“That’s fine then! I just won’t sleep in the house anymore! You’re right!”
“That’s not what I meant…” It’s really not what she meant.
“No, you said you don’t want me sleeping in the spare room anymore, so I just won’t sleep inside at all.” This was really not what she meant.
“All I said was that you shouldn’t sleep in that room if you can’t clean up after yourself. You just can’t leave half-empty food containers everywhere…That’s all.”
“Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore because I’ll just be sleeping outdoors from now on. Like a dog!”
This was an actual discussion my parents had with each other while they were both adults. I have to confess the fight was at least partially my fault. After I moved out my parents converted my old room into a combined spare room and office. Which really just meant an office with a futon in the corner that my dad would regularly pass out on after doing paperwork. The fifteen second walk across the house to his actual bedroom suddenly seemed overwhelming when there was a perfectly good bed just behind his office chair. Last summer I found myself temporarily homeless for a few days between subletting my place in Toronto and heading out West to start my job tree-planting, so I went to my parent’s house and stayed in the spare room. The first night I tried to shift the pillow over a bit on the futon and found it was stuck there. Glued somehow. I yanked on it until it finally ripped up from the bed. It turned out that a spoon with the congealed remains of what looked like chocolate pudding on it had been adhering the pillow to the futon. I don’t know how long ago my dad had left it there but it was stuck hard enough that it had nearly torn the fabric of the couch coming up.
I tried to just wash the pillow myself but my mom noticed it and the argument above soon ensued. Naturally my dad blamed me. If I had just slept on the pudding cushion and let him deal with it later everything would have been fine. Unlike some parents my dad has never shied away from pointing out just how many of the fights he gets into with my mom are mine or my siblings’ fault. This might have been more traumatic in my childhood except that the kinds of arguments my parents regularly got into were so absurd as to border on the cartoonish.
There was, for example, the time my mom had to spend twenty minutes on the phone talking my dad down from buying a car load of what he swore were “real Armani suits” off a guy in a gas station parking lot. He called back three times. The price started off at $1500 and gradually worked down to just under $1000 when my mom finally made him stay on the phone while he got in the car and drove home. He walked in the door visibly shaking and sat down at the table with the kind of sombre expression usually reserved for funerals. “Kids” he addressed all of us, eyes downcast. “I want you to know, you could all. . . all . . . have been wearing brand new Armani suits right now. Each of you. But your mother just would not let me.” I don’t think he ever quite forgave himself for giving up on that deal and may still hold a bit of resentment towards my mother all these years later. The point is that these are actually the kinds of arguments my parents get into on a regular basis. While being adults. So the pudding incident wasn’t that out of the ordinary.
What was a little shocking was that my dad decided to actually follow through with his threat to move out. That same evening he set to work dismantling the futon (It was one of those annoying pieces of Ikea furniture) and moving it out of the house. It’s revealing of some of the intricacies of my father’s mental processes that he decided the garage did not constitute part of the house. Maybe he saw sleeping in the garage as a clever loophole that would allow him to save face without risking a raccoon attack. In his defense it does get a bit drafty in there and opposums have been known to wander in when the door isn’t properly shut, but most people would say if you’re surrounded by four walls and a roof you can’t really claim to be sleeping outside.
Whatever point he may have been trying to make grew increasingly obscure as he moved most of his worldly possessions into the garage. Setting up the futon seemed reasonable enough. Even the space heater was somewhat understandable. But if the idea was to inspire some sense of shame in my mother for forcing him outdoors at the tail end of a harsh Canadian winter he probably should have stopped shy of a full entertainment system. By the time he had set himself up he not only had his desk and futon out there, but a laptop, speakers, television, DVD player and radio alarm clock. There was only one outlet in the garage and so he’d had to plug a couple power bars into each other to get everything working. By the time night came on he was ready. He would stay out here in the garage and my mother would be made sick with regret over asking him to pick up after himself.
It took about two hours for everything to go horribly wrong. At around one in the morning all the power went out in the garage. His set-up had blown a fuse. He could have just bundled up with some more blankets and gone to bed. He could even have replaced the fuse and gotten by with just the space heater plugged in. But in that moment I like to think that, like the great Greek tragic heroes, he realised he was being punished for his hubris. He had wanted too much. Rather than test his luck with the Gods further he gave in. Or maybe the thought of staying in the garage with anything less than three forms of simultaneous entertainment just seemed unbearable. In any case, he immediately set about dismantling the futon by flashlight. I know about this whole process because my brother’s room backs onto the garage. He was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of my father swearing and throwing parts of the futon around the room. As he moved each part back into the house he carefully opened my brother’s door with as little noise as possible and walked gingerly through the room, then immediately started yelling, swearing and banging things around as soon as he got back into the garage, as though the door were some sort of soundproof barrier. Dismantling and re-assembling the futon by flashlight took over an hour. Then he had to move everything else back inside and set it up. By the end of it all he probably got a worse night’s sleep than he would have if he had actually just set himself up in a tent on the front lawn.
He never mentioned moving out again.
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