The Road at My Door

by Lori Windsor Mohr

  7 Downward Trajectory

  Kit’s letter had been a surprise, since she could barely speak a civil word when we shared the same bedroom. I guessed being thousands of miles away in another country made it safe for her to be nice. The next day after school, I wrote back, hoping she would get it before Christmas.

  December 15, 1963

  Dear Kit,

  Life in Colombia sure sounds different. I would die not being able to listen to the Beatles! Do people in South America know that President Kennedy was shot? I’ve never seen Mom and Dad so worried. As of this writing, we haven’t been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. I sure wish we had a shelter. Lyndon Johnson is our President now. He says there won’t be a war.

  Things around here are pretty much the same since you left, without the fighting (no offense). Dad is busier than ever at work, which is good in case the Russians attack. FD is here all the time it seems. I bet Father Sebastian must know he has a secret life outside the rectory.

  Speaking of FD, I took your advice. I’m disappearing as much as I can when he’s around. I like having our bedroom to myself since I’m in exile most of the time.

  The first semester of sophomore year is almost over. I love being in Brother McPherson’s Honors English class again, not because of him or anything, though he sure is cute for a clergyman. We read lots of poetry and even have to write our own sometimes.

  I’ve been going to the Bay Theater on Saturdays with Francie. I don’t care that much what’s playing, as long as I get to be with my friends.

  Anyway, that’s what’s new here. I’ll ask Dad to help me mail you some movie magazines. That way, your Troy Donahue education can continue.

  Merry Christmas, big sister!

  Love, Reese

  P.S. Send me a picture so I can see what you look like fat. It’s hard to imagine.

  P.P.S. I included the poem I wrote about you and Mom. We were supposed to use the structure of Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice. I got an A- because Brother McPherson thought I could come up with something stronger for the last word. Oh well. At least you don’t have lice, which is the only other word I could think of.

  Embers

  Some people scream, their souls on fire,

  Some freeze like ice;

  From what the screaming does require

  I think there’s more than just the fire,

  And if I were to roll the dice

  Hoping it was not too late

  I wouldn’t find just fire or ice

  But embers burning soft and bright.

  *

  FD started referring clients to Mom. If I heard voices in the bedroom/office after school, I was to go straight to my room. Mom said her office had to look professional, and that included the living room, so I needed to be careful about not leaving anything around, including myself.

  With Dad at work and Mom busy with clients or conferring on the phone with FD, I felt more isolated than ever. Adding to the gloom, Mom drew the front drapes by ten every morning. She said her clients didn’t want to be seen by the neighbors. I wasn’t sure how the neighbors would know they were clients. I also wondered how someone helping people have healthy relationships explained secretive meetings behind drawn drapes. At any rate, I steered clear of Mom and holed up in my room until Dad came home from work.

  Dad came up with the idea of painting the bedroom so it would feel more like mine. One Saturday he and FD spent the day scraping the Marlboro flip-top boxes off the ceiling. By the time they finished, the only thing left was a leproscopic pattern in the shape of a K from the clumps of glue and chipped paint where the boxes resisted eviction.

  The room had already felt lonely without Kit. Removing the Marlborough K was like finishing my sister off for good, as if she never existed at all. I wished we had left the K on the ceiling. Taking it down didn’t make me feel it was my room. It made me feel sad.

  Kit had been with me every day of my life. We were a pair, the way Mom and Dad were a pair. Her place was beside me—in the car, in church, on the floor watching The Twilight Zone, across the table at dinner. Now I faced an empty chair.

  Mom’s banishing Kit had gutted our family. She and Dad had lost a daughter. I had become an only child. We felt my sister’s absence as profoundly as we’d felt her presence. Mom hadn’t considered the devastating impact of such a loss, the difference between fire and ice immeasurable in destructive power.

  *

  Christmas break arrived, which meant I needed to disappear all day. Hiding out in my room wouldn’t cut it. Sooner or later I would need to eat, which required running into clients coming, going, or waiting for their appointment.

  My solution was to bundle up and head to the beach, the only soul in sight most days. Even wrapped in my towel and hooded sweatshirt, most days I froze until the sun peeked through for a few hours. By late afternoon the breeze brought fog, grey air hanging like a harbinger of doom.

  The sense of dread weighing me down had grown stronger every day. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen. It didn’t make sense though. For some reason, Mom had been in a better mood lately. Christmas was around the corner. I chalked it up to that. She loved decorating the house and playing nonstop Christmas music on the Hi Fi.

  No one mentioned the fact that it would be the first time Kit wouldn’t be with us. Mom didn’t seem to notice. Christmas Day the house would buzz with cheer and Scotch-drinking priests the same way it had last year and the year before as FD and his friends enjoyed the holiday in our home.

  Mom and Dad had planned to throw a New Year’s Eve party, a three-pronged bash to celebrate Mom’s thirty-seventh birthday and my upcoming fifteenth in January. Mom would cook roast beef, mashed potatoes and fresh green beans. Dad would bartend, mixing Black Russians, FD’s favorite drink. I would stay up until midnight, enjoying the late night crepes, Mom’s specialty, and a glass of champagne to ring in the New Year.

  The evening was a raging success. Mom’s bubbly energy served as an elixir far more potent than Dad’s Black Russians. Watching her work her magic from the wings, I couldn’t help wonder if the dread hanging over me had been a figment of my imagination. Everything felt right. Mom was in her element, a trapped animal set free, basking in the pleasure of staying one step ahead of armed hunters.

  Even Dad had a good time, the drinks no doubt boosting hope that Mom might be happy like this tomorrow and the next day and the next. Seeing her that night I could almost understand what had made him fall in love with her, him and FD both.

  It was more than her beauty. Mom made the world spin.

  I knew that because she affected me the same way.

  *

  What happened next shouldn’t have surprised me. But it did.

  The third of January was especially cold, even for winter. It was the last day of Christmas break and the end of my long lonely exile at the beach. I tugged the strings of my sweatshirt hood and tightened it under my chin. The folded beach towel under me hadn’t helped much. The sand felt hard and cold, like sitting on the edge of a bathtub waiting for it to fill.

  The ocean was turbulent, dark, the sun overpowered by a brooding sea meeting the sky in a narrow horizon. My feeling of dread had come back, worse than the hangover Dad described New Year’s Day. I pushed the feeling down, returning as I had countless times since the party to the image of Mom happy.

  The thin horizon disappeared into ocean as the sun dipped behind it. I broke my own rule and headed home an hour early. By the time I reached the back gate, drizzle had turned to steady rain. I could almost imagine the feel of a hot shower defrosting me.

  Taking the back steps two at a time, I yanked off my soaked shoes and burst through the kitchen door. It hit the wall. I cringed, certain Mom and her client had heard it. I grabbed a tea towel from the drawer and dried off a little so I wouldn’t drip on the kitchen floor. That’s when I noticed the house was unusually quiet. The coffee pot was empty, clean like it hadn’t been used all day. Mom and clie
nts and coffee went together.

  I tiptoed into the living room. The drapes were open, which was odd for a weekday, a client day. I returned to the kitchen to strip out of my wet clothes and toss them in the washer. I would have to sneak by Mom’s room in my bra and underwear.

  A patch of white on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was a letter with no address, only a name—Dad’s. I didn’t move a muscle. The same fear and confusion that had overwhelmed me the night I discovered Mom and FD washed over me now.

  I walked through the living room and kept going to Mom’s office. As I had a thousand times, I pressed my ear to the door, willing the murmur of voices to come through. Nothing. I slowly pushed it open.

  Mom’s typewriter wasn’t on the desk. The shelf above had been cleared of books and client folders. I stood in front of the double closet doors and tightened my hands on the knobs, preparing for the worst, then pulled. Empty.

  Mom was gone.

  I sat on the sofa bed, my thoughts connecting in slow motion. The sense of foreboding I had carried so long had finally revealed its source. For two years I had felt the low rumble of warning, like the build-up of stress at a fault line. For two years I had known it would only be a matter of time before the surface cracked and the earth beneath my feet would crumble.

  I returned to the kitchen on wobbly legs and opened the letter.

  January 3, 1964

  Dear Walker,

  I’m leaving you because I have to. This has been a long time coming. You and I are strangers to each other and I cannot, will not, live my life this way. You work long hours and even when you’re home, you don’t have the slightest interest in me or my work. I’ve thought about leaving for a long time. With Kit gone and Clarice old enough to take care of herself, the time is right. I will die if I have to go on like this. Please don’t try to find me. In time you’ll see this is best for both of us.

  Vivienne

  My eyes glazed over as I stared at the kitchen cabinets, wondering how Mom had decided on the particular shade of yellow.

  It was after six. I folded the thing and shoved it back in the now-unsealed envelope. The house had grown dark and I was still in my wet clothes, numb to the cold.

  My fragmented thoughts no longer collided in a jumble of confusion. They came to me in the straight lines of deductive reasoning. If only I had looked more closely, I would’ve seen it. The truth had been there all along, obscured enough to keep me from seeing what I didn’t want to see—Mom would leave us.

  She would bolt from her life as a housewife, her mind spring-loaded for escape like a Jack-in-the-Box just waiting for the right moment to burst free. That moment had come.

  How sanctimonious I’d felt, accusing Dad of sticking his head in the sand. The signs had been obvious if we’d chosen to read them—Mom’s restlessness, wanting to be anywhere other than with us—first in her novels, then grad school, then work; the dichotomy between who she was as a housewife and who she was as a career woman tearing her apart; her gradual progression away from what she had to do toward what it was she loved. It all made sense now.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t choose. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle both. Mom was the most capable woman I knew. It was that she had married and started a family right out of college. In 1950 that’s what women did. She had chosen Dad based on the strength of their physical attraction, hoping it would be enough. Dad had been the first to admit he had never understood his wife emotionally or intellectually.

  Had the Pill been available Mom never would have chosen motherhood. She was no good at it and smart enough to recognize that. The life she had lived up to now had been chosen by default.

  What my mother dreamed of was the fantasy life she had created for Kit built around career and travel and a man with whom she felt deeply connected. A life with FD.

  Dad walked in the front door. “Hey, where is everybody? Peanut? Why are you sitting in the dark? The back door is wide open. Did you push it all the way closed when you came in? It’s colder than an ice bucket in here!”

  He flipped on the light and walked past me to close the back door. A feeling of panic far worse than being trapped in Greg Stewart’s bomb shelter hit me. I had to give Dad the letter.

  He took off his watch and set it in its usual place on the counter. “What’s the matter? Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s not home.”

  “She leave a note? You’re soaking wet. How long have you been sitting here?”

  I gave him the letter.

  He held it for a long time, just looking at his name in her handwriting. “I’m going to change,” he said in a flat voice. “You should get out of those wet clothes.”

  I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. I sat and waited for my father’s reaction to the end of the world. What would happen now? Ten minutes later, he came back to the kitchen and opened the cupboard. “What do you want for dinner?”

  WHAT DO I WANT FOR DINNER? “Dad, what’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

  He stood with arms outstretched holding the cabinet doors. From behind he looked like a man who’d been crucified and left hanging on the cross. I repeated my question. Dad walked to the table where I sat like a lump and dropped in the chair, rubbing his forehead as if the answer could be massaged out. “Mom isn’t coming home, Peanut. I mean…not tonight.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Reese, your mother and I…these last few weeks I had no idea she was so unhappy. This is all my fault.”

  “Where is she, Dad?” I felt sick. Why didn’t he know? “You must have some idea.”

  “Jack must know. I’ll call after dinner.”

  “Call now!”

  “He’ll be in the middle of evening vespers. What do you want to eat?”

  He could’ve spoken in Russian from the way I gawked at him. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, we have to eat something.”

  But we didn’t. We sat and stared at our food. Two bowls of Campbell’s Split Pea soup stared back.

  RIIIINGGG!

  Dad and I jumped at the phone ringing. My heart stopped. Mom. It was a wrong number.

  Dad retreated to the bedroom and shut the door. I followed and pressed my ear to the door, hardly able to hear over my own heartbeat.

  “She has to have gone somewhere she can stay a while, Jack. She’s taken all her clothes, toiletries, books, even her typewriter. I don’t even know if she has any cash. The checkbook’s in the drawer. What is she doing for money?” Dad’s voice cracked. He sounded more distraught than I’d ever heard him, even when he found out Kit was pregnant.

  “She must’ve confided in you. Who else would she turn to? I have to twist her arm twice a year to call her mother in Canada. Where could she be? I’m sure she made you promise not to tell me, but you have to, Jack. You can’t leave me out of this. I’ll go crazy not knowing if she’s alright.”

  But FD didn’t know. Dad didn’t come out of the bedroom, so I took a shower and got into my pajamas. Thirty minutes later, he was sitting on the couch in the dark. I sat down next to him. Neither of us said a word. An hour later I said goodnight. He didn’t answer.

  The next morning I got up for school and Dad was still slumped on the couch, his face unshaven and drawn. He startled and looked confused, disoriented. A mosaic of red had turned his brown eyes muddy.

  “I’m not going in to the office today. You go ahead and catch the bus with Francie.”

  “Okay. You going to eat something?”

  “I’ll have a bowl of cereal later.”

  We had this same brief exchange every morning for a week. Dad called Rezolin and explained he needed to take a few days off.

  *

  “Reese. Reese. Reeeese, wake up!” Dad stood over me, shaking my shoulder. The light in the hallway cast a shadow distorting him into a faceless hulk from the netherworld.

  I sat up abruptly. “What’s wrong? Is Mom home?”

  “No. But I know where she is. I don’t know why I didn
’t think of it sooner. She’s in San Francisco. I’m sure of it. Her college roommate lives there, Jane Sommers. I dug through the Christmas trash and found her card. She wrote in her note that Mom could visit any time. C’mon, get dressed.” He turned on the desk lamp and tossed my jeans on the bed.

  “It’s the middle of the night, Daddy. Shouldn’t we wait until morning?”

  “The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll find Mom. If we drive all night, we should get there around nine tomorrow morning.”

  “You haven’t slept much. Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to be driving?”

  “I’m not going to. You are.”

  “Me! I don’t know how to drive! I’m not even old enough to get my permit yet!”

  “There’s nothing to it, just put your foot on the gas and steer. I’ll bring a cushion so you can see better and reach the pedals. I’ll be right beside you. It’s a straight shoot all the way up and this time of night the coast highway will be deserted. I’ve made sandwiches and a thermos of coffee in case you get sleepy.”

  Fifteen minutes later I met Dad in front. He sat with the car idling, pointed in the right direction. I climbed in beside him. I put my foot over his on the accelerator like he said. He withdrew his and released the emergency break, then slid to the passenger side.

  I drove up the street to Sunset Boulevard and turned left. Two minutes later we reached the ocean. A right onto Pacific Coast Highway and just like that we were on our way to San Francisco at one-fifteen in the morning.

  It was a chilly, clear night, a half moon flickering in ribbons of silver on the water. I was grateful having the moon to keep me company. We hadn’t been on the coast five minutes before Dad rested his head on the window and fell asleep, right after telling me San Francisco was just shy of four hundred miles from Los Angeles, a seven hour drive with no traffic.

  Dad probably got more uninterrupted hours of sleep than he’d had in weeks. I kept my eye on the gas gauge like he’d told me. Once it got below a quarter tank I took the off ramp into downtown San Luis Obispo and pulled into the Texaco station. Dad’s wallet was on the seat.