A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father by Augusten Burroughs Page A

aunts. In any case, he was very confused, very lost. Yes, I do think he would have killed himself if I’d said no.”
    She brought her thumb to her mouth and bit the nail. “After we had your brother we moved to Seattle. And it was just so gray and rainy. I thought I’d made just a terrible mistake. Here I was, married to this man whose behavior was just getting stranger and stranger and I had a little baby and I was so alone and confused.”
    But what had she meant, “stranger and stranger”? I asked her.
    “Oh, he would drink. He would sit in the dark and he would drink and then he would say things that didn’t make sense. He would come into the bedroom and wake me up.  ‘Margaret, Margaret,’  he would shake me awake. And then he would speak just gobbledygook. He’d be frantic, very, very upset. Very drunk. And just carrying on. I was terrified.”
    The pines surrounding our house were so thick the needles trapped the growing darkness in the living room. My mother’s form was perfectly still on the sofa where she sat now, holding her brush. Dull yellow light from the kitchen fell into a rectangle on the floor outside the doorway and then died there.
    “I was very afraid of your father back then. I had this little baby that cried all the time, he cried so much. No matter how much I hugged him and tried to comfort him, he just cried and cried.”
    My brother, something off about him even then.
    Her voice sounded like it was coming from a different room. Disconnected from the unmoving shape on the sofa. A ventriloquist’s illusion. It made me uneasy, the way she could vanish from a room without even leaving it.
    “After we moved to Pittsburgh, I thought I would kill myself. Your brother was seven and he just didn’t fit in at school, he would come home in tears because nobody wanted to play with him. And then I would cry because I didn’t know what to do. Your father was worse, he was so angry, he had so much rage in him that he kept bottled up. I thought he might snap and kill me, kill your brother. I was just terrified. Calling Mother on the phone and weeping, begging her to come stay with me. ‘Margaret,’ she said, ‘he’s your husband now. You take care of him.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a single friend except our upstairs neighbor, an elderly lady named Eloise but, of course, what could she do?
    “I didn’t dare think about leaving your father. I knew if I did that he would come after us. That he would hunt us down and that would be it. So I stayed.”
    She finally looked at me, sitting on the floor at her feet. Her eyes were moist.
    “And then you were born and I was so happy. You were such a good, easy baby, you never cried. I loved you so much and I knew I couldn’t kill myself because you needed me.”
    A ringing in my ears. In the silence of the dark room, it was a buzz, a steady hum, like steel stretching. It could have been an alarm of some kind, a warning issued from within.
    I STOOD IN the center of the house, the only area that could not be called a  room . It was the point at which the hallway met the top of the stairs, just at the entrance to the living room and dining room, right at the doorway to the kitchen, beneath the twenty-foot ceilings. I stood there and called out in my loudest voice, holding the note in my throat so that the word became a howl, a cry,  “Dead!”
    My mother appeared from around the corner, wiping her hands on the thighs of her skirt. Her face was stricken.
    “Dead!” I called again, lifting my chin up, releasing the word like a swarm of bees.
    My mother reached down with both hands and gripped my small shoulders. “Why are you saying that? What is it? What’s the matter?” There was a frantic edge to her voice, confusion mixed with terror.
    Her intensity frightened me, as did her confusion. “What?” I asked.
    “Why are you shouting ‘dead’? I don’t understand.”
    I looked up at her and said, “I’m calling for my