MrNepathy's Blog

“Atlanta,” she said as she hung up the phone. She said it in the same tone I imagine some captain had used to tell Robert E. Lee that Atlanta had fallen to Sherman: disgust peppered onto disbelief. The  single word held explanation, admission and defeat. It also birthed a slow, roiling chaos.

I glanced at her, as did my brother. My mother’s jaw clenched, trapping further words behind the wall of teeth. Maybe it was not a self-imposed mute, but rather a desire to keep the snarl from her mouth. Her lips quivered and her eyes took on a glistening sheen. They were cased in water that was still waiting to fall. Tiny hands balled into fists. Somehow her fists looked as if she were trying to grip something, some imaginary rail that would help support her. My brother’s fists, however, looked meant to swing, to do harm to a father four states away.

We shared a glance, but I had to look away. I could see the anger in his eyes as sure as he could probably see the concern in mine, or we could see the hurt in my mother’s. Perhaps he was looking for me to abate his anger, find an outlet for it for that was always my role; but in that moment I wanted him to swing, to be the wrath that I could never allow myself to be.

I looked down at my feet, twisting the front of my right foot into the floorboard. My big toe wiggled, pushing up at the top of my shoe and I watched the worn canvas roll about the early morning light. Threads stuck out in several direction, the light making them hazy, like an aura. It reminded me of light coming through the puffy buds of a dandelion still waiting to take flight. I imagined better days.

My eyes flicked towards the window. The lawn needed to be cut. It was a humid, insufferable day and my clothes were already heavy on me. Mowing the lawn would get me out of the house for a while, give me focus. I glanced back at my mother. I had been taller than her since middle school, but in that moment I felt small. Even as I remember it now, I imagine I was looking up at her, but I

wasn’t. I glanced down at her. My brother stood on her other side. Though we loomed close, neither of us reached for her.

The strongest woman we knew stood there, the impossible contradiction of fragile and invincible all at once. I wondered if my hand on her shoulder would cause the tears to liberate themselves from her eyes. Or would a touch break her from the solace of her own thoughts, push her anger out into the world in the form of a harsh tirade, an apostrophe to a man absent over a week? So my hand stayed at my side.

I became more aware of my hands in that moment, how they flexed, how they twitched. Were they trying to choke something or were they reaching to comfort despite my conscious thoughts? I pressed my palms to my legs and forced my fingers flat against the fabric of my shorts. The intent of my fingers troubled me. Their tiny, instinctive motions seemed to stem from my id’s quest for wish

fulfillment. There was a tremor to them, some physical manifestation of an un-confessed rage. I had to be steady, the Flexible Response to my brother’s Massive Retaliation.

Anger made me uncomfortable. It was as foreign to me as a different language. I did not know what to do with it, what to make of it. Sadness I understood. One could not have been counselor and consoler to my mother all those years without learning a thing or two about sadness. My own experiences up to that point added to my apprenticeship in the subject.

My mother stared out the window. The breeze was still, unwilling to interrupt our uncomfortable silence. The curtain only moved enough to suggest the world lived on outside of our house. She reached out to the window sill, scraping her colorless fingernail against a chip in the paint. That chip had been the object of my fascination for many dinners when the topic changed to my mom’s work, or my father’s students. I watched it as it lay there suspended, half-torn from the wall and half-attached, threatening to fall but never doing so.

She was wondering if we would be able to keep the house, or at least that’s what I imagined. Could she still send us to college in fall? My brother would be in his third year, I would be in my first. As her fingernail gave up against the unyielding chip, she scraped it against the band of her wedding ring. It was no accident. Marriage was at the forefront of her mind, or to be more accurate, the dissolving of one was resident in her thoughts. She had never said the word “divorce” to us. I think the concept was as foreign to her as anger was to me. She canonized my grandmother for putting up with my grandfather all those decades.

I caught a glimpse of my brother’s palm as he slipped it over the back of my mom’s hand. There were tiny red crescents dented into his flesh from where his nails had pressed too hard. Though his actions were soft and gentle I could see the profanities flying behind his eyes. The fact that his hand concealed her ring did not escape me.

Her eyes stayed on the window and the world beyond. Perhaps she was imagining my father’s car pulling up into the driveway at any moment, but it was a long drive back from Atlanta. Perhaps she was picturing the storm on the horizon. The day would not be over until there was a loud ruckus or until large drops of water stained the floorboards, even without meteorological influence. The loud squeak of the rusty gate would herald its arrival. Shouts would resonate off the walls. Tired promises with too many miles already upon them would echo again. They would slide past the family photos, the unfinished projects, the mantle of knickknacks and envelopes labeled “final notice.” Well-intended, but ultimately-feigned sincerity would drip from him. He would cry too as if that would save him from the punishment he earned. The acts had been written but not played out.

The denouement still had to be scripted. From the look on my mother’s face, she had writer’s block in that regard.

My anger started to bleed out of me and as I pressed my hands together they felt cold. Now they trembled for a different reason. I tried to imagine my future; my mind raced along the scenarios. I imagined myself working to support us, to pay bills that were not caused by any fault of the three of us, but were our burden now by association. School would become a thing of fantasy or perhaps a series of overpriced community college courses strung out over years, amounting to little academically but much financially. Two Christmases: one in a tiny apartment that I never wanted to visit and one with my mother. We’d bake cookies and roast a turkey breast. The table would no longer house a Norman Rockwell scene of overindulgence but instead a modest array, a subtle hint at Christmases past. At Thanksgiving we’d choke on our words, offering mumbled phrases of Thanks while trying to conceal our anger at the one not there. Even in his absence he would hold a palpable presence. The lack of a chair at the head of the table would be a more tangible reminder of him than he himself could ever be. We would glance towards an empty spot and then look back. The eight pack of rolls would no longer divide up evenly. There would be leftover pumpkin pie for one more day than in years past.

And in all of these imaginings there was an anger and as I contemplated it I realized the anger existed in that moment. It did not require any of these increate holiday dinners. It was already here, and had always been.

I turned just my eyes to look towards my mother as my body and head stayed forward. The words, “We support whatever you want to do” rolled around in my mouth like marbles. I could feel them there. “Want” was the wrong word. “Need” was the correct one. Some small selfish part of me which was not so small at all kept the words within me. I wanted to go to college, wanted to stay in the house. Still my brain screamed the words I should say.

As I shifted on my feet I felt the staple press into my heel. Weeks prior to that moment my brother had told me that my mom shopped for her own clothes at second-hand stores so that he and I could have new clothes. My shoes were falling apart so I had tried to repair them with a staple, not the kind for papers but the strong kind used to fasten Lost Dog signs to telephone poles. At the time it seemed like a good plan and the staple did not pierce the sole of the shoe, but with my weight on that foot, the staple came through and every day there were two bite marks in my flesh when I pulled off my shoe. Though the staple stung me then I let it. The physical reminder jarred me from my internal monologue and all of my imaginings; a self-imposed punishment for my selfishness.

My hand lifted up and I rested it on my mother’s shoulder.

“I just don’t know,” she said as if to answer all of the questions whirling through our minds. Her eyes were still on the window, so I was unclear if she was talking to us, to herself, or to him. Still she reached up and tapped my fingers. The first tear fell from her eyes. My hands regained their anger, but with one hand on my mother’s shoulder I could only allow the other to ball into a fist. With one hand I held my mother, with the other I held my rage. More than anything her tears could bring about my anger. Her tears could throw gravel into my voice. The soft, almost inaudible voice I normally used could become a growl. But as if ashamed of my anger I would only growl at third parties. The rants that should be reserved for him were instead made towards friends in monologues about him. They were never directed towards my mother.

To her I tried to only convey hope, even when that hope was a lie. “We’ll figure it out” and worse, “It will be all right” were the only lies I ever told her and they were the worst lies to tell. Perhaps they were the worst lies because they were the necessary ones; a placebo of words. Those words rolled around in my mouth like ping-pong balls, large and hollow.

She turned away from the window and slipped out from between us. “I don’t know what I’d do without you boys,” she said as she moved towards the stairs. My mother gripped the banister and paused as if the stairs she had climbed a thousand times were suddenly the wall of some great mountain. We watched her disappear and waited until the familiar creeks told us she was at the top of the stairs. I turned back to my brother. His eyes lowered from the ceiling towards me. The muscles around them contracted.

“Sometimes,” he said in a harsh tone. The unspoken wish was obvious. I knew what he wanted to, but could not, say.

I merely nodded, but wished I disagreed with him.

My mom would spend her day organizing coupons, putting them in order of usefulness and throwing out the ones that had expired. Everything expired eventually. It was the perfect task for keeping her mind occupied on simple things and allowed her to remain in the bedroom. The inevitable cycle of events had started. Though the routine would be familiar, the scale was new ground. My brother would assume his role of keeping my father in the house. I would stay out of the way, even so far as out of the room, only to appear after it was over. I’d touch my mother’s shoulders and release my mother’s tears. There would be more in the morning after, and an awkward apology from my father, followed by a promise I stopped believing years ago. Yet I would hope. I would always hope.

“You know we’ll be okay, right?” he asked me.

Another nod.

“I need to run to the comic store, did you want to come along?” he asked. I knew he was saying we needed to give our mother some time alone. We moved almost immediately towards the door. He opened it and I stepped out into the oppressive, heavy day. The staple chewed into my heel and I let it. By the time we would return, I would be ready to say what I needed to say.