By Nicole Martorana
Something in her eyes said ‘No more. No longer. I don’t want to. That’s all.’ and it made me feel that this was the end. Worse than the shouting, worse than the awkward TV-watching in separate rooms, there was the silence – the endless, impossible, unbearable silence. It buried us all and we were quietly suffocating.
Illustration by Rod Hunting
Perhaps we should begin nearer the beginning. My mother had disappeared. She was not out of sight, but had been sucked into a vortex of old and familiar faces, recollections of rocky mountains and Western streams, and the heart palpitations of her fifteen year-old self. To her, it was both beautiful and mesmerizing. Voices that had not changed at all heard across a phone line, photos of tents and pigtails and overalls dug out of shoeboxes, and ears that finally heard when she said “It was the best summer of my life.” She had stepped accidentally into the vortex, but not without relief. We had pushed her there – all of us. We nagged and chided and neglected her in our mindless, affectionate way until suddenly and without warning, she had slipped just out of our reach and we were alone. She was in a shinier, happier place with people more glamorous, more novel, and more attentive than we. At first it seemed harmless. And then, it did not. She dug in, like feet on the sand, and we resented this.
My father was angry. My father was stubborn. My father was sad. He was all of these things and a thousand more that may never occur to me. He looked at me sometimes with bewildered eyes, resembling a man who had sipped from a glass expecting water and tasted turpentine instead. He knew that I held many secrets and yet he did not ask to know them, seeing as a father must how it already weighed terribly on my soul. The oldest child and no longer a child, I constantly heard everything, saw everything, and learned too much. Each time I returned home for holidays or summers, I found myself lurking in dark corners, scanning the caller ID, and reading over unsuspecting shoulders. A bit of information was never enough and, being in the midst of those very years when we feel we are gaining maturity on our parents, I feared that if not for my watchful and constant eye, irreparable mistakes would be made and everything would shatter. I did not see then how little I could do. I did not sense my own irrelevance; this was theirs and never mine. I watched her drift further and further away and watched him glance back with wonder at the days when all things seemed unbreakable. I watched her speak out and saw him turn away. I watched him falter and saw her pretend not to notice. Each day brought new ugly things and yet no real changes. The same old dull sting and the ever-growing sense that our house was a grave where our old happiness had died and everyone now wore a grimace or a furrowed brow.
And then one night, he lurched through the front door after a particularly long and unhappy day at work. He was sick, and he’s never sick. His usually olive-tinged skin looked strangely pallid. The tips of his ears were pink and he spoke more softly than his usual inadvertent bellow. His throat was sore, he told us, and he began to remove his suit jacket. “Come here,” she said, sounding perhaps more annoyed than she was. He stepped into the light of the kitchen. “Open,” she instructed and he did, tilting his chin upwards. She took a step a closer. And that was when it happened. Very gently and very softly, she rested her cold, smooth fingertips alongside his cheek as she strained to see past his tongue. I felt it, and I think he felt it too. The world stopped turning for a moment. Everything went quiet. There was an instant. There was flash of recognition, of memory. She had touched him. All three of us seemed to shudder.
My mother and father made no marriage of convenience. All the odds fought against them. They were from different cultures, different faiths, different sides of town, different clusters of friends – but, as luck would have it, the same Earth Science class. They met at 16 and married at 26. They did not stray and did not falter. To some, this made them seem infallible. To others, it made them seem doomed. And during this strange and torrid era, I changed my membership from the first group to the second. I, too, had stopped believing. I feared, not so much for them or for myself, but for the ones younger than I, whom I loved and for whom I felt responsible. The air they were breathing became more toxic every day and they, in their naivety, barely even noticed. Slowly but surely, I abandoned all optimism, idealism, and faith. I crossed my fingers for the swift and clean demise of a thing I believed must have been dying long before I’d noticed. That is, until she touched his face. I had not seen them touch in months. But in that moment, I remembered my parents, who held hands. My parents, who loved parties. My parents, who laughed out loud.
It would be many months more before that tiny dribble of hope would give way to a slow thaw. There would be more ugly days and nights and accusations to come. But I soon began to realize that these days and nights did not belong to me and I made myself return to my own life. I went back North. I began a new semester. I stopped reading their emails and started reading Chekhov. And they, by the grace of luck and love, found their own winding way.
Though we could not see it then, the giving up was temporary. The hatred was a mask worn by the longing. The affection had not been lost, only buried beneath piles of neglect. And the sharp, icy glacier that had forced them worlds apart could only be melted, it seems, by a single soft touch and a dash of the common cold.
Originally published in glasses glasses’ “His & Hers” issue, March 2009.
