Do You Want me to Take off my Belt?

THE SQUARE ROOT OF TWO

This is what my father was like. One day when I was twelve I went with him on Saturday morning to my Aunt Mary’s house to have coffee. While we were having coffee my father said, “There are cracks in the ceiling.”

My aunt said, “We keep patching them up, but they just keep coming back.”

The next Saturday I went with my father to a construction yard where he bought plaster and some lath. Then we went to my Aunt Mary's for coffee, after which he pulled down the whole ceiling, nailed up the lath, and spread a coat of plaster over it.

When he was done the ceiling was dark brown. I asked him, “Why is the ceiling brown?”

“It’s the base coat,” he said. “Next Saturday we will put up the finish coat.”

That was 1955. The next year my father died. He was 45.

When I was 45 I went to visit my Aunt Mary on a Saturday morning for coffee. We got to talking about my father. She said, “You know, your father put up this ceiling and plastered it.”

“I remember.” I said.

“You know what was odd about it though,” she went on, “when he cut the lath he mitered all the corners.”

“Why not miter them?” I said, “After all, you have to cut them anyway.”

A strange expression crossed my Aunt’s face and she said, “Those were your father’s exact words at the time.”

So that explains the idea behind this subtitle, The Square Root of Two.

The notion that things can actually go on forever.


When I was a child I was punished by being hit with a belt. Just writing that sentence I know that it will not be understood. The various times I was punished in this way do not seem at all terrible in my memory. The idea that my parents were abusive seems ridiculous to me. The “Belt” was simply an extreme last resort when repeated warnings had failed.

How hard was I hit? Hard enough to make me cry, and raise a welt in which I could see the little white dots of the holes punched in the belt. My parents hit me in the same way one might whip a horse. My mother also was fond of the slap across the face and the pinching on the leg. The pinch on the leg was usually accompanied by a twist. The pinching was sort of a secret punishment and was reserved for times when we were with company.

My mother is in the kitchen doing some ironing. It is Saturday. It is raining out and the radio is tuned to a soap opera. My brother Jim and I are in the bedroom we share upstairs, and we are playing a game called “war.” From the kitchen my mother hears shouting and screaming, so she goes to the foot of the stairs and shouts, “What’s going on up there?”

She goes back to her ironing but the shouting continues and then there is a loud thudding on the floor.

Mom goes again to the foot of the stairs and shouts, “Do I have to come up there?”

The shouting continues and there are several more very loud crashing sounds.

My mother starts up the stairs shouting “That’s enough.”

When she enters our bedroom she finds that the sheets and blankets have been removed from the beds, the mattresses are on the floor, and the bed frames have been pulled apart. I have my back to her because I am over at the window in the process of throwing my brother’s blankets out. He has already thrown my blankets into the yard, as a response to my throwing his pillow out. This is “War” the gradually escalating response to your enemy’s provocations. The war begins from the accident of a disturbed coverlet, and proceeds to the complete disruption of everything in the room.

My mother sees what is happening, and turns around and goes to her room. My brother and I know that in about 40 seconds she will return with the belt. What she will do then is strap us on the legs four or five times. We know that this will happen for an absolute fact. While my Mother is gone to fetch the belt I stand there in my underpants waiting for the inevitable, but not my brother. Brother Jimmy instantly grabs a pair of longjohns from the floor. He pulls on the long Johns and then a pair of jeans. He has only just got the pants up around his waist when my Mother rushes into the room with the belt doubled up in her hand. She goes directly to Jim and gives him five good ones on the legs.

Finished with him she turns on me and I shout out, “It’s not fair!”

She stops for just a second and says, ”What’s not fair?”

“You hit Jimmy through his pants, and I’m going to get it on the bare legs.”

There was something about the ethics of this situation which struck her as so funny that she couldn’t proceed.

How hard were we hit? This I think explains it best. On some other day my Mother might have decided to deal with us in a different way. She might have us sit at the kitchen table, and then give us a long lecture about how our behavior was unacceptable. I cannot at this remove remember the words of those lectures, but I can remember my response which was in the middle of it to say, “Please Mom, just give us the strap.”