Leaving Home

Cassie shares a little bit about where she came from.

Last Sunday morning at work Sarah was telling me how heartbroken she was to leave her eighteen-year-old daughter at college two thousand miles from home.

“I keep going into her room, expecting to find her sprawled on the bed talking on the phone to her boyfriend,” Sarah said. “It’s funny. I didn’t realize what energy she sparked in the house until she wasn’t there anymore.”

Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes, and I couldn’t help wondering if my mother’s heart was broken when I left home for good at eighteen. I can still see her face right before I backed out the kitchen door. Her eyes were dull, her green and white gingham apron tied double around her waist. A wisp of dingy hair threatened to obscure her vision. She was cooking dinner – oxtail soup. One hand held the wooden spoon she used to stir the onions, celery and peppers that were frying in Crisco before getting thrown into the soup pot. The other hand held her glass of Coke, which I knew also had a good slug of rum in it. The soup would have a bottle of beer in it, but only after she had taken a long gulp from the bottle. Her cigarette burned down to the filter in the brown glass ashtray next to the sink.

I don’t think she believed me when I said I was going to Chicago with Billy. I don’t think she understood that I wasn’t coming back. She stared at me with her head cocked toward the rum and Coke, midway to her next sip, the wooden spoon poised above the frying pan.

“Do you understand me, Mama?” I asked her. “Do you understand that I’m leaving town?”

“Will you be home for dinner?” she asked.

“No, Mama. I won’t be here for dinner anymore,” I answered.

“Do you want me to make you a nice sandwich for the road?” she asked me, as if I were a child going on a field trip.

“No, Mama. I don’t need any food. I’m leaving now,” I said. I shifted my suitcase from one hand to the other. It felt heavier than when I packed it.

“Goodbye,” I said, taking a step toward her instead of away.

She put her drink down on the counter next to the ashtray, picked up her cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth away from the food. She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and picked up her drink again. Turning back to the stove, she said, “Well, goodbye then. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

I would have expected that comment from my father, but from my mother? Stunned, I backed up, suitcase in hand, until I stood with my back against the screen. I took one last look at my mother in her kitchen, stirring and drinking and smoking, her back to me, fixing dinner for her lost family. I pushed the door open and fled down the back steps of the farmhouse toward freedom, emancipation.

Was my mother’s heart broken? Not that I could tell.

Copyright by Liz Zuercher 2010