Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

On The Outside

Yesterday
I called them
to tell my father
that the basketball playoffs were on.
Detroit vs. Boston.
My mother answered the phone in a huff.
“Well I’m glad you’re having a good night,” she said sarcastically.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She was upset because my father wouldn’t help her open a can of soup.
When I asked to speak with him,
so that I could talk him into helping her,
she said, “here’s your precious daughter.”
As if by precious she meant fucking.
I have always been his “precious” daughter.
Why, I don’t know.
Maybe no one else wanted the job
and I took the only vacant role in the house.
My sister was smart and had taken my mother’s side long ago.
My pick was never around.
My father would leave and spend months at his downtown apartment
sentencing me to an odd in-house imprisonment,
banished from my sister and mother,
but still forced to live under the same roof with them.
In every decision I was always the odd girl out.
It didn’t make for a very good life then or now.
A few moments later, my sister came storming in through the front door of her house,
like a tornado let loose in a small Kansas town.
She was screaming at my parents and at the dog,
who tried to make a run for it out the open door.
Who can blame him? I thought.
Why didn’t they eat? she asked.
Why wasn’t the trash taken out?
Who let the dog out?
These were questions that neither of them could answer now
and probably would have had a difficult time answering even twenty years ago.
I listened to all of it over the phone like I were eavesdropping on some very dysfunctional reality t.v. show.
Finally my father said he had to go,
like a wounded animal
who had just been given the command to “kennel up.”
Now he is the in-house prisoner
and I am on the outside.
The only problem is
I don’t feel any freer.