The Leaving

My mother ran away from home when I was 15. The Friday before Mother’s Day.  I got home from school and found a note on the kitchen table: If I’m not home by 5, make dinner.  I remembered she had mentioned something about a doctor’s appointment, so when 5 o’clock rolled around I heated up some leftovers that were left in the fridge. Though it was Friday and the usual Friday dinner mom made was tuna salad, seedless rye bread and a bowl of fried potatoes and scrambled eggs, my three younger sibs and I would have to settle for reheated macs from Thursday’s dinner.  Pulling out a pot and putting in just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot, I dumped in the leftovers, covered it and let it heat on a low flame.

My father, in addition to being a publisher, womanizer, world traveler and lost boy, was a gymnast and would spend at least three nights a week at the YMCA on 92nd Street doing floor exercises, hanging from rings and throwing himself on and around a set of parallel bars.  While he was hanging around the rings, among other places, my mother was home with us. Lucia ate her dinner with a wooden spoon next to her plate. She only drank water or coffee. Me and the sibs loved soda and she’d dutifully tote the heavy glass two liter bottles home by the half dozen, having my brother and I drag them into the house and line them up in the pantry. She never partook…only water or coffee. Black. Cleaning and reading were my mother’s thing. Cleaning the old Stickley house, making the kids clean various aspects of it on Saturday mornings and her reading of books.  When I got old enough I became a voracious reader myself, the convenience of my attic bedroom allowed me to dig through boxes upon boxes of her discarded paperbacks. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Story of O, The Fear of Flying and other over sexualized trashy novels of the late 70s. My introduction to sex came in the form of me word-stumbling into chapters of these yellowy paperbacks and getting stuck on the hows and whos and what the fucks of the paragraphs illustrating acts between adults that I was, up until that time, completely unaware existed. (Future me was grateful when Our Bodies, Our Lives cleared up a lot of questions).

My father appeared home early that Friday night. “Where’s your mother?” “I don’t know. She’s at the doctor’s or something. She left a note.” He took the note from me, breathed heavily  and grabbed the phone. “I’d like to report a stolen car. Yellow. Chevy Citation.” Hearing that, I went back to stirring the macs and setting the table. My need to disconnect from their personal drama had been ongoing but now their drama involved me stuck making dinner and setting the fucking table instead of making plans to sleep over my bff Lynne’s house or her mine and possibly go roller skating if we could get a ride – our usual Friday night thing. Skating was an escape for us. An escape from her bat-shit crazy mother and an escape from my  bat-shit crazy mother. And what’s more, we could skate around the rink and slap boys hands that we found cute who were standing at the railing during Girl Skate. And then during Boy Skate, we could stand at the railing and boys who were interested could slap our hands. And then if this hand-slapping went on long enough into the evening, maybe a Couples Only skate might be an option for one or both of us. It never really progressed to that, but it was always fun to play Monday Morning Quarterback on Saturday morning.

I found myself later that Friday night standing in the hallway outside my sister’s bedroom watching my father standing there sobbing because my mother was gone. For the first time since I was a very small child, I walked over to him and hugged him. We stood there in an embrace, both sobbing. As unsettling as it was, it was as intimate a moment as when we next hugged as he was dying of lymphoma 20 years later.  I went up to my attic bedroom, removed from the family, and cried some more.

The next morning, a Saturday morning, my father drove me to the supermarket. “Your mother shops on Saturday mornings for groceries. Here’s  fifty bucks. Get some food for the week. We’ll be sitting out here.”

I got out of the car, bills stuffed into my Sassoon jeans, and walked into Shop-Rite. I had only been grocery shopping in this store once before and my not too distant memory of it was my mother, dressed in jeans and a fur coat, reaching to a top shelf to grab a can of hot cocoa mix and her dumping the entire topless (unbeknownst to her) can of mix right over her head, jeans, fur coat and all. I couldn’t suppress my laughter and she couldn’t suppress her anger.

So, I grocery shopped with money in my pocket and not a clue. I bought all my favorites with no regard for practicality. The soft seedless rye bread, olive loaf, bananas, boxes of macaroni and jars of sauce, pre-made brownies and cans of chocolate and butterscotch puddings. American cheese, eggs, more American cheese. Grilled cheese and omelets were easy in a pinch. My youngest brother was 5, my sister was 10 and my other brother was 13. I rounded out the mess with a jar of peanut butter. I knew that was something they would eat.  I paid for my purchases, praying to the saints above that the $50 would cut it and I took my groceries and new found status as the feeder of the family, out to the car.

There they all were. My father listening to talk radio, staring straight ahead. My siblings fighting in their usual way – arguing about who was breathing too loudly or who was sitting in whose space or who kept repeating Q words over and over and over again. Queer, Queen, Quibble, Quiver, Quake, Quiet. Q words drove every one of us crazy.  I loaded the groceries into the back of the car and my youngest brother, bouncing around in that back area untethered, immediately started rummaging through looking for something to eat. Home we went and during the unpacking, my father seemed disappointed in the selections and as he tore through a bag of Lays Sour Cream and Onion chips, he pointed out that there really wasn’t any dinner food there.  I shrugged and went up to my attic room feeling badly that I had disappointed him. He had seemed so disappointed beginning when he’d walked in the door last night.

It turned out my mother had driven down to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with my father’s best friend, some dry cleaning magnate who sold us all the furniture from his Long Island mansion before he moved to Florida a few years before. My mother’s tall tale version was that she had found some female roommates that she rented an apartment with and that she worked retail and was happy. I don’t know how I know this. That Mother’s Day was a surreal one and I tucked the gift (another trashy novel of some sort I had found at the stationary store downtown) into the back of the top drawer of my bedroom’s second hand dresser from the dry cleaning magnate’s mansion.

My father told his version of the truth out loud to anyone who was in earshot, regardless of their age or relation to the family. Your mother has left and I don’t know why and we’ll all get through this.  Getting through this meant finding my friend Lynne’s widowed mother preparing stuffed peppers in my mother’s kitchen the next week. After dad hit on Lynne’s divorced pepper prepping mother some time shortly after she prepared the peppers, she never returned. Eventually Lynne and I were sneaking around because her mother wanted her to be far away from dad and his crazy household of newly motherless children.

Dad was overly enthusiastic about joining Parents Without Partners within weeks of my mother’s departure, involving my youngest brother in such activities as a trip to Wild West City and support groups for the kids of Parents Without Partners. It all seemed fucking ridiculous to me.

My mother did come home in November, the week before Thanksgiving. She came home as the conquering heroine there to rescue her bedraggled family from a year without a Santa Claus.  We picked her up from the airport that dreary day and there she was shining with her newly dyed blonde hair. No more severe, dark bun fastened daily to the back of her head, her Italian skin was even darker with a deep tan. I refused to make eye contact, smile or say a word.  We all walked through the airport and waited for her luggage.

Picking up the unfamiliar bags, she said hello to me specifically, calling me by my name. “Hello, Gen.”  I looked at her in her Members Only jacket and her jeans, tighter than my own, and walked on. “Geneiveve!!”  I looked at her. “Stop it. Talk to me. Grow up.”

I looked her squarely in the eye and in the very first act of consciously chosen confrontation, rebellion and outright truly expressed anger for the first time in my life, to my own mother, I said, “Why don’t YOU grow up?” The words pulled the breath from my body as they left my mouth. There was no wooden spoon that came flying towards me out of some secret Members Only zippered pocket..  There was no smash of an open palm into the side of my head. There was no “Fuck you. Sit down and shut the fuck up,” directed towards me, all of which I very well expected after showing such a display of my own emotions and opinions. There was nothing. We walked out of the airport, got into the car, drove home and started Thanksgiving preparations. Not another word was ever said about that seven month absence of our mother from our lives.