Humping the Bush

It was she who’d captured him in that moment, out on one of his afternoon walks. He had no idea that she had followed him, that she’d tucked herself in a clump of milkweed and aimed her camera at his face. This was before they were married, when she was eighteen and he twenty-two, just a few short months back from Vietnam. Our mother loved to recall how furious he got once he realized what she’d done. How he wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t look at her, but simply climbed down off his rock and left. How she hurried after him, first apologizing, then trying to get him to laugh, and finally getting so enraged herself she hurled fistfuls of pokeberries at his back until his shirt turned dark from the inky fruit.

Still he just kept trudging forward, fists plunged in his pockets, eyes glaring hard at the earth. It wasn’t until our mother darted up ahead of him and began to strip off her clothes that she got him to stop.

“There I was. Raw as a baby. Your poor old father couldn’t even move. That was probably the first time I ever felt any real advantage when it came to being a female, and let me say, I made good use of it, too.”

Six months later, they married. I arrived not long after that. Our mother framed the photograph and kept it on their dresser along with the rest of her trophies and souvenirs. Her grandmother’s brass jewelry box, a jar of wheat pennies. A hand- blown ashtray filled with bits of smoky quartz, rose quartz, slices of mica, and other treasures she’d found on her walk down the mountain to work. Also a bottle of  eau de toilette, years empty, which she kept for the tiny frosted bird perched on its lid. Although our father grumbled about it, and often threatened to toss the picture in the trash once and for all, you could tell he was secretly pleased. He too seemed to view it as some sort of trophy, although just what he’d won was never clear.

The morning after she left us forever, he came into the kitchen and asked my little brother Nate and me if we’d seen the photograph anywhere. We shook our heads no. Nate was five years old at the time. I was twelve.

“Well, then,” he said. “Seems like someone went and forgot all her clothes, but remembered to take that ugly old picture of me.” He glanced at us and left the room, unable to hide the wreckage of pride and shame on his face.

He took comfort in the idea she’d taken it with her. It gave him hope—hope that she still loved him, that one day she’d return. That night, as I checked on it in its hiding place under my mattress, even I allowed myself to think we might one day be a family again.

But over the next few weeks, as Nate and I anxiously studied our father for signs of the terrible breakdown we felt sure was coming, we found ourselves living with a man we did not know. One morning, he announced our family would be starting a daily regimen of sprints and calisthenics. That night, he appeared at supper with his black curls buzzed short. He started calling our meals rations, our clothes civvies. He dug his old dog tags out of his army trunk and strung them around his neck.

He began stockpiling canned vegetables, sacks of rice and flour, peanut butter, freeze-dried fruit. Huge cases of something called “Western Stew.” He stashed malaria tablets and halazone pills in the spice rack. His first aid kit could have won awards. He kept a giant emergency duffel bag in the mudroom, in case we had to evacuate for some reason, and pretty soon it got so you couldn’t open a drawer anywhere in the house without finding waterproof matches, spools of wire, extra shoelaces, miracle glue.