wrong, certainly unable to offer her any comfort, unable even to tiptoe through the kitchen and into the living room and leave her in private.

Grieving, I have decided since then, was what she was doing, grieving for the loss of someone who had never existed: that Ella Piper Leroy whom she had hoped to become, a woman whose potential existence had depended on the possibility of success, on hope.

If hope is like a warm breeze that lifts and lofts and carries us on when we hardly have the will to carry on otherwise (and it is), then the candy-making failure had let my mother down, deflated her. She sank under the weight of her failure. She had lost hope, and having lost hope she had lost someone she had hoped to know someday, someone she had hoped would make her proud, as a mother hopes that a child will make her proud: she had lost Ella Piper Leroy, tycoon, child of her own ambition.

When I saw her crying at the dining room table, she was, I think, grieving over the death of that hoped-for self. In her own mind’s eye, she could no longer imagine a future for herself that was different from and better than the present in which she found herself, so she had no future at all, and that was the end of her.

I didn’t recognize that at the time. I was too full of myself. I was embarrassed by the sight of her, weeping there. I suppose that she was embarrassed too, because she made a stab at pulling herself together, forced a smile in my direction, and shrugged. I returned her false smile with one of my own and went upstairs and into my own cares and my own hopes and my own ambitions for my own little self.

MANY YEARS LATER, I had attained some small success. I was about thirty-four.