It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.
---Sylvia Plath, “Three Women”
“You have to come home,” he said.
“Nobody died, just know that. But you have to come home. Some things are going to change,” he said.
He tried to say more, but couldn’t. I could feel the lump in his throat though my cell phone. All seemed a bit like a bad Verizon commercial. “Can you feel the hurt now? Goooood.”
It’s weird, considering you’ve been waiting for this type of call for years now. You’ve waited so long, and invented so many scenarios, that it becomes in some ways like a movie, with a series of elaborately staged scenes, full of pomp and vigor and Meryl Streep and Hans Zimmer scoring the whole thing. But in the end, it’s not like any of those things. It’s exactly like a simple phone call telling you to come home. And you don’t know what you’ll hear. You just know you already don’t like it.
And so you decide to get out for a while, pick up a memory card for your new Playstation 2. And you get pulled over by the cops, because he noticed your license plate sticker had expired, even though no one for the last four months had noticed, because life is funny that way. And you get home to realize you bought the wrong memory card, because life is annoying that way. And you can’t even get drunk, because life is unforgiving that way.
And then you keep busy all throughout the morning, and you rectify the memory card problem, because that you can control. And you exchange the CD for your father, trying not to realize you didn’t know him well enough to buy him something original in the first place. At least the replacement CD, you can control. And you keep your hands steady on the wheel on the highway, checking your rearview mirror for oncoming cars, and signal as you change lanes, because all of these things can be controlled.
And you get there, and the scene’s eerily like that from a few days ago, with everyone in the kitchen. But you know it couldn’t be further from the same.
And then you hear the words and the explanations and the excuses and you hear even more loudly everything that’s not being said, and has never really been adequately said, and there are still no words to correct this inadequacy. So you sit and sulk and pick your fingernails and try not to absolutely lose it when you hear about new apartments and what furniture’s going where and who failed whom when. There’s nothing you can control but the tears, and even those seem to be slipping through your fingers.
And then you’re in the car. And you see the new kitchen, and the bare rooms, and the scattered boxes, and you know now why your dad took the Foreman Grille in the Yankee Swap 72 hours earlier. And you make small talk on the way home about the Pats and you make morbid humor because what else is there to talk about, really? And you kiss your mom goodbye and you head back on the road. And you adjust the mirror in your car and don’t really recognize the person anymore.
And then you go food shopping, because really, like he said, the sun will come up tomorrow. Which is all great for Annie, I guess, but she had no food either, I suppose. So you’re on the way to the grocery, and you get behind a sedan populated by a family of four, and they sure look happy. But are they? How can you know? Six months, they told me. Six months of work and planning and knowledge and I didn’t know a thing. Makes you wonder. Makes you look a little bit harder. Makes you a lot more distrustful. And you don’t blame them, but it doesn’t make that trust any easier.
And you’re picking out pastas and chicken nuggets and all the other foodstuff you always get because you can’t afford too much more and seems even more woeful than usual, this lifestyles. Our lives. Rinse, lather, repeat, but you’re never clean, never fully cleansed, you just make a good show of it because we’re rats caught in the wheels and we don’t know how to get off. Well, the wheels have certainly come off now, to be certain. Ringing out the old with a vengeance.
And you’re left with the end of the year marking the beginning of new lives, rippling outwards from the center, creating the largest waves to those closest but having impact, however lessened, as the circle widens. You’re left knowing that was the last Christmas you’ll ever have that way, the last birthday, the last Sunday home to do laundry while you play ping pong between the living room and kitchen to spend equal time with them, something you hated but now miss. The last of many things to be replaced by a host of firsts.
And you sit and wonder how you missed every single sign over these six months. How your brother, the more astute of the two of us in terms of gauging my parents, could be fooled. Great thespians, my parents. But God love ‘em, they never wanted us to worry, and they can’t stop us from worrying now, but they’ve eased the pain as much as they can, which is what they’ve always done. And now it’s out time to give a little of that back. I don’t think either of us know how, but that won’t stop us from trying.
And so, in the end, I’m back in my room, alone, typing without thinking, writing what comes to my fingertips, here in the dawn of this new life for the four of us. Trying to type down the answers I need, but only writing out the questions that can’t be answered. So, instead, I go about the mundane. Bit by bit. Step by step.
I drive home.
I unpack my groceries.
I watch the sun set.
I write.
I wait for the run to rise.