The Child Left Behind II

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The Child Left Behind

    I remember the last time I saw my mother walk. With her loose fitting jeans and swaggering, 70’s step, she walked feminist and confident-like.  We kids walked wondering and uncertain-like. We wondered with each step when she’d leave or ever come back as we sauntered around the house those last days uncertainly.
    Afterward, on the toy-strewn living room floor where we played, I gathered up all the junk from the mess we’d made.  I hid them out of sight in the closet.  Then I vacuumed the cookie crumbs and potato chips, picked up the empty cups and plates and wiped the dirty coffee table.  I didn’t realize it was this bad.  I was nine and hid my childhood in the closet with the toys. 
    My mother no longer walks now.  Matter-of-fact, she sits in the same living room where we used to play and watches TV a lot, just like we kids used to all day.  The junk is gone, as are the toys, cookie crumbs and dirt.  But the potato chips from my step-father still lodge themselves in between the recliner’s cushions where my real father used to sit.  I look at the recliner as if he’s still there and check it occasionally to see if I can find a coin or two just like he used to give us for candy.  I feel the tension on the armrests as I sit down and pull the back lever like he did when he came home from a long day’s work.
    “I think the dishwasher’s broke.  Can you take a look?” my mother complained to him.   
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    “Not now” my father said.  “It’s probably just over loaded”.   
    “Can’t you ever do anything around here?” she intoned louder.
    “I will, honey.  I’m watching the game” he said with a sigh. 
    Then later, as we lay in bed upstairs, the storm broke with a thunder of shouts.  We covered our faces in the blankets wondering.  None of us knew why.
    “Go to hell, Nancy!” my father bellowed.
    “Don’t get angry at me, Ron!” my mother yelled.
    “What the hell do you expect from me!” he shouted again and THUMP, the dull thud of his fist punched something soft.
    “You son-of-a b______” my mother yells.  “Don’t you come near me”, she says and slams a door.  Of course he wouldn’t hit her, being an officer and a gentleman.  Hitting was usually for us kids.
    “God d___m it!” my father curses again and the front door slams as we hear the car squeal out of the driveway and take off down the road.
    The last sound is the bathroom door banging shut and the bathtub running.  She’d found her safe place, which was bubble baths and a smoke.  The barricade protected her from the reality that seemed to be hardening the softness she craved.
    This craving grew as she barricaded herself from this reality more and more.  It iced over one frigid day on a cold December evening as she walked out that same bathroom
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door with her Jane Fonda hairdo smelling of perfume and wearing her black fur coat.  We watched her in her knee-length boots trample a trail in the snow towards the Swedish man’s gold Cadillac as he waited for her in our driveway.  The ice hardened us.
    My father chain smoked and gripped the recliner’s armrests harder.  My brothers hid outside and threw snowballs at the Swede’s car.  The dog sneaked into the master’s bedroom to crawl under the bed as if awaiting the storm to break as my sister complained “Why do I have to do the laundry?” Then I sneaked to the picture window overlooking the driveway to flip a little hesitant wave but only to turn back and see my father crying.  “Sunny, what am I going to do?” he sobbed to me as if the wave meant the confidence was gone.  The distance between them grew further apart. 
    I wondered at the distance between us and what to do, too.  I also wondered at the dishes and the junk that seemed to be islands growing around the house.  There were Lay’s Potato Chips to eat and cans of Spagettios and Fluffy peanut butter minus dinner.  For the time being my father bought us pot pies and more snacks and treated us to McDonald’s.  Then he sat on the same recliner chain smoking and watching TV, again. 
      He knew that this night she was gone, forever.  She had walked out of our lives for good and trampled the toys we forgot to put away on the living room floor.  After throwing them in the closet, I went outside and made a snowman

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with my brothers in hopes she would return and take notice.  We decorated the tree and hung the Christmas lights in hope of a brighter Christmas Eve.  But then it came and went and the icicles hung from the gutters above the outside picture window like a dark cave.  That’s when we hung an effigy of the Swede above her bedroom door in case she returned.  Our father’s image loomed larger.
    This image I couldn’t see anymore, though.  I tried to hold on to age13.  Somehow I let go.  The distance divided us and when I called at the age of thirty three asking for help he only said “I don’t know you anymore”.  Yet I heard he remarried and eventually made CEO.  Then he retired at fifty-five and moved to a cabin in the north woods to relax just like he’d said he would.
    But my mother’s image still remains.  She’s a retired school teacher though they gave her the golden glove.  This meant they wanted her off their hands due to her multiple sclerosis.  She couldn’t walk as confidently as she used to, and stumbled now and then.  She brought the chow-chow named Kiko for a guardian and the littlest dog named Bear for comfort when she cleared her desk.  They were her kids as this time no one waved and she said goodbye without anyone looking as she took a severance just like the house and settlement my father left after the divorce long before.
    It didn’t take long for the divorce to happen, though.  The storm of shouts stopped, as did the banging and slamming and thumping.  None of us could tell when she’d

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leave.  She stayed in my sister’s room talking to the Swede on the phone but still nursed the newborn on the living
room couch where she now sits.  I remember seeing her naked breast as she fed my baby brother there one night.  I didn’t realize that was it.  The separation between us began then.
    He was the last baby of seven.  The blanket hid him from us though his fists poked out and clenched like  prunes at something ungraspable.  There was nothing tangible for him to cling to when she left him clinging to the crib at six months of age.  We siblings pitched in to change his diapers as we set him on our father’s bed and watched TV.  Occasionally we rolled him on his back and rubbed his tummy to make him smile as we tried to cling to the bed for support just like him. 
    But one by one we fell off.  One brother fell into dope, another crime and a sister, anorexia.  I fell into emptiness.  This emptiness I filled with the bottle at the age of thirteen.
    The emptiness accumulated with the years. What there is in between is doors and more doors opening and shutting and the congestion of traffic down streets of neon red signs and cities as turbid as the sea which is where the journey took me, or overseas and into a destination unknown as I stepped off the plane into Asia.  The rising sun shone in Japan and the morning calm set softly in Korea and somehow the hardness of reality melted.  Here there was a united family and emptiness, filled. 
    Yet here there was also night horrifically dark.  I turned from the light and touched its darkness.  A knife could’ve
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cut through it easily as flesh or a sword its ideologies.  I learned that ideologies are what make the difference and
what separate us.  Their origins begin with beliefs, some of which lead to mistrust and failures.  Our relationships begin like this, or with belief in trust, and then cut us asunder when trust is lost and you feel no longer one flesh, but two.
    I was caught between these beliefs lying now on a cold, concrete prison floor in China.  The emptiness led me to alcoholism.  You can’t see the light from the darkness of alcoholism, just as you can’t see out the window’s iron bars and screens.  The dim lights diminish you and your view.  The sword’s pierced you and there’s truth to bear.  The 5’x 12’ cell hides you from seeing the public face you once displayed and the one in the mirror though you know the stubble’s gray and you’re not a kid anymore, or that youth is gone.  Who you thought you were ideologically and civilly is gone, too, because here you crawl and sit and sleep on the floor again.  You crawl to the hole in the prison door for your life to return and this in the form of daily bread.
    That’s when you know something’s part of you out there.  There’s another ideology that made you.  You see through that 5’x12’ cell walls with all your heart as far as you can and call to it.  You wonder if it’s the child whom you wandered too far from and injured by taking revenge on them, those ignoble savages you saw outwardly.  Then you see inwardly and the face within yourself, which is even clearer.

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    Home again, I see her and this ideology more clearly now as she’s sitting in a wheel chair.  I push her in it along the seaside park some mornings with the two dogs Kiko and Bear.  There’s hope now we’re here and even more so by the sea.  It’s unlike any other place on earth, for here you can see the horizon unobstructed and breathe the sea’s saltiness like the first breath you took exiting the womb.  You know there’s nothing but life out there and the unification complete.  Your life’s reborn, too.  The journey of the day is just waiting for you.  All you need to do is get up and walk and take that first step forward.
    Your direction’s changed and you crossrd yourself.  You switched identities because none filled the void.  You return to yourself and them.  So you sit again as a man on a new recliner next to your ailing mother and watch TV just as your father did.
    “How are you feeling, honey?” she says, just like when you were a kid.
    “Good, mom”, you say sheepishly.
    “Are you doing okay?”
    “Yeah, everything’s great” you say truthfully, because you know you’re here and life’s as real and tangible as that blanket between you and your baby brother.  This is where you began.  There are fine cookie crumbs ingrained in the carpet and snowflakes covering her tracks and darkness dividing the way back home but spring came and released you from that cell and you knew that on the living room floor was one toy left you didn’t put away.  It was the child you left behind.