Ralston

Abstract

Ralston Stuart Dybek I remember the year, the morning, the very moment that my life as a writer began. I remember exactly what I wrote, the phrase that transformed words into a thrill—a discovery that set the act ofwriting free from the cell of a school subject called English. English was spelling tests, diagramming , tedious exercises in workbooks, but writing became a jailbreak ofthe imagination. What I don't remember, and so still don't understand, is why in that same year I went from a student with straight A's in Religion and no check marks in Conduct—a kid who just the grade before had been told by the nun that he might have a chance to become the first St. Stuart— to a bad boy. It was a winter morning in fourth grade. I'd been awakened during the night by the sound of my mother retching in the bathroom, and so wasn't surprised when she didn't get me up for school. Instead, my father, who should have already been at work at the Harvester plant where he was a foreman, shook me awake a good hour earlier than necessary. "Rise and shine, sonny boy," he said, "Ma's got the flu. You've got to get yourselfoffto school. The snow's coming down out there so wear your earmuffs and galoshes. I made your breakfast. It's on the table."Then he rushed off, late. My winter routine was to drape my underwear for the next day on the radiator each night before going to bed. In the morning, I'd reach for the warm underwear, then strip my flannel pajamas off under the feathertick piersyna in which my grandmother had once swaddled her firstborn son, my father, when they'd come across from Poland. But this morning I noticed that my underwear was barely warm. I guessed that, with my mother sick, my father hadn't had a chance to stoke the furnace at his regular hour. "Ralston" is scheduled to appear in the anthology, The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the IowaWriter's Workshop, edited by Frank Conny, HarperCollins, 1999. 6 Fourth Genre A year earlier, my father had bought the six-flat apartment building to which we'd moved. The steam heat for each apartment was generated by a coal furnace in the basement. Now that he was a landlord, my father would rise at 5:00 A.M. on winter mornings to stoke the furnace before leaving for work. Ifhe didn't, Mrs. Boudena, the tenant right above us, would bang on her radiator, a sound something like convicts raking their tin cups on the prison bars. But she was quiet today, perhaps in deference to the snow-muffled grind of traffic on 25th Street. And minus the sound of the radio my mother always played, broadcasting news, weather, and Frank Sinatra, our apartment was not only chillier but quieter than usual, too. The light seemed faint and frosted as it filtered through screens clotted with snow; one of my father's many planned projects was storm windows, but we couldn't afford them yet. I sat down at the kitchen table before the breakfast he'd made for me: a bowl of Hot Ralston and a mug of chocolate-flavored Ovattine. On good days breakfast might be French toast with Log Cabin Syrup poured from the chimney spout ofa tin can shaped like a log cabin, washed down with the hot chocolate my mother beat from scratch into a foam dusted with cinnamon and topped with Marshmallow Fluff. Or eggs, softboiled ifmy mother made them, served with toast and a strip of bacon, or, as my father made them on Sunday mornings, scrambled with sliced kielbasa . Usually though, breakfast was cereal, which was perfectly fine until the weather turned cold. Then the Rice Krispies, PuffedWheat, Kix, Cheerios, andWheaties would be put away like summer clothes, to be replaced by hot, stick-to-the-ribs cereals: oatmeal, okay if camouflaged by raisins and honey, or Cream of Wheat, which even the dissolving nuggets of brown sugar barely made palatable. Worse by far was Hot Ralston. Hot...