Habeas Corpus, Installment 3
Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under marriage, writings, Habeas corpus |
Since I’m still struggling to shake a head cold AND I’m repainting the dining room, I leave you with installment three of Habeas Corpus…
I hurdle down the highway, home to Northfield. I exit the freeway to get gas, retrieving enough change from the passenger seat floor to make a call from the pay phone. I hope Mom will be awake now, with the sun.
Hello, you have reached Marla and Don.
We are not available to take your call.
Please leave your name and your number at the beep and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
It’s the same recording it’s been for years. Mom speaking woodenly into the phone as if someone was holding a gun to her head, so strained and uncomfortable with technology. Soon it will be replaced by a message saying You’ve reached the Bensleys, the way divorced women, widows, people afraid of being robbed, leave suspiciously pluralistic messages on their answering machines.
No answer. She’s already at the gym in one of her many workout ensembles selected for its flattering color and cut, her hair pulled back to highlight a face carefully completed with smudge-proof eye liner and her trademark shade of lip color - Pink To The Club. She is sporting her iconic black head band, the one she has always used to harness the great mane of chestnut hair that has been the center of her universe for as long as I can remember. I have known my mother to spend whole afternoons considering her hair - its color, the length, pondering the merits of bangs and layers, discussing the acceptability of a grown woman wearing headbands.
Despite her efforts, age has not entirely spared her the usual etchings of time. There are a few world-weary creases about her mouth and eyes. But, at fifty two, she still emanates a sort of steady resolve, a glow of endurance earned putting up with my father who has always been gaining jobs and losing jobs and leaving for weeks at a time, usually in summer to drink and fish and scratch whatever manly itch needs scratching. He’s been at this version of fatherhood as long as I can remember and probably before then.
I straighten my old jeans, grown tight and faded, smoothing at mussed hair that I have allowed to get shaggy, all split ends, mousy and neglected. I swipe my credit card at the pump and can’t help but do the mental math. If I fill up three times today, that’s at least eighty five dollars. I am ashamed to be making calculations. It amounts to, God damn it Dad! Why’d you have to go and get cancer? It’s costing me a fortune.
Winding my way down interstate 91, I rehearse what version of things to tell my mother - about the car, about Chad, about my latest failure to measure up to the money and the optimism she has thrown at my college education, an investment she’s made in my future that has little to do with grades or thesis papers or career preparation. There is a certain life my mother has always imagined for me - children, commitment, a two bedroom house on a quiet street. She saw my going to college as a simple way to avoid the disappointment that is her life.
Like perfect hindsight, I can see now that going to Grafton with Chad wasn’t going to reveal the answer to any of life’s questions. But I moved there in a hurry when Chad suggested I go with him for the year. It seemed the only way out of boring that I could fathom at the time. I didn’t known that countrified Vermont is, in a lot of ways, worse than suburban Connecticut. To my twenty year old self, it felt like a romantic adventure, one that would surely help decide the rest of my life but maybe not in the way I’d hoped.
Chad is the kind of boy considered a jock – high school shortstop, running back, good looking enough in a gangly way. So it’s apt, this post-collegiate career as a guide for a wilderness program serving ‘at risk youth’, spending the summer running delinquents through four week stints in the Green Mountain National Forest, building temporary shelters and splitting wood for evening fires.
There were plenty of pretty, smart girls from established families of wealth and reputation in our graduating class of ‘95. The only distinction I can claim was that I was the only one desperate enough to go with him. There was Abigail Graf with her dancer’s poise and spotless GPA and Erin McLaughlin with the class spirit and the cheerleader’s smile, even Stacy Malloy with her black concert t-shirts and wild eyed brooding. But then, they all had futures beyond a boy named Chad and he must have seen that clearly.
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