Meg Robson Mahoney
Frozen Silence
I was sixteen when I sat alone, across from Dad, at his kidney-shaped desk. Dad—an inventor forced from left-handedness in childhood, his signature unreadable—had designed the desk: a six-foot curve of plywood, three feet across and piled with clutter from his fertile, furtive mind. It had been easier when there were two of us on the receiving end, back when he called both of us to sit with him and listen, before my sister Deb left for college. Across his mix of staplers and schemes, I was his project now. It was a dubious honor, being alone with Dad, the focus of his attention.
My parents were at odds about many things, one of them being religion. Dad was an atheist. On Thursday nights, after dinner was cleared and the dishes were done, Mom left for choir with the smell of pot roast or pork chops still in the air. Our Golden Retriever would circle and settle against the kitchen door as Mom closed it behind her, and Dad would draft me to sit with him at his desk across the hall, within sight of the dog and the kitchen door.
His sentences jumped from stone to stone across the river of his thoughts. The same path from week to week, gradually going deeper over months and by degrees.
“People tell the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. That’s crap.” He tapped a Winston from its pack and flared his lighter. The cigarette bounced with his lips, the smell of it in the air as he waded in. “That was 1871, the year a comet came into the atmosphere and exploded in a shower of burning bits, centering on the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. I had a book that laid it out, but I sorted my books by height, and I can’t find it.”
My eyes followed his hand as it swept toward his wall of books, where forty volumes of Voltaire and The Great Books kept company with two look-alike sets of encyclopedias, junior and senior. My thoughts spun off. I remembered a time when I would hear the garage door come down each night, and I’d throw myself at his legs as he came up the walk. I did this even after my display felt empty. One day, I stopped. If he noticed, I never knew.
Sitting along the outside curve of Dad’s desk, I trained my gaze away from the soft folds of his belly. Relaxing in an evening, at his desk or by the fireplace in his big brown Naugahyde chair, he’d leave his red plaid bathrobe untied, loose and open. He was comfortable with his body, with nudity, and wanted us to embrace nudity too. He spoke wistfully of nudist retreats and might have chosen one as a destination for our vacations, were it not for my mother.
Back when I was maybe six or seven, my father built a six-foot fence around our backyard, the fence being another cause for tension between Mom and Dad. How tall was legal? What would the neighbors think? Could it be both beautiful and private? They argued details, never mentioning in front of us the real dispute—that he was probably angling for his own private nudist camp. Although we never used the backyard as he envisioned, the fence extended along three sides, enclosing my mother’s garden with its lilac bush at the center. My mother planted bushes along the west side, but much of the yard was still visible from my best friend Karen’s second-story window.
One day, after the fence was built and years before I sat with Dad at his desk, Karen and I were playing in the shadow of the lilac bush, building miniature worlds in crinkly aluminum pans left over from frozen chicken pot pies. After filling each with dirt, we lay delicate pebble pathways and used fragments of mirrors as ponds for my glass animals to pause and drink. Karen and I were cool in the shade, while Dad was mowing the lawn in the searing Illinois sun, crisscrossing past us with the smell of cut grass in his wake. Each time he passed, he exhorted us to “Peel!” and I pictured a time when, at his suggestion, my family had indeed peeled ourselves naked to lounge and play along a deserted shore in Glacier National Park.
Karen’s puzzled eyes found mine.
I said, “Let’s go inside.” We left our dish gardens behind.
Trapped across the desk from Dad at sixteen, I listened as he leapt from one thing to another, from Peshtigo to Easter Island and “thirty-two other disasters! They’re in the Almanac. At Easter Island, it was a volcano.”
His stories hopped from catastrophes among the Anasazi to earthquakes in the Midwest to the Illinois town of Olney, named for an ancestor of ours who disappeared in a Mississippi flood. As his words swept by, my eyes fell on his hand-held stamp for embossing plastic labels amid his jumble of handy items. As I recall, he had several labelers. If something’s good, why not have two? If you have an idea, why not repeat it? It was an endless process for him, coming up with ideas to rearrange the world—his family, his home, his work, and beyond.
Downstairs in his basement workshop, he had lined the wall above his workbench with pegboard, painted with the shape of every tool. When a project was under way, his tools left their painted ghosts behind, returning rarely. Once, he built an electric circuit board for one of his inventions. It was a work of art, its wires color-coded to signify their intentions, bending in synchrony and crossing in patterns.
One Christmas, he jigsawed several sets of three-inch-tall balsa ornaments, each symbolizing one of the world’s religions, none of which was his. At his behest, Deb and I painted them in the basement, and he gave them out as gifts: Christmas hopes for tolerance. He was a recruiter to his causes, but people were harder to organize than things.
He never sought my ideas. His questions were rhetorical. My eyes would aim high to one of his model airplanes suspended in flight from the ceiling to a landing strip on an empty shelf among his books—a Boeing B-17 Fortress, say, or a Douglas A-20 Havoc. He’d wanted to fly in the war, but his color-blindness sent him into the army instead. Like the planes circling over his desk, I was suspended too, halfway between the urge to fly and a desire to be accepted by Dad. Eventually he’d say something that would bring me back.
“We lost half our outfit in Burma. Besides me, there was only one other virgin in the whole battalion—Tony. When Tony got his head blown off, I thought I might get home with mine. I know that doesn’t make sense.” He rarely mentioned the war and didn’t go on about it. He leaned back and let his chair swivel a few degrees to face me. I shifted in mine.
“Your mother was a virgin too. I wish someone had told me how important it is to try sex before marriage. Our society sees the human body and sex as shameful, but they’re not. You know, I’ve done a lot of reading about sex in other cultures,” he said, with a sweep of his hand toward his bookshelves.
“I’ve got books by anthropologists who’ve studied cultures around the world. In some places, young people are initiated into sex by their elders. Children learn about the pleasures of their bodies from experienced hands.”
“I’ve got a lot of books.” He gestured toward the hidden door behind him, which led to his private sanctuary, his bathroom. It was invisible to anyone beyond our family. He’d built it, with my mother’s dad, in this room that alternated between dining room and office over the years, so the house would have a second bathroom. This bathroom—“Dad’s bathroom”—was small, with space enough for a toilet, sink, shower, a few shelves for towels on one end, and a wall of books on the other—books on anthropology, along with novels, Playboys, and other magazines with centerfolds of naked women. Beyond the family, no one guessed the room was there. Its door opened inward on hidden hinges and was paneled like the room it robbed space from. Sometimes the only telltale sign that Dad was home was the drone of the fan in there. Dad would secrete himself for hours—and read, I guess. Mornings and evenings. More on weekends.
We weren’t forbidden to use his bathroom. In high school, I visited it like a library, choosing one book at a time to stash under my mattress for late-night flashlight reading. No one knew since I made my own bed each morning and changed the sheets each week. There were no overdue notices or late fees. It was a good way to learn some things I’d missed.
No one at home ever actually explained anything to me. In fourth grade, on the day they showed a film about reproduction and passed out packets with brochures and sanitary pads, I was sick at home. Once I spent a night with my aunt, who must have realized how little I knew. As she said good night, she stayed a while to explain things in the dark, and I was puzzled into wakefulness by visions of blood and cotton pads, too surprised to find a question. I was fourteen when I finally summoned the courage to ask my mother, “How do the sperm and egg get together?” I’d pictured some kind of exchange at the wedding ceremony, perhaps having to do with the rings.
“The penis fits into the vagina,” she said. That was that.
By the time I was sixteen and sitting with Dad at his desk, I knew more, but his bathroom library was a spotty way to learn. I’d gotten used to the near-naked bodies in there, and I’d read The Harrad Experiments by Robert Rimmer, about young lovers exchanging partners, but I’d never had a date, never had a boyfriend, never been kissed.
Back at the kidney desk, Dad’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts again.
“Your mother doesn’t want those books out where they might be seen. She and I can’t talk about sex,” he said with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “She doesn’t care for it. I think she’s frigid.”
Frigid? I didn’t know what he meant by that. It sounded bad. Did a person inherit it? Was it contagious? Could I fend it off?
I knew what virginity was, and I resolved then and there to lose it the first chance I got, to prevent this thing called frigidity if I could. Definitely before I turned eighteen.
Those one-sided conversations with Dad would end at the sound of Mom coming home from choir. The dog always heard it first—the automatic garage door in the backyard sounding an alarm that only a dog might hear. He would circle at the door with friendly barks and a wagging tail that beat against the wall as he rose and wiggled to greet her. Dad’s words would take a precipitous turn toward a neutral topic, releasing me from my frozen silence. He would applaud the dog’s excitement and reach for something on his desk to busy his hands. I’d get up, pat the dog, greet my mom, and escape to my homework.
It’s odd how my experience of listening to Dad was a kind of training in feeling cold and distant, silent and unresponsive.
Odd, too, how we adjust. At seventeen I joined the choir, leaving Dad to shuffle things around his desk and in his thoughts alone.
Meg Robson Mahoney has been published in The Baltimore Review, Tiny Molecules, HerStry, and teaching artist journal. Retired from teaching dance in a public school, she lives in Seattle and explores the Salish Sea and the world beyond with her husband. Website: megrobsonmahoney.com; Substack: megrmahoney.substack.com
