Still Life with Tornado(40)

But we didn’t wait ten minutes.

We stood outside the door and listened to them fight. Dad said Mom was undermining his authority. Mom said “What authority? This is vacation!” Dad said she knew damn well what he was talking about. Mom said, “I think you’re going deeper, Chet. I think you need to stop and remember why we’re here.”

“And why are we here, Helen?” he yelled.

“To help you,” she said. “To help you learn how to relax.”

“And you think I’ll relax when you undermine me? You think I’ll relax when you’re a bitch to me in front of my kids?”

That’s when Bruce touched his room key to the doorknob with his shaking hand and we walked in. It hadn’t been ten minutes. Probably more like five.

Mom was sitting on the sofa. Dad was standing above her with his arms wide, making his point. When we walked in, he put his arms to his sides and walked toward their bedroom. His fists were clenched. He didn’t even look at us.

Mom said, “Oh, hey, kids! Get ready for the beach!”

I said, because I was ten and excited for the kids’ club, “After the beach I can still go to the kids’ club, right?”

Mom said, “Sure, honey.”

Dad came in from their bedroom and just stood there.

Bruce said, “When are you going to just be nice to her?”





Second Chance



Mom has met ten-year-old Sarah. This is what goes through my head as I stand there and look at the two of them. Mom is a new mom. She isn’t the same mom ten-year-old Sarah had. She now wants to have fun and do things. Right this very minute, she wants to go to a movie with ten-year-old Sarah.

I admit I feel oddly jealous.

I finally got my mother back—just a tiny bit—by having an existential crisis, and now ten-year-old Sarah is going to reap the benefits of my hard work.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”

“What movie are you seeing?” I ask.

“Whatever’s in,” Mom says.

“I really could use a nap,” I say.

Ten-year-old Sarah is holding Mom’s hand. I remember that. I remember holding my mother’s hand. There is a thin membrane between that time and this time—so thin I can’t see it, but it’s here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

When Mom asked me last week what I wanted to do to have fun, I couldn’t think of anything. I don’t know what fun is. Fun is going to the movies, I guess.

Mom is on her phone checking show times. Ten-year-old Sarah walks into the kitchen for a glass of water. I’m left in the living room with my mother and the sliver of tissue that’s still stuck to the TV.

Mom looks up at me and says, “I don’t understand what’s really happening here.”

“It’s weird.”

“It’s a second chance,” she says.

“I still need you,” I say.

“We’ll have more fun this week. We’ll go to a museum or something.”

I like museums. I love museums. But I can’t find the answers in a museum.

My answers are somewhere else.

Maybe in Bruce.

Maybe in ten-year-old Sarah.

Maybe just inside myself because I’m the only one who knows all the details of me. But there’s a thin membrane between me and myself, too. It’s like I’m a little me inside the big me and I’m holding an umbrella and the rain is bullshit and I am the rain and I am the bullshit.





HELEN’S GLUE



There is nothing I hate more than bullshit. Especially in a busy ER. I have to work with people who’ve been nursing longer than I have who try to bullshit me. They don’t write down every detail but they say they do. They take breaks to check their phones or post something on The Social and say they were just taking a bathroom break. The only thing I hate more than a bullshitter is a lazy person bullshitting about being lazy. And yet look at my life. Look. At. My. Life.

? ? ?

You think I hate Chet because he’s lazy around the house. Because he shrugs. You think it’s because he doesn’t really vacuum right and because he won’t scrape off the sliver of tissue Sarah put on the TV. And while I don’t respect lazy people, I don’t hate Chet because of this.

You think I’m hard to please.

But I haven’t told you the whole story.

I’m not embarrassed to tell you about my feelings, but I’m embarrassed to tell you where they came from. I’m embarrassed about my bad choices. I’m embarrassed by being stuck and being the glue all by myself.

? ? ?

Nineteen years old. I had never been hit before. Not by a kid in school, not by my parents, not by anyone. I was in nursing school. Chet was in college—living off-campus in an old house near Temple. It was a bad part of town and he wouldn’t let me walk home by myself. He bought me a small can of pepper spray that fit on my key chain after the second night I stayed over and I thought that was sweet. A lot of things about Chet were sweet. He loved to cuddle and we liked the same TV shows and he loved walking around Center City holding hands and talking about everything.

We lived in that apartment near Temple for three years. We got married at City Hall and Chet didn’t tell his mother. I was pregnant with Bruce when we moved out. But before that. Before that there were bad times. Chet could get too drunk and be surly. He’d tell me off and I would chalk it up to his being drunk. He was a college guy and only drank on weekends. He didn’t know how to be drunk yet. He was just messing around. He’d tease me about something too much. His favorite subject was how I’d run off with a doctor one day.