The Blanket by Katie Bannon

In the kitchen, your father mans the video camera. He takes aim at your big brother, the corners of his mustache curling around his smirk. Your brother is five years old: milk chocolate eyes, flyaways fanning his ears, rose petal lips, quivering. On his T-shirt, a tyrannosaurus roars. Your brother is fluent in dinosaur, stumbling only over the -th sounds he has yet to master. Outside, the sun droops beneath the tree line, bathing the counter where you sit in fuzzy peach light. Your mother, seated beside you, squeezes your shoulder. This is the secret language she speaks with her children: loving touches, subtle enough to escape your father’s notice. Her grip tightens as his video camera beeps to life. 

“Are you ready, David?” your father says, zooming in on your brother.     

His voice is playful but edged in mockery. He wants your brother to crack, the way he once did, his boyhood shattered like the empty martini glasses in his parents’ sink. 

“I’m ready, Dad,” your brother says.

Clutched against your brother’s chest is a threadbare blanket. Once canary yellow, its colors have faded to dishrag gray. The fibers hang loose, love worn. Everywhere he goes the blanket goes with him: to preschool, playdates, the pool. Each night, he whispers to it like a friend.

But now, your father has decided he’s too old for the blanket – it’s time to 

say goodbye.

Behind the video camera, your father has begun to sing, “When David turns five, he throws his blanket in the trash!” 

He waves his free arm like a conductor. You find yourself bopping along, infected by his delight. Your own blanket, rainbow-colored, is safe in your bedroom. Somehow you know you will never have to make your brother’s sacrifice. In fact, you will hold onto your blanket for years, until you leave it in a hotel, which your parents will call again and again. When the blanket never turns up, they will buy you a new one, moonstone blue. Years later, you will understand how girlhood endangered you in a million ways, while sparing you this one violence: the breaking of your softness.  

Your brother inches toward the trash bin. The sky has darkened to indigo, casting shadows across the linoleum tiles. Your mother’s breaths are jerky, jagged.

“Steve, please,” she whispers.   

Galvanized by her pleading, your father begins to chant: “Throw it away, David! Do it!” 

For an instant, your brother’s eyes meet your mother’s. Maybe this is when she sees things clearly – the cost of keeping a family intact. How fathers who are present can do more harm than those who are absent. As she looks at your brother, you imagine she feels words she’s not brave enough to say: I’m sorry.

There is a dull thud when the blanket falls. Your brother slinks away, his body limp as a popped balloon. Your father’s cheers fill the kitchen. You join his celebration, glad for his good mood, gladder still that the game is over.

Later that night, your mother will tiptoe downstairs. There, she will pull your brother’s blanket out of the trash bin, breathing in the smell of floral shampoo and Goldfish crackers. This is the scent of her son’s boyhood, perhaps not yet lost. For months, the blanket will rest beneath her bed, a secret kept from everyone – a language of love all her own. She is waiting for the day her son begs for a new blanket. She can then present this to him, a rescued treasure.

Months become years. Your brother’s jaw squares and hardens. He marries, contemplates children of his own. The blanket survives two moves and finally gets returned to him as a keepsake. You live far away by then, but you can imagine the scene: Your brother pulls into your parents’ driveway, where your mother stands, cradling the blanket. As he steps out of the car, his face softens, then sours. “You keep it,” he says with a jolt of his head, shaking free the ghost of memory. She squeezes his shoulder before heading inside, where your father waits, back in the kitchen.

Katie Bannon‘s essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Narratively, and The Washington Post, among others. Her memoir manuscript, which charts her journey as a compulsive hair puller, was a finalist for the Permafrost Nonfiction Book Prize. She lives in Central Massachusetts with her husband and two cats.

21 November 2024