Leaving Home: Short Pieces Read online

  I wonder what commodity my mother thinks she is trading in. Love? Respect? Self-confidence?

  My father leans over and kisses my forehead. "You look so much like her."

  I have heard that all my life. "Do you really think she's just taking a vacation?"

  "How could it be anything else?" my father says, but I get the feeling he's asking me, not giving me the answer.

  #

  Before you could see the hairline cracks in our family - when Dad was actually home for dinner; before Devon hit puberty and became the slouched, hairy, sarcastic beast that he is now; back when my mother seemed happy - we used to play a game at dinner. Each night we'd take turns asking a question for which there was no easy answer: If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could change one event in history, what would it be? What would the title of your biography be, and who would you want to write it?

  I can't remember all the answers, but there were definitely some that surprised me. Like when Devon said that if he had to choose one person to have dinner with, it would be Nelson Mandela, when I would have bet my entire state quarter collection that he hadn't even known who Nelson Mandela was. Or when my father said that the one thing he'd take to a desert island - the only thing he needed - was not his Blackberry, but my mother. The one that sticks in my mind, though, was a question my mother had asked: If you had to have amnesia for the rest of your life, and you could only keep one memory, what would it be?

  We all had a different one. My father talked about the time we all went to a Mexican restaurant and stole the balloons reserved for little kids, then sucked out the helium and sang like the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. Devon picked the time he gave me a haircut the day before my birthday - and clipped off my bangs right at the scalp. For me, it was the school play where I was the buttercup fairy. My mother had stood up in the audience the whole thirty seconds I was on that stage and whistled through her teeth so loud it was hard to hear the other kids with bigger parts speaking their lines.

  At the time, I'd thought my mother's memory was a cop-out - not detailed enough, not specific. "The last best one of the four of us," she'd said.

  #

  The morning after my mother leaves us, I am the Queen of Energy. I set bowls on the table, and spoons, and a variety of cereal. I feel so helpful I can barely stand it; usually I sit down and wait for everything to be brought to me while I yawn my way into consciousness. Devon clatters into the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower. "I'm starving," he says, pouring himself a mountain of Special K.

  "What do you think they serve for breakfast at the Ritz?" I ask.

  "It's the Ritz," he mutters. "They probably serve you whatever you want."

  "Waffles?"

  "With whipped cream and strawberries."

  "Omelettes," I say. "Made to order."

  Devon snorts. "Special K. Except it's more special there." He reaches for the milk and shakes it. "Is there any more in the fridge?"

  "No."

  "Well, this is empty."

  "It's not my fault," I shoot back.

  "What else is there to eat?"

  "How am I supposed to know?"

  We both stop arguing; this is usually the moment where Mom turns around at the stove and tells us to do that very same thing. Devon reaches across the table for the carton of orange juice and pours it over his cereal. "What?" he accuses, when I stare at him. "It's orange juice plus calcium. That's practically milk."

  Last week, during dinner, Devon had announced he doesn't want to go to college. He wants to travel the world with his band, go build huts on a tropical island, find himself. My father had hit the ceiling at this announcement. You couldn't find yourself with both hands free, he said. You want to find yourself? Do it with a good, liberal arts education. Devon had lashed out like a bear caught in a trap he hadn't seen coming.

  How could Dad know anything about the world when he hadn't seen anything but the inside of the New York Mercantile Exchange for the past twenty years?

  By now, my father's come downstairs. He smells like the weekend: shampoo and fresh cut grass and aftershave on his cheeks. "So!" he says, too brightly. "What's for breakfast?"

  I picture Mom eating her Belgian waffle in bed.

  After the fight with Devon, my father had turned to my mother: Charlotte, tell him I'm right.

  I try, but I can't remember what she said.

  #

  Three days after my mother leaves us, we realize that the vacuum cleaner is missing. What's really unfortunate about this is that we make the discovery after Devon has knocked over a spider plant - and all its soil - onto the living room rug. Four days after she leaves us, we give up trying to cook a meal and get all its bits and pieces - meat, potatoes, vegetables - on the table at once; instead, we order in pizza.

  At school, I've had to make excuses - the reason my mother can't come to the Art Open House is because she's visiting her sister; she didn't sign my independent reading sheet because she's gone to a conference on Sanibel Island. The only person who knows the truth is my best friend, Nuala. I can trust her implicitly; I swear I could tell her I'm a hermaphrodite and she wouldn't even blink. When I said that my mother had left, she asked if it was an affair, something that I hadn't even thought of.

  One day Nuala comes into homeroom with an article she's printed off the Internet. "Check this out," she says. "Someone did a study on stay-at-home moms and figured out what their salary would be if they had one."

  I scan the article. Basically, the salary was a compilation of real jobs, pro-rated:

  22 hours of housekeeper, 15 hours of day care center teacher, 13.6 hours of chef, right on down to van driver (4.7 hours) and psychologist (3.9 hours). They figured in overtime pay, because it was a 91-hour week. If my mom was working for a company, instead of us, she'd be making $134,121.

  "That's a lot," I say.

  Nuala folds the paper and sticks it in her backpack again. "It's only a lot if you actually get paid," she said.

  #

  That night, I can't sleep. I pad downstairs in my bare feet to the kitchen. It is now Devon's job to wash the dishes, but he's been playing with his band after school and so there's a stack of bowls in the sink that's precariously curved, like a clock tower in a Dr. Seuss book. A round of melon on the cutting board has flies crawling across its belly.

  Someone's left the milk out. Again.

  It isn't until my father speaks, in a hushed whisper, that I even realize he's sitting at the kitchen table with the phone pressed up to his ear. "It will be different," he says.

  "I promise."

  I hear phrases snipped from their sentences: taken for granted, because, without you. I try not to listen. Instead, I think of all the things that fall apart when you remove their core: a head of lettuce; a solar system; a household like ours.

  There is a muffled beep; my father hanging up the phone. I am just about to back out of the kitchen when he says, "How much of that did you hear?"

  "Nothing," I lie.

  I sit down across from him at the table. "She left once before," my father says.

  He couldn't have surprised me more if he'd announced that my mother used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. "I don't remember that."

  "That's because you and Devon were babies." My father looks up at me. "She was gone for three months."

  Three months?

  I can feel the question that I've wanted to ask all this time, filling me like a hot-air balloon, so that I burst at the seams. "Didn't she love us?"

  "So much," my father says. "So much that she started to forget who she used to be."

  My eyes start to burn. What I haven't told anyone - not Nuala, not Devon, not my dad - is what I think about when it's just me and the stoic moon alone in my room at night. That if I'd been a better daughter - prettier, smarter, funnier - she might have had reason to stay. "Can't you go get her?" I beg. "Can't you just bring her back?"

  My father puts his hand over mine.