Chapter 8 #3
We pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house—our house, I suppose.
One night, right before the start of ninth grade, toward the end of what I thought of as my mother’s year of exile, we sat around watching some show none of us cared about.
My mother grabbed the remote, shut off the TV, and announced, her voice shredded with exasperation, “I can’t live in this house anymore.
” They sold that home, where I’d grown up, and we moved to this one, twenty miles away, closer to the center of the town.
My father fretted about me changing school districts, but I didn’t care.
I didn’t make friends at the new school, but I had so few at the old one anyway.
I had learned to keep to myself, to avoid the trouble that inevitably came from being noticed; at least now, no one knew anything about me.
I would eat lunch alone at a picnic table near the teacher’s parking lot, picking at my sandwich until the bell rang and I went back inside to get through the rest of the afternoon.
“Do you need help with your luggage?” my mother asked.
My father answered for me. “He’s hardly brought anything.”
My mother busied herself in the kitchen, wiping down counters that already gleamed.
My father tended to the plants on the back patio, green tendrils, vivid orange and yellow blossoms. I dropped my bag in my room.
It was sparse, as if it had been cleared out when I left home, but I had never decorated; I always felt like I was visiting this house, on a stopover.
I wandered down a narrow hallway that led to a small back wing with my parents’ room.
Framed photographs lined a wall. Though the photos were old, they only started appearing a few years ago.
Cassie and I, I think at eight and three, in bathing suits, jumping through a sprinkler in the backyard.
Cassie before a ballet recital, enormous smile, bangs curled tight against her forehead.
Her fingers spread wide across layers of pink tulle.
A photo from my first track meet—clasping my ribbon, mouth set in a tentative smile.
A newborn me, hospital band enormous around my wrist, cradled in Cassie’s arms as our father knelt; his own arms stretched behind, protecting us both.
Next to that one, a photo I remembered from my mother’s dressing table.
Her high school graduation portrait, shot in black and white.
Her luminescent face, unmarred by life or age, tipped toward some light, the source of which could not be seen.
A few years prior, my mother had decreed no more cooking for Thanksgiving. “It’s too much fuss, just for us,” she said. My father had made a reservation at a new Italian restaurant. When I said it seemed funny to eat pasta on Thanksgiving, my mother replied, “Italians are American, too.”
We spent the afternoon on the beach. The pale bodies of holiday visitors, released from the bundled layers of their northern lives, were stark among the tanned and oiled bodies of locals, some young and muscled, others old—tawny skin soft and wrinkled.
The sun burned warm and yellow. Only an occasional flat wisp of cloud smudged the chalky blue sky.
My mother sat in a low chair, draped in a thin blanket.
The blanket hung over the arm of the chair, billowing out around her when a light breeze brushed past. She read a book, one of her mystery novels, pausing every few pages to glance up and scan the crowds.
Next to her, my father’s book lay open across his legs as he dozed.
After a while, my mother woke him, waving a bottle of sunscreen in front of his face.
He obliged with a grunt, smoothing thick sheets of it across the dark hair of his arms.
I stretched beside them, letting the sun bake its heat into me, cells waking to the sensations of salty air and soft, gritty sand.
I felt new in my body as I glanced down at my outstretched form.
Sweat rose in bubbles across my chest, glossy with sunscreen.
I looked different to myself, unfamiliar, as if the hungry fascination my eyes had for Tyler were turning to me as well: the sinews of my legs, the eddies of hair circling my abdomen, disappearing below the waistband of my trunks.
This is me, I thought, and felt surprised, the way I often would with Tyler. The feeling had traveled with me.
“I’m going to take a swim. Want to come?”
My mother wiggled her fingers. “I’m too comfortable. You go.”
At the water’s edge, the ocean swelled, forward and back, concaving the sand beneath my feet.
I drew a breath and plunged in. The brisk shock of it jolted.
The ocean’s volumes pushed against me, dampening the noise of its waves and the combative screams of teenagers.
I sank slowly until my lungs ached. I twisted back up, breaking through the surface, the air pricking goose bumps along my arms. A lifeguard whistled at a group past the swim line.
She stood in her raised station, the red sleeves of her windbreaker rippling as she motioned for them to come in.
I realized I was hungry; I hadn’t eaten all day and my hangover had passed.
I swam back to the shore. The current was stronger than I realized and I had been in the water for some time—I had drifted quite far.
The sun had shifted, pulling itself farther into the sky.
It took a moment to orient myself. I headed back and passed two guys together on a blanket, one in a blue speedo, one in green.
The one in blue waved and called out—“Come say hi”—the one in green hiding his face behind his hand, laughing.
“I have to find my parents. Next time.” I smiled and walked on—it felt good to be noticed. Maybe they could sense the new way I was feeling in my body, too.
I ate a sandwich my mother had packed and rubbed sunscreen on the back of her neck.
I napped and woke to the beach clearing out.
We had stayed longer than planned. There wasn’t time to go home before dinner.
We rinsed at the showers outside the bathrooms, brushing the sand from our calves, waiting our turns for the changing rooms. My father felt we would be underdressed for the restaurant.
“We’ll look like a bunch of beach bums.”
“We’re in Florida,” my mother said. “We are beach bums.”
The restaurant was in a part of town that was being aggressively developed.
Glass towers, sea-green, loomed above an over-lit square bisected by a pedestrian-only street.
The thick curved necks of enormous streetlamps swooped down at us, blasting with acidic light.
Everything had been built at once so there was no variation, no uneven patina of wear.
Storefronts and signage popped bright and loud.
The whole scene looked as if it had been lifted from Disneyland, creating the uncanny effect of a town built to imitate an amusement park built in imitation of a town.
(Somewhere, a first-year grad student hunched over a laptop writing a term paper about it, titled something like “Simulacrum by the Sea.”)
My parents sat side by side. My mother leaned toward my father, their shoulders touching, her fingertip tracing lines of the menu he couldn’t make out in the restaurant’s faint lighting.
They looked small there, together. As my mother read out loud from the list of wines, my father buttered a shiny dinner roll and placed it in front of her.
I felt a quick and painful surge of love for them.
The food was good, my mother kept commenting on it, repeating how glad she was to be there, her voice a little loud, giddy with her second glass of wine.
When my father hesitated to join her, I offered to drive home and switched to water. I would let them enjoy the night.
We finished our meals and wandered back outside, the evening sticky after the air-conditioned restaurant.
We did a slow loop up the promenade, stopping to look in the windows of shops, closed for the holiday.
My mother oohed and aahed, pointing things out to me, my father a few steps ahead.
We looped back, down the other side, waiting in front of the restaurant for the valet to bring the car.
“Evelyn! Michael!”
A small woman, my mother’s age, waving and walking toward us.
“Joanne,” my mother said, and then to me, “You remember Mrs. Landewehr.”
Joanne Landewehr, my social studies teacher—sixth grade, seventh?
My mother and she had been close, I couldn’t remember how they’d met.
Something at the school. Her son Jacob was in my year.
Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I had a terrible crush on him.
Every once in a while he would come to mind and I would scour the internet for news of him.
I’d once found photos of his wedding, which, absurdly, sent me into a depressive spiral for days.
Some part of me had never let go of the idea we would be together, despite almost two decades of no contact and his enduring heterosexuality.
Joanne’s husband died some time ago—I remembered my mother mentioning it—and she had moved into one of the new condos crowding the sky above our heads.
“And this is your Mark?” she asked, opening her arms for a hug. She smelled of hairspray and breath mints. “Very good-looking,” she said not to me, but my mother. “Are you still in New York?”
“No,” I said. “Ohio, of all places.”
My mother cut in. “He’s an English professor. At Sawyer College.”
Joanne hummed approval. “Very impressive.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’ll let anyone teach literature these days.”
“He’s just being modest,” my mother said. “And he’s writing a book.”
“Really!”
“Well, I’m trying to. We’ll see.”
“That’s wonderful,” Joanne said. “I can’t wait to read it.”
I steered the car along the quiet roads. On either side, houses glowed with family gatherings lingering into the night. In the back seat, my father nodded in and out. His cottony snores kept harmony with the rumbling engine of the car.
“Do you want to put on the radio?”
My mother, seated beside me, made no move.
“I don’t know why you do that,” she said.
“Listen to music?”
“No.” Her voice cut short and sharp. “With Joanne. The way you put yourself down.”
The light ahead started to change. I pushed the gas, flying through.
“I wasn’t putting myself down.”
“You were. Dismissing your book like that. Saying anyone can teach. It’s not true.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You worked so hard in school. All on your own. You never needed anything from us. You just did it. Most people don’t even finish college, much less a PhD. And you have a great job. You get paid to think. It’s insulting to act like it doesn’t matter.”
This story that I hadn’t needed anything from them was one she repeated often.
Marky has always been independent, she would say.
Marky doesn’t like help, he likes to do things on his own.
Cassie was always the focus of their concern, and anger rose in me at the thought of it—that a child wouldn’t want his parents’ help.
Of course I did, there just wasn’t any left over for me.
“I was just joking. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She turned from me and looked out the window, the headlights of passing cars streaking her face in white bands.
“Your life is not a joke.”
We passed the next few days mostly in the house, venturing to the park a half mile away, to the outdoor mall for an early dinner and movie.
The mall was built around a series of fake canals and after the movie we wandered over its bridges, eating small cups of ice cream going soft.
I flew back to Ohio on Sunday. My mother was up early, as always.
She poured us coffee and we sat in quiet around the kitchen table, sharing sections of the newspaper.
My father joined us a bit later and when the hour of my flight drew near, they drove me to the airport.
The highway was empty and still. We made good time and I found myself wishing we had left later, done more with the morning.
They offered to park and come inside but I said it wasn’t worth it; I was checked in, I’d head right to my gate.
I stood at the curb with my bag and watched their car pull off and out of sight and then I turned and went inside.