“Oh,” she said. “You’re home?” There was activity in the background, people shouting. At first, he pictured her subbing at the elementary school or the junior high, answering her cell phone in front of a room of bored or hostile young suburbanites as they misbehaved and switched identities and asked when their real teacher would come back. But it was Saturday. My mother was working her volunteer shift at the food pantry for the homeless shelter. How altruistic! He imagined her stacking cans of soup, wearing an apron, a self-righteous expression, and also her wedding ring.
“Yes,” he said. “I am home, Natalie. And I think you better come home, too. In fact, you better come home right away.”
She must have picked up on his tone. He said she was silent for a long stretch. Even with the background noise, he could hear her breathing on the other end.
“Yes,” she said finally. “We need to talk.”
He laughed. He actually laughed. He was nervous, he said, freaked out, standing in their bedroom, looking in the mirror at his own middle-aged face and realizing just how much was about to change. My parents had been married for twenty-six years. My mother was a junior in college when they met, my father in his second year of law school. Their union had survived early parenthood, a flooded basement, and the deaths of both of their parents. They had been allies against my sister’s first boyfriend, Kyle, who had been nice enough at first, but who threatened to set himself on fire in our driveway after my sister broke up with him. My parents were married when Reagan was president, when the first Bush was president, when Clinton was president, and then the second Bush as well. They had planned vacations, funerals, and my sister’s wedding, together.
“Oh my dear,” he said, almost tenderly, his voice wistful, or at least it was each of the several times he told this story to me. “Oh Natalie,” he said to my wayward mother. “I’m afraid you have no idea.”
From this point on, the story gets even more slippery. Though unsolicited, my mother and father have each given me a different account of the Day of the Sleeping Roofer, and what happened after she came home. My father said he confronted her with the note, the shirt. My mother said he didn’t need to. He said she sat down at the dining room table, still wearing her long wool coat. She did not appear exactly devastated. If anything, he said, she seemed disoriented, her big eyes staring at the striped wallpaper and crown molding that she herself had picked out and nailed on, as if she’d never seen them before. My father repeatedly emphasized that she looked a little demented—her hat crooked over her curly hair, her cheeks bright red from the cold. He said she didn’t have anything to say for herself. He said he watched her stare at the wallpaper for a while, her runny nose unwiped, and then he went upstairs to get his travel bag, which was, conveniently, still packed, ready to go. He carried it back downstairs, past my catatonic mother, and out the side door to the garage, his heart, he said, a brick in his chest.
My mother agreed, according to my father. Or at least she understood he was right. She left for a hotel. She took only a suitcase the first time she left. Five minutes later, she came back for Bowzer, and all of Bowzer’s medicine, worried, she said, because my father was unfamiliar with the dog’s complicated care routine. My father admits she was contrite and dignified in both of her exits. Of course, he added, with no real malice, she could afford to be contrite at that point. She still had her credit cards.
The next afternoon, forty-two miles away, I went on my second date with Tim Culpepper. We went sledding on dinner trays I stole from the dining hall, and then spent an hour making out in his car, the heaters on high, Nick Drake on the little stereo. After he dropped me off, I was still so happy, and smiling so much, that people next to me on the elevator looked uncomfortable. When I got to my room, my phone rang. I had to tuck the cold dinner trays under one arm to get my phone out of my coat pocket. It was my sister calling from San Diego to tell me about the Sleeping Roofer. I stood still in my doorway, the light of the hallway bright, my room still dark, the phone pressed against my ear. My mittens were wet from the snow.
The dinner trays fell on the toe of my boot, and then clattered on the linoleum floor. I said, “What? No they aren’t.” I had just talked to my mother the week before. She’d been worried about my scratchy throat, my sniffy nose. It was just a cold, but she’d wanted me to go to the doctor. She didn’t think I was getting enough sleep.
“I just got off the phone with Dad,” Elise said. “He’s already talked to his lawyer.”
It was a typical Elise response: irrefutable, no way out. I did not argue again. But when she told me about the Sleeping Roofer, I silently shook my head, not believing her at all. I could not reconcile the idea of it with all I knew of my mother. She was not a careless person. She smiled a lot, but not just at men. She smiled at old ladies. She smiled at squirrels. She was not a seductive flirt. Our neighbor, Mr. Shunke, would whistle at her when she was out gardening, but she would only roll her eyes. She wore comfortable shoes. She read magazines that had mostly recipes. And more importantly, she had been my mother. I had grown up with her kindness, taking it for granted, using it up.
“I have to go,” Elise said. She wasn’t crying, but her voice was quiet. “Charlie’s home, and we have dinner plans with someone at my firm. I’ll call you later.”
I was still holding the phone, staring at it, when Tim Culpepper knocked on my door. I’d left my hat in his car. He held it out to me, looking uncertain and very tall. I said, “My parents are getting a divorce.”
He came in and sat next to me on my bed, and spent much of the rest of the evening listening to me say, in so many different ways, that I was just really, really surprised, that I had not seen this coming at all. He said, “I don’t know what to say.” But he kept sitting there. I told him I was sorry for crying in front of him when he hardly even knew me. He said, “Oh come on, if I had a dollar for every girl who pulled this…” But he looked at my eyes and didn’t make any more jokes.
I didn’t want to call either my mother or my father. I didn’t want to hear them say it, and I didn’t know what I would say. Tim nodded. He didn’t say he had to go. I told him, again, how surprised I was. My family had just spent Christmas together. Elise and Charlie had come in from California. They stayed in her old room, and I stayed in mine, and on the afternoon of Christmas Day, we’d walked over to old Mr. Wansing’s for the neighborhood pie party just like we had on every Christmas Day of my life. Everything seemed normal. My mother got my father a recording device that looked like a pen, something he could use at work. My father got her a juice machine. They’d sat next to each other on the couch in bathrobes and watched as we opened our presents from them. In my memory, they both looked happy.
After a while, Tim started to look tired, his green eyes squinty, his long arms going wide when he stretched and yawned. I told him he could go if he wanted. I would be fine, I said. But I knew I wouldn’t be. I didn’t know what I would do with myself the rest of the night. I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I wouldn’t be able to study.
He raked his hands through his brown hair and said, “This may sound stupid, but when you’re this upset, sometimes TV is good.”
I didn’t have a television, so he took me to his apartment, where I watched infomercials and a documentary on coral reefs until I fell asleep on his couch. He slept in the chair beside me, his legs dangling over the armrest, one of his hands in my hair.
I never liked living in the dorm. Even as a freshman, I disliked the noise, the ugly, orange-cushioned furniture, the communal bathrooms halfway down the hall. During my first visit home, I worked out a careful budget to show my parents that their costs would actually go down for my sophomore year, even when taking utilities and food into account, if they let me move into an apartment with two other girls on my floor. My mother seemed persuaded, but my father would have none of it. He seemed preoccupied by the idea that I would somehow be killed as soon as I had to buy my own groceries. He didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of me walking or biking to the store. He didn’t care that one of my roommates would have a car. He worried my roommates would not be careful about locking doors and windows. He worried that they would skip out on their share of the rent, or suddenly start smoking, or have weird boyfriends. And then, he wanted to know, what would I do?
There was no arguing with him when he got like that, impervious to logic, talking too quickly to hear anything I said. Elise might have known what to say, or yell, back at him; but all I could think was that I had nothing to negotiate with, nothing to threaten, nothing to withhold.
Later that night, my mother tried to plead my case. She didn’t know I was listening. She thought I’d gone out to walk Bowzer, but I was just standing in the mudroom, scratching Bowzer under his collar so he would stay quiet, my ear pressed against the door.
“You read way too many of those crime books.” She sounded angrier than I was. “They are making you completely paranoid. And no, do
not
talk to me about everything you’ve seen in court. You have to quit talking to Veronica like that. I don’t want to teach her to be afraid of everything.” Here, to my surprise, her voice broke.
He started in with a “You don’t kno—” but she made a yelping sound so loud and sudden that I pulled away from the door, and my father actually stopped talking.
“She is making a perfectly reasonable request,” my mother said, her voice quiet now, her breathing even. “I think we could at least consider it.”
A long silence followed. I leaned close to the door again, waiting. I smelled cookies baking, chocolate chip. She would send me back to the dorm with several bags, enough to give out to my friends.
“Okay,” he said. “I considered it. And the answer is no. She’s safer in the dorm. I’m paying for the dorm. I’m not paying for an apartment yet. Period.”
He was calmer the next time we talked, though he didn’t change his mind. He said I would have to stay in the dorm until he could get my mother a new car, so I could have her minivan, which was old, but big and safe and reliable.
I didn’t press him after that. My parents didn’t discuss finances with me, but I had a good idea of why my mother was still driving the same minivan that she had been driving since I was in grade school, and why we had canceled our membership to the country club, and why I was only encouraged to apply for a college where I could get in-state tuition. My father was still making a good income, but there had been some bad investments, and then the nursing homes for both grandmothers, and then the funerals, and then the problems with the house.
My mother had been the first to notice the dark patches on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway. The night they got the estimate for a new roof, they stayed up late and argued, their words rising up from the heating vent in my room. My father said they would have to go into the retirement money, but my mother didn’t want to. He held firm. She was being ridiculous, he said. They had to pay off credit cards, and the home equity loan. The interest rates were killing them. She needed to do the math. They had plenty of time before he retired, and in just a few years, there would be no more nursing home bills, and no more funerals, no more poorly chosen stocks, and I would be the only one in school. He would reinvest in their retirement then. Smooth sailing, my father told her. For now, they just needed to get out of debt.
Of course, the roof repair ended up costing more than either of them could have known. After my father came home to find the Sleeping Roofer in his bed, it was pretty clear to all of us he would not be buying my mother a new car after all.
“I can keep up with your tuition, no problem,” he said, his gaze avoiding my face. “I don’t want you to worry about that. But money’s a little tight. In fact, if you could think of any way to offset some expenses, I would very much appreciate that.”
So I returned to the dorm my junior year, this time as a resident assistant. I got three meals a day and a single room. In exchange, I had to attend a two-week summer training rife with workshops on things like fire safety, eating disorders, and CPR; during the year, I had to be in the dorm from six p.m. on for seven or eight nights a month in case there happened to be a fire, an eating disorder, or a youthful heart attack. The only other thing I was supposed to do was come up with a variety of event programming to make the dorm feel smaller and less institutional, at least for the freshman girls on my floor.
“
I’m sorry,
” my mother wrote in an e-mail. “
I know you were excited about an apartment.
” I could not tell if she meant “sorry” in the universal sense, just extending sympathy, or if she were specifically sorry for her actions, namely, having a slumber party with the Roofer. It was hard to know if she felt sorry about that at all. In those first few months after my father moved into a condo by the Plaza, my mother actually seemed happy, though the Roofer had long disappeared; she presented herself as pleasantly uncertain about what her future held—she didn’t know whether she would stay in the house or move to another part of town, or even to another city. She didn’t know if she wanted to go back to school. “I’m catching my breath,” she told both me and Elise. “I’m just going to wait a bit before I make any decisions.”
But by the time I moved home for summer break, there was a Realtor’s sign in the front yard, though she did not appear ready for any kind of open house. Elise’s room, my father’s study, and one of the bathrooms had been sealed off with some kind of plastic sheeting—my mother said she was trying to cut back on air-conditioning. She’d realized how bad it was for the environment, she said. It was the same reason she’d let the lawn go, she said—all that wasted water and energy and gasoline for the mower. I asked her, half-joking, if that was also why she had stopped using the vacuum cleaner, and the mop. And the dishwasher. Throughout my childhood, my mother had been an energetic housekeeper. She’d baked bread. She’d kept a little flagpole by the front door, with a different colorful flag for every holiday and season. But when I first came home that May, the Christmas flag, with its faded smiling snowman, was still flying over the doorway. Inside, small tumbleweeds of dog hair drifted under the ceiling fan of the living room.
She’d gotten a job selling accessories at DeBeck’s; it was just for the summer, she said. In the fall she would start subbing again, and figure out what she really wanted to do. She brought home fast food for dinner—mostly turkey sandwiches from a sub shop in the mall, and she ate hers right off the foil wrapper they came in, sliding mine to me across the table. She insisted we eat dinner together whenever possible, but she was difficult to talk to. She jumped around a lot in conversation. She asked me the same questions twice.
I, on the other hand, did my best to ask her no questions at all. I did wonder if she had been in love with the Roofer, and if she was heartbroken for him, and not my father. But I could not bring myself to ask her this. She was different now, too open, more than ready to tell me too much. She seemed desperate in a way that my father did not. I was anxious to get back to school, to Tim, to my friends, to all my plans, and to my own unruined life. My mother and I looked alike. We had the same dark, curly hair, the same brown eyes and long noses. But we were not the same person. That whole summer, I could feel myself pushing away from her, like a swimmer trying to escape someone reaching out, about to drown.