My mother’s pièce de résistance was the grandfather clock. As I looked at its face—both the clock and I stood about forty inches tall—I knew it meant trouble. It had a patina of dust and hadn’t ticked or tocked in my lifetime. Not only that, but it had once belonged to my paternal grandmother, with whom my father had had a famously tumultuous relationship.
Before weekend visits with our father, my mother would give me or my sister something of his, something that he didn’t need or want, and then she’d leave for the day. She’d hand my sister a ceramic cow: “Make sure you give this to your father. It belongs to him.” Or she’d look at me with puffy eyes, red from crying: “Don’t forget to give your father that quilt and his Encyclopedia Britannica.” Our weekends always began by handing over junk: the beautiful packaging for The Concert for Bangladesh without the actual vinyl inside; a trash bag containing a torn hammock and a single cowboy boot; a bust of Mozart sans nose. My father’s house was forty-five minutes from ours and it usually took about thirty minutes for his angry rictus to fade.
When my father saw that week’s selection of junk his face turned red and his lips tightened. He picked up the clock, carried it into the trunk of his Volkswagen and slammed the lid.
The grandfather clock was noisy. We could hear the loose springs and gears whine with every curve and red light, its chime sing at random. The noise became a fourth passenger—fifth, if you counted our silence. On this ride home, as the seconds and minutes passed, my father’s anger didn’t ebb, it intensified. His was an anger that you could feel, that bumped and poked you.
Twenty-five minutes into the clock’s nightmare orchestra, my father pulled over. “Where is she?” he said to my sister.
“I don’t know.”
“Where does she go on Saturdays?” His voice rose with every word. “Is she at Carmen’s?”
“I don’t know,” she said almost in a whisper.
My father then turned to me. “Is she at Carmen’s?”
“Maybe,” I said, just to say something different than my sister.
He got out of the car and walked to a payphone a few feet from us. My sister began to cry. I wanted to move up and hug her, but I was frozen motionless, might as well have been tied.
“Where is she?” he screamed into the receiver. “Put her on the fucking phone. Now!” Then again dialing, more screaming. When my father resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to unload his anger on my mother that Saturday, he turned to banging the headset against the hard, black telephone box until it was destroyed. When he got back in the car I noticed that his right hand was bleeding.
I would have many outbursts similar to this as I got older. Once I even kicked a grandfather clock with my bare foot, surrounded myself with sharp wood and broken glass.