In eighth grade shop class at Pleasant Street Junior High, I constructed a pine toolbox, which I gave to Grandpa for Father’s Day. It was too pretty for the inevitable grease and muck of the farm, and I never saw him use it. A spice rack for Mom didn’t find a place on the kitchen wall, and a dustpan, fabricated from folded sheet metal and rivets, was too clumsy for Dad’s garage. The steel handle was hopelessly crooked. For the last project of the year, my best friend John and I volunteered to be the managers for a mass-production job. We settled on a step stool, then designed and drafted our proposal. It measured ten by fourteen by nine inches high, supported by arched legs and a cross brace. The top was to be routed to soften sharp edges, and an oblong hole was devised for easy transport. In the end, the stool was much too low to sit on, not wide enough for both feet, and its modest height resulted in not much of a step for high cupboards. We calculated the amount of lumber required to manufacture enough components for stools for each boy in the class. Back then, in the early 1970s, boys took Industrial Arts, segregated from the girls next door in Home Economics: baking, sewing, rearing imaginary babies, and tending to cuticles. John and I outlined the production process and assigned tasks in the use of table saw, plane, jointer, drill press, drum and belt sanders, glue, screws, stain, and polyurethane. 

That was a good year with John. He sat with me on the bus every morning. His breath smelled like whatever weird thing he ate for breakfast: pizza, his dad’s chili, or tuna noodle casserole. He tried to keep me awake with a cold washcloth when we watched horror movies at Chiller Theater. He lent me a book titled An Otter’s Story by Emil Liers, probably the first book I could say I loved. He laughed at my infatuation with Gayle, and that was just fine. He introduced me to the art of raunchy, sexual innuendo. Even though he was Episcopalian and I was Catholic, we tried being born-again-Christians for a few weeks by attending a church where they spoke in tongues. It didn’t take. We spent most of our time attempting to comprehend what girls were all about. In the middle of art class, a girl invited John to squeeze her breast. The girl laughed. Everyone laughed. I would never. He was nearly expelled for calling Miss Smith, our mini-skirted English teacher, by her first name on the last day of school. We camped for a week in the woods at the end of our eighth-grade year. He smoked pot until it was boring. I didn’t. After college, John moved to Portland, obtained his pilot’s license and took a car apart and put it back together just to see how it worked.

Two years after the shop project, now in high school, John was nowhere to be found. As for me, everything changed far too suddenly. After Dad lost the house and the dry-cleaning business, after we moved from our nice, modern home in the suburbs to a dark, cramped rental on Hamtramck Street, the inadequate step stool landed on the ancient, peeling kitchen linoleum, just beneath the wall phone next to the cellar door. Someone’s foot caught on it nearly every day. After Mom’s paranoia first brought chaos and violence to our family, after Mom’s commitment to the psych ward in the State Hospital, after thrown coffee cups, garbage put in shoes, no cooking, no laundry, and after she shredded several of Dad’s shirts while he was still in them,  it seemed as if the rage and dread would pull the sad house down upon our heads – I am not at all sure what exactly happened. I am only certain that the horror of the moment likely altered my narrative, my memory of the event. Dad was trying his hand, trying his best, at real estate, desperate to bring in some money. God, we needed the money. Soon it would be for rent, gas, groceries, my little sister’s First Communion dress. Collection agencies called daily. Dad was talking with a client on the upstairs phone, from the conciliatory tenor of his voice, attempting to close a deal. When I entered the kitchen, Mom, still in her robe and slippers, was eavesdropping on the extension, her ear pressed to the receiver, her hand covering the mouthpiece. Her eyes were wild, her expression fierce and manic. I knew she was listening for an affair, some morsel of evidence, some small sign of affection or regard for anyone female on the other line.

Money. We needed the money. I looked to Dad for something good to happen. I needed him to be successful. Mom would ruin this. In a flash of anger, I grabbed the phone from her. There was a struggle, and Mom became tangled in the cord. She slipped. Did she slip? I think she slipped. She must have slipped. She slipped. She fell and hit the back of her head on the edge of the step stool. She was unconscious. Out cold. I’d seen this in cartoons, but never in real life. Foghorn Leghorn or Wile E. Coyote was always getting clobbered with a handy mallet or tennis racket. Lumps rose from, and stars circled, their heads. I yelled for Dad, he carried her to the living room couch, and I fetched a cold washcloth. Mom stirred after a few minutes and began to cry. It seemed like she cried for days. I tried to apologize. She cried more. Dad lost the sale. I’d like to say this was the turning point – that it all got better after this – but it didn’t. Mom’s psychosis was relentless. Her paranoia devoured our family. Eventually, John and I turned out fine. I’m not sure what happened to the step stool.