He was in a rush to complete this errand when he, too, came up behind a slow driver. I could see his hands grip the steering wheel tighter and his jaws clench and his brow furrow. He was on the verge of exploding as everyone in the family knew he was capable of doing. My siblings and I did everything we could to avoid setting him off.
“I’m not in a big hurry,” I said. “I can finish it tomorrow.”
My father didn’t hear me; instead, he honked the horn and bullied past the slow car. As he passed, he turned to look at the driver, who was a young black woman who was hugging the wheel and looked scared as if she expected something to fly out of nowhere and harm her. As we passed, my father yelled, “Goddamn welfare babies!”
My father was intolerant of everyone, especially women and people of color and boys like me whom he called sissies and perverts and abominations.
When I’m driving upstate, though, and I come up behind a slow driver, I don’t let the thought he planted in my head materialize. I take a deep breath and wait for a safe moment to pass without comment, without even looking over at the driver, afraid that my father’s voice will suddenly come out of my mouth like an innocent bubble in a glass of seltzer that pops to the surface.
But there are times when I let my guard down, and I parrot his thoughts as if I’m possessed by an evil spirit and the voice that comes out of my mouth is not mine at all.
This is especially true in the city in the summer when the heat penetrates into the subway and sits heavily like rotting garbage in a concrete bunker. When it’s impossible to breathe and tempers flair easily. When sweat soaks my shirt the moment I pass through the turnstile on my way home from work.
I’m drenched by the time on get on the train. The sweat amplifies the odors of my workday: the cups of coffee, the anxious boredom, the greasy lunch, the personal odors of others passed from handshake to handshake. In the subway car, the air-conditioning blows on me and I quickly become too cold. The sweltering heat and the freezing cold feel