It wasn’t hard to adjust to life back at home. Even with my father gone and my mother living like a hermit, going home had the same comfort as it always did. You can’t deny the feeling of your feet slapping against the same planks of wood that you walked on years ago, back when your knees were just wobbly little things and you still weren’t sure how to balance your head on top of your neck. My parents had bought a new TV after Ryan had moved out—a sort of mixed celebration and slap in Ryan’s face for surviving so many years without a remote control. But the couch in the TV room sagged in the same places and still had the stains on it from when I volunteered to paint the walls a dark green. The refrigerator still hummed and clicked in the middle of the night loud enough to wake me.
My mother spent most of her days in my father’s study. She would sit in the darkness of the small room, her little body curled up in the immenseness of his leather La-Z-Boy, flipping aimlessly through his files and scratch paper. She didn’t want to come to the table for dinner so I would bring her soup and watch as she lifted every spoonful to her mouth.
‘I’m just glad that we were young,’ she would say to me in between sips of broth. I would watch her hand drop the spoon back into the bowl with the majority of its contents still sitting in it, putting the soup back into the bowl just so she could pick it back up again to be rejected.
‘Mom, don’t be silly,’ I retorted. ‘You don’t really want Dad to have… been young.’ The word death or gone were still taboo in the house. Especially in the study.
‘No, no, no Elizabeth. You don’t understand.’ Her eyes squinted and her hand flailed around her head. How was it that I always felt like the insane one in moments like these? ‘When I met your father…’ she extended her hands out as if to grab his essence into her, ‘your father… mmm… we were so young. He was such a beautiful man back then. Still is.’
I flinched in embarrassment. I adjusted my vest to sit straight against my chest. But she wasn’t fazed by the mistake.
‘We had so many beautiful moments together, so much love together, with you… you kids… and watching life happen together. Just, watching it all happen, you know? You know what I mean by watching life happen, Elizabeth?’
I had no idea what she was talking about but I nodded yes.
‘It’s so wonderful to grow up next to him. Everything is so much easier when you can share it with someone else.’
Her body froze, her eyes staring straight ahead at the empty wall in front of her. I could see her neck muscles tense. And relax. And then her head dropped onto her neck.
‘Mom?’
‘…. Mmmmm?’
‘Want anymore soup?’
‘mmmmmm’
I could see her head lolling back and forth ever so slightly against her neck.
‘I’ll come back with your medicine.’
‘That’s fine Elizabeth.’ At least she could still make sentences. ‘That sounds… absolutely perfect.’ With effort, she brought her head up high enough to go back to flipping through the different papers and pictures that Dad had left lying around his study. Her fingers flipped through the pages with measured dexterity—using no more than the minimum amount of effort. Watching her move like that reminded me of the way she used braid my hair while I ate breakfast before school. I hated the way that she pulled at my scalp a little at a time, I would have rather that she take my whole head and pulled one, big, painful pull and just get it over with. But I knew if I sat still for the ten minutes it took her to get through my curls, she would feel better and wouldn’t come down to school that day in order to make sure that I wasn’t getting peanut butter or gum in my ‘precious curls.’
‘Mom?’
‘Yes Elizabeth.’
‘I was going to watch Meet Me in St. Louis later if you want to join me. Remember we used to watch that when I was younger? And we used to sing the trolley song? Wouldn’t that be fun?’
She picked her head up to me. In the clouded, mid-afternoon light I could see how her eyes had retreated back into their sockets and how getting older had made little lines form around her lips. My parents were actually getting older, I was becoming them and they were becoming entirely different people. They were elderly. And then I remembered that my mother was the only one getting old at this point so I stopped thinking about it.
That’s when my mother looked at me with the same face of concern that I was wearing for her, like I was the one that needed to be watched and spoon-fed dinner and entertained with mildly entertaining, nostalgic, musicals. How she managed to turn these moments on me, I’ll never know. She nodded her head at me softly with consent.
‘Sure, honey. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it.’
As I walked out of my father’s study, leaving my mother to flip through his personal belongings and pity me, I felt the world turning over and over.
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