The Family

By Richard Haddock

The Marottas were the quintessential family; Joe and Janet were model parents; their children popular and full of life. Danny was handsome and funny, the All American kid. Diane was the tomboy, able to hold her own in back yard games or the back seat of a car. David was serious and quiet. Yet the three, so different, were a close-knit, inseparable group. The entire family fed on one another, sharing love, respect and a dry wit that spared no one.

When Danny is killed in an automobile accident, the family goes into shock. Family bonds, once so strong, seem strained. Janet tries to pull them all back together, planning a retirement party for Joe. The story takes place over the next three days, as each member of the family brings their problems back home into the comforting crucible of tender, sharing love, hoping to heal and resolve.

The unfolding drama is witnessed by the imprisoned soul of Danny, confined to the physical boundaries of the Marotta home, unable to do anything but watch and listen. He tells the story from his perspective, recounting events and characters, espousing his folksy philosophy, wondering how he can help those he loves so dearly.

Filled with drama, comedy and characters that delight and amuse, "The Family" is a warm, funny tale of happiness, trauma and renewed hope. It is a timely story, replete with the unique problems of life's passages, a story that transcends death, where a family misplaces, then rediscovers, the very essence of life itself, indestructible love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 13, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469716534

Richard Haddock

Dr. Haddock is retired and lives with his wife, Marilyn, in Northern Virginia.

Book preview

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

Epilogue

To Marilyn, Christopher, Tiffany and Kenny.

CHAPTER 1  

It’s not much of a house; older, smaller and less spectacular than the tract palaces which now surround it. No cathedral ceilings or bathrooms with jacuzzis, no stately foyers or spreads in Architectural Digest. Plain and functional, our house had not been built for show, it had been built for living.

In many contemporary homes the center of activity is the family room, with large overstuffed furniture clustered about the television like so many adoring nuns around the Pope, heads lowered in silent homage. In others it is the living room, predictably off-white or mauve in color, where guests sit with knees pressed together, little fingers twisted aloft as they sip tea and exchange polite conversation. In our home, where polite conversation was frequently punctuated with melodious notes of flatulence, ground zero was the kitchen.

The room reflected its previous importance in the rural scheme of life, its sunny eastern exposure covering the entire rear of the house. Silo, barn and garden had once been just a few feet out its back door. Both living and dining rooms were accessible from respective ends of the kitchen and from the tiny foyer at the front of the house. A central staircase rose from the foyer and reemerged back down in the kitchen, joining both with the second floor. No wasted space.

The kitchen served as a magnet, drawing family and friends from all over the house and all over the neighborhood, into its cauldron of laughter and invigorating smells. It was a comforting center of warmth and happiness.

A large rectangular table sat against the far wall like a corner booth at a diner. It was where the five Marottas ate and the hub of our indoor entertainment; where we did our homework, built our science fair projects, played cards and board games and where, one memorable New Year’s eve, my sister and I watched with adolescent fascination as Uncle Artie tried to mount his date, a floozy named Rose.

When Artie finally collapsed atop young Rose, pants knotted around his ankles, hairy buttocks on display, I dashed for my Polaroid. Uncle Artie’s favorite expression was Yeah? If that’s so, then my ass is a soda fountain! and I wanted pictorial proof for our scrapbook. Closer inspection of the pictures later revealed that, in addition to the champagne he had consumed, it was Rose’s black fish-net panty-hose, still firmly in place under her red leather miniskirt, that had thwarted Uncle Artie’s amorous jousting. It was tough eating breakfast off that table the next morning.

Our tiny living room served only two purposes: a hiding place where my brother and I would watch my sister grapple with her dates on the front porch and my dad’s pyro-maniacal fires. My sister, Diane, dated a variety of specimens from the low end of the food chain and provided us with hours of monosyllabic dialogue punctuated by moans, grunts and a few handy wrestling maneuvers. I often joked that she had more fingerprints on her ass than the FBI had on file. My hopelessly naive younger brother, David, explained that she was just looking for Mr. Right. My perception was that she was looking for Mr. Right Now.

As for my dad’s legendary fires, you have to understand that dad burned virtually anything. Combustibility was not a prerequisite. If it would melt, explode or compress into small hardened balls of Kryptonite, as mom called them, into the fire it went. To be fair, most infernos consisted of traditional wood products such as tree stumps and concrete-encrusted lumber from every construction site in the county, old furniture and one winter, twenty sets of bowling pins from Manassas Lanes.

Armed with such a variety of fuel, dad would construct an interlocking, cantilevered superstructure from floor to flu, liberally filling the middle with enough kindling to stoke a blast furnace. As the blaze approached nuclear fusion, the room became uninhabitable. Over the years dad vaporized several plastic Christmas garlands on the mantle, melted a dozen iron grates flatter than pancakes and once watched in fascination as mom’s favorite antique chairs spontaneously combusted. We took to hosing down the roof and donning asbestos outfits when dad got that let’s have a cozy fire look in his eye.

Upstairs, a large, airy bedroom occupied each corner of the house. A small but adequate bathroom joined each back bedroom with its frontal counterpart via a set of doors that were normally left open except for the most private moments. Being first born, I occupied the back bedroom next to my parents until Diane, one year my junior, arrived on the scene. She, in turn, vacated the room when David joined the clan three years later. Thus finally situated in our respective lairs, Diane shared a bathroom with my parents, a logistical decision my dad would forever regret, while young David and I exercised our hygiene skills in the other, creating a different, but related, form of agony for our mother.

The Marotta abode sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, on top of a gently sloping three acres of land. My dad had bought the house the year he and mom were married. We must have heard a thousand times how mom cried when she saw the old farmhouse at the end of the dirt road for the first time. There were no neighbors then, no sea of cookie-cutter housing developments that nibbled, chewed and eventually swallowed the surrounding countryside. Manassas, Virginia, in the late 1950’s was still tranquil, red-neck farm country. Progress, in the form of video arcades and shopping malls, had yet to ruin the small town atmosphere, mostly unchanged since the two Civil War battles fought there nearly a century before. The selling point for my dad was not the modest house itself, or even the comparatively spacious wooded property, but what lay out our back door. Nothing.

To be more accurate, our property backed up to a wide area of open ground where huge steel towers carried electricity into the burgeoning city of Manassas. The rolling acreage afforded a magnificent view from our back porch, creating, in my dad’s eye at least, the illusion of a vast expanse of private property flowing for several miles toward the distant Blue Ridge mountains. Assured that this man-made barrier would forever protect our rear from the loathsome ravages of development, dad dubbed the undulating terrain our private estate.

The estate became the Marottae family playground. We had our own fishing hole, golf course and baseball field. We played cowboys and Indians, built monster snow forts and were introduced, with the aid of mom’s educated eye, to nature’s unending cast of fauna and flora. The estate also witnessed our collective rites of childhood passage: learning to ride a bicycle, how to spit through our teeth, the proper way to grip a curve ball. It was where I kissed my first girl friend, a saucy twelve year old red head named Lucy Bates. Unlike the world around it, the Marotta estate never changed; it was a stable sanctuary where one could escape the world’s madness to stroll and think—and dream. It was my favorite place on earth. Dad’s too.

My dad was a career government employee, a GS-something-orother with the Department of Agriculture. To this day I can’t tell you exactly what he did, only that it involved computers. It’s one of the ironies of childhood, I suppose, that I could watch my dad trudge off to work every morning, witness his slump-shouldered return each evening and never once wonder what it was he did all day. It was not a subject that was discussed over dinner or on any of our rambling walks across the estate where we managed to talk about everything else on earth.

At any rate, after thirty-some odd years of bureaucratic tedium and, thanks in part to the money I provided, mom finally convinced dad they should begin enjoying their golden years before they turned to rust. So, two months ago, at the ripe old age of fifty-five, Joe Marotta retired. A man of unending organization, he eagerly dove into a thirty-year-old list of accumulated chores. We all knew this was a doomed effort. For, despite the methodical, precise, carefully planned approach he applied to our own chores, dad’s idea of successfully completing a household task himself was to rush through it as quickly as possible, refusing to read or follow directions and eventually adding the left over parts to a world-class collection of same in the basement. Dad labeled this approach as quickly efficient; mom, in a rare display of profanity, called it half-assed.

As a result, for example, we have a shower in my bathroom where the hot and cold knobs are not only reversed, but turn in opposite directions from conventional plumbing wisdom. Many was the time that David or I, having just come home from college and foolishly expecting plumbing to work in a universal fashion, scalded ourselves in a frantic attempt to solve dad’s plumbing mystery. The shower from hell. We also have a set of deck lights that come on when the microwave is used, a drip under the kitchen sink that has consumed several tons of caulk over the years (and still leaks) and a garage door opener that is unexplainably activated by the television remote control when you select channel four.

So, it surprised no one when dad raced through his thirty-year list of retirement chores in less than a month. Mom graciously acquiesced, figuring she had yet another thirty years to bend him to her careful, meticulous approach to such activities. Now, his checklist completed, dad watches television, flipping aimlessly between channels during the day, (carefully avoiding channel four) and watching a different movie from the video store every night. Sometimes, he tries to help around the house, interfering with mom’s own carefully orchestrated routine. But mostly, he stalks the grounds of the Marotta estate. Alone with his memories, he strangely punishes himself for what might have been, what he should have done differently with his life. But most of all he blames himself for what happened to me.

In an attempt to snap dad out of his doldrums, mom has orchestrated a celebration of sorts. This fine July weekend is dad’s birthday and also my parent’s wedding anniversary. To add to the merriment, mom has chosen to throw in dad’s retirement as another reason to party, inviting family and friends from far and wide for the auspicious occasion. So, Diane and her son Derek will be driving up from Atlanta while David and his extremely pregnant bride Lisa will be flying in from New York City. Dad’s brother, Cecil, has arranged a business trip so he can be in town and we’re all breathless in anticipation to see whom Uncle Artie will drag to the affair.

Mom has planned a full weekend with an intimate family dinner Friday night, a picnic-style roast of dad with neighbors and friends on Saturday and, of course, church on Sunday. It’s the kind of get together we enjoyed so much as kids; raucous friends, half-naked relatives, generous helpings of tall tales, dirty jokes and food.

It’s a reunion I would really love to attend because, well, there’s so much I’ve learned this last year, so much I’d like to say to everyone now. I guess I will be there in a manner of speaking, but not in the way I would prefer. I won’t be there, you see, because, well, because I’m dead.

Now I gotta tell ya, this being dead is overrated. Come this November, I’ll have been gone a whole year, having cleverly killed myself in an automobile accident. Fell asleep at the wheel, off the road right into a tree; never knew what hit me. I guess that’s the way to go, although giving up the ghost in a Mustang convertible at twenty-seven years of age would have been near the bottom of my list of choices on how to depart this world. Anyway, here I am, Danny Marotta, supposedly experiencing the afterlife, paradise, Nirvana. Trouble is, the reality of my circumstances hasn’t lived up to its advertised claims.

I mean, c’mon, haven’t we all had this image of gliding peacefully around the hereafter, knee deep in white clouds, exchanging pleasant smiles and nods of serenity with our other winged colleagues? Nothing, as Dizzy Dean used to say, could be wronger.

I’m not in a place like that. In fact, I’m not in a place, period. I have no bodily form, don’t experience hunger or