Perishable (review)

The publisher's pitch on the cover of Dirk Jamison's Perishable makes the Jamison family sound like a good candidate for the Jerry Springer Show: "Hilarious, horrifying, and ultimately heartbreaking, Perishable is a childhood memoir that chronicles seven years in the life of an almost ordinary American family—that ate garbage." Such a description is unfortunate because Dirk Jamison has written a wry chronicle that people amused by Springer's wacky, psychosocial dysfunctionaries would likely find completely disappointing. However, devotees of National Public Radio's This American Life will admire Jamison's intelligent and entertaining presentation of his peculiar family.

Dirk's father, in his quest to be an unencumbered ski bum, successfully gets fired from his construction job, goes on unemployment, and with almost religious zeal provides free food to the family from grocery store dumpsters: damaged boxes of cereal, pastries past their "use-by" dates, and dented cans of fruit, vegetables, and soup. Dirk's mother (described as huge) is a secret consumer of buckets of fried chicken, when she isn't busy making meals, sewing clothes, and decorating birthday cakes. His older sister is a bully who routinely kicks, hits, punches, and chokes Dirk. These attacks are frequent and one supposes their mother, who is usually nearby, at the sewing machine, or in the kitchen decorating a cake, or on the telephone with one of her many sisters complaining about their father, should notice and do something. With two such distracted and self-absorbed parents, Dirk and his siblings rarely seem to get enough attention, except when it serves as ammunition in the ongoing battle over religion (Mom is a Mormon, Dad is a free spirit), food, and, ultimately, custody of the children.

Jamison presents his chronicle in three chapters, each with several brief scenes; reading the book is like watching a well-edited montage of a family's Super-8 movies. Jamison rarely interposes a personal insight or reveals his reactions; there are no voice-overs to explain how young Dirk feels when his father takes their dying dog to a truck stop where he leaves it with a bag of kibble, or when Dirk barely escapes sexual abuse by the Boy Scout troop leader. He doesn't comment when his mother sews a hideous yellow outfit for his first day at school. He simply presents the facts. It is up to the reader to understand the pain of being abandoned by his father, ignored by his mother, and continually tortured by his sister; it is up to the reader to make assumptions about the effects on young Dirk, and to watch and take note as his parents, seemingly, did not.

Several lines of white space, a small black mark, and more white space set off each scene. In these intervals the reader is left alone—given a moment to worry about young Dirk. It's a clever technique that evokes the reader's own memories and emotions. Many scenes end with a lasting image of young Dirk in trouble. One occurs on his first day at school. His mother doesn't put zippers in his clothes, making it necessary for Dirk to drop his pants to use the urinal. Three older kids "taught me about zippers by pinning me in it [the urinal] and counting out twenty-five flushes."

On the next page a school bully attacks Dirk. The scene ends with Dirk on the ground thinking, "My sister had taught me enough about kicking to know that it was rarely happenstance."

The reader is told about the father's ultimate plan to abandon the family via his Enemies list: "Written by Dad during a night panic, then hidden in plain sight on the bedside dresser. The list was long, and Mother is working on forgetting about it. But she is having trouble forgetting the first two items on the list:

1. 1. Wife

2. 2. Kids"

The scenes pile up, one painful event following another: the church fellowship dance where he doesn't get to be with the girl who relieves the boys' erections is...