Episode 17: Settling In

When John arrives, he decides that we should all eat together. We rarely have a meal with Dad besides holidays. He can’t stand eating with us and claims we give him the hiccups. In some ways, I see his point, given how chaotic and boisterous our meals can be. So my mother feeds us early and has us out of the way when Dad comes home for a separate meal.

John not only wants us to eat together, he wants us all to have cloth napkins. Our sometime cleaning lady and babysitter Sadie is aghast. She looks at my mother as if she’s crazy.

“Ump um hmp!” she grunts in disapproval.

Sure enough, one evening we find ourselves gathered around the dining room

table, white cloth napkins tucked into napkin rings lying in wait for us on our plates. Some of us have even washed our hands. The wooden napkin rings have names crudely burned on to them, put there by Tyler using a wood burning kit. Four of the six of us look uncomfortable and I’m on the verge of tittering nervously. John is cool as a cucumber. He picks up his napkin, pulls it from the ring, and lays it on his lap. The napkin ring goes to the left of the plate. With sidelong glances between us, we do the same.

In spite of the civilized look of this tableau, John proves over time to have a devilish and crude sense of humor. He’ll wait until someone has a mouth full of food, and then will turn to them with a straight face and say something like, “Purple people eater puke.” Usually, it’s not puke that flies out of someone’s mouth, but partially chewed hamburger or chicken. We all roar except Mom.

Ironically, I, too, develop hiccups at dinner time.

“Going to the movies?” he’ll ask you as you pass him in the hall.

“What? No.”

“You’re picking your seat.”

Our dinners do get loud and my mother doesn’t yet have a hearing aid. Sometimes she’ll pound the table and say, “Listen!” Which sets off a refrain from John that will become a family standard:

Listen, listen, cat’s a pissin,’

Where, where?

Under the chair.

Quick, quick, get the gun,

Too late, it’s already done.

John has his own words for some things. Strambaggios are strawberries, crabbage is garbage or trash, bejert is dessert, and spinch is spinach.

Sometimes you’ll be giving a long explanation for something and John will look at you as if he’s taking you seriously and then say, “Horsepoop.” He might refer to a snotwaffle if he catches one of us picking our noses. From time to time, he wears a little red pin with elaborate white Gothic letters. When you get close enough to read it you see that it says, “Horseshit.”

John gets a haircut every two weeks so that his hair always looks the same.

Has John always been this way, or have we unlocked something within him?