Cul-De-Sac

When my parents start seeing a therapist, he tells them to try an “in-house separation.” They are instructed to act as if they are separated, except around the children, and to otherwise continue living together. My father tells me one day, in Target, that my mother doesn’t love him anymore. My mother sobs on the staircase and thinks that she’s ruined my brother and me for life.
Six months later, when I’m thirteen, she moves out. She doesn’t pack much, takes some luggage and fills it with her clothes and toiletries, some pictures and some things that had belonged to her mother. My father and brother bring her things down to her car and start arranging them like Tetris blocks.

Half of everything in the bedroom is gone and the whole room feels asymmetrical: the left side of the walk-in closet is bare except for a garbage bag filled with clothes for the Good Will; the bed looks lopsided with only one pillow; the picture on her side of the dresser is gone, and even though they’re closed, I know that all of the drawers below it are empty.

I sit on her bed and she stacks sloppy rainbow-colored letters and cards and magnets into a shoebox. Things aren’t happening at all the way I had imagined. I had expected more arguing and confusion, more blood and thunder, or a few dozen casualties, at least. But the room is silent and no one is crying; a new episode of Seinfeld is playing in the other room, as scheduled, and next door, someone is mowing their lawn.

“I think you should give me something before you leave.”

She stops, holding an old Mother’s Day card in her hand, and says, “What do you mean?” 

“Well, I don’t know. Something to remember you by, or, like something you pass on to me.”

“Like what?”

“How about your jewelry box?” She has packed almost everything else, but the jewelry box is still there, in the center of the dresser. Sitting above four tarnished clawed feet, it’s covered in pale green velvet and trimmed with thick gold lace and it looks like an antique. I figure that she probably won’t have anywhere to put it anymore.

In the spring, before she leaves, my mother and I are in the kitchen, watching the Rosie O’Donnell talk show, balling melons. “So guess who I started talking to online?”

“Who?” I ask, looking up from the cantaloupe.

“Craig—from up the street. You know, he’s married to Caroline, with the red hair? Her parents live next door?”

Rosie says something funny and my mother laughs, then continues her story: “I pretended that I was another woman, and he’s been trying to ask me out on dates.”

“Are you going out with him?”

“No! Of course not. Plus, he doesn’t even know who I really am. He’d probably be pretty disappointed…” and she takes the small bowl of honeydew balls and dumps it into the big bowl, along with the other fruit. “He told me that he wants to leave Caroline.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s so awful all the time—she always starts arguments and yells about everything. You know, they only have sex once a month. If that.”

I’m not sure how often people usually have sex, so I say, “Wow.”

“And she makes him turn off all of the lights, so that he can’t see her when she’s naked.” She looks at the TV, says “I love it when she does this,” and turns up the volume. Bob Segar’s Old Time Rock and Roll is playing, and Rosie is kissing a picture of Tom Cruise. “I really think that he should just take her out on a date.”

In October, the year before she moves out, the whole family (my parents and my brother and I) goes to movie night at Randy and Trish’s house. They are friends from the theater—mom and dad are in Cyrano de Bergerac—and there is a whole gang that has formed. Trish and Lisa are in the kitchen making fried tomatoes, my parents are in the dining room, and Randy and Hillary are in the living room with my brother and me.

It’s impossible to tell how big the living room is because it has been carefully packed with as much furniture as would fit. The walls are painted a deep burgundy color, and it only shows through in thin strips between the dozens of paintings that cover the walls. Most of the paintings are originals done by unknown artists, and all of them are framed in gold. 

There are thirteen cats in the house, and their hair is plastered to absolutely everything; the smell of urine is faint, masked by the smell of food and candles, and sometimes I think that the hair makes everything softer.

My mother is upset, I think maybe because she doesn’t feel included, and I can hear her and my dad talking from the next room. I try to ignore her; I pet one of the cats (Stella, I think), and my brother and I look at each other as our stomachs sink. Randy and Hillary are talking about the movie Fargo, using their “Minnesotan” voices. I can hear my mother crying. I say, “We could just put in the movie, then, ya know.”

Before the opening credits are finished playing, my father comes up to my brother and I, says, “It’s time to leave, let’s start getting ready.”

“But the movie just started—we just got here!” I’m sure we say this in unison.

He looks at us for a moment, takes a long breath, and says, “Okay. We’ll come back and pick you up. Is that okay with you, Randy?”

 He says that it’s fine, and as soon as my parents leave, I walk into the kitchen to find out what fried tomatoes look like. I’ve never liked them—tomatoes—but these look nothing like tomatoes. ‘These’ have become ‘this’: an unrecognizable mush of varying colors—brown and black and a shade of rust—and before it is cool enough to eat, my father has come back to pick us up.

This time we don’t argue, and we pile in to the backseat of the car, where Mom is crying quietly. Her eyes are red and swollen and wide open, and she’s looking out the windshield.

We start driving, rain rolls down the side of my window, and it is all so sad and wet that it doesn’t seem real. Dad tells us that he’s sorry he made us leave, that Mom tried to run into traffic, and that we all need to help her feel better.

When we get home, Michael goes to his room and shuts the door, and the three of us stay in the basement. Mom and I get into an argument about her wanting to spend time chatting online. She decides to stay offline for the night, but says, “Will you just log on for me and tell everyone that I won’t be online tonight?”

“Why do you have to go on at all?”

She starts crying again. “They’ll think I’m ignoring them—they’re expecting me to be there.”

I say, “I think your internet friends will be okay if you don’t talk to them for one night!” but it’s important to her, and she runs up the stairs and into the kitchen, starts grabbing prescription bottles and spilling pills across the counter. My dad pushes himself off of the washing machine and chases after her.

Because I don’t know what else to do, I take a blanket and I leave the house. I’m not sure where to go and the grass is cold under my bare feet; dew has already started to form and the water numbs my toes. When I reach the back of the yard, I wrap the blanket tightly around myself and I lie on the grass. It’s quiet and I can see my own breath, and I stay there, on my back like a cigar wrapped in cotton, exhaling and looking at the stars, until a police officer shines a flashlight in my face, asks, “Are you Andrea?”

The police officer takes my mother to the hospital, and my father and I follow in the Thunderbird. He says, “Are you sure you want to come with? Your grandma is coming over—you know, she didn’t even take any of the pills.”

When we get there, my father goes back to be with my mother, and I sit in the waiting room, watching TV. When they are back there, my mother remembers that she was almost molested by her older cousin Vince when she was ten. She remembers him bringing her down to the basement on Easter and telling her what was going to happen. He asked, “How does that sound?” and she ducked away, ran up the stairs, ate ham and scalloped potatoes. 

As the three of us drive home from the hospital later that night, my mother says, “You know, I really think I hit rock bottom tonight. But now things have to start getting better. Right?” 

Whenever I do something wrong, my mother says something like, “If I would have done that when I was your age, I would have been in so much trouble.” One day, she tells me about the time she skipped class. She managed to dodge her father, who worked as a janitor at the high school, and spent the afternoon with her friends. But, consumed with guilt, she confessed to her mother the moment she walked in the door that evening. Her father hadn’t even made it home from work yet. 

They lived in a town named Minneota where mail was never delivered and everyone had to keep a P.O. Box. The house was small with two bedrooms for six people; her parents slept downstairs and the four children slept upstairs: my mother and Steve in the first part of the room, Deb and Donna in the second.

Their mother worked night shifts, and at night their father would walk upstairs, through to the second part of the bedroom, and bring Deb downstairs with him. My mother says that she remembers this now—remembers pretending to be asleep as he walked by her, not knowing whether to be glad that it wasn’t her or to wish that she were in her sister’s place, and being able to hear everything that was happening through the thin floors.

And though no one directly tells me about it, I piece together the details. After my mother remembers what happened with Vince, she starts to remember other things, and she and her sisters start talking. Vince molested both Deb and Donna, and so they talk about him and about the basement, or the barn, or the backseat. They talk about the thin floors and the nights when their mom worked late; they all remember, and they all finally say it for the first time.

Later that year, Grandpa is still invited to Christmas, and Mom and Dad give him a carton of cigarettes.

In the summer, after she leaves, I wear a Walkman everywhere I go and listen to Al Green on repeat: “How can you mend a broken heart…” The grass in our yard is a deep shade of green—it stands out from the rest of the yards—and is plush like fresh shag carpet. I stare through the blades and try to memorize the curves of the landscape. “Oh, how can you stop the sun from shining… and let me live again?”

Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see a slide-show of images. Like a View Master plastered onto the inside of my eyelids—fuzzy Polaroids, one right after another: a square from the quilt in a painting above her bed; the velvet pattern on her jewelry box; the collar of one of her favorite sweatshirts; the pink nail polish stain inside one of her dresser drawers.

I don’t have much to put into the jewelry box: some studded earrings, a necklace made of Black Hills Gold, a mood ring, some rubber bracelets. I put old guitar picks where the rings are supposed to go, and I set my favorite necklace, the one made of rainbow beads, on the raised part of the box, so that it doesn’t tangle with everything else.

My mother writes me a letter after a couple of weeks, and I miss the look of her handwriting. She draws a smiley face over the seal of the envelope and writes “I love you!” below it. It reminds me of the notes that she used to put in with our school lunches. The letter says that she’s sorry, that she misses us, and that she’s just trying to “figure things out” so that she can be a better mother. I read it a dozen times, until I can remember the tone of her voice again, and I put the folded letter beneath the box, between the four clawed feet, and eventually I forget that it’s there.

Nichole Held