My Monticello(7)

Let your husband buy you a house in the suburbs, an outpost from which to raise these fair and fitful beings. Whenever he’s home, petition him still. Tell him you could live in Bordeaux or Brussels. Tell him you would live in Madrid. Never mind that already you know his stock answer, that the money is better working from the States.

Insist on a long trip to Europe each summer, though it reminds you of how big the world remains. Stay near La Rochelle, not far from the water, where your husband’s mother now lives. His mother who maintains that your wedding was trop loin, who dresses in crisp linen and plants dry kisses on the children’s cheeks. The whole time you’ve known her, she’s kept the same servant, a North African lady who cleans and cooks and shops like a wife. When you glimpse this second serf of a woman, feel outraged and full of envy.

Those early years are trying: Persist! The children beg you to play on hands and knees. The children run screaming to greet their father whenever he bursts through the front door. Notice the lavish way he lifts them with only a weary peck on the cheek left for you. Jet-lagged, he collapses on the king-sized bed, leaving luggage for you to unpack. Much later, you wake to the light of his cell phone, its blue glow in his eyes and your shared bed lurching to his needy rhythms. Let yourself feel something too, a pulsing sadness, a lumen of want. Even though, before you can whisper his name, he emits a shuddering groan that gives way to snoring.

Notice how quickly the years are unfurling: The children double then triple themselves. The boy is five, the girl is ten, the boy is fifteen. Your husband’s gone bald; still, women swoon at his stubbled jaw and muscled chest. You hear him outside, cursing softly to himself below your open bedroom window. That same morning you find a stack at the back of the closet—old, forgotten journals full of your eager, awful words.

Gawk at those futile, straying stories and don’t pick up the phone when it rings. Momma’s voice lifts up out of the machine to tell you your father has passed. You feel numb and at the same time untethered, as if an invisible cord that anchored you has now been let go. After the funeral, at the stop sign in town, your husband palms your stockinged knee. Believe he is consoling you even when he says, Shall we consider moving here? For your mother’s sake.

Promise yourself you’ll never move back but take Momma’s calls every night. Each small thing she says makes its own kind of sense, but taken altogether, they sound outlandish. Your husband has been home for six weeks in a row, his unflagging presence setting all of your routines askew. Turn away when he mentions moving in with your mother, though he makes it sound like a high-wire trick that might well save you. See how he sidesteps talk of his dwindling work, the partial mortgage payments, the growing distances between you.

Put the house on the market just to see what it will bring—what else can you do? Accept the highest middling bid and let your husband call this freedom. Your son, tall as you, makes fists when you tell him. His mouth twists as if he holds kindling inside it. Your daughter slams her bedroom door, leaving you outside of its dry rattle. Press your ear to hear her mewl on the phone to a middle school boyfriend, a person you’ll never meet.

Those first weeks back are trying—hold on. The old rambling house is a circus and Momma’s confusion, a grotesque new exhibit. See how she stumbles over the children’s names—how she acts like a child herself some days. One bleak winter night she wanders off, though you don’t realize she’s missing till the corded phone in the kitchen blares. Some city-sounding couple is on the line. They must’ve bought your old neighbor’s place. Race down and find Momma in your car’s searching headlights, alone in a grove of pine—a flood of relief. Your own shrinking mother, caped in a mossy quilt and spinning, your son’s filthy sneakers like rank mittens on her hands.

Move Momma into a nursing home and visit every day. Even though, whenever you walk in, her body seizes with agitation. Take a break, don’t go back, one day then another, until a week has passed. That first time you return, Momma grasps the arm of a passing staff member. You hear Momma beg this uniformed stranger to tell her who in the world you are.

Your husband accepts sporadic assignments up and down the coast. He drives to Lexington, to Front Royal, leaving you carless and stranded. He shoots portraits and street fairs and weddings, all of it intimate, fleeting. Eventually he packs his cameras away, reminding you he’s always loved jazz music. He uses the last of your savings to open a boutique record store in a strip mall in town.

The children attend your old high school—classrooms from which you once plotted escape. Each day they grow less tied to you, leaving longer swaths of your days free. One rainy spring morning, after dropping off your husband, you collect a rustling stack of applications. Tell yourself they are for your daughter, but never show them to her. What could you do here with no real qualifications, not even having finished your degree? Could you be a clerk? A secretary? Could you wait tables again?

Mulch Momma’s feral azaleas. Resurrect the kitchen garden that fed you as a child. Fashion raised beds from the railroad ties you find abandoned behind the shed. Eat lunch on the side porch—white bread with sliced tomatoes—your native hair loosed and scraping your shoulders, your face turned to the breeze.

The next time you visit the nursing home, Momma flies up in her wheelchair. She clutches you with such ferocity, it feels like you’ve only just met this woman who raised you. There are letters, she tells you, in the house. Letters your lonesome and stoic father once penned to you. Promise me you’ll find them, Momma says, still squeezing. Hold her cloudy gaze. Let her warm breath fog your face.