Free Blue Genes by Christopher Lukas Page B

I was younger than he. So, as a joke, or as punishment for some of my “misdeeds,” he would wait for me to come around the corner of the house, and then spray me with the hose. I was not amused, but later I learned to turn the tables on him.
    There was another summer activity that was a lot more fun. A half mile down Rosedale, where it meets Mamaroneck Avenue, was a tiny grocery store. No one in our family shopped there, but once we reached a certain age, Tony and I were allowed to walk there in the summer for ice cream cones. I favored chocolate; Tony, vanilla. The cones, costing five cents each, were fully packed, so we had enough for the walk home. The game we played was how long each could make the ice cream last, who could say, as the other finished his dripping cone, “I’ve still got
mine
.”
    I loved sitting in the front seat of our station wagon when Dad or Proctor or Mother drove to the station or the farmers’ market or to pick up Tony from his violin lessons. I played with the window handle, turning it this way and that as if I were steering. It was an elegant vehicle, a Ford, with wooden frame and slats (what the Brits call an estate wagon), polished until it gleamed.
    When we weren’t using the car, it often sat right in front of the house, as if it might be needed at a moment’s notice, left in first gear to keep it from sliding.
    One day, when I was about five, I got into the driver’s seat. I knew how it went: you get in, you close the door, you push the little button on the dashboard, and the car goes. So I got in, I closed the door, and I pushed the little button. And it went. Apparently the brake wasn’t on.
    My feet didn’t have a chance in hell of reaching the floor, and I doubt I would have known what to do if they did. At first I was delighted—no panic. Then
lots
of panic. Then screaming, as the car chugged up the little incline and—luckily—stalled. There was a moment of fear that it might go backward, but the gear held. I slid from the seat to the driveway: guilty, frightened, relieved. I remember no consequences for my naughty act, except having one more guilty escapade to add to my list—a list that would keep growing as I got older.
    Dad and Mother went to Mexico one spring for a brief vacation. We were left to our own devices—under Baba’s and Proctor’s guidance, of course. When our parents returned, carrying chairs from Guadalajara and other memorabilia, we were aware that there was more and more tension between them. One night, waking from a frightening dream, I tramped down the long hallway to knock on their door. Then I opened it. I started toward Mother, but Dad intervened. He was furious.
    “Get back to bed!”
    He chased me down the hall, and as I scooted into my room, crying with fear and shock, I hollered for Mother.
    “Get into bed,” he screamed again. I wanted to stop to take off my slippers, which I had carefully put on as I prepared to go for comfort to my mother’s arms. Dad would have none of it. Into bed I went, slippers and all. The door slammed on my room, and then on their room.
    I was terrified of my father. And I hated him.
    Crying, hurt, uncertain about my safety, I pulled the covers up over me, pretending that I was in a boat on the ocean, safe, water-tight, far from harm. Tony, in the next room, never awoke.
    In some of the psychotherapy I underwent in later years, it was suggested to me that Dad’s fury had to do with my intervention in a sexual event—the “primal scene” about which Freud writes. I dutifully listened to this interpretation, but I reject it. I think that
my
motivation may have been Oedipal (
What is going on behind that closed door?
), but the scene I saw in my parents’ bedroom was not a happy one, much less sexual. Mother sat in her bed, a scowl on her face, Dad in his. I remember how much Dad liked his sleep and hated to be interrupted. But what I recognize now is the tension between them, and Dad’s fear that Mother