Homecoming
The last time I saw my parents was at their house, the house of my upbringing, which they still keep on Gore. It was there I’d said goodbye, and for the next ten years I lived in New Jersey, where I still had college friends, and to which I’d made the half-country trek after my divorce on the advice of my mother, who’d said it wasn’t so bad, she had a cousin who lived near the “big Ferris wheel,” and my father, who’d dared me find the place as anything other than “the armpit of the nation.” By then they were already strangers to me, and coming home I recalled this in memories of their absence for the most part except for my mother’s occasional letter about the weather and the latest birds she’d discovered in the garden and my father’s once-a-year (composed on tax-refund day) in which he’d always expressed something of how my ways ran counter to theirs, such as my tendency to eat out (which I did maybe twice a year) and my little Plexiglas wading pool, which they called “extravagant.” As the lights of Blue Bonnet finally appeared, twinkling in the valley, a rush of excitement filled my chest such that I thought I might ask for their help with the unpacking, until I recalled that the last time (the day Gloria and I had moved into our house) my mother had effectively set everything up. So instead, I just turned my attention to how much I looked forwarded to seeing them again.
I awoke next morning on the floor of the apartment blinded by a light not unlike my father’s slide-projector beam, and though I’d overslept I was stirred by the kind of feeling that comes without care or concern. “Everything is at ease and as it should be,” I thought, as I came to, “as if all exists in concert.” Still wrapped in my jacket, which had made an effective blanket, I phoned my parents to announce my arrival back home.
“That’s good,” my father said (he’d recognized my name on Caller ID).
A vacuum cleaner was roaring in the background. I spoke up. “It was a smooth trip, thank goodness!” I said positively. “But you wouldn’t have believed the thunderstorms through Ohio!”
The vacuum shut off. “Here’s your mother,” my father said.
“Who’s this?” she said.
“Eddie. How are you, Mother?”
“Oh, all right,” she said.
“I’m here!” I said. “I’m back!”
“Back where?” she said.
“Home!” I said.
After a silence I asked her about our next-door neighbors, the Emersons, and she said they were dead. “Can we call you later? she said.
That afternoon I unpacked the TV so that I could watch the football game, the apartment needed some sound, and was asleep before the end of the first quarter. Later a loud sound wakened me, which I figured was my mother’s ring tone, but it was a car alarm. I called them.
“You unpacked?” my mother said.
I announced that from the moment I’d arrived at the apartment, late last night, I’d been hard at work setting it up, and that there were just a few more boxes to go and it didn’t matter that I probably wouldn’t catch up on sleep till tonight or even tomorrow night, in other words, until everything was all hunky-dory; and I changed the subject only when I was certain she’d stopped listening.
“So, how are you, Mother?” I said.
“Oh, all right,” she said. “Here’s your father.”
“Who’s this?” he said.
“Eddie. How are you, Father?” I said.
“How’s your hobby these days?” he said.
“That was my advertising agency,” I said, “my business.”
“Your wife calls it a hobby,” he said.
“She’s not my wife anymore, Father, and I sold it. But I’m here, Father, in Blue Bonnet.”
“Here’s your mother.”
“Well you go finish your unpacking, Edward, we’ll talk later,” she said, and hung up.
Evening fell. Exhausted and dusty, I fetched the yogurt and trail mix that were still in my backpack and inhaled them sitting on the foyer tile under the Etruscan arch. By then I’d also unpacked my books (though I had no shelving; in the other place, they’d been built-in), as well as some of the essentials like canned dinners and T.P. Next day I spent the morning Googling job sites. Then I called them.
“We should get together,” I said. “How about dinner?”
“Save your money,” my mother said.
“No, I mean, my place,” I said.
“You finish unpacking,” she said.
“It’ll be done by then.”
“Your father and I will be busy by then.”
“Busy with what?” I said.
“Bratwurst,” she said. “Already thawed.”
“Bring it over, then,” I said.
Later, after chili in the can, I realized I hadn’t been outside for two days, so I went downstairs. On the landing I stretched and breathed in deeply the blissful Blue Bonnet air, and in my ecstasy kept my arms stretched for a whole minute before going back in. Next day a pipe burst in the bathroom, so I couldn’t call them until the evening.
“What made you come back to this dump?” my father said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I lived on the beach once, too,” my father continued. “Used to get browner than poop. The babes would constantly have their tentacles all over me.”
“You were in the Army, Stuart,” my mother interrupted, on the other line. “There were no babes in the Army.”
My father hung up.
“Any chance you could drop by and give me a bit of a hand, Mother?” I said.
“You told me you were done unpacking,” my mother said.
“I am,” I said. “Just odds and ends.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Got a bridge party tonight.”
Next morning I took a long walk with the happy idea of reacquainting myself with the old sights and sounds, and mid-course rendezvoused to pay them a personal visit. Neither was in, so I wrote a note on a scrap of McDonald’s sack that had blown up on their yard, and put it in their mailbox.
Two days passed. (I’d been concerned I wasn’t making enough progress in the job search, and besides, there’d still been the phone and gas and electric and cable to call.) I called on the third day.
“I knew you’d be back,” my father said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You’re no longer there, are you?” he said.
“Well, no, I—”
“It was an armpit, I just knew it!” he said.
“Oh let the boy be, Father,” my mother said.
“Told you so, Mother,” my father said.
“You ever ride the big Ferris wheel?” my mother said.
“No, Mother,” I said.
I let a week go by to see if they’d call me. I did a lot of sleeping then, but I kept my phone close to my ear. It rang twice, both calls from solicitors. The next week I called them.
“Your father wants to know whether it was worth a shiny penny living the last quarter century eighteen hundred miles away,” my mother said.
“Not twenty-five years, Mother, ten,” I said. “Listen, can we get together?”
“We’re so busy,” my mother said.
“But Mother, I came back. I’m back now.”
“Listen, Edward,” my mother said, “you finish your unpacking or whatever it is you need to do.”
I thought I heard a twitter in her voice. “I finished unpacking more than a week ago, Mother,” I said.
“I’ve got to go now,” my mother said.
“Can’t you see your mother has to go now?” my father said, from the other line.
A few days later, as I dialed I bit my lip. I got their voicemail message about having left for the winter for their Florida place, so I stopped biting.
I didn’t call them again.
The End