Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay

light from the TV fills the air like mist. His head is still thick with the dream: Amy’s chin hooked over his shoulder, Bert’s legs wrapped like a belt around his waist, the strange costume of their bodies against his own. The show is an old sixties movie, and he folds himself eagerly into the plot.
    A man and a woman have married. In a quiet room, they kiss, the woman’s head thrown back to expose her throat, the man’s face impassive. They are just starting out; they call each other Honey and Dear . When the man wants to go out for a paper, he does it. When the woman wants to take a nap, she lies down. They are not being watched by tiny masked faces. They do not think of bruises in the shape of lemons. They are not forced to recall lullabies that make them remember other, bitter things.
    When a commercial interrupts, James watches that too. He loves TV more than anything he can think of. It is small and neat; it is easy to understand. Wives love their husbands. Children love their fathers.
    Brothers love their brothers.
    In real life, he is away from home for weeks at a time, traveling state to state, selling farm machinery. When he comes back, Ellen’sclothing has spilled over into his dresser drawers. The children do their homework at his desk by the phone. He doesn’t know where to sit at the table: beside his mother like he used to? Or next to Ellen, his wife? He doesn’t know which hanger to use to hang his coat: one of the stuffed gardenia-scented ones? A wire one? Cedar?
    And then the children, the smooth skin of their foreheads so delicate, so uncertain. Kiss Daddy hello , they must be told. He hates the wet bite of their lips. He hates setting down his luggage, crouching, swooping them into his arms.
    And Ellen, wearing clothes he doesn’t remember, using words he doesn’t know. Remember the time we—? she says. He does not. The distance between them grows like a shadow at the end of a long hard day. Before they were married, they spent the night together in his car. The weather had turned bad, the roads swallowed in ice. They pulled into a ditch to wait it out and were buried together in the snow, forever close, forever sharing secrets. It was April 1959, and they married one month later, in May, the first buds just starting to show, and everyone eyeing Ellen’s flat stomach, and the whispers, All night they were together in his car —
    She looks at him now as if he were an appliance she doesn’t think can be fixed. She wants to move away from Vinegar Hill and into a house of their own, a house where everything will be even more different, and he will feel even more out of place.
    The children are growing up, she says. Soon you won’t know them anymore. Soon they won’t know you.
    That’s right, he says, that’s good.
    But of course he doesn’t really say it; it would be a terrible thing to say. And it isn’t always true. Sometimes he feels his mind swallow him whole, the way a snake swallows a plain, white egg, and inside the belly of his mind he is not afraid of his children. They come to him, soft as deer. Daddy, look! they say, showing him this,showing him that, and he always knows what to say, without Ellen there to coach him.
    Talk to them, she says. Say something.
    But what?
    He finished his last trip ahead of schedule and came home two nights early, just as Ellen and the children were sitting down for supper. The table looked different to him, smaller, and he realized that the center leaf was missing. The children were in their pajamas; Ellen had flour in her hair.
    â€œWhere’s Ma and Pa?” he said.
    â€œAt Senior Citizens’,” Ellen told him too brightly. “Kids, squish over for Daddy.” She got a plate from the kitchen and filled it with chicken and dumplings. The children slowly edged toward Ellen’s chair, leaving a small space for James between the table and the wall.
    â€œI don’t like