The Kitchen Table

Click, squeak. Ding. Click, click, squeak. Ding.

This familiar rhythm of sounds means my parents are sitting at the green linoleum kitchen table preparing for my mother’s next work day. I like seeing them together. She takes a taxi to Spiller Spring every morning before the sun comes up. It is a fabricating plant for the metal coils that go inside mattresses and furniture. The tail ends that get snipped off the coils flood the floor of the factory and grind into mom’s sneakers like cork screws.

When they sit at the kitchen table at night, mom holds a wire-nose pliers in her left hand. It has yellow plastic handles. She squeezes one of her navy shoes with white-stripes between her knees, bottom side up. As she steadies the shoe with her right hand, she grabs one metal coil with the pliers in her left hand — click. She twists and yanks the metal out of the thick rubber sole — squeak. Drops the coil in a metal bowl on the floor — ding. She goes in for the next coil with gusto. I can see a bulge appear on her upper arm.

“Those damn kids think they know everything,” begins mother’s familiar rant. “They are no more than boys, but they think they are too good to take orders.” One of the many indignities she’s suffered in her late forties is working alongside 18-year-old smart asses.

My dad listens politely. He focuses on rolling the thin paper around the tobacco dispensed in a line by the little brown and gray plastic contraption. He puts the small white cylinder in his mouth and pulls it through his lips to seal it with saliva. It looks odd to see him even handle a cigarette, much less put it near his mouth. He never smoked since I was born. He rolls them for my mom to take to the factory the next day.

My parents say store-bought cigarettes are too expensive. Especially since we had to invest in “good shoes” — Adidas sneakers that cost nearly $8. They last longer and protect mom’s feet better from the sharp metal edges. When mom gets home at 4:35 every afternoon, it sounds like she is wearing cleats as she carefully climbs the three cement steps to our back door. The metal spikes must be slippery because she holds tight to the wobbly iron railing. Clack, clack, clack.

At night after dinner, usually by 6:15, my parents settle at the kitchen table to start twisting coils and rolling cigarettes. She with her brandy and coke over ice in a tall glass, he with his Kingsbury Beer foaming in a dark brown bottle. The Kingsbury Brewery is just a few blocks from our house. Sometimes when the wind blows not over Lake Michigan but towards it, we can smell the hops brewing. Very different from our house cooking smells like a juicy pot roast, baked potatoes with cheddar cheese, and green beans with orange carrot circles heated from a can. I don’t remember ever seeing a real raw vegetable in our refrigerator.

“You won’t have to work at that damn factory for long,” my dad reassures his wife almost every night. “Just until I can go back on the force full-time.” I may be only ten years old, but I know shame when I hear it.

My dad is a police officer, a 1960’s beat cop who walks the neighborhoods of Sheboygan, Wisconsin (population: 36,364 — which includes all the surrounding towns in the county). He says it is his duty to talk to everyone and keep everything safe. Since his diagnosis of colon cancer, the operations and treatments leave him too weak to do his normal job.

Luckily a family friend they call “Old Man Meisfeld” lets dad work at his butcher shop at night when it is closed. I don’t really understand what “moonlighting” means, but it must be illegal because we are not supposed to talk about it.

I imagine my dad is a strong butcher who knows exactly how to use big, sharp knives without cutting himself, even though he works in partial darkness because most of the store lights in the store are off at night. I wonder if he cuts up cow and pig parts in the freezer because he always wears his blue sweat shirt over his green plaid flannel shirt with a jacket and a knit hat when he leaves for work, even in the summer. Mom uses special soap to wash the animal blood stains from his white apron every morning. The best part is we get to eat great food that comes with almost every meal, like steak and eggs for Sunday brunch at the green linoleum kitchen table.