She starts to get sniffly, the way she always does when she brings up the legendary Bobbi Mac. Fortunately, she reins herself in and goes on. “For a while I thought that, maybe, your father’s family might, you know, fill in.”
This is another story I know too well. I pray that she won’t retell the sad tale of her schlepping me to visit Dad’s family back when I was too young to remember and how his super-Catholic parents were all griefstricken about their son joining this weirdo cult and for some bizarre reason they blamed her for not being able to hold on to her man. As if she’d driven him to leave us.
Thinking about grandparents who never really wanted to know their own grandchild makes me wonder how bad it must have been for Dad to have had them as parents.
By the time I tune back into my mom, she is telling her favorite story, the one about meeting my father on the train in Morocco and seeing strange tribal people and eating strange tribal food.
“That’s all that I want for you, sweetie.” Her voice has that icky wobble that means she just might start bawling in the hopes that her tears will melt my callous-bitch heart. “I just want you to have adventures. Adventures like my grandmother had. Even the adventures that all kids used to have when we’d go out the front door first thing in the morning and not come home till after dark and our parents didn’t know where we were. We were with our friends, riding bikes, building forts, getting sunburns, mosquito bites, breaking our arms. I hate it that you never had a friend whose house you could walk to. That no kid has ever knocked on our door and asked if you could come out and play.”
“Sorry I’m such a pathetic loser.”
“No! No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not your fault. It’s Parkhaven. It’s always been Parkhaven. I thought it would be kid paradise. Then, once we were stuck there, I realized that, yeah, there are lots of kids, but they are all in Mommy and Me or select soccer or Space Camp. Or something. I was stunned. Honest to God, you could see more children on Wall Street than you could out playing in our neighborhood. Anyway, this is your chance to start your life.”
I want to thank her for negating my entire childhood and pretty much everything that made me me, but that would definitely have made her cry.
“To meet new people,” she adds.
Meet new middle-class white people with parents who never got over being hippies.
“To have adventures.”
Have your adventures.
“Aubrey, don’t shut me out. Please, I love you more than anyone on this earth. I want to know you. I want to know what’s in your beautiful brain.”
Yeah, right. Just so long as it happens to be exactly what is in your brain.
“Please, can’t we talk?”
“Sure, Mom.” Then, because I have been, I say, “I’m sorry I’ve been so churlish.”
At the word “churlish,” Dad’s signature word, she whips her head in my direction so fast it’s like she just got an electric shock. Dad must have still been using the word when they met. She studies me until I get scared and have to say, “Uh, Mom, the road,” because we’re driving on the shoulder.
Her reaction pretty much confirms my suspicion that if I utter one wrong word, she will know everything. I also see really clearly how upset the slightest mention of my father would make her.
We drive in silence for a long time and the car fills up with her sadness. I stare out at a drizzly, gray world that looks like the inside of an oyster and try to think of something to talk about to comfort her, to get her bubbly mood back, even if it was fake. But honestly I can’t think of one thing to say.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Get the fuck out!” Dori squeals when I tell her that Martin called. Really called. That it really was him.
We’re sitting in the parking lot of Parkhaven Medical Center while I figure out what to do. “He said he hoped I was back from my trip to Europe.”
“Was he kidding? Does he know that the only trip you’ve taken in the last ten years was the College Tour from Hell?”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“ ‘Trip to Europe’? Does Martin have a really bad sense of humor?”