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  • Silence
  • Katherine Riegel (bio)

This is about my father, who loved me. About his gray suits and black wingtips, the index card he took with him when shopping for ties so he didn’t get one that was wider than three inches. He had learned to buy ties and wear suits in the early 1960s, the thin-tie era, and he never was comfortable with the way 1970s ties seemed to overlap his chest, bib-like. He needed the suits for his job as a university administrator, the kind with a lot of responsibility, little power, and less prestige—the job that gave him nightmares of college kids overdosing, of them rioting, of parents and presidents who wanted someone to blame.

When I was five, he took me on a train trip to Chicago. It was a three-hour ride away from Champaign, where my father worked, which was a half-hour drive from the horse farm on 11 acres where we lived. In Chicago, everything was giant and loud, disorienting, like a carnival paved with concrete; but my father never seemed irritated or impatient, as he certainly would be if he were with all of us kids.

He held my hand. He asked me if I was tired, hungry. He took me to lunch at Berghoff’s, a fancy restaurant, and my meal ended with an eight-layer chocolate cake I couldn’t finish, chocolate chips embedded in the layers, and cherry filling as well as chocolate icing between. He took me to men’s clothing stores, where he looked at suits and I sat in soft leather chairs. And he took me to buy new shoes, because the ones I was wearing hurt my feet. [End Page 101]

This is about my mother, who my father blamed for the shoes I was wearing. At the shoe store in Chicago, on the second floor of a sculpted department store, the clerk told him the shoes were two sizes too small, peering up at him with disapproval. My father was embarrassed. He was worried for me and for the day, whether I could keep walking around the city with him. How could I be wearing shoes so obviously the wrong size? It must be because my mother wasn’t paying attention, because of her epilepsy, because of the drugs she was on for the epilepsy.

For years afterwards he would tell the story: “And I had to buy her new shoes because hers were too small. Her mother, you see, was ill . . .” It was an illustration of everything he had to deal with: the sick wife who couldn’t even see to the basics of her kids’ needs. He had to clean up after her, he had to keep everything together, to keep things from falling apart. It was a story about how we kids suffered, because of our mother’s illness and incompetence. It was a head-shaking story, a sighing story, a look-at-the-floor-and-then-bravely-smile-when-he-looked-up-again story. It burned me, this story, rage and guilt going up like tinder whenever he told it—because it was not true for me, for us, because my mother taught us how to play softball and to take care of the horses, to sew and garden and cook; because she didn’t punish without first explaining what we had done wrong, and never when she was angry; because she was safety and anchor.

This is about me, a child who was well aware of the cost of things because I heard my father raging about money like a Greek chorus throughout our two-story farmhouse. My mother had taken me shopping for shoes, and I picked out sneakers with a blue denim pattern on them, nice-looking sneakers, fancier than the muddy-gray ones I wore around the yard and the barn. I didn’t want to get them dirty, to ruin them, so I put them carefully in the back of my closet and wore my old sneakers for months.

My mother forgot I had them—there were four of us kids, after all, as well as the horses—and I was...

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