“George, it was you,” my mother called, “who brought it

up in the first place.” He changed the subject. “Hey what time is it?” The milk was too cold, the coffee too hot. I took a sip and scalded my palate; following this the chill mush of the corn flakes was nauseous. As if to make good my lie, my stomach did begin to hurt; the ticking minutes pinched it.

“I’m ready,” I shouted, “I’m ready, I’m ready.” I was like my father in performing for an unseen audience, but his was far off and needed to be shouted at, whereas mine was just over the footlights. Boy, clutching stomach comically, crosses stage left. I went into the living-room to gather up my coat and my books. My pea jacket, crusty, faithful, was hanging behind one door. My father was sitting in a rocking chair turned away from the fire that hissed and danced in the fire place. He had on his overcoat, a tattered checkered castoff with mismatching buttons, which he had rescued from a church sale, though it was too small and barely reached his knees. On his head he wore a hideous blue knitted cap that he had plucked out of a trash barrel at school. Pulled down over his ears, it made him look like an overgrown dimwit in a comic strip. He had just recently taken to wearing this cap, and I wondered why. He still had a full head of hair, barely touched by gray. Understand that to me my father seemed changeless. In fact he did look younger than his years. When he turned his head toward me, his face was that of a sly street urchin prematurely toughened. He had been a child in an humble neighborhood of Passaic. His face, compounded of shiny lumps and sallow slack folds, to me seemed both tender and brutal, wise and unseeing; it was still dignified by the great distance that in the beginning had lifted it halfway to the sky. Once I had stood beside his knees on the brick walk leading to the grape arbor of our house in Olinger and felt him look level into the tops of the horsechestnut trees and believed that nothing could eyer go wrong as long as we stood so.

“Your books are on the windowsill,” he said. “Did you eat your cereal?”

I rebuked him sharply. “There isn’t time, you keep telling me.” I gathered up my books. Faded blue Latin, its covers all but unhinged. Smart red algebra, freshly issued this year; every time I turned a page, the paper released a tangy virginal scent. And a weary big gray book, General Science, my father’s subject. Its cover was stamped with a triangular design of a dinosaur, an atom blazing like a star, and a microscope. On its side and butts a previous possessor had lettered in blue ink the huge word FIDO. The size of this inscription seemed pathetic and abject, like an abandoned religious monument. Fido Hornbecker had been a football hero when I was in the seventh grade. In the list of names written inside the cover, where my own was last, I had never been able to locate the girl who had loved him. In five years, I was the first boy to be assigned the book. The four names written above mine-

Mary Heffner

Evelyn Mays “Bitsy”

Rhea Furstweibler

Phyllis L. Gerhardt-

had melted in my mind into one nymph with inconstant handwriting. Maybe they had all loved Fido. “Time stolen from food,” my grandfather said, “is time stolen from yourself.”

“The kid’s like I am, Pop,” my father said. “I never had time to eat either. Get your carcass away from the table is all I ever heard. Poverty’s a terrible thing.”

My grandfather’s hands were folding and unfolding gingerly and his hightop button shoes twiddled in agitation. He was an ideal foil for my father because as a very old man he imagined that, if listened to, he could provide all answers and soothe all uncertainties. “I would see Doc Appleton,” he pronounced, clearing his throat with extreme delicacy, as if his phlegm were Japanese paper. “I knew his father well. The Appletons have been in the county since the beginning.” He was sitting bathed in white winter windowlight and seemed, in comparison with my father’s bullet-headed shape bulking black against the flickering fire, a more finely evolved creature.

My father stood up. “All he does, Pop, when I go to him, is brag about himself.”

There was a flurry in the kitchen. Doors squeaked and slammed; hot claws scrabbled on the wood floor. The dog came racing into the living-room. Lady seemed to hover on the carpet, crouched low as if whipped by joy. Her feet in a frantic swimming motion scratched one spot on the faded purple carpet that was never so worn it could not release under friction further small rolls of lavender fluff-”mice,” my grandmother had called them, when this carpet lay in Olinger and she was alive. Lady was so happy to be let in doors she was a bomb of good news, a furry bustle of vortical ecstasy that in vibrating emitted the scent of a skunk she had killed a week ago. Hunting a god, she started toward my father, veered past my legs, jumped on the sofa, and in frantic gratitude licked my grandfather’s face.

Along his long life’s walks he had had bitter experiences with dogs and feared them. “Hyar, hyaar” he protested, pulling his face away and lifting his shapely dry hands against Lady’s white chest. His voice was shocking in its guttural force, as if it arose from a savage darkness none of the rest of us had ever known.

The dog pressed her twittering muzzle into his ear and her rump wagged so wildly the magazines began to slide to the floor. We were all churned into motion; my father rose to the rescue but before he could reach the sofa my grandfather lifted himself to his feet. We all three, while the dog swirled underfoot, pressed into the kitchen.

To my mother we must have looked like an accusing posse; she shouted at us, “I let her in because I couldn’t stand to hear her bark.” She seemed nearly in tears; I was amazed. My own anxiety for the dog had been pretended. I hadn’t heard her continue barking. A glance at my mother’s mottled throat told me that she was angry. Suddenly I wanted to get out; she had injected into the confusion a shrill heat that made everything cling. I rarely knew exactly why she was mad; it would come and go like weather. Was it really that my father and grandfather absurdly debating sounded to her like murder? Was it something I had done, my arrogant slowness? Anxious to exempt myself from her rage, I sat down in my stiff pea jacket and tried the coffee again. It was still too hot. A sip seared my sense of taste away.

“Jesus kid,” my father said. “It’s ten to. I’ll lose my job if we don’t move.”

“That’s your clock, George,” my mother said. Since she was defending me, I could not be the cause of her anger. “Our clock says you have seventeen minutes.”

“Your clock’s wrong,” he told her. “Zimmerman’s after my hide.”

“Coming, coming,” I said, and stood up. The first bell rang at eight-twenty. It took twenty minutes to drive to Olinger. I felt squeezed in the dwindling time. My stomach ground its empty sides together.

My grandfather worked his way over to the refrigerator and from its top took the gaudy loaf of Maier’s Bread. He moved with a pronounced and elaborate air of being in conspicuous that made us all watch him. He unfolded the wax paper and removed a slice of white bread, which he then folded once and tidily tucked entire into his mouth. His mouth’s elasticity was a marvel; a toothless chasm appeared under his ash-colored mustache to receive the bread in one bite. The calm cannibalism of this trick always infuriated my mother. “Pop,” she said, “can’t you wait until they’re out of the house before you start tormenting the bread?”

I took a last sip of the scalding coffee and pushed toward the door. We were all jammed into the little area of linoleum bounded by the door, the wall where the clocks ticked and hummed, the refrigerator, and the sink. The congestion was intense. My mother struggled to get past her father to the stove. He drew himself in and his dark husk seemed impaled on the refrigerator door. My father stood fast, by far the tallest of us, and over our heads announced to his invisible audience, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels.”