The Risk Pool

mother would have blanched at. I drank milk from the carton, ate pepperoni in bed and fell asleep sticky. My father never objected to these practices at home, but if he happened to notice anything particularly foul about me in public, he would hold it up to considerable humor and ridicule, blaming my condition on lax maternal training. More than once the clients of the Mohawk Grill were invited to inspect my caked fingernails. And while comparisons to most of Harry’s regulars weren’t necessarily invidious, my father was right. I was frequently revolting.
    Which makes my squeamishness about his finger in the olive jar that much more absurd, my father being himself a brutal hand scrubber. He bought coarse, gravelly Lava soap for the apartment and required Eileen to have a bar on hand for him at her house as well, though I don’t believe he advocated it for her personal use. Sometimes, in addition to sandpapering his own knuckles and palms, he’d do mine as well so I’d “know what it felt like to be clean, for once.” By “clean” he apparently meant “raw.” No doubt the Lava got his hands clean, but it made no difference in the appearance of his thumb and forefinger, and try as I might, I couldn’t shake the idea that once his black digit invaded an olive jar, the juices therein were tinged a subtle shade darker.
    By the time Eileen began to bring hot food to the table it seemed to me that breakage was inevitable. The jars of pickles and olives were never cleared away, seldom even consolidated sensibly. To the center of the tiny table were added each night, first, a huge bowl of mashed potatoes and an oblong platter of meat, then, at the outer edges of the table a bowl of vegetables and basket of rolls, a dish of fruit or applesauce. By the time Eileen was finished bringing food, it was possible for me to knock something off her end of the table by nudging something at my end by slender centimeters. To make matters worse, we passed things, setting off chain reactions. Lifting the platter of roast pork would upset the bowl of green beans, which someone would try to save, his elbow sending the big bottle of Thousand Island dressing to the floor. In this way, the person who appeared to have made the mess seldom actually
caused
it, but was rather trying to prevent another calamity altogether, the threat of which healone perceived. My father and I ate dinner with the Littlers at least once a week, and I can remember no single meal free of casualties, though what got shattered varied from an old, nearly empty bottle of maraschino cherries (what could
it
have been doing there amid the roast pork, mashed potatoes, canned asparagus, and Parker House rolls?) to a valued fancy casserole dish said to have come down to Eileen all the way from the venerable Myrtle Littler herself.
    Though I was just a kid, it was obvious to me that our attempts to wedge ourselves into Eileen’s little house were not working and that, to borrow my father’s phrase, some fucking thing had to give, but I was the only one who saw it that way. I remember Eileen as a better than average cook, and I’m confident when I say I was the only one unable to enjoy a single morsel at that table.
    So. What follows may have happened that same evening when Drew lifted his cycle out of the snowbank and whistled my father’s broken antenna out into the woods. Or it may have been a month later, with several such meals as the one depicted above intervening. Since neither Drew nor my father ever forgot a single grievance, it probably doesn’t matter. What my father had done and what Drew had done would have been as fresh to them a month later as if it had happened moments before. In any case, the episode begins in my memory with Drew spearing a roast with his mother’s silver serving fork.
    God help me, I had to watch him.
    I didn’t want to, because that’s what my father was doing. I tried to appear occupied by taking some mashed potatoes, arranging them in one corner of the plate, flattening them out with the back of my fork, depressing a cavity in the center for gravy, then spooning some green beans next to them. All of this to mark time while Drew, who was first, as usual, at the meat platter, built a huge mound, one slice at a time while the rest of us waited for him to finish.
    At the time I thought he must be oblivious to us, or at least to my father, who was watching him with an air of quiet homicidal menace, but I’ve since changed my