Marital Bliss and the Entomologist...

It was an eye opener for me to go over to my friend Donny ’s house on Saturday’s and see his entomologist father, who taught both of us how to collect, mount, and identify insects. 

I was seven years old and loved that stuff.

On Saturdays, after we got back from our visit to the collecting fields that for some still unknown reason we called Egypt Hills, Mr Ferguson watched back-to-back baseball games on his big hi-fi console with the little black & white TV built in. No kids allowed in the sun-room to disturb him. He drank beer in there all afternoon, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the Champagne of bottled beers. 

Mrs. Ferguson was always standing at her station, pressed up against the kitchen sink. She stared out  the window over her sink at the empty driveway, drinking from a short glass filled with chopped ice and brown liquor. While washing dishes, she sat her glass on the windowsill. Condensation ran down the sides to form a coaster of swollen wood on the sill, a permanent circle erected over time by the cold sweat of her glass.

Using it like a mini-helicopter landing pad, Mrs. Ferguson knew exactly where to place her drink.

She didn’t want us in her kitchen any more than Mr Ferguson wanted us in the sun-room. That was fine with me. He was preoccupied and would snap at the slightest interruption, while she appeared to be pissed all the time, a scowl on her face. Yes, drunk pissed as the English call it, but also, boiling inside. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that she was an alcoholic, and that she, in fact, was indeed pissed and pissed off. Apparently, she wasn’t happy with Mr. Ferguson, in fact, she hated her husband with a passion.

One Saturday afternoon as the TV was screaming baseball from the sun-room,  I watched her from the dining room. She stood with her back to me, an ice pick in her hand, wearing the same dingy floral- patterned dress that she seemed to wear every day.

Mrs. Ferguson was angrily recreating the Anthony Perkins “Psycho” shower scene with a large block of ice that was sliding around in the sink. I don’t think she saw Janet Leigh in that ice block though, I’m sure it had Mr. Ferguson's face.

Pausing her violent stabbing, mid frenzy, she calmly lifted her left hand away from steadying the ice block and placed it firmly onto the chopping block next to the sink. Lifting her pick high in the air, she froze for an instant to admire the back of her hand, and then continued her downward arc,  plunging the ice pick down hard, right through the middle of her left hand, pinning it firmly to the wooden block. 

Slowly looking up through the window into the empty drive, her left hand crucified in place, I realized that for the first time in memory, she didn’t look pissed off anymore. Her lips turned white as they pressed tightly together, but her grimace had an upward turn, almost like a smile.

She looked…peaceful.

Immediately doing an about face, I left the house by way of the front door that we kids were forbidden to use. Phil Rizzuto was screaming in the sun-room; Mickey Mantle had hit a home run. Over the top of the crowd noise, a high pitched scream slowly rose in volume, emanating from the kitchen, the sound piercing everything like a thousand ice picks, like a cat being squeezed in a vice.

That was my first realization that not all families were like mine. Some adults watched baseball and drank beer all day. Some adults hated their spouses, and some adults shouldn’t own an ice pick...

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Update:

As it turned out, the Ferguson’s foster daughter, Betty, hadn’t left permanently to go live with her Grandparents as we had been told. 

Apparently, she wasn’t a foster… and she never left at all.

It wasn’t until much later, when the new owner was having work done in the basement that they found Betty. The grand prize of her entomologist father, stretched out, dried, mildewed and mounted on a wall of cork board… right next to her mother. 

Unlike the dried exoskeletons of the insects Donnie’s Dad taught me to mount on the balsa floor of all those cigar boxes, the officers on the scene said the close-up stench of those troubling specimens haunted them for the rest of their lives. 

They would wake up in the night, gagging.

It’s funny.  Everyone had assumed Mrs. Ferguson had left Mr. Ferguson. 

Nope, she was still right there. Just not at the kitchen sink anymore.