Three Preludes
I.
The living room floor still had its deep green carpeting and the first set of furniture before the cats kneading their claws forced us through three more sofa loveseat combinations.
It was a sixth grade social studies project: definitions and illustrated examples of various geographical features (archipelago, atoll, cape…), and father was helping me.
I had reached isthmus, and had begun pasting with Elmer’s glue (“Glue sticks don’t work as well”), when he got up to match my mother’s yelling, the origins of which I do not recall.
And then their hands were around each other’s necks, and when my hearing came back, it was in the form of my own voice and my sister’s, screaming for them to stop.
They did not immediately or entirely heed, instead lowering their hands, glaring, my father breaking the silence: Get out of the house, get out. The response: Make me, Alan, make me.
So instead he slammed the door, and soon drove off, and while I cried beside my sister in my room, I listened as his car returned, and we did not know what to do, or what might happen next.
We won’t do that again, said my mother later that night. After all, we broke the answering machine, she half chuckled, but she refused to lie and to say that she still loved my father.
II.
I was driving with my mother to West Hartford, between my first and second year of college, her pressing on the imaginary brake on the passenger side: The speed limit’s 35 here, Jeff.
The ensuing argument arose from, I believe, her technical support needs clashing with my volition not to be found at home, and so began the same exchanges rehashed from years ago.
But with a twist: to emphasize how bad a son I was, how rotten a child I had become, she added, You’re just like your father, you know. Just as horrible as he is.
Defused, I listened as she elaborated: Don’t ever turn out like him, or you’ll never stay married. You’ll never keep someone acting like you do, you know. I put on my turn signal.
That’s why I’m divorcing you’re father. Wait, what the hell? I can’t do it, anymore, Jeff. I’m divorcing him once your sister’s done with college; I’ll die alone, I really will.
I never did tell my father, although when I saw him watching baseball that night, with a cat sitting happily on his chest, I decided to join him instead of going out.
And as we sat there, me the audience to the ultimate in dramatic irony, I began calculating the number of years before I had to tell him that I knew all along.
III.
She proved a faulty soothsayer, as the summer after my sister’s graduation, they remained together, still with their frequent bitching, occasional outings, and frustrating friends.
Then I was in Maine, with them, my grandfather, somehow still alive, and relatives from the West Coast, drinking more than lightly, less than heavily, at a family cottage on a wharf.
The next morning, we drove to Camden, my mother and I in one car, the rest of them in the minivan, a little quieter, a little unsure of what would be remembered.
She recapped the evening’s events, after I had turned in or stopped paying attention, including discussions of religion, money, and how we didn’t want to talk about Sammy anymore (money).
There was no segue to be found on the revivification of the theme of their crumbling marriage, just a key forced into a broken, rusted lock, stuck again now on the passenger side.
I can’t tell, Jeff, she says. When he’s in groups, he can be so fun and charming, but he can really make me feel pretty lonely at home with the things he says.
I mean, with the cancer thing, I could have been there on my deathbed, and if it was the day he was supposed to have lunch with his friends from work, you know he would have gone.
So finally: Ma, we’ve had this talk before. You’ve been saying you that you were going to do this for years. Thinking to myself: oh, and you tried to kill each other.
It’s not that easy. There’s the house, the insurance, the cats, and all the other, just, stuff. I mean, it’d be a very messy thing, and I just don’t know if I have the energy for it.
You know, there’s something he said to me when we first met that should have cued me more than it did. He said that he had never really been happy in his life.
So just do it already, I said, biting my tongue with further advice, thinking of my father, alone in half of the house, drinking a beer after mowing the half of the lawn, trying to see if he’s smiling.
