Divorce

 

On a Sunday morning, it might have been fall or spring, my parents woke from their sleep. What was the conversation like for them that morning as they woke, for the last time, in the same bed? In the same room. In the same house. Was it conversation or was it argument? Did it re-affirm what they were about to do? Did they question themselves? Did the sheets feel any different? Did the air smell different? How long had it been stale? Half the day went by before they called us upstairs. What went through THEIR minds? 

For me, the mind decides what it remembers. It was the in-between type of weather where some of the house windows could be open…where t-shirts worked as long as a sweatshirt was handy. The three windows of the computer room were slightly ajar. My brother, sister and myself had been called to the computer room by our parents. It was an odd request, one that interfered with the amount of daylight my brother and I would have left to frolic around our yard and cul de sac looking for that fine line, presumably written in chalk, between fun and mischief. 

In the corner of the make-shift computer room there sat photo albums that could be called as star-witness to the happiness that had surreptitiously woven its way through my first 11 years. My brother, my sister, me, cross-legged, sat on the floor looking up and around, eyeing our mother seated in one of the computer chairs that raised and lowered with the handle that looked like the end of a screwdriver. I can’t imagine what my mother was thinking as she swiveled slightly in that chair…what my father was thinking as he entered the room. Did they know they were going to lie? 

Separated. Separation. A break. Time apart. Happiness…thinking of you…just a break…just for a little while. Questions? My thoughts scattered. It was like taking a deep breath and getting no air. Choking but without the audible gasping. Words were a blur. Words were a novelty, a parlor trick, insignificant. Words hurt. Words cut. Yes, one question: Divorce? No, emphatic no!

Had it been days that they were planning this? Weeks? What were the days like for them? Had they been trying to have this conversation with us for weeks and couldn’t work up the strength? Can I recall another Sunday, another day, cloaked with a hazy laze of uncertainty, when they tried to cull us into that room and slaughter our childhood? Questions. Only questions! 

I don’t remember now if I cried right away. I don’t remember my initial reaction. I remember walking my father down the stairs. Walking through the garage, to his car, that Subaru hatchback, the trunk stained with bleach from where the Clorox bottle leaked years ago; covered with that afghan rug. Was the car packed already? I know I didn’t think about that then. But now, had I not been punch drunk, I could have known the extent to the pre-meditation. 

As We stood at the edge of the garage watching him back out of the drive-way, I was keenly aware of being embarrassed. I assumed everyone was staring from their windows, lurkers, shadowy figures judging from the confines of their happy marriages. As the Subaru faded in the distance of Cromwell Road, my father off to his parent’s house, we, my brother and sister and mother, slunk heavily up the stairs, all those stairs; 15 or so in the garage to the inside door, another 20 or so to the top of the second floor…oh and that one step from den to kitchen. Each step so heavy until we flung ourselves onto my parent’s (now, presumably, my mother’s) bed. The bed with slats below the mattress, a great place for hiding the Christmas gifts until the year I discovered them.

We sat on that bed crying. I half-remember crying and also forcing tears to match those of my siblings. Was I sad? Whose side would I take? So many questions, no answers. In the faded day’s last burst of sunlight, I remember my last thoughts, how a perfectly good afternoon of play was ruined. How could they ruin my afternoon?