Boulders- Draft 2

I submitted the following as the final assignment for my fiction writing class this past fall semester.

Draft 1

_________________

BOULDERS

Some people call me the product of a broken home. To me, it was just home. There was Mom’s house. There was Dad’s house. 1st, 3rd, and 5th-weekend drop-offs in the middle. One month a summer. Alternating holidays. It was all normal in my young eyes. Explaining the dynamics of it to kids who didn’t understand became second nature to me like riding a bike or the words to The Pledge of Allegiance. Simple, consistent things that I assumed were normal. Normal to me, anyway.

To this day, I can still recite the reasoning Mom gave me whenever I asked her why she left Dad just as well as I can recite the Pledge. In not as many words, too.

Something would stir up the question in my mind, whipping up layers of dust until I was suffocated and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Maybe it was an argument between mom and me. Maybe it was something dad said to me at his house one weekend. The question would fall from my tongue and her answer would always be the same.

“It’s just...” She would pause and let out a sigh, shaking her head. Her short brunette hair would free from behind her ears and cascade in front of her face. She would throw up her hands in the dramatic manner she always did and then bring them down, clasping them at her chest like she was trying to hold onto a floating balloon that was too big for her grasp. “It just didn’t work out.” She would look at me, her hair falling to the side so I could see the similar eyes I saw every morning in the mirror. “We just didn’t agree on a lot of things. It’s better off this way.”

Dad was no help either, leaving me with a simple, “Ask your mom.”

As the years wore on, the reasoning stayed the same and I eventually quit asking altogether. I had heard the vinyl replay enough and didn’t care to listen to it scratch and skip anymore. I thought, “Maybe this will be my life’s greatest mystery: Why Mom left Dad.” I had come to terms with many mysteries that I figured would remain unanswered and figured this would be no different.

20-some-odd years, a bachelor's degree, and three Toyota's later, she revealed to me the truth. Which, to some extent, was what she had been telling me for all those years: disagreements led to the end of their marriage.

“Do you like it?” I asked Mom that night, sliding my hand across the tiled patio table, fingers splayed out to reveal the diamond on my left hand.

A cold front had just grasped the edges of our city the day prior. For the first time in months, the thick summer air was pushed out and we were able to sit outside in sweaters and not boil to death or be swarmed by nagging mosquitos.

I wore a sweatshirt Dad bought me before my first year at college. The orange had faded to the color of an autumn sunrise and I had cut holes in the worn cuffs so my thumbs could poke through. Dad had bought me a few more since then, but they stayed tucked away in the back of my closet or buried in the bottom of my dresser. Mom wore a sweatshirt that she always wore, even when the weather didn’t permit it. Tea and ink stains dotted the pilled sleeves and the fleece on the inside was rough and scratchy. She, too, had others but none that she wore as often as that one. Creatures of habit, her and I. Like mother, like daughter.

She examined the ring, her eyes glued to diamonds that glowed amber under the candlelight, hands pulled snug in her sleeves. “I thought you said that he didn’t want kids.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Marla,” Mom shifted in her seat and crossed her arms. “It is if you want kids.”

“It’s not a big deal. We can make it work.” I rubbed the ring with my other hand. Two sizes too big, it slid up and down my finger with ease.

She let out a huff through gritted teeth. “No, you can’t. Not without one of you sacrificing something. ”

“Isn’t that what marriage is, though, sacrifice?”

She reached for her imaginary balloon, but only found the flaking screen-printed graphics on her sweatshirt, barely legible. “Sacrifice when it comes to the trivial things like where you go out to eat and what movie you see, not sacrificing your lifelong happiness because you and your partner have different opinions on something major like children.”

I scrambled through my mind as I tried to comprehend what my mother, a divorcee, knew about building a good marriage. “What do you know about it, then? You can’t even tell me why you left dad.”

“What?” It was as though I had struck her. The wrinkles on her face seemed to grow deeper and age her by a decade.

“You’ve never told me why you left dad.” I laugh when I get angry, I always have. At that moment, I let out a cackle that grew from the irritability of being left in the dark for so long. “I get caught up in the what-ifs. What if dad cheated on mom? What if mom cheated on dad? What if mom didn’t want me?”

Her shoulders collapsed forward. “Why would you think that I wouldn’t want you?”

“Dad got remarried and had more kids—you didn’t. Obviously, that type of life was never what you wanted.” The words tumbled from my lips like a boulder. If they were physical, they would have cracked the tabletop.

“I wanted you, I still do. I always will.” Mom pulled back into the safety of her sweatshirt. How many times I had seen her there, I couldn’t count.

“What was it then?”

“It was your dad—I don’t want to blame it all on him, he’s a much better man now. But, I just didn’t want to have any more children with a man who got drunk and tried to pick fights with me.” Another boulder crashed down between us.

It was now as though she had struck me and I began to pick at a hangnail on my ring finger. “I’ve never seen dad drunk. I’ve hardly ever seen him drink.”

“He used to, back when you were little.” Boulder. “How would I be able to pass my own beliefs on to you if I was constantly getting yelled at and ridiculed for having them?” She shook her head, “And I’m not saying that not wanting to have kids is bad. And I’m not saying that wanting to have kids is good. I’m just saying that’s not something you want to bend on. You might not be happy in life if you don’t have kids. He might not be happy if he does have kids. You both don’t want to take that chance. And the topic of children could just be a catalyst for even bigger differences and problems.”

She sunk back into the cushion on her chair and said, “It’s something that I’ve thought a lot about over the past few years.” Pebbles trailing off into the cold darkness on the edge of the patio.

A bracing breeze whipped down from the north and extinguished the candle on the table where the boulders lay next to the ring on broken tiles and my life’s great mystery.

_________________

Mom was always this endless candle of light—until she wasn’t. She’d start flickering away until her flame turned to smoke. She’d smolder and brood in the darkness she created herself and it would be hard to reignite her.

I could always tell the state of her flame by her nails. When she was good, she was great. She’d tap her long polished nails on the table while deep in thought, shooting her body up to take action on her newest project, often juggling more than one at the same time. She’d dig into her Anthony Bourdain cookbooks and plan a meal with dishes from three or four different continents. Appetizers through desserts. Prepping vegetables through washing the final dishes. The whole damn process just screamed happiness.

It always filled me with joy to see her like that. It still fills me with joy remembering it now. They’re my favorite memories of her.

When her flame was gone, she would obsessively chew and pick and tear away her nails until they bled at the cuticles. She’d put on a faint happy face while I was around, but would always end up locking herself away in her office. The things she loved to do would sit around here like tombstones for her creativity and the enthusiasm for life that had left her with no rhyme or reason. A painting where she only managed the energy to put down the base coat. A story where she only wrote a single line. A meal she would make and not even eat.

She knew when she was bad, too, and would try to spark happiness in any way she could, try to hold on with broken nails a little bit longer. Her hungry weakness would always get the best of her and she’d collapse back into that graveyard.

These are the memories that I hate to remember, but they come to me so vividly when I am in my own darkness. A catalyst, a foretelling of my future.

One morning, I saw her on the back patio on her knees, forehead pressed to the cracked terracotta floor tiles, trusted sweatshirt rolled up into a ball and pulled into her stomach. Sobbing. Hysterically sobbing. Short, gasping breaths choked out by tears. She murmured something over and over that I couldn’t make out through the stained glass back doors of our house. Some prayer in a language long forgotten except by those who were as broken as the tiles she found herself on.

She threw her head back and stared into the blinding blue sky with her tear battered eyes. It seemed to me that my mother—who had always lived a secular life and raised me as such—was waiting on something or someone from an ethereal plane of existence. An angel to come down and pat her on the back, a sign to tell her that it would be alright. No angels came down, no signs appeared before her.

She closed her eyes once more, lips whispering another prayer that only her mind could hear, and picked herself up from the floor. She brushed a leaf off her dress, a strand of hair off her face, and picked up a broom that leaned up against the patio table.

Later that day, she came home with a bunch of overripe bananas that she bought on sale at the supermarket and a coffee mug with my future university's mascot on it. She made banana bread with peanut butter and chocolate chips. Sea salt sprinkled on top. Served with tea.

I asked her if she wanted to watch a movie. “Maybe that one about love and the British guy who travels through time?”

“No thanks, love.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head, yanking her hair out from the collar. “I think I’m just going to go to bed. Love you.”

I thanked her for the mug filled with tea and the banana bread and wanted to tell her that it was going to be alright, but the words caught in my throat. “Love you, too, mom.”

_________________

When mom died, dad stayed with me at her house for a few days while we sorted through and packed up her life. It was the longest time in those twenty-some years that he had spent amongst the possessions of the woman he was once married to. I wondered if he recognized anything, or if the life she had built for us after they divorced was a completely fresh canvas.

“When did she start painting?” he asked, picking up an unfinished painting off the easel in her office. A single layer of yellow.

“I don’t know. She just always has.” I leaned on the doorway, not daring to cross the threshold.

He put the painting back down, “Oh.” He walked over to her cluttered desk in the corner of the room. She had left the desk lamp on before she left, not thinking, I guess. He flipped open a journal, skimming through the pages. He read a few lines before snapping it shut and tossing it back onto the clutter. “I didn’t know she was so into Ancient Greece,” he said, touching the spines of the dusty hardcovers on the bookshelves and reading their titles.

An intruder. I had always found myself one when I entered her space. Some places are sacred, even for my mother, and her office was one of them. It was a space that was entirely her own from the art on the walls to the paint splatter on the wood floors. Years of journals filled with scribbles and unfinished thoughts lined a long bookshelf under the wide window. At that moment, I was no intruder, I was the heir to her dead creativity and her candle that ceased to flicker.

I stepped forward into the room. “I’ll pack up in here, dad. Why don’t you take the kitchen? I think there are some leftovers in the fridge that need to be thrown out.”

He shuffled around a bit longer, taking one last look at the tomb of the woman he once loved but didn’t seem to recognize.

Maybe I had read his words wrong all those years ago. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to tell me the answer to my mystery, it was that he didn’t know the answer himself.

“Ask your mom,” because only she knows.

_________________

We did end up getting married, Will and I. A large production at one of those big event venues in the country where you can smell the cowpats and cedar trees while walking down the aisle of matted grass. Everything was perfect. The weather, the flowers, the food, everything. A perfect wedding that any normal little girl would dream about.

All perfect except for the empty chair in the front row.

We agreed to hold off on children for a few years. “Let’s wait until my job has settled down a little bit more,” Will said.

I agreed as we celebrated my last birthday in my twenties.

Life did not wait, it never does. Our daughter with hair like my mother’s entered the world less than a year later. We named her Joy after my mom. Our life grew into a picturesque suburban dream. Normal.

As we added more fingers and toes to our family—like we were supposed to—something still nagged at me. In the late hours of the night, while changing diapers and feeding babies by myself, I wondered if she was right. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

_________________

I could never understand why she was the way that she was. I often held back the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I would think to myself, “Just stop. Just stop being sad. Come back into the light, it’s so warm here, you can take off your sweatshirt.” I couldn’t understand any of it, it wasn’t something that anyone talked about. Everything in my mind was so surface level at the time, I didn’t have the knowledge or life experience to dig any deeper. I thought of crying as something she could just turn off. “You’re an adult, just stop it. Please.”

Finally a real adult, I still don’t understand. I don’t understand why I get sad for seemingly no reason. I don’t understand why I can’t find the off switch. I chew on my nails to battle my sadness, I tug on my faded sweatshirt and drink from my chipped mug and bake banana bread for my children while waiting for my flame to ignite—peanut butter with sea salt sprinkled on top.

There were days when I needed her. Light a match, don’t let me burn out. Mom, please tell me how to stop this feeling. She was the only one who could understand or, at least, listen to my cries. Faced with problems and questions about divorce, I needed my divorcee mother’s help, but she was nowhere to be found. An empty chair in the front row in the grand spectacle of the end of my marriage. She was right about it all. She would not be celebrating or gloating, but she would be there. She’d pick me up like she did when I learned to ride a bike and tell me she loved me like she did when she would drop me off at my dad’s house.

I look at my children and wonder if I will ever tell them the answer to their life’s greatest mystery: “Why Mom left Dad.” I know Mom had looked at me like that. Maybe I’ll even take it a step further and tell them that they could have just not existed if I had listened to their grandmother's advice.

Maybe they’ll ask me why their grandmother killed herself. Ask your grandma. Maybe they’ll ask me why their dad doesn’t come around much anymore. Ask your dad. Boulder after boulder slipping from their lips like sand slips through cracks. Questions I don’t have answers to, I’ll leave them caught up in the what-ifs because that is a safe place when you’re still young. They see the cracks in the terracotta tiles, but they don’t see where the boulders go when they slip through.

I wonder if they will grow up and see the darkness and the smokey candle, too. I pray, the same way my mother did, that they don’t and I will stay around long enough if they do.