Free Sunday Best by Bernice Rubens

conditioned by theirs.
    There were to be a dozen of us altogether, married couples, six pockets, so I could reckon on half a dozen presents. Preparations started a few days before, with my father offloading a large cut of meat into the refrigerator. He pinched my mother’s bottom as he closed the door. I remember it very clearly for, for some reason. I intended that he should pay for it. He went into the dining-room and poured himself an unending drink, and then another and another. Between each glass, he would seek out my mother and pinch her with less than affection. I saw my mother wince and I told my father to stop it. He had never once been told what to do, and I expected the full treatment. But he didn’t touch me. He staggered past the dining table and into the kitchen. I followed him because I feared he would take it out on my mother. But he brushed past her too, and went to the kitchen table where my mother had set out four large trifles, her speciality, which she had prepared for the celebration. And there and then, he unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into each one ofthem, taking a drunk’s meticulous care to give each bowl its proper ration.
    I stood and watched him. I marvelled less at what he was doing, than the sight of his member, which I realized I was seeing for the first time. I think my self-aversion was born at that moment, and I looked towards my mother with an overpowering envy. She was crushed and broken, it was true, but she was at least a woman. I watched her as my father, still unbuttoned, left the room, and saw her gather up the bowls one by one, and pour the contents down the sink, as if it was something my father did every day, and that she would clean up after him. I knew then, that one day I would kill him, and I began for the first time to think of the means.
    I suppose they must have made it up, because when my birthday arrived there were four new trifles, twelve guests, six presents and the promise of an enjoyable if not a memorable celebration. I don’t remember who was there, but I do recall an overwhelming smell of meat, since they were all in the trade, and until you got used to it, our dining-room smelt like an
abattoir
in full blast. I remember the conversation being punctuated with surnames, although they were all close friends, and I wondered at that a little. There was wine and my father was in charge of it, and each time he got up to circle the table and fill the glasses, keeping his own to the brim, my mother trembled. But miraculously he held it down. I remember that he was slightly more than jolly, but in the general atmosphere of celebration, he was nothing uncommon. Intemperance is in the eye of the beholder, and blurred or sharp according to the sobriety of that eye. I myself, I suppose, after two unaccustomed glasses saw a jollity without menace, but I was afraid to look at my mother, because if there were a danger, I knew that she could smell it, and that it would show on her face. My father suggested some dancing and he made his unsure way towards the gramophone. Everything was prepared, and he needed only to drop the needle, which he did, somewhere in the middle of a painful cry of rejected love. It was a slow tune, and as I see it now, meant as a warm-up to what he hoped might materialize, and had nothing to do with my twelfth birthday, and in all decency, even less with his anniversary. He grabbed at one of the Missuses as a sign of permission that couples could split, which they did, my mother hovering timidly on the edge of the room, terrified oftwo prospects, first of being asked to dance, and second, of not being asked at all. I remember toying with the idea of asking her myself, but I wasn’t married to her, and it was hardly my duty. I was grateful that not only was she asked, but that two of the Misters awaited her favour. I watched them as they circled the room. I felt even then that my father was too close for comfort to the Missus of his